The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online

so irrevocably as to lose all that made her herself. Polyxena was now tied to the life of the women’s quarters, and seemed quite content to be so; she no longer even seemed to resent the loss of her freedom, and would no longer conspire with Kassandra to run away down into the city.
    Soon enough, Troilus was old enough to be sent to the men’s quarters to sleep, and she herself was twelve years old. That year she grew taller, and from certain changes in her body she knew that soon she too would be counted among the women of the palace and no longer allowed to run about where she chose.
    Obediently, Kassandra allowed her mother’s old nurse to teach her to spin and weave. With the help of Hesione, her father’s unmarried sister, she let herself be coaxed into spinning the thread and weaving a robe for her clay doll, which she still cherished. She hated the drudgery, which made her fingers ache, but she was proud of her work when it was done.
    She now occupied a room in the women’s quarters with Polyxena, who was sixteen and old enough to be married, and Hesione, a lively young woman in her twenties, with Priam’s curling dark hair and brilliant green eyes. Under the seemingly senseless rules of conduct set forth by her mother and Hesione, Kassandra was to stay indoors and ignore all the interesting things that might be happening in the palace or the city. But there were days when she managed to evade the vigilance of the women, when she would run off alone to one of her secret places.
    One morning she slipped out of the palace and took the route through the streets that led upward to Apollo’s Temple.
    She had no desire to climb to the Temple itself, no sense that the God had summoned her. She told herself that when that day came, she would know. As she climbed, halfway up she turned to look down into the harbor, and saw the ships. They were just as she had seen them the day the God spoke to her; but now she knew that they were ships from the South, from the island kingdoms of the Akhaians and of Crete. They had come to trade with the Hyperborean countries, and Kassandra thought, with an excitement that was almost physical, that they would reach the country of the North Wind, from whose breath were born the great Bull-Gods of Crete. She wished she might sail north with the ships; but she could never go. Women were never allowed to sail on any of the great trading ships, which, as they sailed up through the straits, must pay tribute to King Priam and to Troy. And as she stared at the ships, a shudder, unlike any physical sensation she had known before, ran through her body. . . .
    She was lying in a corner on a ship, lifting up and down to the motion of the waves; nauseated, sick, exhausted and terrified, bruised and sore; yet when she looked up at the sky above the great sun-shimmering sail, the sky was blue and gleaming with Apollo’s sun. A man’s face looked down at her with a fierce, hateful, triumphant smile. In one moment of terror, it was printed forever on her mind. Kassandra had never in her life known real fear or real shame, only momentary embarrassment at a mild reproof from her mother or father; now she knew the ultimate of both. With one part of her mind she knew she had never seen this man, yet knew that never in her life would she forget his face, with its great hook of a nose like the beak of some rapacious bird of prey, the eyes gleaming like a hawk’s, the cruel fierce smile and the harsh jutting chin; a black-bearded countenance which filled her with dread and terror.
    In a moment between a breath and a breath, it was gone, and she was standing on the steps, the ships distant in the harbor below her. Yet a moment ago, she knew, she had been lying in one of those ships, a captive—the hard deck under her body, the salt wind over her, the flapping sound of the sail and the creaking of the wooden boards of the ship. She felt again the terror and the curious exhilaration which she could not