The Firebrand Read Free Page B

thought, for her waiting-woman stepped close and said in her ear, “Lady, you are pale; is it the beginning of labor?”
    Such was the Queen’s confusion that for a moment she actually wondered if the strange sweating chill that seized her was actually the first touch of the birth process. Or was it only the result of that brief overshadowing by the Goddess? She did not remember anything like this with Hector’s birth, but she had been a young girl then, hardly aware of the process taking place within her. “I know not,” she said. “It is possible.”
    “Then you must return to the palace and the King must be told,” said the woman. Hecuba hesitated. She had no wish to return inside the walls, but if she was truly in labor, it was her duty—not only to the child, and to her husband, but to the King and to all the people of Troy—to safeguard the prince or princess she bore.
    “Very well, we shall return to the palace,” she said, and turned about in the street. One of the things that troubled her when she walked in the city was that a crowd of women and children always followed her asking for blessings. Since she had become visibly pregnant they begged for the blessing of fertility, as if she could, like the Goddess, bestow the gift of childbearing.
    With her woman, she walked beneath the twin lionesses guarding the gates of Priam’s palace, and across the huge courtyard behind them where his soldiers gathered for arms-drill. A sentry at the gate raised his spear in salute.
    Hecuba watched the soldiers, paired in teams and fighting with blunted weapons. She knew as much about weapons as any of them, for she had been born and raised on the plains, daughter of a nomad tribe whose women rode horseback, and trained like the men of the cities with sword and spear. Her hand itched for a sword, but it was not the custom in Troy, and while at first Priam had allowed her to handle weapons and practice with his soldiers, when she became pregnant with Hector he had forbidden it. In vain she told him that the women of her tribe rode horseback and worked with weapons until a few days before they were delivered of their children; he would not listen to her.
    The royal midwives told her that if she so much as touched edged weapons, it would injure her child and perhaps the men who owned the weapons. A woman’s touch, they said, especially the touch of a woman in her condition, would make the weapon useless in battle. This sounded to Hecuba like the most solemn foolishness, as if men feared the notion that a woman could be strong enough to protect herself.
    “But you have no need to protect yourself, my dearest love,” Priam had said. “What sort of man would I be if I could not protect my wife and child?” That had ended the matter, and from that day to this, Hecuba had never so much as touched the hilt of a weapon. Imagining the weight of a sword in her hand now, she grimaced, knowing that she was weak from women’s indoor work and soft from lack of training. Priam was not so bad as the Argive kings who kept their women confined inside their houses, but he did not really like it when she went very far outside the palace. He had grown up with women who stayed indoors at all times, and one of his most critical descriptions of a woman was “sunburnt from gadding about.”
    The Queen went through the small door into the cool shadows of the palace and along the marble-floored halls, hearing in the silence the small sound of her skirts trailing against the floor and her waiting-woman’s soft footfalls behind her.
    In her sunlit rooms, with all the curtains flung open as she preferred to keep them, her women were sunning and airing linens, and as she came through the doors they paused to greet her. The waiting-woman announced, “The Queen is in labor; send for the royal midwife.”
    “No, wait.” Hecuba’s soft but definite voice cut through the cries of excitement. “There is no such hurry; it is by no means certain. I