The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus) (34 page)

Euryalus snorted derisively.

‘Such arrogance in one so low. Do you think we’ve never set eyes on Odysseus before? Do you
really
think we’re going to believe you’re the king of Ithaca?’

‘This man’s asking for more than a whipping now,’ Sthenelaus hissed, his voice an angry whisper.

The beggar did not take his eyes from Diomedes.

‘Then how would a simple beggar know that Trechos was the first Argive to be killed in Pelops’s tomb, his neck snapped by Pelops’s skeleton as he removed the lid of the sarcophagus?’

‘No-one could know that unless they were there,’ Diomedes answered. He scrutinised the beggar closely for a moment, then smiled and offered him his hand. ‘By all the gods, Odysseus, even your own mother wouldn’t recognise you in that state.’

Odysseus refused his friend’s hand and, retrieving his stick, pulled himself slowly and stiffly to his feet.

‘No Greek will ever be allowed through the Scaean Gate, but beggars come and go as they please. These rags are how I’ll get past the guards, and once I’m in I’ll lower a rope over the walls so you can join me, Diomedes.’

‘We’ll come, too,’ Euryalus declared.

Odysseus shook his head.

‘Agamemnon gave the task to Diomedes and myself. Besides, the more there are of us the more risk there is we’ll get caught.’ He turned his green eyes on Diomedes. ‘Hide yourself on the banks of the Simöeis until dark. I’ll wave a light from the walls – five times from left to right and back again – to show where I’ve tied the rope.’

‘What rope?’

Odysseus pulled back his robes and the folds of his baggy tunic to reveal the rope he had wound several times around his waist.

‘The walls on the far side of the city are lightly guarded,’ he continued, ‘and once you’re over them you’ll be inside Pergamos itself. We can find our way to the temple of Athena, steal the Palladium and be back out before dawn.’

‘Zeus’s beard, I think it might even work,’ Diomedes said with a grin, excited by the prospect of danger and the glory that came with it.

‘There’s one other thing I need to do while we’re there, though,’ Odysseus said. ‘I need to find out whether Eperitus was taken prisoner.’

The others looked at each other doubtfully.

‘He charged a company of Trojan cavalry alone,’ Sthenelaus said. ‘He’s dead.’

‘I spent the whole day searching for his body among the slain,’ Odysseus replied sternly. ‘He wasn’t there! And though some say they saw him shot by an archer as he rode at Apheidas, until I see his corpse and know his ghost has departed for the Underworld I won’t give up looking for him. He’s my friend, and he would have done the same for me.’

‘There’s a chance the Trojans took him,’ Diomedes said, though sceptically. ‘And if they did, they’ll accept a ransom for his release – or we can set him free when we take the city. But that won’t happen until we’ve stolen the Palladium. That has to be our priority, Odysseus, especially if we ever want to see our wives and families again.’

Odysseus did not need to be told the urgency of their mission.

‘Then we should go now. Take the whip and strike me again.’

Diomedes frowned.

‘We’ve given you enough rough treatment already, for which I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I provoked you to it, and it was necessary to make people believe my disguise; but the Trojans have eyes in the Greek camp and unless you want to arouse suspicion then you must continue to treat me as a vagabond and thief. Once you’ve made a display of driving me off you can return to your tent, but make sure you leave unnoticed again after sunset. And don’t forget to bring my sword with you.’

Diomedes hesitated for a moment, then raised the whip over his head and struck Odysseus on the shoulders. He yelped with pain and loudly accused the Argive king of being a whore’s son, earning himself another lash across the lower back. And so it continued until the beggar was out of sight and the guards at the gate had already forgotten his existence.

A
N
U
LTIMATUM

W
ake up.’

Eperitus opened his eyes a fraction before the palm of a hand struck him across his cheek, whipping his head to one side. Snatched from a dream about the Greek camp, in which Astynome was once more his lover, his senses struggled to grasp hold of something that would bring him back to reality and tell him where he was. The stench of burning fat pricked at his nostrils and he could hear the hiss of a single torch. By its wavering light he could see he was in a small, unfamiliar room, the corners of which were piled up with large sacks – probably of barley, judging by the smell. He was seated in a hard wooden chair, but when he tried to move he discovered he was bound by several cords of flax that wrapped around his abdomen and pinned his arms uselessly at his sides. He blinked and stared at the face of the man who had hit him – a face he did not know – then suddenly remembered he was a prisoner in Troy, alone and far away from the help of his friends.

‘Who in Hades are you?’ he demanded, reviving quickly from his slumber and looking around at what appeared to be a windowless storeroom.

The man did not answer, but beckoned impatiently to two armed warriors standing by the door.

‘Untie him.’

The men knelt either side of him and picked at the cords holding him to the chair, while the first man drew his sword and waved the point menacingly at his stomach.

‘Don’t even think about trying to escape,’ he warned.

‘What do you want with me?’

No answer. The two men pulled away his bonds and lifted him bodily from the chair, pulling his arms roughly about their shoulders. As they made themselves comfortable with his weight, he placed his feet on the ground and tried to stand. A bolt of pain shot up from his wounded leg. If he had not been supported he would have collapsed to the floor. Then the first man opened the door to reveal two more guards waiting outside, who followed behind the others as they carried Eperitus through a confusion of half-lit corridors, up steps, through more corridors and into the great hall of his father’s house, which he recognised from when Astynome had been tending his wound. He looked for her in the shadows cast by the flaming hearth, but saw no-one in the fleeting moments before he was dragged to another door and out into bright, blinding sunlight. His eyes had become accustomed to darkness and he was forced to squeeze them shut while he was taken through what smelled like a garden filled with shrubs and strongly scented flowers. He tried blinking, but caught only confused snatches of his surroundings. More baffling was the faint hissing he could hear in the background. Then he felt himself dumped into another chair, while his arms were pinned painfully behind its hard wooden back and bound tightly with more flax cords.

‘Stay close and keep your weapons to hand,’ a familiar voice ordered the guards.

Eperitus’s eyes stuttered open again. The dark, blurry form before him quickly gained focus and became his father, who had planted himself legs apart before his son’s chair. Eperitus tested his arms against the ropes, but was unable to move them.

‘Where am I?’

‘In my garden,’ Apheidas answered with a sweep of his hand, indicating the bushes and fruit trees that provided a cheerful green backdrop in the morning sunshine. He spoke in Greek to prevent the guards from understanding their conversation. ‘You
were
locked up in one of my storerooms – your wound’s healing fast and I didn’t want to risk leaving you in the great hall – but I thought this would be a much more pleasant place to talk.’

‘I have nothing to say to you. You should’ve just killed me on the battlefield and have been done with it.’

‘That was my first thought,’ Apheidas admitted, his voice hardening. ‘After all, you’ve made your desire to kill
me
very clear. But I don’t suffer from the same crippling lust for vengeance that you do. Revenge is a meaningless, empty passion that achieves nothing – you of all people should know that. No; when I saw you lying in the dust it struck me the gods had delivered you into my hands for a reason. So, not for the first time, I decided to spare your life.’

‘What do you want?’ Eperitus sneered. ‘My
gratitude
?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. I want … I
expect
your help.’

‘After what happened at the temple of Thymbrean Apollo? After you murdered Arceisius? After you used Astynome to fool me into thinking you’d changed?’

He spat at his father’s feet, who replied by striking him hard across the cheek, almost toppling him from the chair. A silence followed, filled only by the sinister hissing that seemed to be coming not from the garden, but from beneath it. Eperitus sniffed at the blood trickling down the inside of his nostril.

‘Nevertheless, you are going to help me,’ Apheidas assured him. ‘If not,
then
I will kill you in the worst way you could imagine.’

He knelt down beside a wooden box, on top of which was a pair of heavy gauntlets. He forced his hands into the stiff leather, then lifted the lid. A low sibilating put Eperitus on edge, and as Apheidas pulled out a thin brown snake from the box he felt every muscle in his body stiffen. He strained against the ropes that held him, but was unable to move.

‘Still have the old fear then?’ his father mocked, stepping closer and holding the snake level with his son’s face.

Eperitus felt his hands shaking as he stared at the scaled, lipless creature with its thin tongue slipping in and out of its mouth. He pressed his head as far back as it would go into the hard, unyielding wood of the chair.

‘Take the damned thing away! Take it away!’

‘As you wish.’ Apheidas stood up straight and held the snake to his own cheek, so that its forked tongue flickered against his jaw. ‘You never did master your fear of my pets, did you? I’ve been keeping them again, you know, since I left Greece.’

‘That hissing sound I can hear –’

‘You don’t even want to think about
that
,’ Apheidas told him with a knowing grin. ‘But I wonder if your tortured mind has regained any memory of
why
you fear snakes so much.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t fear them for nothing, Son. It happened when you were very young, perhaps three years old. I’d bred snakes since before you were born, to provide sacrifices for worshippers at Apollo’s temple in Alybas. I kept them in a pit in our courtyard, a courtyard much like this.’

‘I remember it.’

‘Do you remember falling in?’ Apheidas asked, fixing his son’s gaze. ‘Your mother and I thought we’d lost you then. I hurried down the ladder and saw you lying on the wooden platform at the bottom, which I used to stand on to keep me safe from the snakes. If you’d landed anywhere else you would have perished in an instant, but Apollo must have been protecting you that day. Then I saw your leg was dangling over the side, waving about above all those angry snakes. Before I could reach you, a viper sprang up and bit you behind your knee. The mark’ll still be there, if you care to look.’

‘If it bit me, then how did I survive?’

‘It was a dry bite. No venom was released. You were lucky.’

The story did not bring back any latent memories, but neither did Eperitus have any reason to think his father was lying. It certainly explained why he despised the creatures so much.

‘But you won’t be so lucky next time,’ Apheidas added with a sudden snarl.

He threw the snake onto Eperitus’s lap, causing him to jerk backwards in fear. The chair toppled over with a crash, but instead of hitting his head against the ground as he had expected Eperitus sensed a void opening up beneath him. The surprise lasted only a moment as he remembered the snake and lifted his head to stare down at its thin, curling body on his chest. A wave of nausea and dread surged through him. Then a gloved hand plucked it up and tossed it away.

His father’s sneering face appeared above him.

‘That’s nothing to what you’ll get if you don’t listen to me.’

Standing now, Apheidas tipped Eperitus on his side. A black void opened up by his left ear, from which the terrible hissing he had heard earlier rose up like a living entity to consume his senses. Not daring to look, but unable to stop himself, he turned his head to see that he was balanced over the edge of a pit, and in the darkness at the bottom he could see daylight glistening on the bodies of hundreds of snakes. His stomach tightened, pushing its contents back up through his body and out into the hole below.

Then his chair was being pulled up again by four of Apheidas’s men, away from the pit and back to safety in the broad sunlight.

‘
Now
are you ready to listen to my proposal?’ his father demanded.

‘I’ll listen,’ Eperitus gasped, ‘but you already know my answer. In the end you’ll still have to kill me!’

Apheidas sighed and raised himself to his full height. He turned and picked up a leather water-skin.

‘Here,’ he said, holding it to his son’s lips.

For the first time, Eperitus realised how dry his throat was and how much his body craved liquid. He opened his mouth and Apheidas squeezed a splash of cool water into it.

‘You shouldn’t be so hasty to welcome death, Son. You’ve plenty to live for, after all. Astynome, for instance.’

Eperitus was almost taken by surprise, but the hint of uncertainty in Apheidas’s voice gave him away. His father was no fool: he knew Astynome hated him and loved Eperitus, despite all that had happened. He must also have suspected his son had forgiven her for betraying him. For a brief instant Eperitus was tempted to admit as much, if only to show Apheidas that his feelings for Astynome transcended the schemes of his father that had divided them. Then he heard a voice in his head – not unlike Odysseus’s – warning him not to give Apheidas anything to bargain with. His love of the girl could be used against him; by threatening Astynome, Apheidas could force him to agree to whatever he wanted, just as he had used Clymene to bribe Palamedes to treachery.

‘Don’t mock me,’ Eperitus said, narrowing his eyes and trying to sound angered. ‘If all you can offer is that treacherous bitch then save your breath.’