The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus) (57 page)

A woman’s scream shook the Council from its half-hearted dissection of the plunder list. All heads turned to the walls, then higher still to the top of the tower that protected the Scaean Gate. There stood Odysseus, Astyanax held high above his head. The child’s white clothes blew in the westerly wind, and then with a howl of anger Odysseus hurled him down to perish on the stones below.

T
HE
D
EAD
C
HILD

S
haking off Teucer and Little Ajax, Eperitus sprang to his feet and ran from the shocked assembly towards the gates. The child’s body lay among the wreckage of stone beneath the tower, his head dashed in but with surprisingly little blood spattered over the huge blocks on which he had fallen.

‘Wait!’

Eperitus turned to see Peisandros’s stocky physique sprinting towards him.

‘What are you going to do?’ the Myrmidon commander asked as he caught up with him. ‘I mean, if you’re going to confront Odysseus about this, then give me that sword first.’

‘We’re old friends, Peisandros,’ Eperitus replied. ‘You know me better than that by now.’

‘Angry men have been known to do rash things.’

Eperitus shook his head, but handed Peisandros his sword anyway. ‘I just want to know
why
. Why
would
he do that?’

Peisandros stared down at Astyanax’s body. ‘I don’t know, but I’m coming with you.’

They ran through the gate and entered the doorway that led into the dark interior of the tower. Eperitus’s eyes adjusted quickly and spotted the wooden ladder ascending to the next floor. The two men climbed it but found the room above empty except for a pile of spears in one corner and shields stacked against the foot of the wall. A dusty shaft of grey light fed into the gloom from a hatchway above and without hesitation Eperitus continued climbing. He reached the top of the tower and saw Odysseus standing against the parapet, looking out at the smoking ruins of Troy. As he clambered through the narrow square in the wooden floor, half-followed by Peisandros, Odysseus looked at them both and raised a finger to his lips. The angry words that Eperitus had been about to hurl at his king fell dead.

‘Are you alone?’ Odysseus asked them.

They nodded, mystified, and then Odysseus leaned across and tipped the stack of shields forward to reveal Astyanax, alive and smiling at them. Peisandros almost fell back through the hatch.

‘But –’ Eperitus said. ‘But –’

‘You saw me throw him from the walls?’

Peisandros rushed back to the opposite wall and looked down at the body still on the stones below.

‘Come back from there, you fool,’ Odysseus ordered. ‘Do you want the Council to see you?’

‘But how’s it possible?’

Odysseus raised his eyebrows. ‘Most things are possible, with a little deception. After you tried to save Astyanax, Eperitus, I remembered there was the body of an infant on the rocks by the gate – he was thrown down from the walls just as the Council was convening this morning. When I took Astyanax through the gate, I simply picked the boy’s corpse up as I went past. Once inside the tower, I swapped Astyanax’s princely garments for the plain sackcloth the dead child was wearing, then threw him down from the top of the tower. The head was already a mess, but I’m hoping nobody will look too closely at the body. The hardest part was carrying them both up the ladder – Astyanax under my cloak, and the other dangling by his ankle.’

Peisandros knelt by the child and offered him a thick, dirty finger. Astyanax took it and pulled, laughing at the Myrmidon.

‘So what are you going to do with him?’ Eperitus asked. ‘You can’t leave him here. He’ll just be found and thrown from the walls anyway. And if the Council find out –’

‘I didn’t have time to think about that,’ Odysseus confessed, ‘but I think I have the answer now.’

‘Oh?’

‘You, Peisandros. Neoptolemus is your leader and Astyanax’s mother has been allotted to him.’

‘So?’

‘So you smuggle the boy on board with you and take him back to Phthia. There’re plenty of soldiers doing the same with other Trojan boys; I’ve seen it – they haven’t the heart to throw them from the walls, so they’re disguising them as girls and taking them back to Greece. You can do the same and bring Astyanax up among your own family.’

‘
What
?’

‘And make sure you tell Andromache that her boy is safe, so she can watch him grow up from a distance. But Astyanax is never to know his true identity, you understand?’

‘Well, of course, but –’

‘That’s settled then,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘You’ve always been a good man, Peisandros. I’ll make sure you get a little extra from the plunder, too. Just to help you feed the additional mouth when you get home, naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ Peisandros sighed.

Astyanax tugged at his finger and giggled, causing the Myrmidon to laugh out loud, despite himself.

As they walked back to the ships at the end of the day, with the sun already melting into the distant edge of the Aegean, Eperitus turned to his king.

‘You took a big risk for the sake of that child. A child you’ve never even seen before, and the son of your enemy.’

‘I hold no enmity towards Hector,’ Odysseus replied. ‘He was just a man fighting for his homeland, and now his soul is in Hades where it can’t harm any more Greeks. If I took a risk, it wasn’t for Astyanax’s sake.’

‘Then whose?’

Odysseus smiled at him.

‘Yours. When I realised why you wanted to save the child – because you’d been unable to save Iphigenia, and because that failure has eaten away at you for ten years – I knew I had to help you. If I took a risk in doing what I did, then I did it for your sake Eperitus. Who else’s?’

‘Thank you,’ Eperitus said, quietly.

They reached the Ithacan galleys, which were turning black against the crimson sunset.

‘And now,’ Odysseus said, looking up at the muddle of masts, cross spars and rigging, ‘I suppose we had better think about going home.’

Despite not appearing directly in
The Iliad
or
The Odyssey
, the story of the wooden horse is probably the most iconic and familiar of all the myths associated with the Trojan War. The idea of a simple trick succeeding where ten years of brute force had failed has an appeal that has stood the test of time. Naturally, there isn’t a thread of historical evidence for the horse – after all, mythology is not history – though many have tried to interpret it in more realistic terms. Perhaps the most convincing is the suggestion, first put forward by the Romans, that the horse was a metaphor for an ancient siege tower. I preferred the courage and desperation of the original story, with the surviving heroes of the Greek army (except Agamemnon, of course) hiding in a wooden horse and hoping their enemies will take the bait.

The oracles that foretold the fall of Troy are less well-known. To the ancient Greeks the gods were as much a part of life as working, fighting, eating and sleeping. The fact that everything rested “in the lap of the gods”, as Homer puts it, was unquestioned, so to have the outcome of the war depend on the fulfilment of divine prophecies was only natural. As ever, there are a variety of different versions of who predicted what and when, so I have chosen the ones that I believe best suit the story I’m trying to tell.

In the original myths, Helenus is a genuine seer whom the gods entrust with the final oracles that point to the fall of Troy. He even appears as a warrior, if only briefly, in
The Iliad
. But with two prophets already in the book – Calchas and Cassandra – and innumerable fighting men, I decided to rob him of these virtues and make him a charlatan instead. Though Odysseus was not sent to fetch the bone of Pelops, and the guardian of the tomb is entirely my own invention, he
was
sent to fetch Neoptolemus from Scyros and steal the Palladium from Troy. Disguised as a beggar, he entered the city, met Helen and gleaned important information from her before returning later with Diomedes and making away with the effigy.

Even with all the oracles fulfilled, Troy would not have fallen if Odysseus had not thought up the greatest military ruse of all time. This makes him the most effective hero of the whole siege and recognises that wars are ultimately won by brains rather than brawn. He also had the idea of leaving behind a man to persuade the Trojans the horse should be taken into the city rather than burnt on the plain. In the myths this job was done by Sinon and not by Omeros, who does not appear in any of the original tales.

One of the drawbacks of trying to condense such a vast collection of stories into a comparatively short narrative is that much has to be cut out. Regrettably, one such edit was the tale of Lacoön. Yet another Trojan seer, he protests the folly of bringing the wooden horse inside the city walls, but is cut short when Apollo sends two sea-serpents to crush him and his twin sons to death. The horrified Trojans take this as a sign that the horse is to be accepted, whatever their suspicions.

The horrific sack of Troy, with its widespread murder and rape, is typical of the end of any great siege where the victorious warriors take out their pent up anger on the city’s population. Aeneas was one of the few males to escape – though
not
with the help of Odysseus – and according to the Romans his ancestors later went on to found the city of Rome. Antenor and his family also escaped (
with
the help of Odysseus), but poor Astyanax did not. Some versions have the boy murdered by Neoptolemus, others by Odysseus. I have been kinder to both Astyanax and Odysseus in my account.

You will not find Eperitus in any of the myths. He, his love affair with Astynome (who appears in
The Iliad
as Chryseis) and his feud with his father are all inventions of my imagination. I wanted at least one major character whose fate, unlike those of Odysseus and the others, is entirely in my own hands!

And so the war is over, but not the adventure. In fact, the greatest chapter in the whole saga is just about to begin. As Odysseus turns toward home he is ignorant of the new challenges the Fates are lining up before him. From man-eating songstresses, seductive witches and one-eyed monsters, to the very depths of Hades, he must call on all his courage and wit if he is ever to return home to his beloved Penelope.