They had brought me to the palace after it had happened, my hair wild around my face.
‘Who has done this?’ I heard Priam ask. ‘What’s happened to her?’ He was poised, alert, ready to command his guards, to hunt down any perpetrator. The image of it was ridiculous; I thought of his armed men marching up the sides of Mount Olympus, and laughter erupted from me.
‘She’s hysterical,’ Hecabe said, wringing her hands together. ‘Take her to rest, summon a healer for her.’
I pushed at the women around me, shoving their solicitous hands away before they could bear me off. ‘It was Apollo.’ I stood as straight as I could, trying to stop my legs from buckling under me. A murmur of disquiet rippled through the women, a note of irritation that I was still clinging to this nonsensical story. ‘It was. He came to me, in the temple. He was there.’ I knew what I looked like – a madwoman – and I couldn’t force my tongue to shape the words that would make them believe me. Everything sounded absurd and impossible; I could hear it myself, and the more I tried to make the truth sound believable, the more preposterous it became. ‘He kissed me,’ I said. ‘And then—’
My mother drew her breath in sharply, her face frozen as she stared at me.
‘He gave me his power,’ I continued. ‘I saw so many things, all at once.’
‘What things?’ Priam asked.
‘I – I don’t know, exactly. It was a blur; I couldn’t see it clearly.’
Already, his eyes were sliding away. ‘Perhaps the seer could interpret?’ he asked my mother doubtfully, but she shook her head.
‘The god doesn’t visit us,’ she said. ‘His messages don’t come like that. What is there for a seer to interpret in what she’s saying? If it was a dream, then perhaps – but this, this is a fantasy. It’s an insult to Apollo to say this. We risk his anger in even hearing it spoken.’
Panic flared in my chest. ‘I know he comes to you in dreams, but it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t come to me in another way,’ I cried.
‘No!’ She stood, a quick and convulsive movement. ‘Don’t say it; don’t repeat it!’ She smoothed down her dress, breathed deeply and closed her eyes for a moment, gathering her calm. ‘I told you once before, Cassandra, it is not a gift. I serve the god. Perhaps he has chosen me sometimes to be the vessel for his message, for a seer to interpret and understand what he wants us to know, but I would never dare to say that he comes to me, that he would show himself to me.’
The answer thickened in my throat. How could I tell them why he had shown himself to me and not to her? I looked around the room, from one doubting face to the next, and then back to my parents. It pained me to see the mingling of love and frustration in their eyes. The powerful desire they had for me to go away, to keep my wild stories to myself. I let them tend to me, to bring the healers to try to calm me, to cure the madness they were sure must have overtaken me. Lying in the dark solace of my bedchamber, I wondered if the memory would recede, if it would become shaky, if the herbs they crushed for me and made me drink would dull the chaos of visions in my brain.
It didn’t happen. I knew as surely as anything I had ever known that Apollo was there that day. I had felt the grip of his immortal hands on me. I had felt the burn of his venom in my mouth. The memory of it flowed in my bloodstream; the echo of his touch imprinted on my skin; the visions he had given me flickered and twisted in my head, all of them fighting for supremacy, never settling into one clear picture. But for the sake of my anxious parents, I tried to push down the memories and to master my words, to hold in the tide of unwelcome prophecy that I knew no one wished to hear, that would only be taken as evidence of, at best, my madness and, at worst, my impiety.
But when a powerful vision came, it would split my mind with a roaring chasm of light and there was no way of holding myself in one piece. When Apollo’s gift set my senses aflame and blinded me to everything but the revelations he showed me, I rolled upon the floor and screamed with the agony of it. It was better to keep myself alone as much as I could.
Even in my own bedchamber, there was no peace for me, no safety. There was no escape from Apollo’s invasions into my head. I had no sanctuary in the city; not even my mind felt like my own. Even in the respites between his attacks, I felt afraid, never knowing when the visions would seize me again.
In an hour of calm, I lay awake in the soft, silver moonlight. My eyes ached and my body was exhausted, but everything was quiet. A tray of food lay untouched on the table, where the slave-girl had left it earlier, her eyes lowered as she backed out, desperate to be away from me. A pile of olives gleaming in brine, the rich tang mingling with the salty scent of the crumbling cheese, made me think of the dark tangle of seaweed down at the shore where I used to walk. The sweetness wafting from the jug of wine carried the memory of the temple, the silent hours I had spent there in dedication. The only place in the city that had ever really felt like it was mine.
I was still his priestess. I’d sworn my oaths. I was bound to serve him for the rest of my life. The idea of going back there made my heart quicken in fear, but I couldn’t banish the thought that perhaps that was the only hope I had of ending my suffering. In the peace of that night, I could reason with myself. If I returned, if I showed him my loyalty and my obedience, then maybe he would grant me his mercy. Maybe he would end this punishment for my defiance and quell the visions. I quaked at the prospect of setting foot on those stones again, of kneeling before his statue. But he had inflicted this curse upon me, and only he could take it away again.
No prophetic agony split my head apart that night, and by the morning, I could see no other choice but to return to the temple. It made my parents relieved to see me dress once more in my sacred robes, to put on the semblance of the girl I had been before. If the others didn’t want me back there, they didn’t dare say it to the king’s daughter. I took up my duties again. I laid offerings at the feet of Apollo’s statue, as I had always done. He remained impassive: silent, motionless stone.
When I was not in the temple, I fled to the shore, leaving the walled city behind me. It was better to have nothing but the waves as company, to mutter my truths to the empty wind and the water, where the clusters of seaweed would wave in the froth as though in agreement with me.
I was used to being misheard and misunderstood. I had been a timid child and an awkward young woman, always striving to make my voice clear and brave. I was no stranger to struggling with my words, feeling them die in my throat when people looked at me. And I could see with bitter clarity that everyone thought this new manifestation of madness that had come upon me was just another part of my oddness; that I had always lived in a dreamworld, and it had only got worse. Whilst the world saw my encounter with Apollo as further proof of my strange mind, I saw that the day he had come to me in the temple was like a lightning bolt shattering the centre of my life, the cracks in the earth spiralling from it in every direction. I knew that the madness within me had not been building to that moment, but rather that the echoes of his devastation had rung back through my years as well as forward. Such was the power of Apollo: he could shatter my existence from beginning to end.