As Briseis’s friend, I accompanied her to the Greek camp; that too seemed reasonable to everyone except Eumelos. With us came two of my brothers and five warriors, all unarmed. Not one of us Trojans doubted that a Trojan woman who is going to her father deserves a worthy escort. But the Greeks seemed confused by us, almost anxious! Calchas, after he had greeted his daughter tenderly and warily, explained our strange reception. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘would one of the Greeks enter the enemy camp unarmed.’ ‘But they would have our word that they would be safe if they did that,’ I cried. Calchas the seer smiled. ‘A word! Adapt, Cassandra. The sooner the better. If I had not terrified them, they would have done in your unarmed brothers.’ ‘Terrified them, how?’ ‘By telling them about the magical power one of our unarmed warriors possesses, especially when he is accompanied by a woman.’ ‘One of our warriors, Calchas?’ ‘One of us Trojans, Cassandra.’ For the first time in my life I saw a man gutted by homesickness.

We were standing by the sea, the waves were licking our feet. I saw the heaps of weapons – spears, javelins, swords, shields – behind the wooden wall which the Greeks had swiftly erected against us along the coast. Calchas understood my gaze, replied: ‘You are lost.’ I wanted to test him. ‘We could give Helen back to Menelaus,’ I said. Again he smiled his painful smile: ‘Could you really?’

A shock: he knew. Did they all know then, all the men who were swaggering up to gape at me and Briseis: the temperate Menelaus, the keenly observant Odysseus. Agamemnon, whom I instantly disliked? Diomedes of Argos, a lanky fellow. They stood and stared. ‘In Troy men don’t look at women that way,’ I said in our language, which only Calchas could understand. ‘They certainly don’t,’ he replied unmoved. ‘Get used to it.’ ‘And this is where you are taking Briseis? To these men?’ ‘She must live,’ said Calchas. ‘Survive. Nothing more. Life at any cost.’

So now I knew why Calchas was with the Greeks.

No, Calchas, I said. At any cost? Not so.

Today I think differently. I was so calm. Now everything inside me is in revolt. I will beg that terrible woman for my life. I will throw myself at her feet. ‘Clytemnestra, lock me up for ever in your darkest dungeon. Give me barely enough to live on. But I implore you: send me a scribe, or better yet a young slave woman with a keen memory and a powerful voice. Ordain that she may repeat to her daughter what she hears from me. That the daughter in turn may pass it on to her daughter, and so on. So that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come.’

And could I believe that, even for one day?

Slay me, Clytemnestra. Kill me. Hurry.

Inside the citadel they are drinking. The wanton clamour I would so gladly not have heard is rising to a crescendo now. So on top of everything else the men who come to fetch me will be drunk.

We did not see the hero Achilles when we delivered Briseis to her fate. He was her fate. He saw us from some hidden place. How my heart burned when I embraced her. With an unmoved face she stood leaning against Diomedes, whom she had just seen for the first time in her life. The ungainly lout. I pictured my delicate boyish brother Troilus. ‘Briseis!’ I said softly, ‘what are you