Paris rose to his feet. "If you drive out Helen, I go with her."

"Go then," cried Andromache wildly. "That too would be a blessing to our city! You are no less a curse than she! Your father did well when he sought to send you away!"

"She is raving," Deiphobos said roughly. "Helen shall not go from us while I live; the Goddess sent Helen to us, and no other roof shall shelter her while my brothers and I live."

Priam looked down the hall. "What shall I do?" he asked half aloud. "My Queen and the wife of my Hector have said to us—"

"She must go," Andromache cried. "If she remains here, I will depart this night from Troy - and I call upon all the women of Priam's house to go forth with me; shall we remain under one roof with her who has cast our city down into the dust?"

"And yet the walls of Troy stand firm," Paris said. "All is not lost." He rose and came to Andromache, taking her hand gently and raising it to his lips.

"I bear you no grudge, poor girl," he said. "You are distraught with your grief, and no wonder. I'll answer that Helen shall hold no malice toward you."

Andromache jerked away.

""Women of Troy, I call on you, come forth from the accursed roof that shelters that false Goddess, who would bring us all to ruin and slavery—" Her voice had risen, high and hysterical; she picked up a torch and cried, "Follow me, women of Troy—"

Priam rose in his place and thundered, "Enough! We have trouble enough without this! My child," he said to Andromache, "I understand your pain; but I beg of you, sit down and listen to us. Nothing would be solved by driving Helen forth. Soldiers have fallen in battle long before Hector was born - or I." He reached out to embrace Andromache, and after a moment she collapsed against his breast, sobbing. Hecuba came to enfold her in her arms.

"Peace," she said sombrely. "We have Troilus to mourn and to bury before the sun rises; and you women, collect your jewels to offer for Hector's ransom."

Kassandra, joining the women as they gathered together to assemble by Troilus's body, found herself wondering whether Andromache had been justified. Andromache alone among the women did not follow Hecuba; she remained at Priam's feet, crying out desolately, "I have not even a body over which to mourn." Then she raised her voice and called after the women, "Let not Helen touch Troilus's body, Mother! Know you not the old tale - a corpse will bleed if his murderer touches it - and he has little blood left to spare, poor lad!"

All night Kassandra heard the rain and wind, beating and tearing around the high palace of Priam, as the women of Priam's household gathered together, wailed for Troilus. They washed and dressed his corpse, covered it with precious spices and burned incense to cover the sickly smell of death. In the grey lull between darkness and sunrise they ceased their nightlong mourning to drink wine and listen to a song from one of the minstrels in the room. She praised the beauty and bravery of the dead youth, singing that he had been felled because his beauty was such that the War-God desired him, and took the form of Akhilles in order to possess him.

As the song ended Hecuba cried out, "Since he had no wife and no child, only my daughters and I may mourn him!" She called the musician to her and gave her a ring as a memento of her noble elegy, and one of the women persuaded her to sit down and rest, and to drink a cup of warmed wine with spices. Helen, who had also accepted a cup, came and sat beside Kassandra.

"I will go and sit somewhere else if you do not want to be seen talking to me," she said, "but it seems I am not welcome anywhere among the women now." Her face looked thin, even haggard, and pale - she had lost weight since the deaths of her children, and Kassandra noted dulled strands among the gilt of her hair.

"No, stay here," Kassandra said. "I think you know I will always be your friend."

"All the same," Helen said, "my offer was sincere; I will return to Menelaus. He will probably kill me, but I might have a chance to see my only remaining daughter once before I die. Paris thinks we will have other children; and indeed I had hoped—but it is too late for that. I think he wanted our son to rule Troy after us."

She looked half-questioning at Kassandra, and Kassandra nodded, with a shocking sense that by agreeing with what Helen had said, it was as if she willed that the doom be so.

In the last years she had grown accustomed to this feeling and knew its foolishness; the guilt, if guilt there must be, belonged only to the Gods, or whatever forces there were which made the Gods act as they did. She raised her cup to Helen and drank, feeling the heaviness of the wine strike her hard at this unaccustomed hour; and she had eaten but little the day before. Helen seemed to echo her thoughts, saying, "I wonder if the Queen is wise to serve so strong a wine unmixed when we are all half fainting with grief or hunger; these women will all be raving drunk in half an hour."

"It is not a question of wisdom but of custom," Kassandra said. "If she served less than her best, they would question her love and respect for the dead boy."

"It's odd," Helen said reflectively,"the way people think, or refuse to think about death. Paris for one - it seems as if he thinks that since our children have died, perhaps the Gods will accept the sacrifice of their lives and spare ours!"

"If a God would accept the innocent to expiate the sins of the guilty I could have no reverence for her, and yet there are some peoples who do believe in Gods who accept the sacrifice of innocent blood," Kassandra said. "Perhaps it is an idea the Gods—or fiends - put into all men's heads; did not Agamemnon sacrifice his own daughter on the altar of the Maiden for a fair wind to bring his fleet to Troy?"

"It is so," said Helen, softly,"though Agamemnon will not now hear it named, and says the sacrifice was of his wife's - my sister's—doing, a sacrifice to her Goddess. The Akhaians fear the old Goddesses, saying they are tainted. The bravest of men flee in terror from women's mysteries."

Kassandra looked round the shadowed room, where the women were drinking and talking in little groups.

I wish somehow we could inspire them with this terror now," she said, and remembered how she had visited Akhilles's tent in a trance - or only in dream? The thought stirred in her mind that perhaps she still might have some such access to the mind of the Akhaian hero; she would attempt it at the first opportunity. She raised her cup silently and drank; Helen, meeting her eyes over the rim, did the same.

There was a sudden strong draught in the room; the door opened and Andromache stood there, holding a torch with long flaming streamers blowing in the strong wind from the corridor. Her long hair was dripping with rain and her dress and cloak were soaked. She came through the room like a walking ghost, softly chanting one of the funeral hymns. She bent over Troilus's wrapped body and kissed the pale cheek.

"Farewell, dear brother," she said in her clear reedy voice. "You go before the greatest of heroes, to speak to the Gods of his eternal shame."

Kassandra went quickly to her, and said softly, yet audibly, "Shame done to the brave is shame only to the one who commits the crime, not to the one who suffers it." Yet Hector willingly fought Akhilles, playing this game of scoring on one another. He did only what his whole life had taught him to do.

She poured out a cup of the spiced wine—it was heavy now, even less diluted than what had been in the pitcher when it was fuller. Perhaps it was better; Andromache would go from here to sleep and some ease of her horror, if not of her grief. She set the cup in her cousin's hand, smelling on her breath the heaviness of wine—wherever she had spent the night, she had been drinking.