The Song of Troy (10 page)

‘As you wish,’ Father sighed. He disliked minutiae.

‘That, Tyndareus, is merely the beginning. When you speak, you will inform the suitors how much you adore your precious jewel of a daughter, and how hard you have prayed to the Gods for guidance. Your choice, you will tell them, has been approved in Olympos. The omens are auspicious and the oracles clear. But almighty Zeus has demanded a condition. Namely, that before any man – save you – knows the name of the lucky winner,
every
man must swear an oath to uphold your choice. But more than that. Every man must also swear to give Helen’s husband wholehearted aid and co-operation. Every man must swear that Helen’s husband’s welfare is as dear to him as the Gods are. That, if needs be, every man will go to war to defend the rights and entitlements of Helen’s husband.’

Agamemnon sat silent, staring into space, chewing his lips and visibly burning with some inner fire. My father just looked stunned. Odysseus sat back picking at his fowl, obviously pleased with himself. Suddenly Agamemnon turned to grasp him by both shoulders, knuckles pale under the fierce pressure of his hold, his face ominous. But Odysseus, unafraid, looked back tranquilly.

‘By Mother Kubaba, Odysseus, you are a genius!’ The High King twisted to stare at my father. ‘Tyndareus, do you realize what this means? Whoever marries Helen is assured of permanent, irrevocable alliances with almost every nation in Greece! His future is certain, his position raised a thousandfold!’

My father, though immensely relieved, frowned. ‘What oath can I administer?’ he asked. ‘What oath is so awful that it will bind them to something they will abominate?’

‘There is only one,’ said Agamemnon slowly. ‘The Oath of the Quartered Horse. By Zeus the Thunderer, by Poseidon Earth Shaker, by the Daughters of Kore, by the River and the Dead.’

The words fell like drops of blood from the head of Medusa; Father shuddered, dropped his face into his hands.

Apparently unmoved, Odysseus changed the subject abruptly. ‘What will happen in the Hellespont?’ he asked Agamemnon chattily.

The High King scowled. ‘I don’t know. Oh, what ails King Priam of Troy? Why is he blind to the advantages of Greek traders in the Euxine Sea?’

‘I think,’ said Odysseus, choosing a honey cake, ‘that it suits Priam very well to exclude traders. He gets fat on the Hellespont tolls anyway. He also has treaties with his fellow kings of Asia Minor, and no doubt he takes a share of the exorbitant prices we Greeks are charged for tin and copper if – as we have to – we buy from Asia Minor. The exclusion of Greeks from the Euxine means more money for Troy, not less.’

‘Telamon did us a bad turn when he abducted Hesione!’ said my father angrily.

Agamemnon shook his head. ‘Telamon was in the right of it. All Herakles asked was rightful payment for a great service. When that miserable old skinflint Laomedon denied him, a mindless idiot could have predicted the outcome.’

‘Herakles has been dead these twenty years and more,’ said Odysseus, watering his wine. ‘Theseus is dead too. Only Telamon still lives. He would never consent to be parted from Hesione, even if she’d be willing to go. Abduction and rape are old tales,’ he went on blandly, apparently having never heard a single whisper about Helen and Theseus, ‘and they do not have much if anything to do with policy. Greece is rising. Asia Minor knows it. Therefore what better policy can Troy and the rest of Asia Minor adopt than to deny Greece what it must have – tin and copper to turn into bronze?’

‘True,’ said Agamemnon. He pulled on his beard. ‘So what will come of Troy’s trade embargo?’

‘War,’ said Odysseus peacefully. ‘Sooner or later there must be war. When we feel the pinch hard enough – when our merchants scream for justice in every throne room between Knossos and Iolkos – when we can no longer scrape up enough tin to bronze our copper and make swords and shields and arrowheads – then there will be war.’

Their talk grew duller still; well, it no longer concerned me. Besides, I was heartily sick of Menelaos. Wine was beginning to affect the gathering, fewer faces were turned up to me to worship. I slipped my feet out from under the table and stole away through the door behind my father’s chair. Down the passage which paralleled the dining hall, wishing I wore something more silent than my jangling skirt. The stair to the women’s wing was at the far end where the passage branched off to other public rooms; I reached it, ran up it without being called back. Now I had only to get past my mother’s apartments. Head bent, I pulled at the curtain.

Hands fastened upon my arms halted me, and my cry of alarm was muffled by a hand across my mouth. Diomedes! Heart pounding, I stared at him. Until this moment I had had no opportunity to be alone with him, nor conversed with him beyond salutations.

The lamplight gleamed upon his skin and polished it to amber, a cord beat very fast in the column of his throat; I let myself meet his dark, hot gaze, and felt his hand fall from my mouth. How beautiful he was! How much I loved beauty! But never in anything as much as I did in a man.

‘Meet me outside in the garden,’ he whispered.

I shook my head violently. ‘You must be mad! Let me go and I will not mention how I encountered you outside my mother’s rooms!
Let me go
!’

His teeth flashed white, he laughed silently. ‘I will not move from this spot until you promise to meet me in the garden. They’ll be in the dining hall for a long while yet – no one will miss either of us. Girl, I want you! I care nothing for their decisions or delays, I want you and I mean to have you.’

My head was still fogged from the heat of the dining hall; I put my hand to it. Then, apparently of its own volition, it nodded. Diomedes let me go at once. I fled to my rooms.

Neste was waiting to disrobe me.

‘Go to bed, old woman! I will undress myself.’

Used to my moods, she went gladly, leaving me to tug at my laces with trembling fingers, tear off my bodice and my blouse, struggle free from the skirt. I stripped off the bells, bracelets and rings, found my linen bathrobe and wrapped it about me. Then out into the corridor, down the back stairs into the night air. The garden, he had said: I found the rows of cabbages and edible roots, smiling. Who would look for us among the vegetables?

He was naked beneath a laurel tree. Off came my bathrobe, far enough from him to let him see me in the rain of moonlight. Then he was beside me, spreading it for our bed, holding me against himself flat on Mother Earth, from whom all women gather strength and all men lose it. Such is the way of the Gods.

‘Fingers and tongues, Diomedes,’ I whispered. ‘I will go to my marriage couch with hymen intact.’

He smothered his laughter between my breasts. ‘Did Theseus teach you how to be a virgin?’ he asked.

‘No one needed to teach me that,’ I said, stroking his arms and shoulders, sighing. ‘I am not very old, but I know that my head is the price of losing my maidenhead to any save my husband.’

By the time he left me he was, I think, satisfied, if not as he had anticipated. Because he loved me truly he honoured my conditions, just as Theseus had. Not that I was very concerned about how Diomedes felt.
I
was satisfied.

Which showed the next night when I sat beside my father’s throne, had there been any eyes to note it. Diomedes sat with Philoktetes and Odysseus in the throng, too far from me in the dimness to see how he looked. The room, bright with frescoes of dancing warriors and scarlet-painted columns, had sunk to dark and flickering shadows. The priests came, thick and cloying fumes of incense rose, and without fuss or fluster the atmosphere took on the solemn, burdensome holiness of a shrine.

I heard my father speak the words Odysseus had prepared; the oppression settled down like a living thing. Then came the sacrificial horse, a perfect white stallion with pink eyes and no hair of black on him, his hooves slipping on the well-worn flags, his head snaking back and forth in the golden halter. Agamemnon picked up the great double-headed axe and swung it expertly. The horse went down, it seemed, so very slowly, mane and tail floating like wisps of weed in water currents, his blood spurting.

While my father informed the company of the oath he required, I watched in sickened horror as the priests hacked the lovely beast into four quarters. Never shall I forget that scene: the suitors stepping forward one by one to balance their two feet on four limp pieces of warm flesh, swearing the terrible oath of loyalty and allegiance to my future husband. The voices were dulled and apathetic, for power and masculinity could not survive that awful moment. Pale and sweating faces waxed and waned in the torchlight as it wavered; from somewhere a wind was blowing, hallooing like a lost shade.

Finally it was done. The steaming carcass of the horse lay ignored, the suitors from their places looked up at King Tyndareus of Lakedaimon as if drugged.

‘I give my daughter to Menelaos,’ Father said.

There was a great sigh, nothing else. No one shouted a quick protest. Not even Diomedes leaped to his feet in anger. My eyes found his as the attendants went about kindling the lamps; we said our farewells across half a hundred heads, knowing we were beaten. I think the tears ran down my cheeks as I looked at him, but no one remarked on them. I gave my numbed hand into the damp clasp of Menelaos.

5

NARRATED BY

Paris

I returned to Troy on foot and alone, my bow and quiver across my shoulders. Seven moons I had spent among the forests and glades of Mount Ida, yet not one trophy did I have to show for them. Much as I loved hunting, I could never bear to see an animal stumble under the impact of an arrow; I preferred to see it as well and free as I was. My best hunting moments concerned more desirable quarry than deer or boar. For me the fun of the chase was in going after the human inhabitants of Ida’s woods, the wild girls and shepherdesses. When a girl sank down, defeated, no arrows pierced her save the one Eros shot; there was no stream of blood or dying moan, only a sigh of sweet content as I took her into my arms still gasping from the ecstasy of the chase, and ready to gasp with another kind of ecstasy.

I always spent my springs and summers on Ida; Court life bored me to the point of madness. How I hated those cedar rafters oiled and polished to richest brown, those painted stone halls and pillared towers! Being shut in behind huge walls was to suffocate, to be a prisoner. All I wanted was to run through leagues of grass and trees, lie exhausted with my face pillowed against a perfume of fallen leaves. But each autumn I had to return to Troy and spend the winter there with my father. That was my duty, token though it was. After all, I was his fourth son among many. Nobody took me seriously, and I preferred that.

I walked into the Throne Room at the end of an assembly on a wild, bleak day, still in my mountain clothes, ignoring the pitying smiles, the lips pursed up in disapproval. Dusk was already dimming to the gloom of night; the meeting had been a very long one.

My father the King sat upon his gold and ivory chair high upon a purple marble dais at the far end of the hall, his long white hair elaborately curled and his tremendous white beard twined about with thin strings of gold and silver. Inordinately proud of his old age, he was best pleased when he sat like an ancient god upon a tall pedestal, looking out over everything he owned.

Had the room been less imposing, the spectacle my father presented might not have been so impressive, but the room was, they said, bigger and grander even than the old Throne Room in the palace of Knossos in Crete. Spacious enough to hold three hundred people without seeming overcrowded, its lofty ceiling between the cedar rafters was painted blue and bedewed with golden constellations. It had massive pillars which tapered to relative slenderness at their bases, deep blue or purple, round plain capitals and plinths gilded. The walls were purple marble without relief to the height of a man’s head; above that they were frescoed in scenes of lions, leopards, bears, wolves and men at hunt – black-and-white, yellow, crimson, brown and pink against a pale blue background. Behind the throne was a reredos of black Egyptian ebony wood inlaid with golden patterns, and the steps leading up to the dais were edged in gold.

I slid off my bow and quiver, handed them to a servant and worked my way through the knots of courtiers until I arrived at the dais. Seeing me, the King leaned forward to touch my bowed head gently with the emerald knob of his ivory sceptre, the signal to rise and approach him. I kissed his withered cheek.

‘It is good to have you back, my son,’ he said.

‘I wish I could say it is good to be back, Father.’

Pushing me down to sit at his feet, he sighed. ‘I always hope that this time you will stay, Paris. I could make something of you if you would stay.’

I reached up to stroke his beard because he loved that. ‘I want no princely job, sire.’

‘But you
are
a prince!’ He sighed again, rocked gently. ‘Though you are very young, I know. There is time.’

‘No, sire, there is not time. You think of me as a boy, but I am a man. I am thirty-three years old.’

He was not listening to me, I fancied, for he raised his head and turned away from me, gesturing with his staff to someone at the back of the crowd. Hektor.

‘Paris insists he is thirty-three, my son!’ he said when Hektor arrived at the bottom of the three steps. Even so, he was tall enough to look into our father’s face at the same level.

Hektor’s dark eyes surveyed me thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you must be, Paris. I was born ten years after you, and I’ve been twenty-three for six moons now.’ He grinned. ‘You certainly don’t look your age, however.’

I laughed back. ‘Thank you for that, little brother! Now you
do
look my age. That’s because you’re the Heir. It ages a man to be the Heir – tied down to the state, the army, the crown. Give me the eternal youth of irresponsibility any day!’

‘What suits one man doesn’t necessarily suit another’ was his tranquil reply. ‘I have far less taste for women, so what does it matter if I look old before my time? While you enjoy your little escapades in the harem, I enjoy leading the army on manoeuvres. And while my face may wrinkle prematurely, my body will be fit and spare long after yours sports a pot belly.’