Warriors in Bronze (25 page)

'These exiled kings,' Gelon explained, 'had ruled Egypt from
fortresses guarded by monstrous walls and therefore felt un­comfortable without ramparts. The limestone walls which
girdle Avaris, their capital in Egypt, soar higher than the tallest
in Achaea.'

From Gortys the aliens, within fifty years, captured neigh­bouring Phaestos, then Malia and Knossos, overran Crete and
established rulers in all the cities.

'Impossible!' I protested. 'Cretans can fight if they have to -
remember their record at sea.'

'The men from Egypt,' Gelon said, 'brought chariots and
horses, both unknown to Cretans. Chariots, my lord, were de­cisive then, and later in Achaea.'

Towards the end of this period Zeus, grandson of a deposed
shepherd king, first saw the light on Mount Dikte where his
parents found temporary refuge from a palace uprising in
Knossos. ('In fact his name was User,' Gelon interpolated,
'taken from a king in ancient Egypt. Cretan tongues soon
twisted the word to Zeus.') He grew to manhood, peerless in
war and cunning in counsel, valiant and wise, a paladin and
paragon who held all Crete in fee.

Then fire fell from heaven.

An insignificant island called Thera lay a day's sailing north­ward from Crete. A volcano humped from the island's centre;
intermittent earthquakes tumbled houses. (Manifestations of
dread Ouranos, who lives in the bowels of the earth, whose
name nobody speaks. Indeed to
think
of him invites disaster. I
will hurry on.) On a summer's day three centuries ago an appalling eruption buried Thera under twenty spears' lengths
depth of ashes. Successive shocks carved clefts in the crater's
sides. Sea gushed into the blazing hollow.

The entire island exploded.

The sound stunned people in distant Colchis, desert dwellers
in far Sumeria trembled at the thunder. Masses of molten rock,
burning ash and debris whirled to the roof of heaven. Ash and
vapour blackened the sky and plunged the world in darkness
from Thracia to Egypt - one of many plagues afflicting the
country around that time. A poisonous blanket fell on Crete
and smouldered three feet deep.

Worst of all were the waves.

The speediest horse ever foaled can gallop just so fast: the
waves came four times faster. Walls of water from sunken
Thera battered the Cretan coast. They were fifty feet high, so
Gelon averred, and utterly engulfed the towns on the northern
shores. Blackened, cracked and cloaked in ash, inland Knossos
alone survived.

I listened enthralled. A memorial of catastrophe in days be­yond man's memory lingered faintly in bardic lays; Gelon told
the story as though his eyes had seen it. I said, 'How can you
know of happenings which are so remote in time?'

'My ancestors were there, and wrote it down. We have the
records still.'

'Ancestors? Are you then of Egyptian or Cretan blood?'

Gelon sniffed. 'Certainly not. Long ago my people, defeated
in war and enslaved, were taken into Egypt by the victors. We
brought the art of writing, and found employment in the
palaces. When the shepherd kings were evicted they carried
away their Scribes. Part of my tribe - called Dan in our tongue
- arrived in Crete.'

I glanced at his crow-black hair, nutbrown hook-nosed
features, the long grey robe all Scribes affect. Undoubtedly he
and his fellows, both in character and appearance, seemed
different as Phoenicians from the fair-skinned men of Achaea.

'Go on. What happened next?'

King Zeus and his surviving kindred surveyed the ravaged
island. A crust of virulent ash blighted the earth. Nothing
would grow, the people starved. Zeus decided to cut the ties
and begin again in a different country. He salvaged broken
ships from the fields where the waves had flung them, scoured
the southern harbours which had suffered lesser damage. Em­barking all the descendants of those who came from Egypt
seventy years before, the Scribes and chariots and horses, he
sailed northwards to Achaea.

Simple rustic husbandmen inhabited the land, peaceable and
unwarlike, dwelling in open villages. Zeus and his warriors de­stroyed them like a holocaust. Thousands died, more became
slaves; many fled from the fury and sought shelter in the
mountains.

'Where their children's children are present-day Goatmen,' I
remarked.

'Even so. Implacable enemies, my lord, ever seeking venge­ance for the wrongs their forbears suffered. As you well know.'

Before Zeus died, Gelon continued, his followers ruled in
Pylos, Elis, Argos, Sparta, Mycenae. Arcadia became a no-man's-land where the old race fought the new. (It remains so in part
till now.) They fortified the towns, bred multitudinously over
the centuries - 'Achaean families are always large,' Gelon com­mented wryly - and extended their sway to the realms we
know today.

'Zeus died peacefully in bed, and there he lies: Mycenae's
earliest king, the founder of your line.' Gelon pointed to the
oak-surmounted mound. 'He and Hera his queen, his sons and
other relations. All wear masks of beaten gold, their bodies
encased in gold and silver. And nowadays' - a tinge of con­tempt - 'the common people believe him a god.'

'Much to the Daughters' annoyance.' I dredged my memory.
'Haven't I heard of a brother Poseidon, a famous mariner who
founded the House of Perseus?'

'He led Achaea's navy three hundred years ago. Pylos claims
his grave and the royal line his blood. I think they err in both:
our records show him lost at sea while fighting Sicilian pirates.
None the less the lower orders worship him in Pylos.'

An ox-cart squealed up the road from the town, laden with
jars and hides and cloth - some outlying manor's tribute. Chil­dren played 'catch-if-you-can' among the burial ground's stone
mounds, their voices muted by distance like mosquitoes whin­ing at dusk. A peasant trickled a handful of corn in the dust of
Zeus' Tomb, folded his arms in prayer, seated himself with his
back to a slab and drowsed in the oak tree's shade. I said wonderingly, 'So I'm descended from Egypt's kings. You've cer­tainly opened my eyes to the past! The bards sing none of
this.'

'The bards!' Derision was plain in Gelon's tone. 'They come
to us for history, then embroider and distort. They sing to
flatter their patrons; and only in chanting pedigrees which
Heroes know by heart do they tell the approximate truth. Even
then they often invent to hide unsavoury gaps. If you'll forgive
me, my lord ...' Gelon finished in some confusion.

'What do you mean ?'

The Scribe hurriedly disclaimed any reflection on my an­cestry which, he swore, the documents traced generation by
generation through Pelops back to Zeus. But, he added un­comfortably, the Perseid line was not so well attested. Perseus'
mother Danae certainly had no husband: in Argos when her
pregnancy grew obvious her angry father, Acrisius, immured
her in a watch-tower. Perseus later founded Tiryns and rebuilt
Mycenae's crumbling walls. His descendants asserted their distinguished progenitor could not have been misbegotten; so the
bards concocted a story that Zeus' ghost raped Danae - when it
comes to protecting the blood line the bigger the lie the better.

Gelon quoted similar tales to cover lacunae in noble descents.
'You see, my lord,' he ended apologetically, 'nobody likes bas­tards dangling like rotten fruit on the family tree.'

'No one does,' I agreed. 'In my own genealogy I've occasion­ally doubted the line from Zeus to Tantalus. Some odd
names.
.
..'

'I promise you, my lord,' Gelon said earnestly, 'your line is
quite unsullied, each ancestor truly attested. You can see them
in our records, if only you could read.'

(Years afterwards, when Gelon became my trusted Curator
and friend, he confessed that my lineage from Tantalus back
was almost entirely bogus. I laughed and smacked his back; I'd
suspected it all along.)

'Which you refuse to teach me,' I smiled, 'because Scribes
won't share their skills.'

'We are forbidden. A short-sighted policy. When we and our
writings are gone, what will remain to tell Mycenae's splen­dour, the prowess of her warriors, the mightiness of kings?

Naught but minstrels' lying songs handed down by word of
mouth, increasingly warped as the centuries roll, perverted and
encrusted by unbelievable tales until, in a thousand
years,
people might easily doubt the Heroes ever existed.'

I laughed. 'As a man who lives in the present, Gelon, you
can't expect
me to
worry a thousand years ahead.
We have
idled too long by this sun-warmed wall, and
I'd
like
you to
check the stores I am taking to Tiryns.'

Side by side, grey-robed Scribe and kilted, bare-bodied
Hero,

we climbed the rubbled path to the palace gate.

* * *

The citadel of Tiryns stands on a jagged mound in
the plain
within sight of the sea. Walls of tremendous hewn stone blocks
rise from natural rock, the mightiest rampart on earth, fifty
feet thick and thirty high. The resonant galleries piercing the
walls - where Atreus prisoned the Heraclids - lead
to maga­
zines and store rooms which are second in the wealth they
hold only to Mycenae. On top of the mount the palace build­ings stand three storeys tall, plastered and painted white,
a
beacon for mariners entering Nauplia's harbour. Twisting
streets and steep stone steps weave between houses and work­shops; and a walled enclosure juts from the northern ram­parts: a shelter for refugees in times of danger. Around the
hillock's foot homesteads, hovels, shops and byres spread like a
mottled apron.

Tiryns became my home, and during the next few years I
seldom saw Mycenae. The palace Heroes - some twice my age
- obediently accepted me as Warden: they recognized in
Atreus' son their future king. Midean cattle raids had ceased on
Atreus' conquest; our friend Adrastus of Argos allowed no dis­sensions within his realm; so nothing marred the harmony of
my peaceful life in Tiryns. I expected some disturbance when
Adrastus sent an embassy demanding tribute from Epidauros -
an inoffensive city notable only for the medical clinic Aescu­lapius founded. But Argos and Mycenae had reached an under­standing about their respective spheres of influence: Atreus'
eyes henceforth were turned to the north, to command of the
Isthmus and dominion along the Corinthian Gulf.