The Songs of the Kings: A Novel Read online

  But Phylakos was not prepared, in a military camp, to take rebukes from a civilian, however high-ranking. “It wasn’t me telling the story,” he said, in a voice like the dragging of gravel. “It wasn’t my story at all, it was yours. You schooled them in it, you should have seen the bastard was off his chump.”

  “Good heavens, do you think I have time for character analysis? Have you any idea of the administrative difficulties involved in organizing a meeting like that, making sure that the chiefs are notified well in advance, so no one is drunk or out hunting or pillaging some local farm or busy raping someone? No good sending out memoranda, none of them can read.” This clodhopper, he thought, all he can do is swing a sword. “And you backed him up,” he said. “You supported that nonsense about the eagles eating the young of the hare. It’s the official version now.”

  “No good crying over spilt milk,” Odysseus said. “The harm is done now, recriminations won’t help.” How ridiculous, he thought, these two standing glaring at each other, the soldier and the civil servant, each feeling he belonged to a superior race, when in reality they were as alike as two peas, both hirelings. Phylakos had physical courage but he would sign up with anyone he thought likely to win; he took orders and hoped for promotion if he did well. Chasimenos was devoted to the King’s interest, as he saw it, but he was a natural subordinate, dreaming of a Greater Mycenae across the water, where his services would be rewarded and his power and influence increased. One in steady employment, one up for grabs, that was really the only difference. “We must look forward, not back,” he said. “The past has less substance than a shadow, it can hardly be said to exist at all. Besides, it isn’t such a disaster. The omen has become more ambiguous than we intended, that’s all. Phylakos, can I ask you to do me a service?”

  Phylakos raised his chin and squared his shoulders. “Yours to command.”

  “Either go yourself or send one of your people, find Croton the priest and bring him here to my tent as soon as possible.”

  “I will go myself.” With this, he raised his hand in salute and strode out, without a glance at Chasimenos, who said, as soon as he was out of the tent, “That man is an oaf, he has no manners at all, he really gets my back up.”

  “Well,” Odysseus said, “you are two very different kinds of person after all. But we’ll have to forget our differences and forge ahead if we want what is best for Agamemnon and the Greek cause.”

  “That is true.”

  “Before Croton comes, there are one or two things I thought we could talk over. As you and I both know, the expeditionary force is far from united at present. Less than half of the people here are from regions anywhere close to Agamemnon’s power base in the Argolis. My own Ithacans are a case in point. Of course, I’m bound by oath to the Mycenaean cause, through thick and thin, but the same can’t be said for everybody. There are plenty here who think only of their own interest. The alliance was always shaky and it’s getting shakier day by day. People are homesick—home being the place where there is no wind, no sense of being under sentence of doom. Before very long, if we don’t find a way of holding things together, the army will start melting away. I’ve seen it happen before. Desertion is contagious. It starts here and there, in ones and twos, then before you know where you are it has developed into a mass movement. By then it’s too late to do anything about it, much too late.”

  Chasimenos nodded, lips compressed. He had a habit, when pondering deeply, of switching his eyes from one side to the other, as if following the flight of some small, erratic insect, and this lent a look of slight alarm to his narrow face. “What we need,” he said, “is some way of guaranteeing the end of the wind, some promise of an end to it that they will believe in.”

  “Brilliant.” Odysseus felt the customary throb of pleasure at subjecting another’s intelligence to purposes of his own. It was hardly necessary in this case, their interests more or less coincided; but deceit was more than an inveterate habit, it was power, it quickened the blood in his veins. “I never thought of it in quite that way, but it’s true,” he said. “Duels won’t do it. Omens won’t do it. That is all spectacle, it is all part of the entertainment business. What we need is something more, something definite.” He paused a moment, brow furrowed. “Something that will reconcile them to waiting.”

  “We need an event, a significant future event.”

  “A significant future event, bravo, that’s it exactly.” He looked with smiling wonder at Chasimenos, who was still tracing the flight paths of the insect. “Absolutely brilliant,” he said. A delicate moment had arrived. Chasimenos was loyal to Agamemnon, and even loved the King in his way, or at least regarded himself as the King’s creature. That could be put to use, but it needed a light touch. “Of course,” he said, “whatever this future significant event turns out to be, and I am confident of further ideas from you on that score, we must take care that Agamemnon is kept informed.”

  Chasimenos’s look of concentration disappeared and he stared at Odysseus with surprise and the beginning of indignation. “Kept informed? It must proceed directly from the King, it must be seen as his will, his intention, his idea. It must be he that guarantees an end to the waiting, no one else. Surely you see the importance of that.”

  “Well, now that you put it like that . . . Of course, whoever guarantees an end to the waiting will be hailed as leader, and as we know only too well, there are those among us ready to seize any occasion to take over the command. No, I see it now, we daren’t allow Agamemnon to be set aside, relegated, what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Marginalized.”

  “Marginalized, brilliant. No, we can’t allow Agamemnon to be marginalized, whatever happens we can’t allow that. But the thing is, if he is not to be marginalized, if he is to act as guarantor, he will have to accept responsibility, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Certainly. Responsibility is the essence of command.”

  “Essence of command, there you go. But responsibility for what?”

  “Why, the conduct of the war, of course.”

  “I couldn’t agree more, but we are still here at Aulis, still waiting to embark. How to deal with this waiting also belongs to the conduct of the war, wouldn’t you say?”

  Chasimenos was looking less certain now. “I suppose so, yes,” he said.

  “So Agamemnon, if he is to be responsible for the conduct of the war, must make himself responsible for the waiting, which means that he will also be held responsible for the cause of it, the wind. If he is not to be marginalized, I mean. We can’t allow him to be marginalized, can we?”

  “Certainly not. But no one knows the cause of the wind.”

  “Exactly, you’ve hit the nail on the head, no one knows the cause, that’s why it’s so demoralizing. But if they believe they know the cause, if they believe it lies in him, in the King, if they believe he has it in his power to end it, not now, not immediately, but through some significant future event, to use your excellent phrase, something only he can do, what then?”

  The two men looked closely at each other for some moments. Then Chasimenos said, “We could hope to discover the sender and make sacrifices of atonement. In that case, the curse would be lifted before the future significant event needed to take place. Then there would be no problem. But the King will suffer in the meantime.”

  “He will, he will,” Odysseus said, infusing his tone with compassion. Agamemnon was already being blamed for the wind, they both knew that. It surprised him slightly that Chasimenos, for all his undoubted intelligence, understood so little of future significant events and relative probabilities and the nature of public promises. Or perhaps he wished to seem ingenuous. Either way, it didn’t matter.

  The scribe was nodding slowly. “I can’t see any way round it,” he said. “No one will believe that Agamemnon can put an end to the wind without also believing that he is the cause of it. It’s inescapable.”

  “Inescapable, brilliant, that’s just—”
r />   At this moment, Phylakos reentered the tent, the tall and lantern-jawed Croton beside him. Odysseus briefly debated within himself whether the captain should stay. As a general principle, the less the trust, the less the risk, but Phylakos could be useful, he had influence with certain sections of the army, especially those from Mycenae; and his own interest could be expected to keep him faithful.

  “I am glad Phylakos found you,” he said to Croton. “Can I offer you a cup of wine?”

  The priest’s long hair, which he wore piled in the shape of an inverted bowl on top of his head and waxed to keep it in place, had been disordered by the wind and hung round his face in glistening strands. His lips were very pale and sometimes had a writhing motion when he spoke. “I am under a vow,” he said. “I take nothing to eat or drink during the hours of the sun.”

  “I see. Is there some special reason?”

  “Until this uncleanness ends and the will of Zeus is clear to all.”

  “Let us hope it will be soon, for your health’s sake.” Odysseus glanced away from the priest’s face, which was disturbing in its contrast between the fixed gaze and the convulsive movements of the mouth. Croton inspired a strong distaste in him, but one could not always choose one’s instruments. And the priest would go to any lengths to spread the power of Zeus and his own. “I am told you have a theory, let us call it that, regarding the sender of this wind and the reason it is sent?”

  2.

  The Singer was in the place he usually occupied in the middle hours of the day, sheltered from the wind and protected from the sun by an overhang of rock. He had been silent for some time, leaning back against the rock, between sleep and waking, his lyre resting over his knees. The dazzle of reflected sunlight from the white surfaces of granite on the hillside, the shivering of light from the scrub as it was endlessly agitated by the wind, the vague gleams of human forms as they moved before him, these were splinters that could still hurt what was left of his eyes. He kept them closed now as he took up the lyre again, feeling the thin, bitter tears beneath the closed lids.

  It had been a day like all the others since they came there, the wind contending with his voice. Earlier, the boy had come again, bringing bread and figs. He had sat close as he always did, not speaking or moving, listening intently—the Singer could sense the intensity of this listening. He did not know the boy’s name and had never heard his voice. He came every day, though not at the same time, and generally brought some gift of food. Today he had not stayed long. Then, sometime later, there had been the face of Ajax the Larger hovering above him like a reddish, cratered moon. From one of the craters came a request for a song of praise dedicated to Ajax the Unifier and celebrating the brilliant idea of a Games Day. Ajax had asked if Calchas the diviner had already approached him with this, but the Singer never gave information about his sources. He had forgotten, he said, his sight was poor, there were so many requests, so very many. Ajax had promised him a silver hair clip and he had promised in return that he would compose the song in his mind and then, on receiving the hair clip, sing it.

  A lie, of course. He never composed verses beforehand. He possessed a vast stock of epithets and phrases inherited from his father, who had also been a Singer. For the rest, for what was new in the Song, he relied on the prompting of the gods, which came to him more strongly and urgently at some times than at others but never entirely failed him. He sighed as he struck the preliminary run of notes, his usual way of attracting attention. How many dusty roads he had traveled. It was shameful that people should try and take advantage of a blind old man. He would give his services free when he chose; but not for a skinflint like that one.

  He began with a Song completely familiar to all in the camp, the one he had been requested—politely but very firmly—to recite at least once a day so as to keep the just cause of the war well to the forefront of men’s minds. This was the story of Paris, prince of Troy, the handsomest man in the world, who had gone on a visit to Sparta, stayed in the palace of Menelaus and, while his host was away, seduced his queen, the fabulously beautiful Helen, who in addition to this beauty had the unusual distinction of having been hatched from a swan’s egg after her mother, Leda, had yielded to the embraces of Zeus, who visited her in the form of a swan. Paris had taken Helen back to Troy with him, an outrage to Greek honor that could not be taken lying down. Hence this great army, united in their patriotic duty to avenge the insult and recover the queen.

  He did not linger on the story, being himself thoroughly bored with it by this time, but passed quickly on to the epic battle between Stimon the Locrian and Opilmenos the Boeotian, their bronze helmets and breastplates glittering in the sun, their speeches of defiance one to the other, the marvels of valor and dexterity both had displayed. The wretched end of Opilmenos, butchered at leisure as he scrabbled on the pebbles of the shore, came over the more graphically, he felt, for the contrast with the physical splendor that had gone before. Such a downfall gave a sense of doom, a note of tragedy. He liked this version of the duel and intended to repeat it several times before any of Opilmenos’s friends or relatives could get at him with requests to dignify the hero’s manner of dying. But of course no story was ever final and requests came sometimes in a form one couldn’t refuse . . .

  Next he sang of the wind that held them there. Day by day this wind was heaping up the fabled wealth of Troy, making her towers and walls more wondrous, more lovely to destroy. As the embers of their campfires glowed and flamed in the endless wind, so the heaped gems took fire, so the gold flamed in the fanning wind of their desires.

  It was no more really than a sustained simile, but he liked it. He was coming to the end when he was again aware of someone drawing near. It was a shape of face and quality of voice he recognized. Face and voice came very close. “I am Chasimenos of Mycenae, chief scribe to Agamemnon. You know me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know you,” the Singer said.

  “We want you to make it known to the people of the army that this wind is sent by Zeus because of an offense.”

  “Whose is the offense?”

  “No need to go into specifics. You can say it’s somebody high up.”

  3.

  On the edge of the camp they found men who had come with fish to sell, and one agreed to ferry them over. Even here, in this narrow, sheltered strait, the wind chopped at the water, breaking the surface into shallow ridges that reared and flashed. Hoping for a good reward, the man made a show of the labor involved in taking them across in such weather. This he did by gesture and expression of face— he spoke a language they did not understand, it had no words of Helladic in it. As they set off, in pursuance of his new intention to instruct, offspring of kindness and envy, Calchas tried to explain to Poimenos that the people of these shores had kept their own tongue, which was not related to Greek and so must have been theirs already in that far distant time before the Greeks came. But this was too abstract, it soon became clear to him that Poimenos had no concept at all of such a time, or of one system of sounds that could be older than another.

  It was that time of day in summer when the sea and sky seem more definite in color and more substantial than the land. When they looked towards the island it seemed that water below and air above were clasping the land, keeping it in place. This too Calchas pointed out to the boy. “Like the hands of a Titan,” he said. “See, he keeps his hands flat, one above and one below, so the island cannot slip away, cannot escape.” He saw the quickened interest in the boy’s face as his imagination caught at these giant hands; it was always stories that held him.

  The man rowed from the prow with a single oar, standing upright, grunting with each forward lunge of his body. The wind was all around them now, ruffling the sea, stirring scents from the land they were approaching. Poimenos’s eyes were shining and he uttered some laughing exclamation. He was glad to be on the move, in this rocking boat, away from the tedium and oppression of the camp. Some tincture of this gladness came to the priest and he
experienced, as sometimes before, a feeling of gratitude for the boy’s vivid, quick responses to all things of sense, an eagerness that helped for a while to allay his own doubts and fears.

  He had it in mind to speak of this to Poimenos, something he had never done before. But at this moment he saw two crows flying towards the sun. They came from the direction of Thrace, the homeland of Boreas, god of the north wind. Calchas followed them with his eyes as they flew towards the sun, followed them as far as he could, till they were lost in the fire and his eyes were blinded. When he could see again, the sky was empty, there was no smallest speck of a bird in it. On the evidence of sight—the main evidence the gods gave to men whether awake or dreaming—the birds had flown into the sun and been consumed.

  As they approached the calmer water on the lee shore of the island, he strove to understand the meaning of this immolation. The crow was the bird of hope, the messenger bird of Polunas, a god of the Hittites. She had once been a white bird, pure white, but one day Polunas, furious at some unwelcome news she brought him, pronounced a malediction on her, and she turned black as night. Afterwards he repented, but the color of a creature cannot be restored; further changes there can be, but there is no reverting to the original. Not even Zeus could do that, he thought. Though Croton would doubtless say otherwise. Croton preached that the power of Zeus had no limits, an obvious absurdity. No god known to man could undo the effects of his own power, no god could take back his words, no god could restore to mortal life a creature destroyed by his breath.

  The reason for that anger of Polunas was that a girl he desired had fled from him, and it was the crow that brought this news. Calchas remembered Agamemnon’s face and his smile. The right words. The crow had not brought them. Was it only this then, a warning? But hope could not be extinguished or consumed, even in the furnace of the sun . . . Zeus had launched them with the eagles, Artemis was detaining them with the wind. As patron of guests and hosts, Zeus was offended by the behavior of Paris, cuckolding Menelaus while staying in his house, then escaping with his prize, getting off scot-free. As protectress of childbirth and the young, Artemis was offended by the slaughter of the innocents that the war would entail. Male justice, female compassion. One looking back, one looking forward. Were they in conflict or blended in a harmony as yet too obscure to see?