The Songs of the Kings: A Novel Read online

  A sudden recklessness came to Calchas, akin to the laughter that had just broken from him. He said, “Does it not seem to you that this world of the camp is a world turned upside down? Two champions of unity always divided, a god who blesses and curses us in the same breath, a victim whose innocence takes away our guilt?”

  The guard said nothing. No particular expression had appeared on his face. Calchas turned away, already regretting his words. “It takes some understanding, doesn’t it?” he said.

  He was beginning to make his way back towards his own tent, but before he had gone far it came to him quite suddenly where Poimenos must be. He changed direction and went towards the open space on the shore side of the camp, where the Locrian lines began. As he approached he heard the short twanging sounds of the lyre when the strings are plucked and at once stilled. Then the Singer’s voice came over to him in snatches. He was singing of the eighth labor of Heracles, the capturing of the four mares that fed on human flesh. Drawing nearer, he saw Poimenos sitting very close to the Singer, a little behind him. The boy was motionless, listening with head tilted upward in an exact replica of the Singer’s pose. He was lost in the story, spellbound, as sightless in his way as his new master.

  8.

  A gamemnon’s pious habit of including the senile Nestor in all councils and consultative assemblies meant that nothing, however small the gathering otherwise, could remain a secret for very long. Sooner or later it would find its way into one of the old man’s interminable monologues about the highlights of his life, especially the one about his youthful exploits as a rustler in Elis, when he had disemboweled the king’s son and got away with fifty cows. So it came about that one evening Agamemnon was visited in his tent by an Achilles incandescent with rage, accompanied by his inseparable companion and lover, Patroclus.

  Rage in Achilles was not much expressed in outward motions. Rather, his movements became slighter, more contained, as if he was saving energy for the moment of the kill. There was a glowing paleness about him, his eyes were wider than usual and the line of his jaw more prominent, somewhat marring the perfection of his profile.

  Agamemnon was with Chasimenos and Odysseus when the two visitors entered brusquely without depositing their arms at the door, as custom demanded. Meeting that murderous gaze, he thought for a moment that these two were the leaders of a coup, an event he dreaded day and night, arriving to put an end to him. He started up and his hand went to the sword at his side. He might at least put paid to that vain dimwit Patroclus before Achilles’ sword found his heart. He was stayed by calm words from Odysseus, who also feared a coup, but not on the part of Achilles, whom he considered too coldhearted and narcissistic to have much popular appeal. Besides, he had instantly reasoned, they would have moved faster, there would have been more of them.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Is there something the matter?”

  Tension about the jaws did not allow Achilles much range of sound. His words came out flat and uninflected. “Whose idea was it to use my name?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t—”

  Achilles looked at Patroclus, who said, “Lord Achilles has formed the intention of challenging to mortal combat the person responsible for putting forward his name, without his knowledge or consent, as a suitor for Iphigeneia’s hand in marriage.”

  “My name,” Achilles said, grinding his teeth. “My name.”

  “An illustrious name was needed, or she might not have agreed to come,” Chasimenos said. “What name more illustrious than yours, O mighty Achilles, goddess-born.”

  He received in reply the full homicidal blaze of Achilles’ eyes, which caused him quickly to lower his own.

  “It was you then?”

  “Er, no.”

  Agamemnon felt unutterably weary, weary to the marrow of his bones. Wasn’t it enough that a man should be bearing the heavy burden of command without having a maniac like this to deal with? “It was a collective decision,” he said. “I forget how many people were involved. A dozen at least. You can’t kill us all, you would leave the army leaderless.”

  “That’s a lie. I know you, Agamemnon. You would have kept it close and secret, just among a few, schemers like yourself. Do you think I’m a fool? By Zeus, I’ll show you different.”

  “We’ll really have to stop including Nestor in these meetings,” Chasimenos said.

  “Is it only this?” Odysseus’s smile concealed a vast surprise at the depths of human stupidity. Here was one who could not see beyond vanity and bloodlust, even in a matter that concerned his reputation and public image. He felt a preliminary pang of pleasure at the thought of bemusing this brute and taming him with words. “I will tell you the truth, Achilles,” he said. “As you know, it is not my habit to go beating about the bush. It is true that we put you forward as a suitor for Iphigeneia without telling you. We were afraid that otherwise you might refuse. And if you had refused and we had gone ahead after your refusal, that would have been worse still, wouldn’t it? And we would still have had to risk it.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Well, look at it this way. If you had been asked and refused, that refusal would have been a very public one. You would have made sure it was public, wouldn’t you? You would have wanted there to be no doubt, no smallest doubt, about your attitude. And what would the result have been?”

  “The army would have known I set a value on my name, the army would have understood what it means to be Achilles.”

  “Forgive me, it would have had an opposite effect, your name would have been irredeemably tarnished. The army would simply have thought, mistakenly of course, that self-esteem was more important to you than the Greek cause, that you were lacking in the spirit that unites us all in this great enterprise, making us forget petty differences, making us gird up our loins, set our shoulders to the wheel, share and share alike, what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Civic sense.”

  “Civic sense, brilliant, you can always count on Chasimenos for the mot juste. Of course, you might not have refused, but how were we to know? Now, as things are, you have been saved from a total disaster in public relations, for the simple reason that the matter is not public at all. Agamemnon, understandably enough, exaggerated a little. The only people in the know are the people in this tent now, at this present moment in time. Nestor’s sons waited outside on that occasion and nobody takes the old man seriously, it’s a well-known fact that he doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.”

  “I have always found him a great support in times of trouble,” Agamemnon said.

  “Well, you are alone in that. Even Diomedes, whom we chose as our ambassador, doesn’t know. We were obliged to tell him that you had agreed. He is a simple man, with a very rudimentary moral sense, and would not be convincing if he didn’t believe what he was saying.”

  Achilles’ jaws had slackened appreciably in his puzzlement at these words that issued so easily, in such impeccable order, from the slightly smiling mouth before him. “You mean to say he believes the offer of marriage is genuine?”

  “No, no, not that, but he believes that you know the offer is being made.”

  “But if he knows the offer is fake he is lying through his teeth.”

  “My dear Achilles, that is a secondary matter, another unit as it were. Life is made up of units. Units of action, decision, choice. We try to associate them together, to discover the essential relations between them, to see them as links in a chain, what’s the word—”

  “Making connections.”

  “Absolutely brilliant, bravo Chasimenos. Now some of us are not so clever at making connections and Diomedes is one such. He has outstanding qualities, he is a first-rate charioteer for example, but he does not think in terms of links. It doesn’t concern him that the offer is a fake, all he needs to know is that you actually made it. Otherwise, you see, he would be misrepresenting a comrade, and that would seem dishonorable to him. Chasimenos, you always have a
lucid grasp of detail, perhaps you could sum all this up for us?”

  “Certainly. Since nobody in the army except us knows that you didn’t know, and since nobody in the army except us and the members of the delegation, who in any case think you knew, knows that the proposal is being made at all, and human assumptions being what they are, the view that you had full knowledge from the beginning will prevail over any other possible view.”

  “That’s supposed to be lucid?”

  “My dear fellow,” Odysseus said, “it will prevail because it is the way we look at things. When it comes to the conduct of affairs, people are far readier to see purpose and design than ignorance and accident. We are all basically on the side of the operator because we see how he succeeds.”

  “We’re talking human nature now,” Chasimenos said.

  Agamemnon entered the discussion at this point, with a cloudy sense of playing his part, and very nearly ruined everything. “It is true, Achilles,” he said. “People are more likely to think one a twister than a dupe.”

  “Anyone who calls Achilles twister or dupe will soon find himself feeding his entrails to the crows.”

  “No, no,” Odysseus said, “these are not the right terms at all. The King has a lot on his mind, as we all know. No, it will simply be thought that, suppressing all personal feelings, acting for the common good, Achilles lent his illustrious name to our enterprise. The common good, what a wonderful, all-embracing concept that is.”

  Achilles pursed his lips and glanced at Patroclus, who shrugged. “But what if one of you should go round telling people that I didn’t know, that I was fooled? It would ruin my image.”

  “Why on earth should anyone do that? What purpose would it serve, other than to suggest discord and disunity at the very time that we want to convey the opposite impression? In any case, we would not be believed. It would simply be thought we were trying to blacken your name, make you out to be a simpleton, when all the world knows you are a shrewd fellow.”

  “How can I be sure?”

  Odysseus paused, savoring the moment. He had kept the most clinching argument to the last. “Because, my dear Achilles, your greatness of soul, your patriotic readiness to forward the cause of the Greek Expeditionary Force, will be made official as of today, it will be told to the Singer immediately, and he will insert it into his program of entertainment for this evening, at a time when the audience is at its peak, and he will repeat it at intervals during these coming days until it is common knowledge. Once a thing is common knowledge, there is no power on earth that can put it into question. I will see to this myself, in person, you can rest assured. He and I have an excellent understanding. Of course, it’s always a good idea to give him a sweetener, it seems to increase the power of his performance. Perhaps you could provide me with something? Some trifle . . . That pendant of yours, the one that all the fuss was about, that would be just the thing.”

  9.

  Poimenos did not return. Thenceforth he cared for the Singer, foraged for him, made up his fire and slept beside him in his shelter of skins, while Calchas, lonelier than ever, lay grieving for his loss, remembering the foreshadowing of it on the boy’s face, portents he had not fully appreciated, trapped as he had been in his role of mind-former, advocate of the critical spirit, corrupter of simplicity. The boy had chosen fictions and the choice was final; he would not come back—this Calchas knew with certainty, as he knew the fault was his own.

  In the nights of his desolation he tried to find sleep through a discipline of the senses, striving to shut out the greater sounds of the wind and hear only the lesser ones, noises not audible except to the imagination, the manifold frictions along the surface of the earth, the tumbling or hopping or sliding of minute particles. He would drift away on this, only to wake in fear as the wind roared its anger at being cheated.

  Meanwhile the life of the camp continued. Big Ajax, in the course of training for the javelin-throwing event, which, like the weight lifting, he had every prospect of winning, as so far there were no contestants but himself, made a throw so mighty that it brained a member of the Arcadian contingent, who was crouched two thousand paces away—or so the Singer was to give it out—waiting at a rabbit hole in the hope of braining a rabbit as it emerged. This man turned out to be a second cousin of King Agapenor and the blood price demanded was high. On the grounds that they were both in this thing together, having been partners in the enterprise from day one, Big Ajax tried to get his small partner to pay half, which led to furious quarrels, a serious crisis in their friendship and a total and indefinite suspension of the Games.

  The knife was finished and hammered into keenness, and the smith, who was an artist in his way, made a beautiful job of the silver inlay and the incised decorations, using a mixture of his own, lead and sulfur and borax, powdered and fused by a process he guarded jealously. Odysseus and Chasimenos continued to attend on the King, keeping careful watch over his swings of mood, which were quite unpredictable. The knife was a case in point: having taken such an intense interest in the making of it, he now showed no desire to see it. For everyone the tension of waiting was great. Iphigeneia was expected from hour to hour. All looked for the fires that would signal the first glimpse of her ship as it rounded the headlands of Attica and entered the sheltered waters of the Euboean channel.

  Then, on a morning like any other, when the wind had lowered a little, quietening into gusts like sobs, as it quite often did in the first light of the day, it came to Calchas what he must say to the King. He lay still as the light strengthened, and the words came to him in the sobs of the wind. When the sun was over the horizon he went to Agamemnon’s tent and asked the guards to announce him. He had come prepared to wait but was admitted almost at once. The King was seated on his throne chair. His face looked swollen and his long hair was lank and unkempt, hanging below the thin gold band that circled his head. There was only Chasimenos with him, sitting on a cushion at his feet. “Well,” he said, “what has Calchas, the priest of Apollo, to say to Agamemnon?”

  “Great king, live forever,” Calchas said, and hesitated a moment, only now aware of having used the ceremonial form of address common among the Hittites. In his solitude he was reverting to foreignness, to the outcast state. He said, “I have kept vigil and prayed for light to Pollein, whom the Greeks call Apollo, giver of ecstasy, god who dwells in light, and I have come to announce the meaning of that eagle feast the King was told of.” He paused on this. The moisture had gone from his mouth. He heard Chasimenos make a muttered exclamation which seemed derisive in intent.

  “You have hesitated long,” Agamemnon said. “Too long. You are one who will always hesitate too long, which is something I did not know when I took you for my diviner.”

  “You are wasting the King’s time, in any case,” Chasimenos said. “The whole army now accepts the meaning of the omen as given to us by Croton.”

  Without looking at Chasimenos, Calchas said, “Croton’s meaning allows the King no way but one. It was here, in this place, that the man told us he had witnessed the eagles devouring the young of the hare. This was something that was not true before, it became a true story only as he spoke it, there was no knowledge of it in anyone’s mind before. And because of this, because this new story was unwelcome to the others, or even just unexpected, his mouth was stopped. Croton knows, and all of us know, that Zeus does not concern himself with the creatures of earth and their young. Zeus lives above, he governs from above, his justice is not something you can see or touch, it does not live in concrete things or have a particular shape, like a hare that is killed by eagles in the morning, a hare with young. The creatures are in the care of the Lady, who has different names in different places, Rhea, Potnia, Cybele, Artemis. She spoke to us through the man’s mouth.”

  Chasimenos had risen to his feet and now stood close to the King. He said, “We have reason to think that this man is in the pay of our enemies. We Greeks worship Artemis as the daughter of Zeus, but the Trojans deny sh
e is the daughter, they say she was here before, that she has always been. It is now clear that this priest has been bribed to spread the Asian cults among us and so undermine the war effort.”

  Calchas felt fear at this; there was no mistaking the menace in it. But he had gone too far to retract; the only way now was to convince the King, recover his favor. He had good hope of this; he had come with a gift for Agamemnon, something deserving of gratitude. He said, “Those on guard with him, the other witnesses, why did they not immediately deny the man’s words? When he said they had seen what they had not seen, why did no one speak? There can only be one reason.”

  “The King has heard enough of this raving,” Chasimenos said.

  “No, let him speak.” Agamemnon fixed on the diviner a look of somber and deliberate patience. “Tell us the reason.”

  “They could not deny it without discrediting their own story too. There was no hare, this was an invention of some here who wanted to raise the army’s morale by promising a glorious end to the war.”

  He paused again and after a moment bowed low to Agamemnon, a deep reverence from the waist, knees flexed and head lowered, following—deliberately now—the practice of the Hittites. He said, “Lord King, I am still your diviner. You have shown me your love, do not take it from me now. The wind is sent by the goddess, she who planted the words of warning in the man’s mouth, the Mistress, however we call her, the protectress of the innocent. It is sent to give us pause, to tell us that for the slaughter of the unoffending she will exact a price.”

  He raised his head, struggled to control his breathing. He was about to do the bravest thing he had ever done in all his fearful life. “She will exact a price,” he said again. “Not now, not in the present, not by requiring the blood of an innocent. How can she be propitiated by the shedding of blood now, when she is warning us against it in the future? The gods are not like us, they cannot contradict themselves.”