THE SPOILS OF TROY
Lindsay Clarke

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as part of The Return from Troy by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Lindsay Clarke 2005

Map © Hardlines Ltd.

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Lindsay Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008371081

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008371074

Version: 2019-10-01

Dedication

For Phoebe Clare

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

The Justice of the Gods

The Fall

A Visitor to Ithaca

The Division of the Spoils

The Strength of Poseidon

An Audience with the Queen

The Last of Troy

The Ghosts of Mycenae

The Bitch’s Tomb

Cassandra

Death in the Lion House

Anxiety on Ithaca

Glossary of characters

Acknowledgements

Also by Lindsay Clarke

About the Publisher

Map

The Justice of the Gods

More than fifty years have passed since the fall of Troy. The world has turned harder since iron took the place of bronze. The age of heroes is over, the gods hold themselves apart, and my lord Odysseus has long since gone into the Land of Shades. It cannot now be long before I pass that way myself; but if honour is to survive among mortal men, then pledges must be kept, especially those between the living and the dead.

Thus I Phemius, bard of Ithaca, remain bound by the solemn pledge I made to Lord Odysseus on the evening when a few of us sat by the fire in his great hall discussing whether or not justice was to be found among the gods. I insisted that few traces of divine order were discernible in a world where a city as great as Troy could be reduced to ruin and yet so many of its conquerors were also doomed to terrible ends. What point was there in looking to the gods for justice when the deities could prove as fickle in their loyalties as the most treacherous of mortal men?

‘That Blue-haired Poseidon should have wreaked his vengeance on the Argive host is unsurprising,’ I declared. ‘He had favoured the Trojans throughout the war. But Divine Athena had always been on our side, even in the darkest times. So how could she have forgotten her old enmity with Poseidon for long enough to help him destroy the Argive fleet? Such perfidy would be appalling in a mortal ally. How then can it be excused in an immortal goddess?’

Odysseus studied me in silence for a time. The expression on his face reminded me plainly enough that I might know all the stories by heart but I had never been at Troy myself and was speaking of matters that lay far outside my experience.

‘Even a god’s heart can be shaken by the sacking of a city,’ he said. ‘Even enemies can conspire when they find a common cause. As for myself, I believe that the gods see more deeply into time than we do, and what appears to us as mere caprice may eventually prove to be a critical moment in the dispensation of their justice.’

I saw him exchange a smile with his wife Penelope, who turned to me. ‘Consider,’ she said, ‘what Grey-eyed Athena must have thought as she saw Locrian Aias trying to ravish Cassandra even in the sanctuary of her own shrine. Consider how the goddess must have felt when Agamemnon ordered her sacred effigy to be taken from Troy and carried off to Mycenae.’

‘And those were not the only crimes and desecrations committed that night,’ Odysseus added. ‘If Divine Athena turned her face against us, it was with good cause. I can well imagine that she looked down through the smoke on the destruction of Troy and felt that she had seen enough of the ways of men to know that there could never be peace till they came to understand that the desolation they left behind them must always lie in wait for them elsewhere.’

It falls to me now to show how the truth of those words he spoke about Divine Athena was made manifest in the hard fates that awaited the Argive heroes after they celebrated their triumph at the fall of Troy.

The Fall

Odysseus stood in the painted chamber high inside the citadel of Troy, listening to the sound of Menelaus sobbing. Spattered in blood, the King of Sparta was sitting on a bed of blood with his head supported in his blood-stained hands. Helen cowered at his back, white-faced. The mutilated body of Deiphobus lay sprawled beside him. Though the streets outside rang loud with shouts and screaming, here beneath the rich tapestry of Ares and Aphrodite it felt as though time itself might have halted to hear Menelaus weep.

Even Helen, whose delinquent passion had precipitated all these years of suffering, had ceased to whimper. Having been so appalled by the sight of warm blood leaking across the bed that she might have screamed and been unable then to cease from screaming, she was now staring at her husband with a kind of wonder. For the first time in many weeks she was thinking about someone other than herself, and feelings that she had long thought petrified began to stir with an almost illicit tenderness. Was it possible then that, for all the offence she had given him, and all the anguish she had caused, this gentle-hearted man still loved her?

Afraid that she might break the spell that had so far spared her life, she raised a bare arm and stretched out her hand to comfort his quaking shoulder.

Instantly, as though that touch had seared like flame, Menelaus pulled away. He leapt to his feet and turned, lips quivering, to stare down at the woman lying beneath him. Unable to endure the naked vulnerability of her breasts, his gaze shifted away to where Deiphobus lay with his eyes open and blood still draining from the ragged stump of the wrist. Menelaus bared his teeth and uttered a low growl. Dismayed that he had been so visibly overcome by weakness, resolved to countermand all signs of it, he picked up his sword from where it had fallen to the floor and began to hack once more at the lifeless flesh.

Watching Helen cower across the bed, Odysseus knew he had seen enough. If, in his madness, Menelaus desired to murder the woman who had betrayed him, that was his business. Odysseus would not stay to witness it. Silently he turned away and passed through the door, leaving his friend to do as he wished with the dead body of his enemy and the terrified, living body of his wife.

As he stepped out into the night air, he caught a smell of burning drifting upwards from the lower city. From somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls, he made out the din of swords beating against shields: a host of Argive warriors were still climbing the ramp and roaring as they poured through the open gate. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – more were already inside the walls, taking command of the streets and extinguishing whatever resistance the bewildered citizens were managing to muster. The nearer sounds of screaming and shouting were hideous on his ears. Yet it would all be over soon, Odysseus thought as he crossed the courtyard of Helen’s mansion; the Trojans would come to their senses and lay down their arms in surrender of their captured city. Even to the bravest and most fanatical among them, any other course of action must soon come to seem futile and insane. But he was worried by that smell of burning.

When he came out into the street he found the cobbles underfoot slippery with blood and he was forced to pick his way among the corpses. Here they were mostly top-knotted Thracian tribesmen who lay thrown over one another in lax postures, with slack jaws, like too many drunkards in the gutters. There was no sign of movement anywhere among them. From the top of the rise, beyond their silence, came the shouts of Argive soldiers and a terrible screaming.

Afterwards Odysseus would wonder how he could not have been prepared for what awaited him there. After all, he had sacked towns before. He had killed men and taken women into slavery. In the heat of battle he was as ruthless as the next man and had never lost much sleep over what he had done. It was the way of things. It had always been so and nothing would change it. Yet when he turned the corner and saw three Spartans laughing as they tugged at the legs of a white bearded-old man who was trying to climb over a wall, then thrust their spears through his nightshirt into his scrawny belly, he was not prepared. He was not prepared for the way, all along the street, doors had been broken down and the terrified, unarmed figures of men and boys were being driven from their homes at spear-point and cut down by the warriors waiting for them.

When Odysseus saw their sergeant swing his sword at the neck of a sobbing youth with such force that it almost severed the head, he grabbed the man by the shoulder, shouting, ‘In the name of all the gods, what are you doing? These people aren’t putting up any resistance.’ But the sergeant merely shrugged and said, ‘So what? They’re Trojans, aren’t they?’ and turned away to pull the next cowering figure towards the sweep of his sword. Odysseus saw the naked man’s throat splash open as he crumpled and fell. He looked up through a slaughter-house stench of blood and saw such deft butchery repeated again and again along the length of the street while women with their hands in their hair stood screaming as they watched. One of them threw herself over the body of her husband only to be dragged away while a burly axeman finished him off.

Odysseus shouted out a demand to know who was in command here, but his voice was lost in the shrieking of the women and he received no answer. He pushed his way along the street, making for the square outside the temple of Athena, and saw Acamas, son of Theseus, who had ridden inside the wooden horse with him, holding a man by the hair as he twisted his sword in his guts. Hearing Odysseus shout out his name, Acamas looked up, smiled in recognition, let the man drop, and stepped back, wiping the sweat from his brow.

‘It’s going well,’ he said as Odysseus came up to him.

‘But none of these people are armed,’ Odysseus shouted above the din. ‘There was an agreement.’ He took in the warrior’s puzzled frown. ‘We gave Antenor our word!’ he shouted. ‘We said we’d spare the lives of all those who surrendered.’

Acamas glanced away at where his men were working their way like dogged harvesters through a huddled crowd of Trojan men and boys trapped in a narrow corner of the street. ‘That’s not what I was told,’ he said. ‘We’re under orders to kill the lot and that’s what we’re doing. It’s the same all over the city.’

‘That can’t be right,’ Odysseus protested. ‘Where’s Agamemnon?’

‘Probably strutting through King Priam’s palace by now. I haven’t seen him.’ Acamas wiped a bloody hand across his mouth. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s still a lot of work to do.’ Then he turned away, lifting his sword.

In what should have been the most glorious hour of his life, Odysseus was seized by a numbing sense of dread. To fight in open combat across the windy plain of Troy had been one thing: this slaughter of defenceless men, stinking of piss and panic as they stumbled from their sleep into narrow alleys from which there could be no escape, was quite another. Yet the havoc in these streets had already run so far beyond control it was clear that any male Trojan, man or boy, would be lucky to survive the night.

In a fury of disgust, Odysseus turned to push his way through the throng, looking for Agamemnon. The smell of burning was stronger now and through a thickening gush of smoke a lurid flame-light glared out of the darkness of the lower city. If fire had broken out among the weaving halls with their bales of cloth, reels of yarn, and timber looms, then more people might be burnt to death or trampled in the scramble for safety than would fall to the sword. The dogs of the city barked and whined. Coarse laughter surrounded a frantic screaming where a man was being tormented somewhere. Women cried out as they were pulled from the sanctuary of holy altars and driven like geese along the streets. Children sobbed above the bodies of their fathers. And when Odysseus strode into the square before the temple of Athena he saw the immense moonlit form of the wooden horse, like a monstrous figment from a dream, looming in silence over the spectacle of a city in its death throes.

Sick with shame, he remembered how he had harangued the troops on the day when it looked as though they might refuse to follow Agamemnon when he called for a renewed assault on the city. That had been months ago but he remembered how he’d incited them with the thought of the women waiting to be raped inside these walls. How easily the words had sprung to his lips. How little thought he’d given to the price they would exact in human suffering. But now Odysseus stood in the shadow of the horse that had sprung from his imagination, watching men kill and die in helpless multitudes. In conceiving his clever stratagem to breach the unbreachable walls of Troy, he had released ten murderous years of rage and frustration into the streets of the city. Never had he seen so many people cut down like cattle in a hecatomb. Never before had he felt so entirely culpable. When he looked about him, there seemed no limits to the horror he had wrought.

Still shaking from having seen her husband’s head lopped off by that monstrous boy Neoptolemus, Queen Hecuba was among the first of the women to be dragged beneath the open portico in the square. Her younger daughters, Laodice and Polyxena, were supporting her feeble frame while the women of the palace followed behind, wailing and tearing at their hair. Neither Cassandra nor Hector’s widow, Andromache, were anywhere to be seen.

Not long ago, for a few brief hours, the Trojan Queen had lain beside her husband in a dream of unexpected peace. Now the world had turned into a phantasmagoria around her aged head and so intense was the feeling of nightmare, so violent the alteration in her circumstances, that she could no longer trust the evidence of her senses. It was impossible that Priam lay dead with his regal head severed from his body. It was impossible that these streets and squares, which only a few hours earlier had been filled with thankful prayers and jubilant with revelry, should now echo to the brutal shouts of foreign voices and the anguish of her frightened people. It was impossible that the bronze helmets and armour of the soldiers dragging her away were anything other than the figments of a dream. Yet she knew from their gaping eyes and mouths that her womenfolk were screaming round her and, after a time, Queen Hecuba came to understand that she too was keening out loud with all the strength of her lungs.

Lifted by the breeze from the burning buildings in the city below, smoke gusted across the square so that the staring head and arched neck of the wooden horse seemed to rise out of fog. The women were left coughing as they moaned. Spectral in the gloom, their faces blemished by the streaks of paint running from their eyes, they looked more like creatures thrown up from the underworld than the graceful ladies of royal Troy they had been only an hour earlier. Then they were screaming again as the armoured figure of the herald Talthybius strode out of the torchlit smoke. He was clutching the slender, half-naked figure of Cassandra by the arm.

The girl’s eyeballs had turned upwards and she was singing to herself, not for comfort but in a crazy kind of triumph. Hecuba recognized the words from the Hymn to Athena. As though unconscious of the terror around her, Cassandra was singing of how, when the armed goddess sprang with gleaming eyes from the head of Zeus, all the gods had been awe-struck and the earth itself had cried out and the seas had stood still.

Pushed out of the swirl of smoke into the throng of women, Cassandra too might have sprung in that eerie moment from some unnatural source. But the suave pragmatist Talthybius had his attention elsewhere. Seeing Hecuba shivering in the night air, he berated their guards for putting the health of these valuable captives at risk. He ordered one of them to raid the nearest house for throws and blankets before the women caught their death of cold. Then he turned to confront the Trojan Queen where she stood with the cloth of her gown hanging open to reveal her depleted breasts.

‘Forgive me for not observing your plight earlier, madam. The guards should have shown greater courtesy. But I beg you to calm these women.’ Talthybius raised both his staff and his voice to silence the captives. ‘The High King himself has commanded that you be brought here to safety and kept under guard. No harm will come to any of you. You have my word on that.’

‘No harm!’ Hecuba’s thin grey hair had come unbound. It was blowing about her face like rain in wind. ‘You think it no harm to see our men struck down? You think it no harm to watch our city burn?’

‘Such are the fortunes of war.’ The herald glanced away from the accusation of her eyes. ‘Your husband would have done well to think of this when he threw our terms for peace back in our teeth all those years ago.’

‘Do not dare to speak of my husband, Argive. The gods will surely avenge what has been done to him.’

‘Isn’t it already clear that the gods have set their faces against Troy?’ Talthybius sighed. ‘Be wise and endure your fate with all the fortitude you can.’

Reaching out to take Cassandra into the fold of her arm, Hecuba said, ‘The Queen of Troy has no need of Agamemnon’s lackey to teach her how to grieve.’

‘The Troy you ruled has gone for ever, madam,’ the herald answered. ‘You are Queen no longer. When this night’s work is done, you and your kinswomen will be divided by lot among the Argive captains. I pity your condition but things will go easier with you if you school yourself in humility.’

‘Do as you like with me,’ Hecuba defied him. ‘My life ended when I saw Hector fall. It was only a ghost of me that watched my husband die. What remains here is less than that. Your captains will find no joy in it.’

Talthybius shrugged. ‘It may be so. But I give Cassandra into your care. Be aware that my lord Agamemnon has already chosen her for his own.’

‘To be at the beck and call of his Spartan queen?’

‘To be the companion of his bed, madam.’

Hecuba looked up at him with flashing eyes. ‘I would strangle her with my own hands first.’

But at that moment Cassandra reached her fingers up to her mother’s face and held it close to her own. She was smiling the demented smile that Hecuba had long since learned to dread. ‘You have not yet understood,’ she whispered. ‘This is what the goddess wants of me. I have seen her. I saw her in the moments when they sought to ravish me beneath her idol. Divine Athena came there to comfort me. She told me I would be married to this Argive king. She told me that we must light the torches and bring on the marriage dance, and go joyfully to the feast. So that is what we will do. And you too must dance, mother. You must dance with me. Come, weave your steps with mine. Let us rejoice together and cry out evan! evoe! And dance to Hymen and Lord Hymenaeus at the wedding feast,’ – her voice dipped to a whisper that the herald could not hear – ‘for Athena has promised me that this marriage will destroy the House of Atreus.’

And then, as Hecuba looked on in dismay, Cassandra broke free of her grasp and began to stamp her foot and clap her hands above her bare shoulder, crying out to the bewildered Trojan women to join her in the dance and honour the husband who would shortly share her marriage bed.

‘Look to your daughter, madam,’ Talthybius warned. ‘I fear she is not in her right mind.’ Then, commanding the guards to keep a watchful eye on both women, the herald left the square to go in search of his master.

Slowly the hours of that terrible night dragged past. The women trembled and wept together. As if drugged on her own ecstasy, Cassandra slept. Exhausted and distraught, her throat hoarse from wailing, her breasts bruised where she had pummelled them in her grief, Hecuba entered a trance of desolation in which it seemed that no more dreadful thing could happen than she had endured already. And then Hector’s widow, Andromache, was brought through the gloom.

Hecuba did not see her at first because her eyes were fixed on the twelve year old warrior Neoptolemus, who strode ahead of Andromache wearing the golden armour that had once belonged to his father Achilles. The last time she had seen this ferocious youth he had been standing over Priam’s body looking down in fascination as blood spurted from the severed arteries of the neck. Still accompanied by his band of Myrmidons, Neoptolemus was carrying his drawn sword but he had taken off his helmet so that for the first time Hecuba could see how immature his features were. Only a faint bloom of blond hair softened his cheeks, and the eyes that surveyed the captive women were curiously innocent of evil. They were like the eyes of a child excited by the games.

Unable to endure the sight of him, Hecuba glanced away and saw Andromache held in the grip of two Myrmidon warriors. It was obvious from her distracted eyes and the uncharacteristic droop of her statuesque body that they were there to support rather than restrain her. The women of Hector’s house followed behind, weeping and moaning. Evidently hysterical with terror, the body-servant Clymene seemed scarcely able to catch her breath as she gripped and tore the tangles of her hair.

Neoptolemus gestured with his sword for the women in his train to be brought forward and herded with the others. But when Hecuba held out trembling hands to receive Andromache into her arms she was appalled to see her daughter-in-law stare back at her without recognition through the eyes of a woman whose memory was gone.

Though Andromache said nothing Hecuba could hear her breath drawn in little panting gasps as though she was sipping at the air. Her cheeks and throat were lined with scratches where she had dragged her fingernails across the surface of the flesh. A bruise discoloured the skin around the orbit of her right eye, and there was such utter vacancy in the eyes themselves that Hecuba knew at once that this woman had already been made to endure the unendurable.

‘Where is your son?’ she forced herself to ask. ‘Where is Astyanax?’

Andromache’s eyeballs swivelled in panic as though at sudden loss. Then memory seared through her. Again, as though the scene were being played out before her for the first time, she saw Neoptolemus dragging Astyanax by the lobe of his ear across the upper room of her house. Again she saw the deft sweep with which the young warrior lifted her child above the parapet of the balcony. Again she released a protracted scream of refusal and denial, and again it was in vain. Neoptolemus opened his hands and Astyanax vanished, leaving only a brief, truncated cry on the night air.

Unable to stop herself, Andromache had run to the balcony and gazed down where the small body of her son lay twisted on the stones twenty feet below. A pool of blood oozed from his head like oil. In that moment she would have thrown herself from the parapet after him if Neoptolemus had not grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away. So she had stood with that gilded youth bending an arm at her back, screaming and screaming at the night.

But even the mind has its mercies and, for a time, Andromache had slipped beyond the reach of consciousness. When she was pulled back to her senses, she woke into an alien land of torchlight, noise and violent shadows. If she had been asked her own name she could not have recalled it. Still in that primitive state of near oblivion, she had been conducted through the streets of Troy until she was brought to the moment when Hecuba asked after Astyanax. At the sound of the name a whole universe of pain flashed into being again.

Wiping the back of his hand across his nose, Neoptolemus stepped forward to look more closely at the terrified group of women huddled beneath the portico. Wrapped in blankets now, their heads held low in the gloom, they were hard to distinguish from each other. He used the blade of his sword to edge one woman aside so that he could see the girl cowering behind her. ‘The boy had no father,’ he was muttering, ‘and now the mother has no son. But I have a remedy for that.’

Hecuba reeled where she stood. She felt as though she was striding against a dark tide and making no progress. She had seen her firstborn son Hector slain before the walls of Troy. She had seen her second-born, Paris, lying on his deathbed pierced and half-blinded by the arrows that Philoctetes had loosed at him. Others of her sons had failed to return from the battlefield. She had seen one of the youngest, Capys, die that night, cut down trying to defend his father. Then Priam himself had been murdered under her bewildered gaze. Now her six year old grandson Astyanax, Hector’s boy, who had been the only solace that remained to her in a world made unremittingly cruel by war, was also dead. Somewhere she could hear Neoptolemus saying, ‘One of you must be Polyxena, daughter of King Priam. Come forth. The son of Achilles wishes to speak with you.’ Had she not already been exhausted by atrocity, every atom of her being would have shouted out then in mutiny against the gods. As it was, this latest devastation had left the Trojan Queen reduced to the condition of a dumb animal helplessly awaiting the utter extinction of its kind.

And no one among the women moved.

‘Come, Polyxena, what are you afraid of?’ Neoptolemus cajoled. ‘I understand that my father was fond of you. It’s time that we met.’

Still there was no movement among the huddle of blankets.

From somewhere Hecuba found the strength to say, ‘Haven’t you brought evil enough on Priam’s house?’

The boy merely smiled at her. ‘We Argives didn’t seek this war. Troy is burning in the fire that Paris lit. We’re looking only for justice here. As for me, remember that this war took my father from me. He might still have been living at peace on Skyros with my mother if your son hadn’t taken it into his head to meddle with another man’s wife. Now tell me, where is your daughter, old woman?’

But at that moment the sound of Agamemnon’s voice boomed from across the square, shouting out his name and demanding to know where his generals were. As Neoptolemus turned to answer, Odysseus stepped out of the shadow of a nearby building, holding his boar-tusk helmet in the crook of his arm. Immediately Agamemnon demanded to know where he had last seen Menelaus.

‘I left him with Helen,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Deiphobus and his household are dead. The Spartan Guard have control of his mansion.’

‘Has he killed the bitch?’

‘I don’t know. Not when I left.’

Detecting an unusual shakiness in the Ithacan’s voice, Agamemnon looked at him more closely. ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you taken a wound?’

‘Have you seen what’s happening down there? Have you seen the blood in the streets? I gave them my word – I gave our word to Antenor and Aeneas that we would spare all the lives we could. But this …’

Brusquely Agamemnon interrupted him, ‘Aeneas and his Dardanians have already gone free. Antenor is safe enough if he stays indoors. And I’ve got my mind on other things right now. Memnon’s Ethiopians have broken out of their barracks. Diomedes and his men are having a hard time containing them.’

He would have turned away but Odysseus seized him by the shoulder and stopped him. ‘Antenor only agreed to help us because I gave him the most solemn assurances. I gave them on your behalf with your authority. Now you have to get control of this or they’re going to kill everybody. You have to do it now.’ But then he caught the shiftiness in the High King’s eyes. His heart jolted. ‘Are you behind this bloodbath?’ he demanded. ‘Is this what you want?

Agamemnon shrugged the hand from his shoulder and walked away to where Neoptolemus had abandoned his search for Polyxena and was now assembling his war-band for action.

‘Move your Myrmidons down into the lower city,’ Agamemnon ordered. ‘If you look lively we should be able to trap Memnon’s men between your force and Diomedes. I want it done quickly.’

The young warrior raised his sword in salute and, to a rattle of bronze armour, the Myrmidons jogged out of the square down a narrow street that would bring them out in the rear of the Ethiopians.

Agamemnon looked back with displeasure over the city he had conquered. ‘We need to start fighting this fire before half the treasure of Troy is lost to it.’

He was speaking to himself but Odysseus had come up behind him, determined to get the truth from him. ‘You intended this all along,’ he said. And when no answer came, ‘You never meant to hold on to Troy as we planned, did you? You were just making use of me to deceive Antenor and Aeneas.’

‘I’ve no time for this,’ Agamemnon scowled. He was about to walk away when he was snagged by a need to justify himself further. He looked back at Odysseus again. ‘Your stratagem of the horse worked well, old friend. Troy is finished. Poets will still be singing of this victory a thousand years from now. And you’ll be back home on Ithaca soon enough, a rich man, tumbling your wife on that great bed of yours.’ He grinned through the smoke at the grim face that frowned back at him, white as wax, in the moonlight. ‘Think of it, Odysseus. Just think of it. We are immortal, you and I. Whatever happens, our names are deathless now.’

And with that, Agamemnon, King of Men, summoned his bodyguard around him once more and advanced towards King Priam’s palace.

All night long, not speaking, refusing to be touched, Menelaus prowled the bloody chamber where the bed had begun to stink like a butcher’s stall. Helen crouched in a corner, stifling her whimpers. Sometimes, as the night wind gusted, smoke blew into the room, charring the air. After a time the oil-lamp that had been left burning on a tripod guttered out. Now the darkness was almost complete.

Menelaus went to the balcony once to look for the source of the fire and saw that the mansion was in no immediate danger. Beneath him, a tumult of screaming people ran along the street, looking back over their shoulders to where a company of spearmen advanced towards them rattling their shields. But he took almost as little interest in what he saw as did the many corpses already cluttering the gutters. He was remembering those moments in the bull-court at Knossos when he had first heard the news of Helen’s defection – how the roaring of the crowd had dimmed in his ears so that it sounded like the distant throbbing of the sea; how time had wavered strangely, and he had been possessed by the feeling that nothing around him was quite real.

Now it was much the same, for he was as little moved by the sacking of this city as he had been by the antics of the dancers in the hot arena or by the sleek rage of the bull. All this din and terror amounted to nothing more than an incidental accompaniment to the unappeasable clamour of his grief.

Menelaus could no longer see what was to be done. He had come to Troy with a single clear purpose in mind. But Paris had escaped him, fleeing from their duel in the rain like the craven coward he was. And though he had fallen later to the arrows of Philoctetes, it was an end in which Menelaus could take no pleasure because it deprived him of the personal satisfaction he had sought. And then, when the sickening news came that Deiphobus had taken Helen to his bed, Menelaus had found a new and still more violent focus for his hatred. Because of this further insult to his heart, he had driven on the Argive generals to fight when it looked, for a time, as if the two exhausted armies might settle for a negotiated peace. He had reminded them of the oath they had sworn to him in Sparta. He had made it clear that he would be satisfied by nothing less than the death of Deiphobus. So the war had gone on and now the war was won. Troy had been taken, as Helen had been taken, by stealth and treachery. Deiphobus was dead, and Menelaus had made sure that he had known in the moment of his death exactly who it was that killed him. But his body lay on the bed like the joints of horse-meat on which the princes of Argos had sworn to defend Menelaus’s right to Helen, and his troubles were now over. Yet even as Menelaus had hacked at his body, severing the head and limbs and genitals with his sword, he had found no satisfaction in the act. His arms were sticky with the man’s blood. His face was splashed with it. And almost as strong as the grief in the King of Sparta’s heart was the wave of disgust that left him retching in the night.

And still Helen lived.

Already Menelaus knew that if he was going to kill her he should have done it when he first found her in bed beside Deiphobus. But he told himself that he had wanted her to see her lover die. He wanted her to know how terrible his vengeful fury was. He wanted her to see what she had done to him, to learn how she had turned his gentle heart into a murderous thing. So the moment in which he might have acted had passed. And still, as she crouched in the corner like a frightened animal, he could not bring himself to finish her.

Nor could he command anyone else to do the deed.

Menelaus walked back from the balcony into the room and stood leaning against the door. He was still holding his sword. With the back of his free hand he tried to wipe the flecks of vomit from his mouth only to realize that the hand itself was wet with blood.

What was to be done? What was to be done? All across the city his comrades exulted in their triumph. Agamemnon must already be sitting on Priam’s throne. Young Neoptolemus would be taking bloody vengeance for his father’s death. The others would be revelling in the slaughter, toasting each other in captured wine as the women fell into their hands, or stripping the sacked palaces and temples of their treasure. Only he on whose behalf this long war had been fought stood in the darkness, empty and wretched, rejoicing at nothing.

Though the pain of the memory was almost more than he could bear, he was remembering the days long ago, in another time, in another world, when he and his wife had played together with their little daughter Hermione in the sunlit garden of the citadel at Sparta. How could Helen have dreamed of turning her back on such happiness? What must he himself have lacked in manhood that she should have spurned the unquestioning, utterly trusting fidelity of his heart, for a mad act of passion that could only ever have ended in disaster such as this?

Never, in all the long years since Helen had left him, had Menelaus felt so utterly alone.

Odysseus stood alone in the lurid night, beating his brains with the knowledge that this catastrophe was of his making and that he had intended none of it. His plan had been clear enough. He had discussed it carefully with Agamemnon and secured his agreement. Odysseus had always maintained that the long-term gain must be greater if the victorious Argives exploited the trading strength of Troy’s position rather than merely despoiling the city of its wealth. With this larger aim in mind he had pursued his secret negotiations with Antenor and Aeneas, and he had done so in good faith, certain that King Priam and Deiphobus would be more easily deceived by the stratagem of the wooden horse if the distrusted minister and the vacillating Dardanian prince were seen to suspect it. So the city would fall by stealth and need hardly be damaged in the taking. Crowned as a client king once Priam was dead, Antenor would owe his throne and his loyalty to Agamemnon. The presence of a strong garrison in the city would underwrite the alliance. And then, with Troy secured as an Argive fiefdom commanding trade with the Black Sea, the entire eastern seaboard must sooner or later fall under Agamemnon’s control. Meanwhile, Odysseus would go home to Ithaca a wealthy man, having crowned the Lion of Mycenae as undisputed ruler of an Aegean empire.

It was more than a plan: it was a vision – a vision that would change the map of the known world for ever. Even as he had climbed the ladder into the wooden horse, Odysseus had been sure that Agamemnon understood the dream and shared it. But he had come out of Helen’s mansion and stepped into a massacre.

The fire, he was prepared to concede, might have started by accident. But if, with the low cunning and purblind greed of a common soldier, the King of Men had already decided to opt for quick profit rather than the long-term benefits of a less certain vision then the logic became inexorable. To prevent Troy rising again and descending on Argos with the force of the avenging Furies, the destruction must be complete. The city must be burned, its walls torn down, its men exterminated, its women carried away. So even as he licensed Odysseus to give the assurances demanded by Antenor and Aeneas in return for their defection, Agamemnon must have known this was what he would do. He must have been hugging himself with glee when the Trojan defectors accepted those assurances. And why should they not have done when Odysseus had also been deceived?

All his care and craft and guile counted for nothing now. His brain was in flames with the knowledge. If Agamemnon had been standing beside him in that moment Odysseus might have struck him down. But it was another figure that came hurrying towards him out of the night, a huge Ethiopian, one of Memnon’s men, half-naked, his black skin glistening with sweat, his eyes wide and very white. Reflexively Odysseus drew his sword and stuck him through the belly.

The shock of the man’s weight jarred at his arm, driving the sword deeper. The Ethiopian hung there for a moment impaled, grunting with dismay. Odysseus pulled out the blade and stood back, watching him sag to his knees and fall, shuddering, to the ground. He could hear the black man muttering something in his own tongue – a curse, a gasp of execration, a prayer to whatever gods he served, who knew what those mumblings meant?

Odysseus stared down at the dying man, resentful that he had been drawn into the killing. Then his mind swirled in a blur of rage. If Agamemnon wanted blood, then blood he should have. He advanced across the square towards the sounds of slaughter and once he had begun to kill it seemed there was no stopping. He saw frightened faces gasp and cry as they fell beneath his sword. He saw the wounds splash open. He was killing people swiftly, without compunction, as though doing them a service. At one point he slipped on the entrails of a fat man he had butchered and found himself lying beside him, face to face, with the sightless, outraged eyes staring back into his own. Then he pushed himself to his feet again, driven on by an impulse of disgust, filled with fury and self-loathing.

Almost as deep in delirium as Ajax in his madness had once slaughtered the cattle in their pens, imagining them to be his enemies, Odysseus killed and killed again, working his way through the throng as though convinced that each body that fell before him might prove to be the last, so that he could be liberated, once and for all, from this dreadful duty. His mind was numb. His arm ached from the effort. His throat was parched. It all seemed to be happening in silence.

A Visitor To Ithaca

So loud was the anguish at the fall of Troy you might have thought the noise must carry across the whole astounded world; yet it would be weeks before the news of Agamemnon’s victory reached as far as Ithaca. Of all the kingdoms that sent ships to the war, our western islands were furthest from the conflict. We were always last to receive word of how our forces were faring and by the time reports arrived they were far out of date, never at first hand and, more often than not, coloured by rumour and speculation. To make matters worse, Troy was taken late in the year when all the seas were running high and the straits impassable, so the fighting was over long before we got to know of it.

The view must always have been clearer from the high crag at Mycenae but even the intelligence that reached Queen Clytaemnestra was not always reliable, and she was too busy managing Agamemnon’s kingdom in his absence to keep my Lady Penelope apprised of events on the eastern seaboard of the Aegean. Meanwhile the infrequent letters Penelope received from her father, Lord Icarius of Sparta, were always terse in their account of a son-in-law of whom he had never approved. So throughout the war we Ithacans were fed on scraps of information that had been picked up in larger ports by traders who came to the island, or that reached us from the occasional deserter who made it back to mainland Argos. Such men had only a fragmentary picture of events, and who could say whether their accounts were trustworthy? All we knew for certain was that Lord Odysseus had still been alive the last time anyone had news of him.

As Prince Telemachus emerged from infancy into the proud knowledge that the father of whom he lacked all memory was one of the great Argive generals, this proved to be an increasingly frustrating state of affairs. So as his friend, I Phemius – still only a boy myself – did what I could to supply his need with flights of my own fanciful imagination. Each day he and I, along with a ragged troupe of fatherless urchins, fought our own version of the Trojan War around the pastures and coves of Ithaca. From hill to hill we launched raids on each other’s flocks, singing songs and taking blows. Meanwhile, far away in windy Phrygia, Odysseus used all his guile to steer his comrades towards victory over a foe that had proved tougher and more resilient than anyone but he had anticipated.

Then, in the ninth year of the war we learned that an inconclusive campaign in Mysia had ended with the Argive fleet being blown back to Aulis by a great storm. For a time we lived in the excited hope that Odysseus might seize the chance to visit the wife and child he had left so many years before, but all that came was a long letter which was delivered under seal directly into the hands of Penelope.

The next day she summoned my mother and some of the other women into her presence and with the gentle grace that always distinguished her care for our people, she told them that The Raven, the ship in which my father Terpis had sailed from Mysia, had failed to appear at Aulis. There remained a small chance that the crew might have made landfall on one or other of the islands scattered across the Aegean but the women should prepare themselves for the possibility that their husbands were drowned at sea and would not return.

The island rang loud with wailing that day. For me, for a time, it was as though a black gash had been torn in the fabric of things. But remembering how my father, the bard of Ithaca, had sung at the naming day of Prince Telemachus, I converted my fear and grief into a solemn vow that, if he did not return, I would honour his memory by becoming the island’s bard myself.

Meanwhile Penelope gave her son as sanguine an account of the letter as she could. How else was she to speak to a ten year old who knew nothing of his father except her love for him and the fact that almost all those he had left behind on the island spoke of him with affection and respect?

Only many years later, long after the war was won and Odysseus still had not returned to Ithaca, was Telemachus allowed to read the letter for himself. He told me that it contained warm expressions both of undying love and of agonized regret that a hard fate had kept him so long from his wife and son. But it was also filled with bitter criticism of the way the war was being fought. In particular, Odysseus was at pains to distance himself from the decision that had just been taken to sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenaia on the altar of Artemis in order to secure a fair wind back to Troy.

He attributed the blame for that atrocity to Palamedes, the Prince of Euboea, a man for whom he cherished an abiding hatred. It was Palamedes who had demanded that Odysseus take the terrible oath that had been sworn at Sparta to protect the winner of Helen’s hand from the jealousy of his rivals – an oath which Odysseus (who was not a contender for Helen’s hand) had himself devised. It had been Palamedes who accompanied Menelaus to Ithaca and compromised Odysseus into joining the war against his will. Now it was Palamedes who had thought up the scheme to lure Iphigenaia to her death in Aulis with the pretence that she was to be married to Achilles, and Odysseus could no longer contain his contempt and loathing for the man’s devious mind.

Small wonder then that Penelope had been deeply troubled by the letter, for the roguishly good-humoured, ever-optimistic man she had married was entirely absent from its words. In his place brooded an angry stranger about to return to a war which he had never sought. And he did so with his mind darkened by the conviction that the evil shadow of that war was corrupting all on whom it fell.

So the fleet had put to sea again in the tenth year of the war, and we in Ithaca heard nothing further about the fate of those aboard until the spring afternoon several months later when a black-sailed pentekonter with a serpent figurehead put in at the harbour. It bore the arms of Nauplius, King of Euboea.

Nauplius was not the only visitor to Ithaca at that time. Earlier that week Prince Amphinomus had sailed over from the neighbouring island of Dulichion to pay tribute on behalf of his father, King Nisus, who owed allegiance to Laertes, King of Ithaca. This agreeable young man had proved such an entertaining companion that Penelope persuaded him to remain a while after his business with her father-in-law was done. She claimed that he lifted her spirits in what was, for her, a lonely and anxious time. I also grew fond of Amphinomus. He was possessed of a charming, easy-going manner, was eloquent without showiness, and did not condescend when I revealed in answer to his friendly question that it was my intention to become a bard like my father before me. But Telemachus took against him from the first and to such a degree that his mother felt obliged to admonish the boy for his rudeness.

‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ Amphinomus mildly chided her. ‘After all, he has lacked the guidance of his father’s hand.’

‘Sons have lost their fathers in this war and fathers their sons,’ Penelope sighed. ‘Sometimes I can see no end to the woes it brings.’

‘My own father feels the same way.’ Amphinomus gave her a wry smile. ‘He often thanks the gods that I was too young to go to Troy with Odysseus – though there have been times when I bitterly reproached them for the same reason.’

‘Well, I pray that the war will be over long before you are called upon to serve,’ Penelope replied, ‘and not least so that my husband will come back soon to take this skittish colt of mine in hand.’

At which remark Telemachus scowled, whistled his father’s dog Argus to his heel, and left the chamber.

‘Go with him, Phemius.’ Penelope favoured me with the smile that always made my heart swim. ‘See if you can’t improve his ill humour before we dine.’

But when I did as I was bidden, Telemachus merely glowered at me. ‘You should have stayed and kept an eye on him,’ he said. ‘I don’t trust that man. He’s too eager to be liked.’

‘I like him well enough anyway,’ I said. ‘He’s asked me to sing for him tonight.’

But Telemachus was already staring out to sea where the distant sail of an approaching ship bulged like a black patch stitched into the glittering blue-green. ‘Who’s this putting in now?’ he murmured, throwing a stone into the swell. ‘No doubt some other itchy hound come sniffing at my mother’s skirts.’

Until that moment such a thought had never crossed my mind. Penelope was the faithful wife of the Lord Odysseus and everyone knew that theirs was a love-match. While most of the other princes of Argos had lusted after Helen, Odysseus remained constant in his devotion to her Spartan cousin, the daughter of Icarius. Their marriage had been a cause for great joy on Ithaca and though its early years had been shadowed by a grievous number of miscarriages, no one doubted that the shared grief had deepened their love, or that it was only with the most anguished reluctance that Odysseus finally left his wife and newborn son to fight in the war at Troy. Then, as the war dragged on and King Laertes and his queen Anticleia grew older, Penelope had become the graceful Lady of the island. She was always a reliable source of comfort and wisdom to those in need, revered throughout all Argos for her constancy, and utterly beyond reproach. So I don’t know whether I was more shocked by the vehemence of what Telemachus had said or troubled by my sense of its astuteness.

I was fifteen years old at that time. Telemachus was four years younger, yet he had seen what my own innocently cherished infatuation had failed to see – that the fate of Odysseus was at best uncertain and if he failed to return to Ithaca then Penelope would become the most desirable of prizes. I also realized in that moment that if Telemachus had seen it, then others must have seen it too. And with that thought it occurred to me that he must have overheard someone else uttering some such remark as the one he had just made. In any case, my angry friend stood scowling out to sea, too young to defend his mother’s honour but not too young to worry over it.

However the black ship bearing down on our island that day did not carry some hopeful suitor making a speculative bid for Penelope but someone more devious – a bitter old man motivated neither by love nor by lust but by an inveterate hatred, which he did not at first reveal.

I clearly remember King Nauplius coming ashore on the island that day – a scraggy, bald-headed figure in his sixties with a hawkish nose and an elaborately barbered beard. There was a gaunt and flinty cast to his features, and the shadows webbed around his eyes darkened the critical regard with which he studied both our undefended harbour and the homely palace on the cliff. But what most impressed my young imagination were the conspicuous mourning robes he wore. I remember thinking that whatever news this king was bringing, it could not be good.

King Laertes, the father of Odysseus, was not present in the palace to receive this unexpected visitor. In those days the old king had taken to spending more and more time tending the crops and animals on his farm, or simply sitting in the shade, fanning himself with his hat and wishing that his son would return from the foreign war to assume the burden of kingship over the western islands. Laertes had been famous among the heroes of Argos in his day. As a young man, he had sailed to far Colchis with Jason on the raid that brought back the Golden Fleece. He was also among those who hunted the great boar that Divine Artemis had loosed to ravage the lands around Calydon, but he was growing old and weary now. Earlier that week he had received the year’s tribute from Dulichion, Same and Zacynthus, and then done what he could to give fair judgement over the various disputes that had arisen between them while their leaders were away. Now, once more, he had retreated with his wife Anticleia to the peace of his farm.

Having apologized to the unexpected royal visitor for the king’s absence, Penelope was ordering a runner to call Laertes back to court when Nauplius raised a restraining hand and gravely shook his head. ‘There is no need to trouble him,’ he said. ‘Let old Laertes enjoy such peace as this world allows. In any case, it is you I have come to see.’

The words fell on the air as stark and grim as the robes he wore. Sensing that grief had turned to a mortal sickness inside the man, Penelope said, ‘I see you have suffered some great loss, my lord.’ But she was remembering how she herself had suffered at the last visit from the royal house of Euboea. Already she was fearful that the ill news that Nauplius brought with him must press closely on her own life too.

‘A loss from which I do not expect to recover,’ Nauplius answered. ‘This war has cost me my son.’

‘Palamedes is dead?’

The grey eyes studied her as if in reproach. ‘You have had no word from Troy?’

‘We have heard nothing since the fleet sailed from Aulis.’ Opening helpless hands, Penelope shook her head. ‘I grieve to hear of your loss. Tell me, how did this thing happen?’

Nauplius made as if to answer, then seemed to change his mind, shaking his head at the immense burden of what he had to utter. ‘I have sailed far today,’ he sighed, ‘and my heart is heavy with evil tidings. Let me first rest a while and regain my strength. Then we shall speak of the grief that this war has brought to us.’ Nodding with the absolute authority of a sovereign who had decided that everything that needed to be said for the time being had now been said, he turned away, raising a ringed hand to his body-servant for support.

‘Of course,’ Penelope answered uneasily. ‘My steward will escort you to your chamber. But first … Forgive me, but I must ask you, Lord Nauplius …’

Frowning, the old king tilted his head to look back at her. Penelope forced herself to speak. ‘Do you have word of my husband?’ She saw how one flinty eye was narrower than the other and its lid quivered like a moth beneath its brow. Into a silence that had gone on too long she said, ‘Does Odysseus live?’

Nauplius drew in his breath and stood with his mottled head nodding still.

‘Oh yes,’ the voice was barely more than a hoarse wheeze, ‘Odysseus lives still. Odysseus lives.’ And again, with a sigh that seemed to rebuke the relief that broke visibly across her face, he turned away.

When Nauplius and his attendants had left the hall, Amphinomus approached Penelope, smiling. ‘Good news at last, my lady.’

‘Yes.’ Penelope stood with the fingertips of her right hand at her cheek. ‘But I fear that Nauplius has more to say,’

Amphinomus shrugged. ‘It may only be that his grief has darkened his view of things. You mustn’t let his shadow dim your own fair light.’

Penelope shook her head. ‘The truth is that I didn’t greatly care for Palamedes. He was a clever man, in some ways as clever as Odysseus, but he lacked warmth. And I have often wished that he had never set foot on this island. If he hadn’t come here with Menelaus all those years ago, Telemachus would have a father to watch over him and I a husband in my bed. Yet one must pity any man who has lost his son.’

‘One must indeed,’ Amphinomus pursed his lips, ‘even though he brings a deathly chill into the hall with him!’

Penelope reproved the arch smile in the young man’s handsome face. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the King of Euboea sickens from more than grief. Also he is as much a guest of the house as you are, sir. We will be civil with him.’ But she was glad of her friend’s company in what threatened to be a difficult and demanding time.

Her apprehensions were confirmed at dinner that evening when Nauplius merely frowned in response to Penelope’s warmly expressed hope that he was well rested, and then went on to express his surprise that a young woman of the royal house of Sparta had not long since grown discontented with the dull round of life in rustic Ithaca.

‘I regret that our plain ways are not to your taste,’ Penelope answered. ‘I myself have always found the simple life here wonderfully refreshing after the rivalries and gossip of the court in Sparta. With each day that passes I learn to love this island and its people more.’ Nor did she entirely conceal the reproach in her voice as she added, ‘Indeed I sometimes think that were all the world to emulate such dullness, it might be a happier and more peaceful place.’

‘Your husband has been gone for nearly ten years, madam,’ Nauplius replied. ‘Have those years not taught you that happiness and peace are not to be found anywhere for long?’

Penelope shrugged her delicate shoulders. ‘I respect the wisdom of your years, my lord, but it may be that Ithaca has something to teach you still.’

‘However,’ Amphinomus put in, ‘we are all eager for news of the war, and not much reaches us here. Will you share with us what you know of its progress?’

‘Troy still stands,’ Nauplius glowered. ‘Men fight beneath its walls and die, and it would seem that Agamemnon and Achilles are fiercer in their quarrels with each other than they are with the Trojans. Meanwhile prudent counsel is ignored and honest men are traduced by liars. In short, the Argive army is led by knaves and fools. What more is there to say?’ Undismayed by the flush he had brought to Penelope’s face, he looked away.

Amphinomus said quietly, ‘I think you forget that Lord Odysseus is among those who command the host.’

‘No, sir, I do not forget,’ Nauplius answered shortly.

From further down the table Lord Mentor, whom Odysseus had entrusted with the management of his affairs on Ithaca uttered a low growl. ‘Then you will except him from your remarks, I trust?’

But either Nauplius did not hear him or affected not to have done so. He took a trial sip from his wine-cup, wrinkled his nostrils in a barely concealed grimace of disappointment, and smiled at Penelope. ‘Our Euboean vintage is mellower, my dear. I must make a point of sending you some.’

Her voice uncharacteristically tense, Penelope said, ‘My husband is no man’s fool, sir. Do you suggest he is a knave?’

Nauplius opened his hands in a mild gesture of protest. ‘You were daughter to my old friend Icarius long before you became wife to Odysseus. Believe me, I have no desire to say anything that would cause you pain or displeasure.’

Aware that the answer was neither a withdrawal nor an apology, Penelope made an effort to still her breathing. If she had suspected earlier that this dour old man had come with mischief at work in his embittered mind, she was convinced of it now. Looking for space to gather her thoughts, she turned to Amphinomus. ‘Did you not ask Phemius to sing for you tonight? Perhaps his voice will please our royal guest?’

And so I was required to stand before this uneasy table and raise my voice in the silence. I had been looking forward to this moment all day but any bard will tell you that few can sing at their best before those whose minds are elsewhere. My ambition had been to sing from The Lay of Lord Odysseus on which I had been working, and in the circumstances it would have been the courageous thing to do. But I was reluctant to expose a still raw and tender talent before a judge as stern as King Nauplius, so I chose instead to sing some of the traditional goat-songs sung by shepherds on the island. Amphinomus and Lady Penelope received them warmly enough, but those bucolic airs appealed no more to the visiting king’s ears than our island’s wine had done to his palate.

‘My son told me that you liked to keep a simple life here on Ithaca,’ he said dryly, ‘but I’m surprised to find that the court of Laertes lacks a bard even!’

‘The boy’s father is our bard,’ Penelope answered quietly. ‘There is some fear that his life was lost at sea after the Mysian campaign.’

‘A campaign against which my own son strongly advised,’ Nauplius said with narrowed eyes, ‘but other counsel was preferred, and with what disastrous results we may all now plainly see.’ Then he cast a searching look my way. ‘The boy sings sweetly enough,’ he conceded. ‘I hear the grief in his voice. It is hard for a son to lose a father, but it is in the natural course of things.’ Nauplius shook his gaunt head. ‘For a father to lose a son however …’

Amphinomus said, ‘Surely a father can take comfort from the knowledge that his son died honourably in battle?’

But Nauplius turned a cold stare on him. ‘My son was denied such honour. And denied it by those whom he had loyally sought to serve.’

The silence was broken by Lord Mentor. ‘As the king has observed,’ he said, ‘we are simple souls on Ithaca. Perhaps he will make his meaning plainer.’

Nauplius met the controlled anger with a bleak smile. ‘In good time,’ he said, ‘in good time. My business here is with the Lady Penelope. If she will grant me private audience when this meal is done, we will talk more of these things.’

‘You are the guest of our house,’ Penelope answered. ‘It shall be as you wish.’

And so, with the only subjects about which people wished to speak thus firmly confined to silence, this awkward meal progressed. Amphinomus did what he could to ease the atmosphere by extolling the contribution that Euboea had made to the art of navigation. In particular he praised that island’s introduction of cliff-top beacons beside dangerous shoals, an invention which had caught on across Argive waters and proved a boon to mariners everywhere.

Nauplius nodded in acknowledgement. He and Amphinomus chatted together for a while. ‘It pleases me,’ he said, ‘to learn that the Lady Penelope has found a diverting companion in her husband’s absence.’ And at the fireside pillar where we sat with the dog Argus stretched between us, kicking his hind-legs in a dream of chase, I saw Telemachus scowl.

Eventually, having eaten well for all his disdain for rustic fare, Nauplius declared himself replete, washed his hands in the bronze bowl and indicated his desire to speak alone with the lady of the house. We watched them leave the hall together, he gaunt and frail, she taller by almost a head, yet they felt worryingly like an executioner and his victim.

‘Come, Phemius,’ Amphinomus called across the hall, ‘sing for us again.’

Not for many years, not indeed till after her husband’s return, did Penelope utter a word about what was said between her and King Nauplius that night. The following morning, shortly after dawn, that disagreeable visitor put out to sea without offering thanks or saying farewell to anyone. No one on the island regretted his departure though we were all troubled by the shadow that he had evidently cast across Penelope’s mind and face, and not even Amphinomus could persuade her to share the burden of her cares.

Not many weeks would pass, of course, before we learned that this was only one of many visits that Nauplius was to make to the chief kingdoms of Argos, and everywhere he went, including, most dramatically, Mycenae itself, he left the contamination of his vengeful grief. And from reports of what happened elsewhere it was not difficult to guess what must have passed between Nauplius and Penelope that night.

Nauplius would have begun by singing the praises of his dead son Palamedes. Was his not the swiftest and most orderly mind in the Argive leadership? Had he not come to the aid of the duller-witted Agamemnon by recommending an order of battle which would take full advantage of the diverse forces assembled under his command rather than allowing their rivalries and customs to weaken their strength and cause disarray? Had he not devised a common signalling system that could be understood and exploited equally well by tribesmen from Arcadia, Crete, Boeotia and Magnesia? Had he not unified the systems of measurement used throughout the host so that there could be no confusion over distances and arguments over the distribution of rations and booty might be kept to a minimum? Wasn’t it Palamedes who had kept the troops in good heart by teaching them his game of dice and stones? Hadn’t he always done what he could to make sure that the voice of the common soldiery was heard among the council of the kings? In short, Nauplius insisted that if it had not been for the presiding intelligence of Palamedes, anticipating difficulties and finding means to overcome them, Agamemnon’s vast army would quickly have degenerated into a quarrelsome rabble with each tribal contingent looking only to its own interests even though the entire campaign might founder on such narrow pride.

Penelope would have listened patiently to all of this. After all, the man was her house-guest and it was understandable that a father’s grief should exaggerate his dead son’s contribution to the arduous effort of a war in which he’d lost his life. She had no doubt, of course, that the intelligence and experience of Odysseus must have played at least an equal part in that effort, and probably a greater one, but she had already sensed that to speak up for her husband at this juncture could only arouse a hostile response from this lugubrious old man. So she preferred to hold her peace and wait to see what menace still lay concealed behind his show of grief.

It was not long in coming. Frowning into space as he spoke, Nauplius told how, late in the previous year, when their supplies began to dwindle and raids along the Phrygian and Thracian coasts produced little by way of grain and stores, the Argive host had been faced with a choice between starving outside the walls of Troy or turning tail with little to show for all those long years of war. Odysseus had been in command of one of the raiding parties that returned with its holds empty. When he was met by the rage of Agamemnon, he publicly defied any man to do better. The harvests had failed everywhere that year, he claimed. The granaries were bare.

‘Palamedes took up the challenge,’ Nauplius said, ‘and when he returned to the camp only a few days later, his ships rode low in the water, heavy with grain. You would have thought he deserved the heartfelt thanks of the entire host, would you not? And the common soldiers were warm enough in their praise. My son had always championed their cause. Now he had saved them from hunger. But with the generals it was a different story.’ Fiercely the old man drew in his breath. ‘Whenever there had been conflict among them as to the most effective course of action, Palamedes was invariably proved right. The high command sometimes paid a high price in blood for ignoring his advice and now, once again, my son had succeeded where others had failed. Their envy turned first to spite and then to malice. At least one of them was determined to blacken his name.’

By now Penelope must already have guessed the direction of Nauplius’s story. She knew very well that Odysseus cared for Palamedes no more than she did herself. But nothing could have prepared her for the charge that Nauplius was about to bring against her husband.

‘My son used to send me frequent reports of the progress of the war,’ he said. ‘After all, I had been one of Agamemnon’s principal backers from the first. To fight this war he needed the wealth of Euboea as well as our ships. Without the huge loans I made him, he could never have mustered half the force he did. And both my son and I were well aware that those loans would not be repaid unless Troy fell. So Palamedes went to the war as the guardian of my investment. I relied on him to make sure that the campaign was effectively pursued. I relied on him for news. When he fell silent I began to suspect that something untoward had happened.’ After a grim silence Nauplius said, ‘I sent urgent messages to the Atreides brothers. When no word came back I decided to sail for Phrygia myself.’

After a deliberate silence Penelope asked, ‘And what did you learn there?’

‘I learned that my son had been dead for some time. But he had been denied an honourable death in battle. Palamedes had been traduced by men he took to be his friends. Envious men. Men who worked in darkness to do him harm. A conspiracy of lies had been mounted against him. He was accused of treason. Evidence was fabricated. It purported to show that he had taken Trojan bribes. He was tried and found guilty by the very men who had perpetrated this foul calumny. Palamedes, always the most prudent and honourable of men, met a traitor’s end. He was stoned to death by the host he had sought to serve to the very best of his ability.’ Nauplius was shaking as he spoke. His lips quivered but his eyes were dry as in a hoarse whisper he said, ‘My son’s last words were, “Truth, I mourn for you, who have predeceased me.”’

The words lay heavily on the silence for a time. They could hear the sound of men carousing in the hall below. Eventually Penelope raised her eyes. ‘You are impugning the honour of Agamemnon and Menelaus?’ she demanded.

‘I am,’ Nauplius answered, ‘and I am impugning Diomedes of Tiryns and Idomeneus of Crete who conspired with them against my son.’ He paused to fix her with his flinty stare. ‘And I am impugning your husband Odysseus who was the father of these lies.’

‘Then I will hear no more of this,’ Penelope said steadily, ‘for it seems to me that anyone can vilify another man’s name when he is not present to defend himself, but there can be no honour in such slander.’

‘Which is precisely what your husband did to my son,’ Nauplius retorted, ‘and his shade still cries out for justice. Do not turn away from me, Penelope. I have never felt anything other than affection in my heart for you. Yet I confess I have long shared your father’s doubts about the man you chose for your husband. Odysseus was always a plausible rogue, yes, but a rogue nevertheless. And now I know him to be more and worse than a rogue – he is a villain, one who will stoop to any deceit to secure his own ends. Do not turn away, my dear, for as you will soon learn to your bitter cost, you are as much the victim of his duplicity as I have been.’

But Penelope was already on her feet and crossing the room to leave it. She stopped at the door to confront the old man with the cold rebuke of her eyes. ‘You have already said too much.’

‘The truth is often painful, I know,’ he began to answer, ‘but it must be heard if justice is to be done.’

‘You are the guest of my husband’s house,’ Penelope interrupted him, ‘and you are also old, sir. So I will not ask you to leave this place at once. But I advise you to take to your ship at dawn. Otherwise I will not answer for your safety.’

‘Hear me,’ Nauplius beseeched as she turned to open the door. ‘I speak only out of care for you. This war has corrupted all who lead it. Why do you imagine that not one of them has come home in all these years? It is not because they are constantly in the field, I assure you. Far from it! Those errant gentlemen have long been living a life of licence and debauchery out there in Phrygia. From all the many women they have taken to their tents, each has now selected his favourite concubine. And there is more. They mean to make queens of their oriental paramours when they return to Argos. Pledges have been given before the gods. Believe me, my dear, Odysseus is as faithless as the rest.’ He took in the hostile glitter of Penelope’s eyes and refused to be abashed by it. ‘You do well to look for comfort elsewhere. Amphinomus is a handsome fellow.’

Penelope drew in her breath. ‘Now I am sure that you lie,’ she said. ‘May the gods forgive you for it, for I cannot. Let me never see your face on Ithaca again.’

She left the chamber, banging the door behind her. Yet for all her defiance I doubt that she slept that night. Nor can she have known much rest in the days and nights that followed, for secrets and lies are defilers of the heart and once the trust of the heart is breached it knows no peace. So Penelope was often to be heard sighing as she worked her loom by day, or again when she made her offerings to Athena and prayed that the goddess might teach her patience of soul. And often she would walk alone along the cliff, gazing out to sea as she wondered what had happened to her husband beneath the distant walls of Troy.

The Division of the Spoils

Dawn, when it finally came, was little more than a ruddy gleam blackened by smoke and made redder by the flames still rising from the burning buildings. Again and again throughout the night the nerves of the Trojan women had been shaken by the noise of roof-beams collapsing and the harsh clatter of falling tiles. Here and there the hoarse gust of a blaze still sent its vivid exhaust of sparks upwards through the smoke, but most of the fires were now under control, all resistance had ended, and only occasional screams rose from men under torment to reveal where their riches were concealed.

The streets stank vilely of blood and excrement. With the trapdoor still hanging open at its belly, the wooden horse looked down on a dense litter of corpses. Already kites and vultures circled. Somewhere, indifferent to everything but the glory of his own existence, a cockerel crowed his clarion to the day.

A few of the women had briefly taken refuge in oblivion, but only Cassandra had truly slept that night, and it would have been wrong to deduce from the subdued sound of their sobbing that the captives were calmer now. Rather, with the coming of the light, they felt more than ever to be the victims of a fate so violent and capricious that it numbed their frightened minds. Yesterday Troy had been intact behind its walls, having withstood all the strength the Argive host could bring against it. Today the city was a ruin and its royal women were waiting like stockyard cattle to be apportioned among foreigners they detested and feared.

Yet the sun seemed content to preside over such outrageous fortune and the sky might have been void of gods for all the notice it took of their imprecations. So these women were far from calm. They huddled together, exiled from the past, afraid of the future, seeking from each other the solace that none had to give, and deprived even of the means to kill themselves.

Polyxena crouched among them, knowing that sooner or later Neoptolemus must come in search of her again. She had been present by the altar of Zeus when that terrifying youth had struck off her father’s head, and she had guessed already that he would seek her out. The sixteen year old girl had huddled behind her sister Laodice in the portico earlier that night, listening to his voice cajoling her to reveal herself. She had cast about for a form of words that might convince him that she had been only the unwitting bait in the trap that had been set for Achilles. But she had seen the torchlight glancing off his sword and knew that words would make no difference. The boy was fanatical in his desire to avenge his father. Her only chance of survival was to conceal herself among the other women in the hope that he might be struck down by the hand of a merciful god before he could identify her. Then, when Agamemnon had called Neoptolemus away, she had begun to wonder whether the fates might prove kindly after all. But as the night wore on there was no evidence of kindness in this stricken city and when daylight broke, her terror returned with greater force.

Polyxena could not prevent her teeth from chattering as she crouched beside her mother who sat nursing Andromache’s head in her lap. Beside them Cassandra whispered prophecies that the Trojans would prove more fortunate than their enemies. They had at least died in defence of their sacred homeland, while thousands of the barbarian invaders had perished far from their homes, and those who made it back to Argos would find a cruel fate waiting for them.

‘Agamemnon will see that he has taken death into his bed,’ Cassandra chanted. ‘Already the lioness couples with the goat. A blade glints in the bath-house. A torrent of blood flows there. I too shall be swept away on that red tide. But the son of Agamemnon shall bring a bloody end to Neoptolemus. He will leave his impious body dead beneath Apollo’s stone. As for that ingenious fiend Odysseus, Blue-haired Poseidon will keep him far from the home while others junket and riot in his hall. The Goddess will seize his heart. Hades will open his dark door to him. Death will crowd his house.’ But none of the women believed the mad girl any more than they could silence her. So they sat together under the portico, watching the sun come up and dreading what the day must bring.

Exhausted from the efforts of the night, most of the Argive leaders were relaxing in the palace across the square. The first elation of victory had passed and the rush of wine to their heads brought, at that early hour, only a queasy sense of what they had achieved. Odysseus had wandered off alone somewhere. Apart from Menelaus, who still brooded in the mansion that Paris had built for Helen, the others were carousing together, but there were grumbles of dissent from Acamas and his brother Demophon when Neoptolemus claimed the right to take Polyxena for his own before the lots had been apportioned.

Annoyed that even in this hour of triumph, discord should have broken out so quickly among his followers, Agamemnon stood uncertainly. He knew there was some justice in the complaint but he was reluctant to offend Neoptolemus who had shown a ferocity in the fight against the Ethiopians that had astounded older, battle-hardened men. Also he knew what fate lay in store for Polyxena if he acceded to this demand, and his thoughts had involuntarily darkened at the memory of what he had done to his own daughter Iphigenaia.

Seeing his hesitation, Neoptolemus declared that the shade of his father had demanded in a dream that the girl who had betrayed him should be sacrificed on his tomb. ‘Does the High King not believe that the man who did so much to win this war should be accorded such justice? Would you deny my father’s shade?’

Immediately Agamemnon made the sign to ward off the evil eye. A quarrel with Achilles had almost lost him this war once. He would not risk another with his angry ghost. ‘Take her,’ he said. ‘It is only just.’

So Neoptolemus came to claim Polyxena in the early morning light. Again he summoned her out of the huddle of women. Again Hecuba rose to protect her youngest daughter. But the weary young warrior was in no mood to listen to her pleas and insults. ‘If you don’t want to feel the flat of my sword on your old bones,’ he snarled, ‘tell your daughter to show herself.’

Polyxena rose from the place where she had been crouching. ‘I am here,’ she declared in a voice that shook as she spoke. ‘Achilles asked for me more gently. If you hope to emulate your father, you must learn to speak with something other than your sword.’

‘Come into the light,’ Neoptolemus answered. ‘Let me take a look at you.’

Loosing the hand of Laodice, Polyxena stepped between the women huddled round her and stared without flinching at the youth. Being his senior by three years or more, she might, in other circumstances, have taunted him for parading in the suit of armour that had been made to fit his father’s broader shoulders. But she knew that her life stood in graver danger now than when she had met with Achilles in Apollo’s temple at Thymbra. Her face was flushed with fear. Her breath was drawn too quickly. When Neoptolemus smiled at the swift rise and fall of her recently budded breasts she glanced away.

‘I understand that my father sought to befriend you,’ he said. ‘Is that not so?’

‘Achilles asked to speak with me, yes.’

‘But it was you who made the first approach.’

Nervously she whispered, ‘My father asked it of me.’ Polyxena’s gaze had been fixed on the ground beneath her. Now she looked up hopelessly into those cold eyes. ‘We thought it the only hope of having Hector’s body returned to us.’

‘And because my father had a noble heart he acceded to that hope, did he not?’

Polyxena nodded and averted her eyes.

‘Yet that was not the last time you saw him?’

Her arms were crossed at her breast. Now she was trembling so much that she could barely speak. ‘But it was Achilles who sought me out.’

‘Perhaps you had given him cause to do so?’

‘I swear not,’ she gasped. ‘The priest told me he had come looking for me many times. The thought of it frightened me. I didn’t understand what he wanted.’

‘But still you came.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you didn’t come alone. You told your treacherous brother Paris that Achilles was to be found unguarded at the temple of Apollo. You told him exactly when he would be there. You told him to bring his bow and kill my father in vengeance for the death of your brother Hector.’

‘That is not how it was!’ Polyxena cried.

But Neoptolemus was not listening. He was remembering that Odysseus had told him how, in a quiet hour together, Achilles had confessed his tender feelings for Polyxena. Looking at the girl now – the tousled ringlets blowing about her face, the delicate hands at her shoulders, the shape of her slim thighs disclosed by the pull of the breeze at her shift – he thought he understood how this alluring combination of poise and vulnerability might have tugged at his father’s heart.

It did so now, seditiously, at his own.

Yet this girl had betrayed his father, whose shade cried out for vengeance.

‘And is not Thymbra under the protection of the god?’ he demanded. ‘Isn’t it a sacred place of truce where men from both sides – Argive and Trojan alike – were free to make their offerings without fear?’

Seeing that her truth and his must forever lie far from each other’s reach, Polyxena lowered her head again and consigned herself to silence.

Accusation gathered force in his voice. ‘But you and your brothers lacked all reverence for the god. Together you violated the sanctuary of Apollo’s temple. Your brothers were afraid to face my father in open combat like true men, so they set a trap for him. And you, daughter of Priam, were the willing bait in that trap.’

In a low whisper Polyxena said, ‘I knew nothing of what they planned.’

Neoptolemus snorted. ‘I think you’re lying to me – as you lied to my father before me. I think, daughter of Priam, that it’s time you were purified of lies.’

He turned away from her and gestured to the two Myrmidons who stood at his back. The women who had listened with pent breath to their tense exchanges began to moan and whimper as the Myrmidons stepped forward to seize Polyxena by her thin arms.

Swaying where she stood, Hecuba screeched, ‘Where are you taking her?’

‘To my father’s tomb,’ Neoptolemus answered coldly. ‘There is a last service she can perform for him there.’ Then all the women were wailing again as they watched Polyxena dragged off through the gritty wind blowing across the square, past the impassive effigy of the horse, towards the Scaean Gate.

Walking at dawn through ransacked streets where only the dead were gathered, Odysseus disturbed vultures and pie-dogs already tugging at the silent piles of human flesh. They cowered at his approach or flapped away on verminous wings, peevishly watching as he stared at the horror of what had been done.

During the course of the night a living city had been transformed into a vast necropolis. Its very air was charred and excremental. As though some swift, inexorable pestilence had struck out of the night sky, all its men folk had lain down in droves, their necks gaudy with wounds, their entrails flowering in garlands from their bellies, their eyes gaping at the day. Here lay a man who might once have been a jolly butcher, now with his ribs split open like a side of beef. There, in a slovenly mess, crouched two twin boys – they could only recently have learned to speak – with their infant brains dashed out against a wall. And over there a youth sat propped against an almond tree, evidently puzzled by the broken blade of a sword that had been left protruding like a handle from his skull. And still, in the boughs of that tree, a linnet sang.

When he came out into a small square strewn with bodies, Odysseus saw three men who had followed him to Troy from Dulichion. They were quenching their thirst at a fountain while another milked a nanny-goat into an upturned helmet clutched between his knees. Across the square a half-naked woman with blood splashed at her thighs sat weeping in the doorway of a house.

The soldiers leapt to their feet at his approach, pressing knuckles to their brows as though expecting a reprimand. When Odysseus merely asked if he might share their water, he was offered goat’s milk but said that water was all he wanted. Before he could reach the fountain however, the weary men relaxed and began to congratulate him on the success of his ruse. Only a man out of the Ionian isles, they declared, could have been canny enough to dream up a scheme as clever as that of the wooden horse.

‘We shall have tales to tell when we get home, sir,’ lisped the oldest of them, a grey-headed man who had taken a scar across his mouth and lost half his teeth in the rout at the palisade much earlier that year.

‘Do you think there was ever a night of slaughter such as this?’ asked another.

Odysseus shook his head, unspeaking.

The man who had been milking the goat said, ‘There’s been times I’ve wondered whether I’d ever get to see my wife again, but thanks to you, sir, I expect to come home a rich man now.’

The first man nodded, grinning. ‘It seems the gods were with us after all.’

Around them, the bodies of the dead paid scant attention to these ordinary men, their murderers. And when Odysseus opened his mouth he found he could not speak. His hands were trembling again. When he lifted them to where water splashed in the basin of the fountain he realized that his arms were still stained with blood up to his elbows.

Hurriedly he washed them clean, then cupped his hands at the spout and lifted them to his lips. Water splashed across his tongue like light. He stood swaying a moment, possessed by brief startling intimations of another life in which, with a frenzy entirely alien to his nature, he too had joined the massacre. He saw the Ethiopian mumbling in his blood; he saw the fat man’s eyes staring back at him.

Then he returned to time. He heard the water splashing in the bowl and the woman sobbing still.

Nodding at the soldiers with a weary, distracted smile, Odysseus walked out of the square towards the gate, making for the sea.

At a wind-blown dune not far from the burial mound of Achilles he came to a halt and stood alone beside the sea, watching a flight of pelicans flag their way across the bay. Then his gaze shifted westwards with such concentration that his keen eyesight might have travelled out across the turbulent Aegean and over the mountains of Thessaly to focus on his small homestead island of Ithaca. He was thinking about his wife Penelope and his little son Telemachus, who must now be almost as old as Neoptolemus. With a fervour that amazed him, Odysseus heard himself praying that, unlike the son of Achilles, his own boy would never rejoice in a night of slaughter such as the one he had just endured.

Hunched against the wind, he remembered the dream that had come to him on Ithaca – the furrows of his fields sown with salt, his infant son thrown down before the ploughshare. Ten years, the sibyl at the Earth-mother’s shrine had said, ten wasted years must pass before Troy fell. And now Troy had fallen, destroyed by his own ingenuity, and those long years of war seemed waste indeed, for he had lost more in a single night than all the gold of Troy could redeem. He had done such things as would chill his wife’s blood should she ever come to hear of them.

The white caps of the breakers rolling in off the Hellespont clashed against the shore. The wind banged about his ears. Odysseus swayed where he stood. His breathing was irregular, his tongue dry as a stone in his mouth. Shivering, he lifted a hand to his brow and found that his temples were rimed with sweat. His fingers trembled. He sensed that his nerves had begun at last to mutiny.

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