Cassandra (Greek Mythology)

α. Apollo is there when she wakes, crouched down beside her in the sand of an unfamiliar shore. Her throat aches from where Clytemnestra drew the knife across it, though she does not know that then—only the ache when she breathes. (It is the one scar that will never heal; the blade went too deep, the hand the wielded it struck too true.)

I was dead, she says to the god, who is watching her with eyes like the unforgiving sun. 

No, he answers. You will never die. I’m sorry.

They are both lying, of course. (It is an old game.) Still, Apollo helps her to her feet, and she feels his eyes on her as she walks away, down the sand.

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β. The centuries wax and wane, she dies. She is never dead. The Sibyls pity and shelter her, until there are no more Sibyls. Then she is alone.

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γ. She takes holy vows, pledging herself to the upstart god who swallowed her pantheons and spit out ruins, calling them empty. But the sisterhood of holy women is the same as it was in Ilion’s bright temple, and she clings to that, murmuring idolatrous prayers during vespers.

She writes hymns to a god who burns forever those who deny him, and she can hear echoes of her native tongue in her sisters’ praise—ekstasis, they say, and mustikos.

Her prophecies of death and destruction, unheeded, turn to ash on Viking pyres, along with her sisters. (She does not know their nameless god—not as she knows Athena, who revenged her against Ajax, or Apollo, whose immortal curse she wears. But she prays to the Christian god for their sake, that he might look after his dead as kindly Hades did.)

She goes north. Above her, the sun is bright, and shameless.

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δ. They burn her as a witch in the 17th century, in Trier. She wonders, as the flames flay her skin from her bones, if this is what it would have felt like to lie with a god who was also the sun. 

The smoke from her own flesh chokes her, but she can still see him in the crowd, golden and smirking.

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ε. In Palermo, the mafiosi come in the night and drag her from her little house. They force her to watch as they crumple up her little leaflet—hand-printed, she passed them out in the square—and stuff the paper under the eaves. They burn like dry grass, and Cassandra must watch another of her homes set ablaze.

They demand their answers in a snarling tones, but it is the same question she has been asked in every age, how did you know, how were you right (why didn’t we listen?) 

She laughs, baring Clytemnestra’s scar to their knives, and daring them to silence her. Greater than you have tried.

By the next dawn, she is on a train bound for the east, a pale scarf wrapped around her neck. In the rocking of the cart, hums under her breath idly, a hymn to Apollo that has not been sung for lifetimes.

When she catches a flicker of gold from the corner of her eye, she smiles.

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ς. It is strange to think of this country as hers, when the tongue it speaks is unfamiliar, and its name has changed with every army. (She misses Anatolḗ, the land of cedars and lions, and her whole heart aches for—but there is no peace in remembering walled cities long swallowed by the earth.)

A throat cleared startles her gaze up, into eyes as pitiless as the sun.

Let me buy you a drink, Apollo says, sliding into the booth across from her. He is dressed in a well-tailored western suit. What name do you go by, in this age?

She turns her junker of a laptop around, so that he can read the byline of her blog. MİT should have shut her down a long while ago for spilling state secrets, often before the incident occurs—but she is heeded as much in the 21st century as she was in BCE. Not even Hürriyet will publish her articles.

Aletheia, Apollo reads, and his mouth curves very slightly upward. The truth told. Appropriate.

What brings you here, Parnopios? she asks, when their beers come. They were not ordered, but then, he is god. She imagines he never waits for a table, either.

Can’t I visit old friends? he returns silkily.

Oh, is that what we are?

His smile is thin and bitter. You are cruel, Cassandra. You always have been.

She doesn’t flinch at the name anymore. Instead, she thinks of all she has lost to fire, all the deaths she has known, all the prophesies none have listened to. All the times he has come to taunt her. If it is true, what you say, then—I am only so cruel as my gods have made me.