The Songs of the Kings (4 page)

4.

The King was waiting, seated in his great chair. Calchas knelt before him and touched his forehead to the ground. He rose and was backing away to a respectful distance, but the King stopped him with a gesture and indicated a point close to his chair, a place of honor. Across from him but farther off were Croton and his two disciples, bearded like their god, their hair piled on top of their heads in the shape of beehives and thickly lacquered to keep it in place. They were dressed for the occasion in their white robes and white headbands, and they held their oak staffs grounded, like spears at the ready. All three looked at Calchas with hatred.

Most of the chiefs had already assembled. Glancing round quickly as he took his place, he saw Achilles and Palamedes standing together—natural allies, those two, he thought, alike in coldness of heart. Round-faced, red-haired Menelaus was there, whose cuckolding by Paris had provided the pretext for the war, and wily Odysseus and the aged and rambling Nestor, whose head trembled incessantly. Idomeneus, leader of the contingent from Crete, entered quickly, hailed the King and stood alone: he had no friends except among the people he had brought with him.

Calchas was still struggling to make sense of Ajax's words; it was his nature always to be tormented by what he couldn't understand. Was it because references to his grandfather were offensive to Agamemnon? Pelops after all had committed a string of notable murders, in Pisatis, in Arcadia, in Elis. A serial killer, basically—he had left a trail of blood wherever he went. On the other hand, the first of these killings had been for love, in order to gain Hippodameia for his wife. This should be a cause for family pride or at least fellow feeling in Agamemnon, whose first act as king had been to slaughter Tantalus, the husband of Clytemnestra, so he could take her for his own wife. He had gone one better. In his jealous desire to remove all traces of the man he had supplanted, he had ordered the child of the marriage, a baby still at the breast, to be smothered with a sheep fleece. So it was whispered at least. No, he was probably quite proud to be the grandson of Pelops . . . Then suddenly he understood. Nothing to do with family sensibilities at all. Even the impetuous and unreflective Ajax had been infected by the general distrust now gaining ground among the chiefs. It emanated from the King himself, who lay awake at night and listened to his enemies breeding in the wind. The nearer the claim, the closer the connection, the more suspicious Agamemnon would be about the motives. Better to say nothing about this Games Day himself either; Ajax would blunder on with it anyway. Only six days it had taken to bring them to this pass . . .

In accordance with his usual tactics, Agamemnon was waiting for movement among the chiefs to cease before he spoke. The constant billowing and collapsing of the canvas, like laboring lungs, was beyond his control, as were the flat, smacking sounds of the wind in it. He had put on the skullcap, black silk stitched with gold thread, which he used for audiences of state. Below this his eyes looked huge, dark-ringed and slow, eyes of the sleepless or the drugged. It was hot inside the tent, but he wore the same heavy blue gown, the same thick belt with its buckle of bronze and hanging dagger. When the people gathered there were still, he spoke, not loudly. “Let them be brought before us.”

They filed in almost at once, four men, unarmed, accompanied by Chasimenos, still in his tunic of a palace official. They made their reverences, crouching with heads lowered and hands on knees. Then they straightened and stood together, side by side before the King. One of them Calchas recognized, a man named Phylakos, a captain in Agamemnon's guard. He was naked to the waist, dressed only in cotton kilt and leather wristbands and sandals, a powerful, deep-chested man, nearly bald, with pale scars on his body and a papyrus flower tattooed on his right thigh.

In the pause before the King spoke again, all heard, twining through the voices of the wind but distinct from them, the flailing of the bull-roarers down near the shore like the sound of many wings beating together. Every day the shamans of the Pelasgians, a people with their own gods and their own language, fronted the sea and whirled their long ropes, with flat pieces of wood attached, in great circles overhead, striving to outdo the wind with the whirling they made and so drive it back to its caves in the north. Perhaps stirred in his twilight by this mighty wingbeat, old Nestor began some querulous complaint, hushed immediately by his two sons, who were in constant attendance upon him, one on either side. It was never possible to tell whether these two were speaking separately or together. In the years of trying to quieten their father, their voices had become identical, like the cooing of doves. Calchas felt again that shudder of warning within him. These things too were exact, unrepeatable, as was the way they had chosen to stand together, even though it might seem as random as the stones in a streambed.

Agamemnon began to speak. His voice was slow, like the voice of one who relates a dream immediately on waking and strives to remember the order of things as they happened. He spoke about the omen of the eagles, the two male eagles, one black as night, one with a blaze of silver, seen about the palace of Mycenae in the time before the expedition set out, seen several days in succession, haunting the walls, always on the right hand, the spear side, auguring good fortune. Two full-grown male eagles in company together, a thing never seen before. “Those of Mycenae will remember this omen and the interpretation made at the time by our diviner Calchas?”

Nobody spoke but Menelaus nodded and after him several others, as if they had needed the example. None of the four who had been brought in made any sign. Agamemnon turned his head slightly towards the diviner. “Calchas will remind us of his words at that time.”

Thus prompted, the priest began to speak in his careful, slightly hesitant Greek, moving his body slowly and rhythmically forward and back in the way the priests of Caria did when uttering prophecies—it was in Caria, as a youth, that he had been admitted to the cult of the god whom he must always now remember to call Apollo. A coldness gathered in his breast as he spoke, because his words at Mycenae had been uttered to please Agamemnon and establish his own position, he had not been properly mindful of the nature of his god, who was male and female in equal parts and so gave divided counsels, which then had to be reconciled. There was no choice now but to repeat the simple message.

“As the eagle is the king of birds, so Agamemnon and Menelaus are kings of men, the eagle brothers, sons of Atreus. The eagle is the bird of Zeus, and this has been so from the beginning of his rule, even before his rule was established. It was an eagle that flew towards him on the eve of his great battle with the Titans for supremacy in heaven, thus ensuring his victory. The eagles that came to haunt the battlements of Mycenae, and whose presence was remarked by many, were sent by Zeus in token that the quarrel with Troy is a just one.”

He stopped here, the coldness still gathered around his heart. Croton was already raising his staff. He had known that the priest would intervene, would want, as he had wanted from the beginning, to make the augury his own, establish himself as sole interpreter of the god's will. But he had expected more ceremony. Now Croton broke into speech, scarcely waiting for the King's nod—mark of the power he had gained in these few days.

“The justice of Zeus demands that the outrage to hospitality committed by Paris in his abduction of Helen while a guest in the house of her husband Menelaus should be avenged. The justice of Zeus—”

He was interrupted by Menelaus, who said loudly, “Absolutely right, you've hit the nail on the head, Croton. A piece of shit like that, a beastly Asian who started life as a ragged-arsed goatherd, how could my Helen, who was always repelled by anything coarse, have allowed herself to be forcibly abducted like that if he had not used the wiles of the bitch goddess Hecate and all the demons of his filthy country against her?” He was fair-skinned and inclined to freckles and his nose had peeled, making it look strangely paler than the rest of his face, which had flushed with the force of his feelings. “Asians stink,” he said, more mildly. “Their houses are like pigsties.”

Croton's staff was still raised. He seemed not to have registered the interruption. “The justice of Zeus gives redress to the wronged, the justice of Zeus is vested in the eagle brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus.”

His eyes were alight and his voice vibrated with passion. This was the new thing, this cry of justice, Calchas thought. It simply didn't make sense. Thoroughly unreasonable. It derived from the same error, that of regarding a god as a father. Naturally, the children will want a father to be just, especially since they can't achieve justice themselves. Zeus was cloudgatherer, rain-giver, thunderer. Where did the justice come in? He glanced across at Menelaus's patched face. That reference to the uncleanness and evil habits of Asians, had it been a dig at him? On the whole, he thought not. The representative Asian was still Paris, who had seduced his wife while he was away at a funeral and then run off to Troy with her. All the same, these outbursts were getting more frequent all the time and more wide-ranging. Calchas thought of the houses of Tarsus, with their scrubbed steps and entranceways, the smell of wet dust in the courtyards of Hattusas when they scattered water to clean the paving stones. In Kadesh they employed street sweepers, a thing unheard of in the Greek lands. Menelaus had seen nothing of Asia, of course—except perhaps the slave markets of Miletus . . .

Croton seemed about to continue, but Agamemnon raised a hand to stay him. No one had yet mentioned the wind and it seemed unlikely to Calchas that anyone would, not here, not unbidden. It was too dangerous a subject. But the question must be there in all minds, as it was in his: If Zeus had sent the eagles as a blessing on the expedition, why was the army being held there in Aulis, why were they being prevented from sailing?

Agamemnon looked round at the faces as if he might see treason on the wing among them. “It was to Mycenae that the eagles were sent, not elsewhere,” he said. “They were sent to me. By consent of my brother first, and then by consent of you all, the conduct of the war is given to me.”

No one had questioned this, at least not otherwise than in private with those he could trust, or in the thoughts of his solitude. For Agamemnon to assert it publicly now was a mistake, a sign of weakness. Calchas sensed the knowledge of this twisting through the minds of all those in the tent. He saw Odysseus glance aside, but could not tell where his eyes were directed. Chasimenos, standing beside him, appeared lost in thoughts of his own. Achilles was turning his perfect profile upward, towards the roof of the tent, with his usual air of bored indifference. No particular expression showed on any face; but Calchas could sense the twisting course of the knowledge of weakness as it went from mind to mind, a serpent of thought, moving like the snakes of light that coiled and loosened on the walls of the tent as the wind ruffled the flaps of canvas at the entrance. The snake, sign of the Mother . . .

“There is something we did not know before,” Agamemnon said. “My captain, Phylakos, has words for us.”

Phylakos took a step forward from the other three and stood in a position of attention, arms at his sides. “These men saw something more. They were at the lookout post on the northern side of the citadel on the third day of the eagles, early in the morning, soon after dawn.” He paused to look briefly round at the others in the tent. “The light is good at this time,” he said. “That I can vouch for. I sometimes inspected the guard posts then. It is the time you find men sleeping, before sunrise, before the guard is changed.”

His face was impassive but it was immediately apparent to Calchas that he was trying to secure belief beforehand for what they were going to hear; or at least to anticipate objections. But this, after all, was no more than anyone would do when there was a story to tell, a story he believed and wanted others to believe.

“This man will tell you what they saw,” he said now, indicating one of the three. “He is called Leucides.”

Leucides stepped forward in his turn and braced his shoulders preparatory to speech. He was a bony man with a conspicuous rib cage and a long, sad face. “There was a hare,” he said. “We saw the eagles stoop at this hare. They killed it and tore it to pieces.”

In the startled silence that followed on this, the plaintive muttering of Nestor became audible, rising above the shushing of his sons. His concentration span was short, and he had lost interest in the proceedings at an early stage, embarking yet again on the interminable narrative of his own past deeds. He was talking now, Calchas realized after some moments, about a cattle raid into Elis that he had made in his distant youth.

“. . . show these Trojan dogs a thing or two, I'd be over there in two shakes of a duck's tail if I was young again, in those days I could outdistance the wind, I would race ahead of it, as I did when we went rustling cattle in Elis, they couldn't stop us, they tried to stop us but they couldn't stop us, nobody could stop us, Achilles is a runner but he isn't a patch on what I was, I tell you I could outrun the wind, bounding and bounding over the land and the wind falling short behind me, I heard the wind behind me, wailing because it couldn't keep up . . .”

“That is a striking image, father, but running is no good now, there is water before us.”

“Father, that wind was behind you, whereas this one . . .”

“They couldn't stop me, they tried to stop me, nobody could stop me, we got away with fifty cows, Itymoneus tried to stop me, or was his name Iphitomenos, he was the son of Hypeirochus or Hypernochus, I'm sure of that, they were his father's cattle, he came against me, he fancied his chances, but I took my sword, it wasn't a javelin, the singers have said it was a javelin but it was a sword, who would carry javelins on a cattle raid, you need to make a quick getaway on a cattle raid, it was a sword, I went down on one knee and quick as a flash I gave him an upward thrust with it, straight up the crotch, ha, ha, he wasn't expecting that, the blades were longer in those days . . .”