Laocoon’s fury. The crowd wavering in doubt. A frozen moment; our future hanging in the balance. Then the screaming, the anguished howl of terror, high and thin, keening from the smallest of Laocoon’s sons. His brother thrashed mutely; his cries deadened by the suffocating weight of the scaly coils that already wrapped around his little body.
Sand muffled my cries as I tried to struggle to my feet, blinded again by another piercing flash of light, and I rolled back, my head striking a rock, blood seeping warm and damp down my neck. I could not see through the horrified mass of people, but I knew what was happening as the two giant serpents surged from the waves, twisting around Laocoon’s two children. As he flung himself at their gleaming, glistening coils, they entrapped him, too. I knew the moment that the little boys’ faces went grey and still amidst the shifting scales; I knew that Laocoon saw it, too, moments before the fangs sank through his neck and venom flooded his veins.
Screaming. Fleeing footsteps. Terror and panic sent the crowd rushing across the sand, away from that frozen tableau of horror. Laocoon, between his boys, desperately reaching across to them still, the mighty snakes looped around them all in an inescapable tangle of death. I could feel the blood pulsing from the gash behind my ear as the blindness started to dissolve.
The hissing died away. The serpents slid back into the sea, their work done. And one by one, the people turned their accusing gaze to Laocoon’s spear, still quivering in the horse’s flank.
Perhaps it might have been enough: a clear message to the watching Trojans that the gods moved quickly to punish any damage to the horse. But whether they would have dragged it up the plains and through the city gates itself without Sinon, I do not know. He was a Greek, weeping and swearing to us that he had escaped his own army, who wanted to sacrifice him to the gods for a fair wind home. I watched Sinon speak, every word a poisonous lie. They did sacrifice, these Greeks. I knew that was true, for I saw a girl trembling at a makeshift altar, a knife flashing in the light of the rising sun above her bare neck. But they would not have sacrificed this man, whose eyes slid sideways as he spoke, who urged us to take the horse and steal the luck of the departing Greeks, so that their ships would sink and we would prosper.
I clutched at my father’s elbow. ‘Do not believe this man,’ I implored him.
Priam shook away my hand like it was a fly buzzing about him. ‘The Greeks have treated him ill,’ he said. ‘See the gashes on his legs where they beat him; the weals in his wrists where the ropes bound him.’
‘A trick to make us believe him!’ I said.
I stilled my panicked breathing, shook back my knotted curls and tried to square my shoulders, to assume a regal bearing. Andromache wandered the sand with Astyanax toddling at her side, her thoughts awash with sorrow whilst he squealed with delight at the unfamiliar sensation of sand trickling through his chubby fingers. Helen contemplated the horse. Did she believe that her first husband really sailed back to Sparta, leaving her widowed in this foreign land to which Paris had brought her? Or did she too suspect a grand deception, a final ambush still in store to bring her home at long last? Her beautiful face gave nothing away.
Priam and Hecabe, my mother and father, were shrivelled in upon themselves with pain, and I could see that there was nothing they wanted to believe so much as Sinon’s story and Antenor’s guidance. So many of their sons drifted, pale and wispy, through the Underworld. How bitterly they must have rued the fact that they were left with me, their mad daughter, who tried now to destroy their hopes of claiming some kind of victory at last.
I loosened my grip on my father’s frail arm, the marks of my fingers sagging in wrinkled circles. ‘We could leave the horse here, on the beach,’ I tried. ‘Dedicate it to Apollo out here under his gaze in the sunlight, and bolt our gates tonight in case any Greeks remain.’
The hammered bronze discs adorning the neck of his tunic glinted in the harsh light. ‘They buy the goodwill of Athena with this wooden horse,’ he mused. ‘But if it is Troy that gives her such a gift, instead of them, then who is to say she will not turn her favour to us instead at last?’
Tears of frustration burned behind my eyes. My father was staring at the horse so intently, my words were as futile as feathers drifting in the wind.
The crowd hummed with activity, men slinging ropes around the great horse, hauling it with all their strength. The sun shone down on them, their bare arms bathed in a sheen of sweat as they pulled together, grimacing and laughing all at once. A lightness rippled over the Trojans, a sweet breath of joy at being free of fighting and siege, at pressing their toes into sand and talking of freedom again. I stood apart.
If I was going to run, this would be my chance. No one wanted to hear any more of my warnings; they wouldn’t care to listen to anything that might puncture this fragile newfound delirium that had overcome them all. In a city that had succumbed to a credulity that seemed insane, it was only me, the mad prophetess, who had clarity.
A tide of resentment was building in my body, seething into a rage. I had done everything I could to serve Troy. I had tended to Apollo’s temple, said the prayers and performed the rituals to keep our patron god happy. I had bitten down on my unwelcome insights as hard as I could manage, all these years. I had fought my best to contain them. Apollo had punished me so cruelly, and I never breathed a word against him, never railed at the injustice, only strove to serve him better so that I could deserve his mercy. And all of them had turned away from me. I had no respect from the people of Troy; I, daughter of Priam and Hecabe, was reviled and ignored, no matter how hard I tried to help them. Perhaps I should leave them to their doom, let them happily embrace the devastation of the city.
I opened my eyes. The crowd was further up the slope, inching towards the city walls. Their shouts drifted over the breeze: the gates were not wide enough, some were calling, they must knock down the wall at the side so that the horse could be taken in without scratching a single panel. The walls that had withstood ten years of the biggest army anyone had ever seen battering against them, now they would fall at Trojan hands, because of Trojan foolishness. I shook my head. Took a step forward, away from them all. And then another. And another.
‘Where will you go?’
I bit down on my bottom lip. Keeping my eyes fixed on the sea, I didn’t answer her.
‘Cassandra?’
Her footsteps, light on the sand as she followed. I shook off the touch of her hand on my shoulder.
‘Cassandra, it isn’t safe out here.’
The ring of panic in her voice gave me pause. I had never heard Helen so rattled. Not even when the army first arrived. Certainly not when Paris died.
‘It isn’t safe back there,’ I said.
She gripped my shoulder again. She was so close to me, but I kept my eyes averted from her, refusing to look into her face. ‘I don’t know the meaning of the horse,’ she said, her words spilling out low and fast. ‘Why the Greeks left it, if they should take it into the city or not – I don’t know.’ Her fingers dug painfully into my skin. ‘But you can’t stand out here alone, unprotected. If any soldiers remain; if anyone has been left behind . . .’
A sob caught in my throat. Somewhere, in the distance, if only I could walk far enough to find it, there was safety, I was sure. I could see it more clearly than I saw the ocean before me. Soft hills, wooded with welcoming forests. A quiet farmhouse, a spiral of smoke drifting into the air from its chimney. A peaceful solitude, a place where no agony would shatter my skull, a place where nothing of note would ever happen, so there would be nothing to foresee.