The Songs of the Kings: A Novel Page 21

  The Theban’s eyes rested briefly on Achilles, whose splendidly articulated biceps rippled below the oiled skin with each slow movement of the fan, and who chose this moment to turn his head lazily, not as if looking but listening.

  “We are waiting,” Agamemnon said.

  “Well, now that I look again, I’m not so sure. I could be wrong. One pendant is very like another after all.”

  “We understand perfectly,” Calligonus said, casting significant looks here and there. He was coming to the end of his plea and he wanted it to be strong. He felt the sympathy of the crowd and it led him now to think—a bad mistake, as it turned out—that he could get Leucon off altogether. “It is the wind that is to blame,” he said. “This terrible wind that keeps us cooped up here. Consider the case of this poor Leucon. Consider it well, because it is the case with all of us. When he first came here he was full of ardor and enthusiasm, determined to distinguish himself in battle, get his hands on a pile of loot and move up some notches in society. Then what happens? He lies awake night after night listening to the voices of the wind. He feels the constant touch of it, on his face, on his body, always picking him over, giving him no peace. Round the headland he knows it is a gale. Day by day his hopes wither, all that youthful idealism crumbles away, he is not far from a nervous breakdown. Like us all, he is waiting for Iphigeneia. Like us all, he must believe his leaders when they tell him that the sacrifice of the witch will bring an end to the wind. He must have faith. But faith is a variable, not a constant. It goes up and down. Anyone who denies this is either a fool or in bad faith. On top of everything else, this poor Leucon is hungry. It’s getting harder all the time to screw anything out of these miserly people. And there aren’t enough whores, Leucon has to stand in line. Waiting half a day in the wind is guaranteed to take the edge off anyone. Is it so surprising that his morale, his sense of solidarity, should be undermined? Is it so surprising that Leucon, in his frustration, should become bewildered and confused, should lose his sense of the distinction, a valid distinction as I am the first to agree, between pilfering and pillage? He took only one small thing, not very valuable. It was a gesture, a token. My friends, this was not a theft at all, it was a cry for help. Let our great commander Agamemnon, tamer of horses, show mercy to this poor confused man and give the blame to the wind.”

  Even before he came to the end of this he saw a certain sort of stillness settle over the judges and knew he had blundered. There was silence for some moments, then Agamemnon said, “How can a wind sent by Zeus be a cause of crime?”

  Odysseus, one of the two judges on Agamemnon’s right, now spoke for the first time. “You would have done better to stick to the issue of impulse and beg for leniency, without bringing the wind into it. But you are in love with your own voice, Calligonus, and you have gone too far. Do you not see that you have forced us to an extreme judgment? If we make the wind an excuse for this theft, we make it an excuse for any wrong that is done here. Murder, mutiny, desertion, failure to keep your weapons in good order, you name it. It’s a formula for anarchy. Above all, and this is where you have really fouled up your case, it reduces everyone to the same level. We are all exposed to the wind. If Leucon is a victim of the wind, so are we all. In that way we lose the vital distinction between a contemptible instance of petty thieving and the noble and altruistic readiness of our Commander-in-Chief to sacrifice his nearest and dearest for the sake of the common good.” He paused for a moment, glancing towards his fellow judges. “I hope I take you with me on this,” he said. “It seems to me absolutely crucial.”

  No way round it, this Leucon would have to die, he thought as he watched them nodding. An even more dangerous precedent lurked behind this one of declaring that the wind was to blame. He had seen how cleverly Calligonus had swayed the audience, made his appeal to the common man; he had noted the easy rhetoric, the sense of theater, the readiness to run into danger for the sake of winning. That touch about it not being a crime but a cry for help, so bold and original. He could hardly have done it better himself. This Calligonus was a dangerous man, he would need watching carefully. An error of the first magnitude to give him the victory now, or any slightest concession that could add to his prestige or strengthen his influence among his fellows.

  “One might just as well say the sound of the sea maddened me, or the cawing of the crows, or the voice of a neighbor,” said Agapenor, leader of the Arcadians, the judge on his left.

  “Zeus sends the wind to show us our past crimes, not lead us into new ones.” This came from the Lapith chief, Polypoetes, on the other side of Agamemnon.

  “We are agreed then. Guilty with no extenuating circumstances.” Odysseus looked towards Agamemnon as he said this. One could never be quite sure of the King’s responses; that reference to the sacrifice had been a calculated risk, it could have released a flood of self-pitying bombast. “Great King, we wait for you to pronounce the sentence,” he said.

  Agamemnon showed no hesitation. “It is our judgment that Leucon the Athenian be delivered to the sword of the man he has wronged.”

  The remaining moments of Leucon’s life were few. In spite of his tears and the loud displeasure of his countrymen, he was taken and made to kneel and his hands were tied behind him. He begged for mercy as he knelt there, offering himself as bondsman to Achilles, swearing to serve him all his life long without wages.

  Achilles paid no heed to this. He exchanged the fan for a short sword, very heavy in the blade, which had been fashioned specially for him; having set his feet in just the right position to the side of the kneeling man he performed one or two preliminary passes to show how he could make the blade whistle. Then, with a beautifully coordinated pivoting movement of shoulders, arms and trunk, all below the waist remaining planted and immobile, he made a perfectly judged slicing cut, drawing the blade in an arc so cunning that Leucon’s head, though completely severed, yet remained on his shoulders, and his eyes continued to stare ahead. There were even those among the bystanders ready to swear that Leucon had continued pleading for his life and offering his services free for some appreciable time before he toppled over and his head jumped away.

  6.

  Sitting in his accustomed place, the Singer mingled past and present and future together, strands of a single rope. He sang of an ancient conflagration, flames that burst through the roofs of the caverns under the sea because they had stoked the fires too high in the workshops of Poseidon, burst up and made a mountain with a burning mouth, and the discharge from this mouth destroyed the island of Thera and made the sea boil, killing all the creatures of the deep, rearing up in a scalding wave as high as the palace of Pylos, that ran against Crete and destroyed all the ships in the harbors of Knossos and Cydonia, and the ashes of the fire covered all the land and nothing would grow and the people starved.

  He sang of the consummately skillful blow that had decapitated Leucon the Athenian, who had gone on begging for mercy without knowing he was a dead man. He gave out news of the knife, repeating the details of design and emphasizing the costliness of the materials. Then, for the fourth time that day, he traced the itinerary of Iphigeneia on her way towards them. This, he had discovered, went down very well—it brought her nearer; his audiences had doubled since the idea came to him. Indeed, so popular had the item proved that there was no need to bother with metrical form. He concentrated on cadence, chanting Iphigeneia’s journey as a litany of place names. Many of his listeners, especially those coming from the places mentioned, joined in with obvious enjoyment. It was the first time in his career that the Singer had experienced audience participation on anything like this scale.

  Overland to Corinth on the good road, then by ship through the Saronic Gulf, steering between the islands of Salamis and Aegina, rounding Cape Sounion, hugging the shore to escape the wind, passing on the lee side of Macronisi, entering the mouth of the Euboean Strait. Then Brauron, the looming shape of Pendelicon, Rhamnus and the temples of Nemesis. At Rhamnus there were those wa
iting and watching, ready to light the bonfires as soon as she was sighted entering the narrow water. From Rhamnus to Aulis, less than a day’s sail . . .

  How eagerly she was awaited, how happy they would be when she came, what a glorious future awaited them once the sacrifice had been made and Zeus had released them from his displeasure, what undying fame would be achieved by the Greek heroes. The war would soon be over. Their leaders were men of high caliber, men to be trusted, and they had announced that Troy could not stand a long siege, lacking adequate supplies of water. The Greek heroes would return to their homes and the arms of their wives, laden with honor and precious cups and tripods and shining cauldrons. Their children, and their children’s children, gathered round the fireside in the evening, would be able to ask them: “O Father,” or “O Grandfather,” as the case may be, “what did you do in the war?” And the answers would bring a flush of pride to those fresh young faces: “Yes, I fought in the Trojan campaign. I impaled so-and-so on my spear and held him aloft, wriggling like a worm on a pin, for all to see. I got so-and-so through the throat with an arrow at five hundred paces, a shot that is still remembered round the campfires. We surrounded so-and-so and, having first stripped him of his armor, we cut off his arms and legs and rolled him downhill like a bobbin, what a laugh. Then we quarreled over the armor, and guess who was the only survivor of that quarrel, yes, it was your own father, or grandfather.” As the case may be.

  He had liked the zeugma, and tried a variant of it now, to round things off. “Freighted with fame and the glorious trophies of conquest.” He made a brief pause and was about to begin on the story of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, he who sowed dragon’s teeth and had a crop of armed warriors, when he became aware of the face of a boy near his own—a face which, even to his impaired vision, was revealed as beautiful. This face leaned towards him, whispering: “Will you sing me the stories of Lemnos?”

  7.

  Calchas waited still for the right moment, the right form of words, a message to take to the King that should be true and compelling, like that perfect shape of the sun, so briefly seen above the headland before it streamed away and mixed its fire with baser elements, mist, the spume of the sea. He was alone more now, Poimenos was away more often and for longer. In these periods of solitude he kept mainly to his tent, but was sometimes seen walking slowly along the shore, beyond the camp, eyes lowered as if studying the ground before him. Sometimes he would stop dead and remain fixed for several minutes. All the energy of his mind was consumed in an endless reviewing of his failures and mistakes, a seeking to find, at least here, some pattern, some meaning. His slowness to discover the sender of the wind, his failure to understand that Stimon’s dancing and the leaping flames had been symbols of life, and that life, whether of man or fire, is purchased by destruction. Why had Pollein misled him? Agamemnon’s dream of the tongueless nightingale, he had lost an opportunity there to sound a warning. He might have told the King about his own dream, that tide of bronze that bore away the helmeted warriors, Greek and Trojan tumbled together in the bright flood, then drowned and lost in that strange silver peace of the horizon. Poimenos had wanted him to speak of this, had been disappointed at his failure to do so. Looking back now, it seemed to Calchas that this had been the boy’s first disappointment in him, the first shadow. He had tried to conceal his fears and doubts so as to keep the boy’s regard, this too a mistake— Poimenos no longer observed him, no longer imitated his movements, though he could not remember a definite time when that had ceased. If he could, even now, convince the King that Artemis was the sender, then Iphigeneia might be saved and the crime and the bloodguilt averted. For why should the goddess desire the death of her priestess? Why was there no help for him in smoke or cloud or embers or the light on water? The gods had deadened his eyes.

  He continued to visit the smith and make his reports; he was becoming an expert in the manufacture of knives. The King wanted to know the progress of the work in detail, and this detail Calchas faithfully supplied. An exact model of the knife had been made in wax, then covered in clay and heated so that the wax melted and drained off while the clay hardened, forming the mold—a process that Agamemnon knew well enough already but still wanted to hear related. Calchas praised the mold’s sharpness of detail, described how it was grooved on both sides to make strengthening ribs for the blade.

  He was no longer allowed to attend alone upon the King— that mark of favor had been withdrawn. He did not apply for audience now, he waited until sent for, and there were always others present when he came. When Poimenos accompanied him, he left the boy outside the tent, where he was subject to the indecent proposals of the guards.

  “Such a mold is used only once and must then be thrown away,” the diviner said, and saw the King nod with satisfaction.

  “And the casting of the bronze?”

  “Lord, it is done already.” It had been a source of fearful wonder to Calchas, whose mind was so fluid in its connections, almost helplessly so, how the King’s close interest in this knife detached his mind from thoughts of the wound it was designed to make, the blood it was designed to spill. It was as if the weapon were being made for its beauty alone. When he saw Agamemnon’s deep-set eyes, dark-ringed below the prominent ridges of the brows from the nights of his insomnia, light up at some detail to do with the knife’s fashioning, saw this all-consuming interest in the technical process, the impression returned to him that the King was mad, that the gods had taken away his capacity for imagining.

  I am mad too, he thought, to lend myself to this game. He said, “Molten bronze has a special property, or so the smith tells me. It chooses the final moments before solidifying to enlarge its body in the mold, and so it picks up all the fine detail. As it cools it dwindles again so as to be the more easily extracted. This property of swelling and shrinking is possessed by neither of the parent metals. It is a gift to the alloy from the god Hephaestus.”

  The King’s eyes glistened. “He knows my design for the decoration of the blade?”

  “Your instructions have all been made known to him.”

  The King said nothing for some moments, chin sunk on chest as if pondering. Chasimenos, the only other person present on this occasion, also remained silent, his thin face stiff and expressionless. Calchas became aware again of the insistent, petulant snapping of the wind in the folds of the canvas, the seeping hiss of the air below the edges of the walls. Overhead, where sunlight trembled through the membrane of the roof, he counted four tortoiseshell butterflies fluttering together, and heard or imagined small thuds of collision among them. All the tents now were haunted by butterflies and moths and small creeping things that had taken the only refuge they could find against the unceasing onslaught of the wind. Even the men sleeping in the open would be troubled by beetles and lizards and mice that crawled under the covers with them or hid in the folds of their clothing.

  As the silence continued it seemed to Calchas that all his experience of patience, all the times in the whole of his life when he had longed for release, was summed up in these few moments of waiting for Agamemnon to make known his further wishes regarding the knife, moments which lay clasped and enclosed within all the other things there were to wait for: a sign to guide him, the courage to speak, the arrival of Iphigeneia, an end to the wind, an end to this cold fever of his life. Like square boxes of juniper wood, one fitting within another, that he had once seen on a market stall in Miletus, seen and wanted at a time of poverty when he had nothing to tender in exchange. Fashioned in the far north, the Thracian traders had told him; wood from the lands of snow. But the scent of the wood had come warm to his nostrils, like a breathing of the sun . . .

  “I want the inlay of silver to go the whole length of the blade from the haft to the point. I want the width of it to be so.” Agamemnon held out his right hand with thumb and forefinger a little extended. “Come closer, priest,” he said.

  Calchas approached and looked down at the hand. “Yes, I see,” he said.<
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  “You will tell the smith. This is the width I want for the inlay.”

  “Lord, I will deliver your instructions.” The required width of the inlay had been conveyed to the smith once already; due allowance had already been made for it.

  “He will be well rewarded. I have some ideas for the incising of the inlay, but we will talk of that later. One thing at a time, eh?” The King’s mouth formed into a thin smile. “You too will be rewarded,” he said. “When the time comes.”

  Calchas emerged from the tent with these words still in his ears. There was no sign of Poimenos. He heard a booming voice that carried over the sound of the wind and saw Ajax the Larger below him on the shore, watched him lower from his face and then raise again a long, cone-shaped object. He set the narrow end to his mouth and the strange booming came again.

  “What is that?” he asked one of the guards.

  “He is getting them lined up for a footrace.”

  “No, I mean the thing he is shouting through.”

  “Palamedes invented it, they say. He calls it a voice-booster. Both the Ajaxes have one. The voice is made bigger—down there they have the sound of the water as well as the wind to contend with. But they mainly use them for shouting at each other.”

  Calchas glanced round in search of Poimenos. “Why is that?”

  The guard spat delicately aside. “They don’t see eye to eye on anything, those two. These Games won’t come to anything, if you ask me. No one is going to burst his lungs for the sake of a few bloody leaves.”

  Tension broke from Calchas in a short, barking laugh. “Those two will never see eye to eye, that much is certain.” He lingered some moments, glancing at the guard’s face. It was rare that anyone spoke so freely to him these days, and this man had even accompanied him a little way as he was leaving the tent. The eyes that regarded him expressed no friendliness, but there seemed nothing of hostility in them either, small in the big-chinned, weather-roughened face, red-rimmed and sore-looking from the constant pressure of the wind.