The Songs of the Kings (7 page)

2.

The Singer was in the place he usually occupied in the middle hours of the day, sheltered from the wind and protected from the sun by an overhang of rock. He had been silent for some time, leaning back against the rock, between sleep and waking, his lyre resting over his knees. The dazzle of reflected sunlight from the white surfaces of granite on the hillside, the shivering of light from the scrub as it was endlessly agitated by the wind, the vague gleams of human forms as they moved before him, these were splinters that could still hurt what was left of his eyes. He kept them closed now as he took up the lyre again, feeling the thin, bitter tears beneath the closed lids.

It had been a day like all the others since they came there, the wind contending with his voice. Earlier, the boy had come again, bringing bread and figs. He had sat close as he always did, not speaking or moving, listening intently—the Singer could sense the intensity of this listening. He did not know the boy's name and had never heard his voice. He came every day, though not at the same time, and generally brought some gift of food. Today he had not stayed long. Then, sometime later, there had been the face of Ajax the Larger hovering above him like a reddish, cratered moon. From one of the craters came a request for a song of praise dedicated to Ajax the Unifier and celebrating the brilliant idea of a Games Day. Ajax had asked if Calchas the diviner had already approached him with this, but the Singer never gave information about his sources. He had forgotten, he said, his sight was poor, there were so many requests, so very many. Ajax had promised him a silver hair clip and he had promised in return that he would compose the song in his mind and then, on receiving the hair clip, sing it.

A lie, of course. He never composed verses beforehand. He possessed a vast stock of epithets and phrases inherited from his father, who had also been a Singer. For the rest, for what was new in the Song, he relied on the prompting of the gods, which came to him more strongly and urgently at some times than at others but never entirely failed him. He sighed as he struck the preliminary run of notes, his usual way of attracting attention. How many dusty roads he had traveled. It was shameful that people should try and take advantage of a blind old man. He would give his services free when he chose; but not for a skinflint like that one.

He began with a Song completely familiar to all in the camp, the one he had been requested—politely but very firmly—to recite at least once a day so as to keep the just cause of the war well to the forefront of men's minds. This was the story of Paris, prince of Troy, the handsomest man in the world, who had gone on a visit to Sparta, stayed in the palace of Menelaus and, while his host was away, seduced his queen, the fabulously beautiful Helen, who in addition to this beauty had the unusual distinction of having been hatched from a swan's egg after her mother, Leda, had yielded to the embraces of Zeus, who visited her in the form of a swan. Paris had taken Helen back to Troy with him, an outrage to Greek honor that could not be taken lying down. Hence this great army, united in their patriotic duty to avenge the insult and recover the queen.

He did not linger on the story, being himself thoroughly bored with it by this time, but passed quickly on to the epic battle between Stimon the Locrian and Opilmenos the Boeotian, their bronze helmets and breastplates glittering in the sun, their speeches of defiance one to the other, the marvels of valor and dexterity both had displayed. The wretched end of Opilmenos, butchered at leisure as he scrabbled on the pebbles of the shore, came over the more graphically, he felt, for the contrast with the physical splendor that had gone before. Such a downfall gave a sense of doom, a note of tragedy. He liked this version of the duel and intended to repeat it several times before any of Opilmenos's friends or relatives could get at him with requests to dignify the hero's manner of dying. But of course no story was ever final and requests came sometimes in a form one couldn't refuse . . .

Next he sang of the wind that held them there. Day by day this wind was heaping up the fabled wealth of Troy, making her towers and walls more wondrous, more lovely to destroy. As the embers of their campfires glowed and flamed in the endless wind, so the heaped gems took fire, so the gold flamed in the fanning wind of their desires.

It was no more really than a sustained simile, but he liked it. He was coming to the end when he was again aware of someone drawing near. It was a shape of face and quality of voice he recognized. Face and voice came very close. “I am Chasimenos of Mycenae, chief scribe to Agamemnon. You know me, don't you?”

“Yes, I know you,” the Singer said.

“We want you to make it known to the people of the army that this wind is sent by Zeus because of an offense.”

“Whose is the offense?”

“No need to go into specifics. You can say it's somebody high up.”

3.

On the edge of the camp they found men who had come with fish to sell, and one agreed to ferry them over. Even here, in this narrow, sheltered strait, the wind chopped at the water, breaking the surface into shallow ridges that reared and flashed. Hoping for a good reward, the man made a show of the labor involved in taking them across in such weather. This he did by gesture and expression of face— he spoke a language they did not understand, it had no words of Helladic in it. As they set off, in pursuance of his new intention to instruct, offspring of kindness and envy, Calchas tried to explain to Poimenos that the people of these shores had kept their own tongue, which was not related to Greek and so must have been theirs already in that far distant time before the Greeks came. But this was too abstract, it soon became clear to him that Poimenos had no concept at all of such a time, or of one system of sounds that could be older than another.

It was that time of day in summer when the sea and sky seem more definite in color and more substantial than the land. When they looked towards the island it seemed that water below and air above were clasping the land, keeping it in place. This too Calchas pointed out to the boy. “Like the hands of a Titan,” he said. “See, he keeps his hands flat, one above and one below, so the island cannot slip away, cannot escape.” He saw the quickened interest in the boy's face as his imagination caught at these giant hands; it was always stories that held him.

The man rowed from the prow with a single oar, standing upright, grunting with each forward lunge of his body. The wind was all around them now, ruffling the sea, stirring scents from the land they were approaching. Poimenos's eyes were shining and he uttered some laughing exclamation. He was glad to be on the move, in this rocking boat, away from the tedium and oppression of the camp. Some tincture of this gladness came to the priest and he experienced, as sometimes before, a feeling of gratitude for the boy's vivid, quick responses to all things of sense, an eagerness that helped for a while to allay his own doubts and fears.

He had it in mind to speak of this to Poimenos, something he had never done before. But at this moment he saw two crows flying towards the sun. They came from the direction of Thrace, the homeland of Boreas, god of the north wind. Calchas followed them with his eyes as they flew towards the sun, followed them as far as he could, till they were lost in the fire and his eyes were blinded. When he could see again, the sky was empty, there was no smallest speck of a bird in it. On the evidence of sight—the main evidence the gods gave to men whether awake or dreaming—the birds had flown into the sun and been consumed.

As they approached the calmer water on the lee shore of the island, he strove to understand the meaning of this immolation. The crow was the bird of hope, the messenger bird of Polunas, a god of the Hittites. She had once been a white bird, pure white, but one day Polunas, furious at some unwelcome news she brought him, pronounced a malediction on her, and she turned black as night. Afterwards he repented, but the color of a creature cannot be restored; further changes there can be, but there is no reverting to the original. Not even Zeus could do that, he thought. Though Croton would doubtless say otherwise. Croton preached that the power of Zeus had no limits, an obvious absurdity. No god known to man could undo the effects of his own power, no god could take back his words, no god could restore to mortal life a creature destroyed by his breath.

The reason for that anger of Polunas was that a girl he desired had fled from him, and it was the crow that brought this news. Calchas remembered Agamemnon's face and his smile.
The right words
. The crow had not brought them. Was it only this then, a warning? But hope could not be extinguished or consumed, even in the furnace of the sun . . . Zeus had launched them with the eagles, Artemis was detaining them with the wind. As patron of guests and hosts, Zeus was offended by the behavior of Paris, cuckolding Menelaus while staying in his house, then escaping with his prize, getting off scot-free. As protectress of childbirth and the young, Artemis was offended by the slaughter of the innocents that the war would entail. Male justice, female compassion. One looking back, one looking forward. Were they in conflict or blended in a harmony as yet too obscure to see?

These thoughts and the return of dread they brought with them so occupied him that he was hardly aware of nearing the shore. Only when they were out of the boat and wading, with Poimenos holding his arm, did his mind clear. They agreed with the boatman by signs that he should return next day when the sun was overhead, and in order to be sure he came Calchas promised payment only then.

They could see from below the place of the goddess; it was marked by the presence of water, a cluster of close-growing plane trees, the glint through leaves of a thin cascade. They began to climb, following the rocky path, passing through straggling bushes of broom, brown with seedpods. After this, where the water came closer to the surface, there were ferns and two walnut trees, the nuts still green. Bees were busy among the thyme and origan, rifling the tiny flowers, releasing their scent, performing miracles of balance and tenacity as they clambered and clung, endlessly jostled by the wind, which brought scents of the sea and pine resin and summer dust.

Higher up the spring bubbled out over the flat, mossy stone, rippling the trails of moss like hair in the wind. Below it a pool had formed, clear water under the trees, with cress at the edges. Dragonflies hovered here and gnats rose and fell. Beyond was the dark mouth of the cave. It was a small, separate world of water they were in, set apart from the dry scrub of the hillside, the loud concert of the cicadas and the myriad brittle creatures of drought.

Close to the entrance was a formation of rock in the shape of a belly and a navel, and as they paused here an old woman came towards them, walking upright but slowly. From the absence of greeting they knew her for the guardian of the shrine, the keeper of the fire. She stood before them and bowed her head but did not speak. They gave her the woven shawl they had brought with them as a gift to the goddess and she took it and stood aside. They entered the mouth of the cave and stood together at the edge of the low wall of stones built round a raised slab for offerings. There was the smell of woodsmoke and they felt a faint heat against their faces from the hearth below the table, where a fire of charcoal was kept alive under its quilt of white ash. The ground at their feet was scattered with cold ash and the bones of animals.

The old woman lit the lamp that stood on the earth floor inside the entrance. They were able now to see the dark stains of blood on the table, and the votive offerings that lay over the stains: bronze knife blades, the simulacrum of a double-headed ax, a wide-mouthed jar. Beyond this, in the center of the cave, rose the shrouded figure of the goddess, in the shape of a column, streaked with eternal dew.

The priest felt Poimenos draw closer to him, press against his side, felt the fear transmitted through the boy's body, helping him to control his own fear, relieving the constriction of his heart. In these moments of silence they heard the slow drip of water from the darkness deep inside the cave, a sound strangely distinct. Calchas prayed in his native Luvian to the goddess, mistress of animals, Mountain Mother, asking her pardon for this intrusion of strangers, her blessing for Poimenos and himself, her help in lighting up his mind with the meaning of the message she had sent them through the man's throat. Touching the stone of the wall with his forehead, he thought he heard a hiss of breath from deeper inside the cave, sign that he had been heard. They poured libations of wine, using the bronze beaker they had brought with them, and they left this as an offering and came away to the clear space outside.

From here, from a point just above the pool, they could see through the trees and look back across the water, see the way they had come, see the tilting masts of the ships and the wind-driven smoke of the fires. It was this view of the tormented camp that made Calchas understand. The distinctness of the water drops, the hiss of the goddess's breath . . . There was no wind in this enclave, the leaves were still, the flight of the gnats untroubled. He should have known: the author of the wind could not be touched by it—the calm was a proof.

The light was fading, the summer dark would fall quickly. He sent Poimenos to gather dry sticks. When the boy returned with an armful of kindling, he went and took some fire from the hearth, a small ember from under the ash, holding it between two twigs. He built a small pyramid of twigs around it and blew till the twigs took fire. Poimenos went again for thicker pieces. When he returned the priest told him to sit farther off and he obeyed, though Calchas knew he was afraid and would have liked the comfort of nearness.

He waited till the fire had a red heart, then raked it over. When the flames had died he took his bag of hemp seed and crushed bay leaf and cast a handful over the embers and sat with his face close above, covering his head with a piece of silk woven with gold stars, which accompanied all his travels, a gift to him from a merchant of Byblos whose future wealth he had foretold, though without staying long enough to see how things turned out. The heavy folds of the cloth hung down on either side, closing off the air. Eyes fixed on the pattern of the embers, he breathed in the scented fumes, striving to empty his mind of all that might obstruct.

Three handfuls he gave to the embers, feeling the sweat run on his face from the heat of the fire and the deep breathing in that hunched position. Then there was heat no more, he was on the banks of the Maeander, in the land of his birth. The water was clear, he saw the pale shapes of the stones in the streambed as he had seen them in childhood, and the swirls and eddies where the current fretted, and it was autumn because the surface was suddenly covered with bronze-colored leaves and these were borne away swiftly and they trembled and quivered with light, they were not leaves but the bodies of men in armor, it was the river of blood he had glimpsed at Delphi before his mind clouded, but now the water and the drowned warriors were all one color of bronze, Greeks and Trojans mingled together in it, drained of blood, limbs and weapons tumbled helplessly together in the tide of metal that was bearing them away into the far distance, where the stream ran silver and was quite empty.

It was this emptiness that brought fear. He cried out and flung the cloth from his head and tried to move back from the fire, but his limbs would not obey, they shone like bronze, like silver. He felt hands at his back and spoke some words without knowing what they were. Then nausea rose in his throat and he turned away from the hands and choked up the drained soldiers and the bronze blood; and in the coldness and loneliness after the vomiting no slightest sign or mark of favor came to him from anywhere in this enclave devoted to the Mother.