The Armour of Achilles (48 page)
‘I will not throw Ajax’s body to the fish, as some have demanded,’ he began, looking at Menelaus and Little Ajax. A few among the council voiced their relief and pleasure, and even Eperitus felt an unexpected flush of gratitude towards the King of Men, whom he normally loathed. Then Agamemnon held his hand up for silence and they realized their relief had been premature. ‘But neither will he receive the full rites due to a great warrior. Ajax took his own life and as such will be allowed a simple burial without honour. Teucer, you have my permission to bury him wherever you choose, as long as it is beyond the walls of this camp.’
And so it was, in spite of all the Trojans he had slain and all the battles he had turned in favour of the Greeks, that Ajax’s giant corpse was placed in a lonely suicide’s grave on a cliff top overlooking the sea. He was not given a period of mourning or a warrior’s cremation, and there were no games in his memory. The only song raised over his body was the wailing of Tecmessa, competing with the howls of the wind and the crashing of the waves below. Eurysaces sat beside her, clutching his mother’s black dress as he watched Teucer, Odysseus, Diomedes and Eperitus lower the shrouded body of his father into the pit they had dug. Then each man cut off a lock of his own hair and threw it into the grave, before refilling it with earth. Halfway through, Little Ajax appeared and stood beside them, honouring his friend with his tears as he hung his head and was silent. After a while Teucer put an arm about Tecmessa’s shoulder and led her, carrying Eurysaces, back towards the camp, followed at a distance by Little Ajax.
Once the last of the soil had been replaced, Odysseus and Eperitus returned to the beach where Arceisius’s funeral pyre was being prepared. While Odysseus carried out sacrifices and uttered prayers to the callous gods, Eperitus stood back and watched the sun draw gradually closer to the distant horizon. It was a scene he had observed countless times before, but today there was a finality about it, as if some prophetic instinct told him he would not see many more. Then the first pall of smoke twisted up from Arceis-ius’s funeral pyre, spreading a smear of imperfection across the cloudless sky. The smell of burning wood and roasted flesh accompanied it, giving an unpleasant tang to the otherwise clean air that blew in from the Aegean. And all the time the sea breeze filled his ears with the crash and tumble of the white-capped waves, silencing the usual noises of the camp beyond the beach so that the only other sound was the crackle of flames, snapping and popping delightfully as they hastened the destruction of Arceisius’s corpse.
A handful of other figures stood watching the pyre: Antiphus, his arms crossed and his eyes red with smoke and tears; Eurybates, busying himself by throwing an armful of faggots on to the fire; Polites, massive and silent, his giant hand resting on the shoulder of the fourth figure, the comparatively diminutive Omeros. In the few months since he had arrived on the shores of Ilium the young bard had shed his gentle layers of fat and had started to grow his hair long, like all the other soldiers in Agamemnon’s army. He had lost much of his naïvety, too, surviving the murderous press of the battle line and killing and maiming his share of Trojans in the process. And yet, while the Fates had spared Omeros, Arceisius – the shepherd boy whom Eperitus had transformed into a fearsome warrior – had joined the legions of the dead that the war had created. Such was the will of the gods.
Eperitus turned his eyes from the flames of Arceisius’s funeral pyre to where Odysseus was washing the sacrificial blood from his hands. After staring at the burning corpse for a few moments, the king walked to his hut and fetched Achilles’s armour, which he planted in the sand before sitting down with his arms folded across his knees. Eperitus joined him and they sat there in silence as the sun crept lower towards the horizon, Odysseus contemplating the patterns on the great, circular shield – as if the answer to all his worries and problems lay in the cyclical movements of the little figures – while Eperitus’s mind slipped into a trough of black thoughts about the death of Arceisius, Apheidas’s treachery and Astynome’s deceit.
After a while his eyes fell on the armour.
‘What will you do with it?’ he asked, his voice slightly croaky because he had not spoken for so long.
Odysseus shifted, wincing slightly as his muscles complained at the movement.
‘Such armour isn’t for me, Eperitus, and I’ve vowed never to wear it. But there’s something I didn’t tell you. Something that Athena revealed to me in my hut.’
Eperitus turned to him, his curiosity aroused.
‘Go on.’
‘The gods wanted to destroy Ajax, but they also wanted to prevent him keeping the armour for himself. They say it’s meant for another, someone even more worthy than Ajax.’
‘Then who? Ajax’s son, Eurysaces?’
‘No. And I wouldn’t curse the poor child with it – you do realize it’s cursed, don’t you? It’s the symbol of everything that’s bad about this war.’
‘Perhaps we should send it to the Trojans, then. After all, it was Paris who killed Achilles. He’s welcome to have the armour, and good riddance to it.’
Odysseus glanced at his friend and smiled, looking a bit more like his old self. He dismissed the suggestion with a shake of his head.
‘The Trojans have enough problems of their own. But whoever the rightful owner is, Athena said he is destined to take Achilles’s place in the army and that the walls of Troy won’t fall without him. I suppose I’ll know who to give the armour to when I see him.’
‘So is this what you’ve been thinking about all this time?’
‘No, I’ve been thinking about home. This war isn’t infinite, Eperitus. The end must come and I’ve been wondering how I can hasten it along. I keep thinking of Astynome getting through the gates in the back of that old farmer’s cart, and the story Omeros concocted about how I got past those Taphian guards concealed in a pithos of wine. You remember that one? The only problem is I’m not sure how I’m going to smuggle an army inside the Scaean Gate.’
He looked quizzically at Eperitus, who nodded without comprehending a word of what Odysseus was saying.
‘But suddenly my mind is full of Ithaca again,’ Odysseus continued. ‘I’ve been trying to remember how it looks from the prow of a galley, sailing up from the south – the shape of the hills, the channel between Samos and Ithaca, the harbour below the town, and then the road that leads all the way up to the palace gates. And I can picture what Penelope looks like again, Eperitus. I haven’t been able to recall her face for so long, and then I saw her in a dream the night before Ajax killed himself, as clear as if I had only seen her that morning. And I’m going to see her again soon, I’m sure of it.’
‘Good,’ Eperitus said.
He smiled despite the pain he felt. Odysseus’s renewed desire for his home and family reminded him that he had lost his own love, and that all his dreams of marriage and children had been ripped apart by Astynome’s betrayal. And yet he could not bring himself to stop loving her, and he knew they would meet again one day – even though the walls of Troy lay between them.
‘And there’s something else,’ Odysseus added, ominously. ‘A new prophecy.’
Eperitus shifted round in the sand and looked at his friend.
‘Calchas?’
Odysseus nodded. ‘Before we left to fetch Ajax’s body, Agamemnon took me aside. Calchas came to him early in the morning, while we were fighting your father in the temple of Thymbrean Apollo. He says Zeus will not bring an end to the war until a number of conditions are met, but Apollo has only shown the first one to him. I suspect one might be the identity of the rightful owner of Achilles’s armour, but, either way, these oracles will only be revealed by another seer – a Trojan – though Calchas doesn’t know who or when.’
‘Then what
does
he know?’
‘That for Troy to fall Paris must first be killed by the arrows of Heracles.’
Eperitus’s eyes narrowed in thought.
‘But . . . but they belong to Philoctetes,’ he said, ‘whom
we
abandoned on Lemnos ten years ago!’
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
The first two books in this series,
King of Ithaca
and
The Gates of Troy
, retold some of the earlier myths associated with Odysseus and the beginnings of the Trojan War. They drew on a handful of lesser-known tales that allowed my imagination plenty of room for manoeuvre.
The Armour of Achilles
, however, is set at the peak of the war, the epic events from which have been told and retold by countless poets, playwrights and other storytellers, both Greek and Roman. Rather than being able to pick over a few myths like a guest at a modest buffet, I now had a feast to choose from and was forced – often reluctantly – to restrict myself to those myths I thought most important and relevant to the tale I wanted to tell.
Chief among the ancient sources for the Trojan War is, of course, Homer. His is the name behind the oldest works of Western literature,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, in which such themes as glory, wrath, fate and homecoming are explored in the brutal and uncertain lives of figures such as Achilles, Hector and Odysseus. Ironically,
The Iliad
covers only a brief, if bloody, period of the war: nearly seven weeks in total. Twenty-one of its twenty-four chapters cover just eight days. It begins with Chryses’s appeal to the Greeks for the return of his daughter, Chryseis (also known as Astynome) and ends with the funeral pyre of Hector. Naturally, much of
The Armour of Achilles
follows the action in
The Iliad
, though I have made the gods less prevalent and highlighted Odysseus’s part in the story. The events before and after come from a variety of other Greek and Roman sources, some of which are lost and are known today only from quotes and references by later writers.
The Armour of Achilles
begins with the sacking of Lyrnessus, something that happens off-stage as far as the main myths are concerned. As for the stoning of Palamedes, the original version has Odysseus planting gold in his tent to frame him for an act of treason he did not commit, purely out of spite. The ancient writers were often divided in their portrayals of Odysseus: some depicted his keen wits and great oratory as heroic, while others saw his cunning nature as quite the opposite. For obvious reasons, I have tried to make him appear in a more positive light.
The battles with the Amazons and the Aethiopes that follow Hector’s funeral are epic stories in their own right and, by necessity, have been curtailed in my own version of them. The death of Achilles happened differently in different sources – some have him stabbed from behind while others say he was shot down with an arrow; in either case, he remained undefeated in individual combat, as befits a hero of his stature. Similarly, the only man who could kill Ajax was himself. He was driven to self-destruction out of pride, unable to bear the humiliation of losing the armour of Achilles to Odysseus. In the original myths, Odysseus wanted the armour for his own personal gain, but again I have tried to save his credibility by giving him a more worthy motive.
There are other threads in
The Armour of Achilles
that are entirely my own invention. The story of Eperitus and his ruthlessly ambitious father, Apheidas, is one of them. So is the romance between Eperitus and Astynome, though Astynome does appear as a minor figure in the original tales. Equally, the background events on Ithaca can be found nowhere in the myths, even if Penelope’s longing for her husband’s return is very Homeric. But unfortunately for her, she cannot be reunited with Odysseus until the Trojans are defeated and their city razed to the ground. For that to happen, Odysseus must first fulfil the oracles set down by the gods and find a way to breach the impenetrable walls of Troy.
PRAISE FOR GLYN ILIFFE
‘A must read for those who enjoy good old epic battles,
chilling death scenes and the extravagance of ancient Greece’
‘It has suspense, treachery, and bone-crunching action
. . . It will leave fans of the genre eagerly awaiting
the rest of the series’
Harry Sidebottom,
Times Literary Supplement
‘The reader does not need to be a classicist by any means to
enjoy this epic and stirring tale. It makes a great novel
and would be an even better film’
Historical Novels Review
Glyn Iliffe studied English and Classics at Reading University, where he developed a passion for the ancient stories of Greek history and mythology. Well travelled, Glyn has visited nearly forty countries, trekked in the Himalayas, spent six weeks hitchhiking across North America and had his collarbone broken by a bull in Pamplona.
King of Ithaca
was his first novel, followed by
The Gates of Troy
.
Also by Glyn Iliffe
King of Ithaca
LOSSARY