The Songs of the Kings: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE Eagles OF Zeus

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  THE Heavy Burden OF Command

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  At Mycenae

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Waiting FOR Iphigeneia

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Dressing Up

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  ALSO BY BARRY UNSWORTH

  Copyright Page

  For Aira with love and thanks

  THE Eagles OF Zeus

  1.

  This was the sixth night. He had lain awake through most of it, listening to the wind, the body of the sleeping boy beside him, beset by fear at still not knowing the sender, fear of other failures that might follow from this. The strands of the wind he knew by this time; tensed in concentration, he imagined he could hold them apart, the shrilling high up among the bare rocks, the softer combing in the shrub lower down, the ripple of loose canvas from the tents. Even the very smallest sounds he strained to hear, random sobs and whispers, stirring of grasses, the faint scrape of displaced pebbles along the shore. A wind from the northeast, unheard of at this season, keeping the fleet trapped in these straits at Aulis, and the army with it, waking the men every morning to the unhappy knowledge of some god’s displeasure. It came from the direction of Troy, where lay their dreams of conquest. Six days and six nights with no sign of relenting, though the voices varied. The wind itself seemed to suffer in all its moods, even in its rages pleading to be quieted, to be soothed.

  Then, early in the morning of the seventh day, came the summons from Agamemnon. He noted the time just as in those days of his power he noted all such things. Just before sunrise, the wind still there but quieter now, as if for the while exhausted after its riots in the dark. A time disputed between Hecate and Helius, when the world is between states. He was between states himself, as he also noted: neither inside the tent nor out of it, but cross-legged on a cushion at the threshold, watching his acolyte Poimenos, who was still half asleep, fumbling together a fire for the infusion of mint and honey he had been schooled to prepare. And he was neither clothed nor naked, being dressed only in a loincloth, with a piece of cotton over his shoulder as a shawl. These were things important to remember and interpret; not mortals but gods chose the times.

  It was the chief scribe Chasimenos that brought the message, approaching from the rear, appearing suddenly, flanked by soldiers from the King’s Guard. At midday, after the fight, Agamemnon would require the presence in his tent of Kalunas, I beg your pardon, Calchas, priest of Apollo.

  He smiled saying this, glancing away with eyes so pale as to seem almost colorless in the narrow, bearded face. Calchas read the usual veiled contempt in voice and smile, the elaborate politeness, the stress upon the name, not his own, bestowed on him by the Greeks. Contempt too for his shaven face, his plaited hair, the smudges of kohl that would be still on his eyelids, the amulets worn as a bracelet, contrary to Greek custom. Asian priest of an Asian god without even a cult center yet established here.

  All this was in the looks and the words—Calchas was practiced in reading such marks. But there was also the fact that this upstart diviner had been granted a shelter of canvas when most of the army spent the nights in the open, finding what cover they could; that he had a boy to share his tent and see to his needs; that he slept on a woolen mat, thickly woven; that he need not reply promptly to a messenger, even one of high rank. It was common knowledge that the King would make no decision, take no step, before Calchas had first scanned the auguries.

  Chasimenos stood there waiting in his long-sleeved tunic of a palace bureaucrat. His smile had withered at the delay. “The King requires the presence of his seer,” he repeated. The soldiers stood on either side of him, their long spears grounded, their faces heavy with ill humor at being given escort duties at such an hour, not much after dawn. It was early for the King to send; he would have had another bad night. Chasimenos had no need of an escort for such a small thing as this. But the habit of armed guards had grown in the days they had been there, waiting on the wind. Agamemnon himself never appeared without at least six. The diviner said, “Calchas will be honored beyond honor to kneel at the King’s feet. May he live forever.”

  As he spoke he heard the small crackle of the fire, saw the smoke rise straight up in a thin plume. He felt a slight shudder within him, premonition of ill. These calms were dangerous, always brief, cheating the army with hope. There was some quality of danger too in this dawn summons to a meeting he had not been consulted about. Nothing of this showed on his face. He had known how to wait before answering, just as he knew now how to appear unaffected.

  He had expected, the answer once given, that the other would quit his presence immediately—it was one he had never shown signs of liking, not even back in Mycenae, before they had set out. But Chasimenos remained there, and after a moment, in a tone he tried to make friendlier, said, “Which of them do you think will win?”

  Now at last Calchas could permit himself to show some slight surprise. He was being solicited for an opinion as to who would live and who would die that morning, Stimon the Locrian or Opilmenos the Boeotian, due to fight a duel later on as champions of their respective tribes. “I have no ideas on the matter,” he said, which was untrue.

  “Opilmenos is the stronger and has more battle experience, but they say this Locrian is very quick.”

  Something in the tone of this suggested that the scribe might have a stake in the outcome. Calchas had heard from Poimenos, who came and went about the camp on various kinds of foraging expeditions, gathering gossip on the way, that the men were wagering on the result. Though what they could have to wager it was hard to see, they possessed nothing but their weapons.

  Chasimenos was lingering still. “I thought that the god might have made it known to you,” he said.

  Calchas shook his head. “What does Lord Apollo care for the quarrels of men? Live or die, what concern is it of his? The gods will view the outcome with complete and serene indifference unless there is some offense we know nothing of, something done or left undone, said or left unsaid, which might weigh against the one or the other man when it comes to the meeting. It is dangerous to neglect a god, even when not knowing. Punishment can arrive before knowledge.”

  He spoke carefully, knowing the other for an enemy who would destroy him if he had the power. He had been given a sign as to who would be the victor, but it would have been unwise to talk to Chasimenos about this, as it had been of an unusual kind and he had mentioned it to no one. The outcome of the fight was of course the only thing Chasimenos couldn’t organize. He was a gifted and devoted administrator, meticulous to the point of obsession, which was why he held his senior position in the palace hierarchy. He had been busy with this fig
ht from the moment Agamemnon had given his approval of it, working out in close detail the order of assembly, the precise positions to be occupied by the allied forces when they lined up for the spectacle. A real headache that, Calchas thought, to remember all the quarrels, some of them ancient, keep feuding tribes at a safe distance from one another. But the outcome he couldn’t fix. No one is bribed to lose in a fight to the death . . . “This wind that plagues us is an example,” he said. “The punishment has come before the knowledge of the fault.”

  As if in support of him, the wind rose again now in a long gust that scattered the smoke and rattled the canvas of the tents throughout the camp like a fury of drums. One of the guards clutched at his helmet.

  Disappointed at not getting the tip he had obviously been hoping for, Chasimenos reverted to his former aloof and slightly sneering manner. “Croton wouldn’t agree with you. He maintains that Zeus cares what happens to every single one of us.”

  “Yes, I know Croton says that, he says we are the children of Zeus.” Calchas paused, again conscious of the need for caution. Zeus was the father-god of the Greeks and Croton was the priest of Zeus, with a large following in the army. He and his two disciples paraded frequently through the camp proclaiming the power of their god. “Zeus is lord of all,” he said. “But how can we be children of the gods when we are made of different stuff, when we are perishable and they are not? It isn’t logical. We have one season only but the gods live forever. Of course, there is shelter in the thought of a father, and shelter is needed.”

  He was beginning to enlarge on this theme, which he had suddenly found interesting, the relation between the need and the thing needed, which thing existed at first only because of that need, but then, because of that need, took on true existence. “Perhaps it works the other way too,” he said. “Perhaps we humans only exist because the gods need us.”

  But Chasimenos said nothing to this and did not stay to listen to more, turning abruptly on his heel and disappearing round the side of the tent. However, there was comedy in this that made up for the rudeness; the guards were taken quite by surprise and had to go lumbering after him, hoisting their spears awkwardly. Measured movement, a certain stateliness, were necessary for a person under escort; but Chasimenos, used to scuttling down palace corridors with no company but his own intriguing mind, had yet to learn this. A mistake in any case to talk much at all to him. Themes commonly discussed in Apasas, city of the diviner’s birth, and the lands of the Hatti from Kadesh to Sardis, were too abstract for these gross Mycenaean minds. Even a scribe, he thought, a representative of their intellectual class. Chasimenos was hostile enough without having claims made on his intelligence which his intelligence was not able to meet.

  He stayed where he was while the light strengthened. After a while Poimenos brought his drink and a wheat cake to go with it. They were in wheat country there, with fertile land to the south; and now, at the end of August, the harvest was in, though the troops had to go farther afield every day in search of full granaries—it was known now that the country people were hiding their grain. Unpatriotic scum, in the words of Menelaus. Since losing his beautiful Helen to Paris—that swine of an Asian, as he called him—Menelaus spoke often of patriotism and solidarity.

  As Calchas ate and drank, the first darts of the sun struck through the canvas of the tent behind him, warming the odors of night still caught there in that narrow space, oxhide, crushed grass, the faint scent of bodies in the folds of the wool. Before his face was the radiant sky, a few bright curls of cloud low on the horizon, moving slowly, barely perceptibly—this wind did not change the sky, did not bring storms. He watched the clouds drift together, looked for a shape in them. A fleece, a swan’s neck, the forepart of a chariot. He strove to empty his mind for the message, but he could read nothing there, they were random shapes; and he felt a constriction of the heart at this further failure, knowing that nothing in the world was random. There had been no sign for him in clouds or embers or the flight of birds, not one, in all these days at Aulis, when signs were so desperately needed, when Agamemnon waited for his words, when all the camp waited to know who was sending the wind that kept them huddled there along the shore, a thousand men, the greatest army ever assembled by the Greeks in alliance, trapped there while the useless ships rocked at anchor and the waves mocked them and slapped their hulls. In these sheltered waters, with the hills of Euboea making a barrier, the wind had a varying breath, sometimes deep-voiced, sometimes screaming, sometimes, as now, derisively gentle, hardly more than a breeze; but once round the promontories, when you were facing the open sea, the wind was a flail of terrible power, beating ships back, smashing them on the rocks.

  He could see the masts from the rise where he was sitting. That August sky was so fiercely bright, they glowed as they swayed as if stirred in their own fire. Smoke was rising everywhere now, swirled by the wind, shot through with sunshine. There were voices and movements of men lower down towards the shore, where the main body of the army was encamped.

  With the warmth, the pervasive smell of human excrement grew stronger. On the third day, Ajax of Salamis, called Ajax the Larger, who thought of himself as a practical fellow, had organized his people to dig a long trench for a latrine—a heavy job in the hard ground of the hillside. The whole force from Salamis had been employed on this, laboring in shifts. It kept them busy, an added advantage, as Ajax remarked to his small friend and namesake, Ajax the Locrian, called Ajax the Lesser. Mischief was bred by idleness; working together for a common purpose was good for morale. You form them into squads, appoint a few overseers, tell them you’ll tan their hides if there is any slacking, and there you are. Unfortunately, however, in his enthusiasm for the project, Ajax had temporarily forgotten why they had all been obliged to wait there in the first place, and sited the latrine to windward of the camp. Being obstinate in the extreme, he would not admit his mistake, and now forced all the contingent from Salamis to continue using the latrine on pain of his severe displeasure—and all knew what that meant—if found defecating anywhere else. It was generally agreed that the people of Salamis had not been the luckiest contingent so far. Meanwhile the smell was getting worse. People grumbled, but in the general apathy that had fallen over the camp no one was ready yet to face the violent encounter with the enormous Ajax that any direct protest was certain to bring about.

  Thinking of this brought back to Calchas’s mind thoughts of the fight that was soon to take place. He believed he knew who would win it. He had been given a sign, not because the gods were interested in the outcome, but because their power pervaded human life, like this fire that glowed on the masts without consuming them.

  On the first night of their stay there, when it was still thought the wind would be short-lived and spirits were high, he had walked alone along the shore, passing close to where the Locrians had their quarters. He had seen one of them dancing with wonderful grace in the firelight, to the music of pipe and drum. The man was naked but for a loincloth and his body shone with oil or sweat. The fire was veering and flaring in the wind and he brought these movements of the flames into the dance, stepping near to the fire with his arms raised and his head turning, now held in stern profile, now glancing down in serious pride. Such a dancer was he that Calchas had stayed to watch and seen him twice leap the fire, over and back, without faltering, without breaking the rhythm of the dance, so that those watching him shouted in exhilaration, their hearts leaping with him as he leapt. The firelight was cast upward and Calchas had seen the man’s face clearly and the faces of those nearest. He had seen the Singer there too, a little apart, with his lyre laid across his knees, looking straight before him, and he had wondered what this scene might mean to the Singer, who was almost blind, what flickering, looming shapes of dancer and flame he might be seeing.

  So he had watched for a while, then moved on; but the strong impression of the dancing stayed with him. Then there had been the brawl between groups of Locrians and Boeotians, and a seriou
s wounding—a man stabbed in the right shoulder, disabled. Such incidents bred feuds when men had little else in mind; and feuds among the Greek tribes, once taking hold, spread like a virulent fever. Champions were elected in haste on either side to meet in single combat and settle the matter.

  It was when he saw these champions brought forward to be presented to the assembled host that Calchas thought he knew which would be victorious. He had recognized the Locrian at once: it was the man who had danced in the firelight. The other was a half head taller, smooth-haired, narrow at the waist and powerful in the shoulders, an athlete. Moreover, a professional soldier who had fought for Thebes against the combined forces of Phocis and Megaris. They stood on either side of Odysseus, who along with Chasimenos had organized the business, while their names were shouted out: Stimon of Locris, Opilmenos of Boeotia. Both were acclaimed in equal measure for the promise of entertainment they offered, and the Boeotian smiled to hear the shouts but the Locrian remained as serious now as he had been among his own people.

  As Calchas had watched and seen one man smile and the other not, it had come to him with luminous certainty that Stimon the dancer would be the one to die. He remembered how he had been drawn by the music and the shouting. And he knew now that he had been directed to turn his steps that way, so as to come upon the man in the pride of life, at the climax of his dancing, when he leapt the fire. The truth of things lay always in contradiction; as the cup brimmed, so it spilled. His own splendor had marked the dancer out for death. So Calchas had reasoned when the champions were brought forward; and so he reasoned still as the sun climbed in the sky and they waited for the event.

  Poimenos was sitting on the other side of the dying fire, keeping a distance in the absence of indications to do otherwise. Calchas noted that the boy had copied his own posture with exact fidelity, sitting cross-legged with back held straight, holding his bowl of tea with both hands. He would have dipped his cake into the warm tea and eaten it so; Calchas knew this, though he had been too much occupied with his thoughts to notice. He knew it because it was what he did himself. Poimenos watched him without seeming to and strove to imitate his movements in the hope of being graced to read the signs, and so take some part in the stories of the gods and in their power. Perhaps then he would leave me, Calchas thought. But there was no danger; the boy was devoted but he showed no sign of a gift. There were those who were drawn to the threshold never to enter the house; he was one of that number, born to serve. At times Calchas detected the helpless knowledge of this already in him. He was beautiful to look at, slender of form and narrow-boned, with eyes black as jet, slanting upward towards the temples, and a mouth with a full underlip, giving him a slightly sulky expression as if needing kisses. Poimenos had been a gift from the gods to him; he had found the boy at Delphi when he had gone there from Mycenae, sent by Agamemnon to consult the oracle of Ge, the Great Mother, as to the outcome of the war which at that time was still at the planning stage. The boy had been a server there at the sanctuary, the humblest of servers, sweeping the precincts, gathering wood for the sacred fire, which was tended by others. He had run away from home, a mountain village on the slopes of Parnassos, and was living as he could on the leftovers from the offerings. Poimenos had been at his side when he had half fainted and almost fallen at the vision granted him by the oracle, the river of blood and the warriors of Troy rolling over and over in the swift current, borne away on their own blood-tide. The boy had seen his power then and stayed by his side ever since. The vision he had recounted to Agamemnon and received gold beads and a silk vest . . .