by Peter Tonkin
The Anger of Achilles
A Trojan Murders Mystery
Peter Tonkin
© Peter Tonkin 2021.
Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2021 by Sharpe Books.
For Cham, Guy, Mark and Lana as always.
Table of Contents
1: The Princess.
2: The Temple
3: The Feast
4: The Chariots
5: The Fire
6: The Pyres
7: The Bones
8: The Gold
‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus’
Homer The Iliad
Book 1, Line 1
1: The Princess.
i
‘It seems,’ said General Odysseus grimly, ‘that we have a problem of practical logic here whose most likely solution lies in a death.’ He sheathed his sword and turned to the two men who had brought him the news. Both leading members of his crew, they were currently, like him, dressed in full armour and covered in blood. The gigantic oarsman Elpenor stood beside his slighter companion Perimedes who was almost as fast on his feet as Prince Achilles of Phthia, the general leading the famous army of Myrmidons into battle beside us. Odysseus leaned towards Perimedes and said something I could not hear. The crewman vanished. Odysseus turned to Elpenor and nodded, his helmet-plume stirring at the movement, then side by side they began to stride urgently through the shattered gates of the citadel and into what was left of the city’s final defence-works towards the palace at its heart.
During the mid-part of the afternoon I had come up from Odysseus’ ship Thalassa where my quarters had been for the last few days. I was forbidden to join the fighting as, according to Odysseus, my songs telling of heroic acts were far more effective than anything I was likely to achieve with the edge of a sword or the point of a spear. It was, he had observed, the rhapsode’s lot to sing of great deeds and make his audience burn to emulate them on the battlefield, but never to do any himself. Now, however, I had armed myself and come across the sand on which Thalassa was beached and through the camp of the Achaean armies, ranged along the shoreline close to the outer wall of the city of Lyrnessus, which we had so successfully besieged. I had come through the shattered West Gate, past the ship’s mast Odysseus had made the strongest soldiers use like the head of a charging ram against the fire-weakened wood. I had limped past the steady stream of our wounded who were being helped or carried towards the tents of our physicians near the beach and the boats. I had hurried along the main street of the lower town where our men were pursuing the last defenders, sacking buildings, taking their contents, and putting them to the torch. Their brutal reaction to the frustrations of the siege strengthened by orders of High King Agamemnon as he sailed back to Troy that we make sure Lyrnessus could never be used as a base by any army coming up behind his lines. I had turned right at the central agora marketplace, and come up the hill to the citadel itself. Ultimately, and by the best of good fortune, I had managed to find General Odysseus at the moment his armoured crewmen with their strange message had done so too.
‘How could this be, General?’ I asked, following him as best I could. ‘I see death all around us but I don’t see any logic here.’
Odysseus, the ship’s captain turned battlefield general as befitted a king in command of an army, answered by flinging the words over one bronze-armoured shoulder. ‘There is a woman,’ he said. ‘A princess marked for death who nevertheless does not wish to die. But the only way she can protect her life is by threatening to kill herself. And we need to hurry before she is forced to do so.’
He did indeed hurry, making no allowance for my legs, broken in an attack on the dockside at Troy and as badly healed as my left arm nor for my eyesight, also damaged in the same attack. A piece of uncharacteristic thoughtlessness which showed how worried he was. As I followed, I thought briefly how different this ruthlessly decisive leader was to the affable King Odysseus of Ithaca, the gentle family man beloved of Queen Penelope and Prince Telemachus; and equally different to the adventurous Captain Odysseus, commander of Thalassa, the intrepid explorer. And, indeed, to the insightful, almost uncanny Odysseus whom I knew best of all, the solver of impenetrable riddles, unmasker of deadly, deep-buried crimes and the men and women who committed them.
Pausing for an instant to catch my breath, I looked back at the lower city into which our armies had broken a day or so earlier. Lyrnessus lay in smouldering ruins. Huge columns of thick black smoke joined the burning streets below with the low grey clouds above. Flame-gold sparks swirled like galaxies cut adrift. Anything still standing seemed to be ablaze. Errant breezes came and went, each apparently thicker and hotter than the last. Even the bricks seemed to be burning, though the stench was that of burned wood. Burned wood and spilled blood: charcoal and metal. Black headed gulls and carrion crows without number wheeled through the clouds and the smoke, waiting for things to quieten so that they could land and go to work.
In what remained of the agora, anything of value from the lower city was piled or corralled, awaiting transport to our Achaean camp and then aboard the ships nearby when all our wounded and dead had been seen to. There was a growing herd of terrified livestock, beside heaps of furnishings and furniture. And, most importantly, hillocks of arms and armour, much of it battered and bloodied but all of it still usable. There were bushels of grain and bread; amphorae of olive oil and local wine– most of it guarded by grim-faced, black-clad Myrmidons, the rest being consumed by ill-disciplined Locrian soldiers who were getting drunk and running out of control. There were no Locrian commanders in evidence, no sign of their leader, Prince Aias nor of his companion and right-hand man General Idas.
In due time there would be captives to be enslaved, most of them women and children. But the only citizens crowding the place now were all men. Dead men stripped of their weapons and anything else of value, heaped in hillocks higher even than the mounds of their looted possessions and battle armour, leaking blood and other wastes across the sticky ground, waiting for the birds to settle and feast and the dogs to scatter their bones.
***
Three armies were picking through what was left of the place, looking for hidden survivors to capture, rape or slaughter and searching for further supplies which we could add to High King Agamemnon’s provisions for his attack on Troy, a few days’ sailing further up the coast. During the previous weeks we had removed one potential Trojan ally at the nearby city of Thebe. Agamemnon himself led that attack. The slaughter had been great and the pickings rich when the city finally fell. Although Achilles himself had killed the Theban king Eetion, Agamemnon had personally slaughtered the rest of his family – women, children and all - as a warning to other recalcitrant monarchs. Then he had taken the most beautiful woman in the city as his prize and bed-slave, declaring this his right as High King. He took her especially, he said, because the slim-figured, milk-skinned nineteen-year-old virgin was more beautiful even than his wife Clytemnestra, sister to Helen, the loveliest woman alive. The unfortunate young woman’s name was Astynome but she was also known as Chryseis, because she was the daughter of Chryses the High Priest of Apollo, who had managed to escape the slaughter.
Satisfied with his booty for the time-being, the High King led the bulk of his army back northward to his vast encampment outside Troy as we took care of the last of Trojan King Priam’s local allies except for Sarpedon, the warlike prince of Lycia, currently encamped with a sizeable force at Myletus five days’ sail or ten days’ march further south and far too large a mouthful for us to bite off now that Agamemnon had taken so many Achaean forces b
ack with him.
Lyrnessus and Thebe lay on that vast tract of hilly Anatolia called the Troad, looking out across a bay towards the great island of Mytilene, which some call Lesbos. They stood not far south of the much greater city of Troy, and under immediate Trojan influence therefore – despite the legend that Hercules had founded the latter. Agamemnon had left units in occupation there for the time being as he sailed north and we came south. And now we had removed King Euenos, another friend to Troy with his twin sons Mynes and Epistrophos, and taken everything that he had stockpiled not only to endure a siege but also to supply King Priam. The only building still standing relatively undamaged was the old king’s palace at the heart of his ransacked citadel on top of the low acropolis at the heart of the upper city. And that was where we were heading now.
I hurried after Odysseus as best I could as he moved through the shattered gates to the citadel, heading towards the palace. Although we had broken into the lower city some time ago, the gates to the citadel had held us back for more than a day. Then the fearsome defence of the palace itself had slowed us even further – until almost this very moment, in fact. It had also cost us the majority of our casualties. The choking clouds of smoke drifting up from the lower city added to the distress I felt walking so quickly on my damaged legs. But now that I had entered Lyrnessus as the last and least of Odysseus’ soldiers and followed him up to the citadel, I had no intention of falling too far behind him, even though I was further handicapped by armour to which I was utterly unaccustomed. I was already planning how I could turn what was happening all around me into an epic poem to be sung later in the Achaean camp on the beach below the walls of Troy, fulfilling my position as Odysseus’ rhapsode court poet. However, just as I was wearing thick hide armour for the first time, I was also experiencing my first sight of the aftermath of close-quarters battle because Odysseus had taken no part in the sack of Thebe and neither, therefore, had I.
I was shocked by the bloody brutality of it; the utter lack of heroic splendour which formed the basis of so many epic poems. I understood, of course, that these cities not only had to be conquered but also destroyed as Agamemnon ordered, for they had the potential to send both supplies and armies to strike behind the Achaean lines and stab the High King’s forces in the back. It was only later that I came also to understand the deadly depths of resentment and even hatred that a siege could engender in both the besiegers and the besieged, which I suppose went some way to explain what had happened here. And, as I was about to find out, was still happening.
The horrific visions all around me came and went, flashes at the edge of my damaged sight adding to the blazing Tartarus of the citadel through which we were moving, whose simple heat was making the air writhe and twist like molten glass. The noise of the city’s destruction and the screams of its last unfortunate defenders, echoed as they were by the calls of the hungry birds, made it as hard to hear as it was to see. Nevertheless, I managed to make myself heard as I asked, ‘Who is this woman, General? The one threatening to kill herself in order to stay alive?’
Elpenor answered. ‘It is Princess Briseis. Her husband Prince Mynes, elder son of the old king Euenos, her brother-in law, Euenos’ younger twin Epistrophos, her three brothers and all the other men in the royal household are dead as far as I know. King Euenos’ wife died long ago so Briseis is the head of the women in the household. Now she finds herself confronted with Prince Aias of Locris, who is notorious for his enjoyment of rape and brutality. Prince Aias means to enjoy the princess here and now then keep her as his bed-slave like the High King plans to do with young Chriseis from Thebe.’
‘And Princess Briseis will die before she yields?’ I asked.
‘Precisely,’ answered Elpenor. ‘She is standing facing Aias and his men, keeping them at bay by holding a blade to her own throat. Assuming she has not already used it.’
ii
‘Luckily Aias is slow-thinking, especially when considering personal pleasure rather than any wider purpose,’ spat Odysseus.
‘Once his prick is up, his intellect shuts down,’ expanded Elpenor.
‘Such intellect as he can lay claim to, that is,’ said Odysseus. ‘However, if the Fates are with us, we may still be in time.’
‘We will need to be quick and lucky, General,’ prompted Elpenor. ‘I caught a glimpse of Princess Briseis on my way to summon you. She is almost as beautiful as King Menelaus’ kidnapped wife Queen Helen, but her character by all accounts is nearly as strong as Agamemnon’s Queen Clytemnestra.’
‘A formidable combination,’ agreed Odysseus as he strode through the gaping doorway and into the outer chamber of the royal palace and I staggered in his wake. ‘If the Fates are with us it will be too much for Aias to handle, no matter how aroused he is!’
‘Surely,’ I observed, ‘he would wish to enjoy a woman that beautiful while she was still alive.’
‘Yes,’ said Odysseus. ‘Which explains his hesitation to let her kill herself.’
‘If that is her entire strategy,’ I said, ‘then she is incredibly brave. Or desperate.’
The entrance hall of the palace was piled with yet more bodies, the floor tiles thick and slick with blood and other fluids, all telling of a final desperate attempt at resistance. One that appeared, to my untutored eye, to have been better organised than those outside in the citadel and the lower city. At least these corpses were still clothed and armoured, lying in what was left of what seemed to have been well-organised ranks. Odysseus’ Cephallenians were standing guard and they were almost as well disciplined as Achilles’ Myrmidons. I looked around for the body of Prince Mynes, though I was well aware that whoever had killed him would probably have stripped him of his arms and armour before Odysseus’ guards arrived. As they would have done to his brother and his three brothers-in-law from Princess Briseis’ family, given the chance. But there was no-one there who appeared regal to me. No-one wearing the simadi exousia golden badge of royalty that defined their social standing and their military authority, such as Odysseus, Achilles and Aias wore. No kings or princes – and none of Briseis’ royal brothers either, by the look of things.
But there was a group of Locrians in one corner who were gathered round a fallen comrade. Odysseus paused – he was as adept at healing as he was at sailing and soldiering – but one of the crouching soldiers caught his eye and shook his head. He moved to one side revealing the figure of the fatally wounded man. I recognised the white face. It was General Idas, Prince Aias’ lieutenant and bosom companion. A spear was sticking out of his right side. Its head was buried in the one place his breastplate did not meet his back-plate tightly enough to protect him – his arm-pit. Even as I registered this, the general’s body gave a strange heave and a torrent of black blood burst out of his mouth and nose, covering his already bloodied cuirass and spattering all those crouched around him. Odysseus gave a terse nod of understanding and strode forward once again.
Frowning with shock, I hurried after the two soldiers through the gloom. The bronze scales of Odysseus’ cuirass gleaming brightly beside the thick dark leather of Elpenor’s, a very much larger version of my own. Both men’s armour was bloodied from top to bottom at the front as General Idas’ had been, though relatively unsullied at the back. Odysseus’ breast and belly was one unbroken coating of gore because he wore the golden disk which was his badge of authority tucked behind his armour. He had met his foes face to face and killed them breast to breast, as the rules of honourable warfare dictated. Unlike whoever had killed King Idas.
At the start of the siege, however, Odysseus and Achilles had ridden into battle in their chariots on the narrow plain between the tents on the beach and the city walls, challenging the king and princes of Lyrnessus to single combat, like any of the heroes in my epic songs. Their challenges had gone unanswered, for it seemed Lyrnessus’ rulers preferred to rely on strong gates and high walls rather than heroic encounters. Especially encounters with warriors like the wily Odysseus and the undefeated �
� undefeatable – Achilles. There had been one or two sallies through the main gates and the posterns close to them but these had been beaten back until the Lyrnessans seemed content to rely on their defence works. But their confidence in their defences had been misplaced. Under cover of darkness, the Achaeans had piled wood soaked in naphtha against the great West Gate and set it ablaze. No matter how much water was poured on it, the fire burned on, weakening the gates. Until Odysseus’ men using a mast as a ram had opened the way for Achilles’ Myrmidons. Odysseus himself had followed – sending a unit under his lieutenant, King Eremanthus of Zakynthos, through another, smaller and weaker postern gate half hidden beneath a tower in the wall nearby; a tactic Aias had been swift to copy. The dead General Idas, King of Kynos, had led the Locrian charge through the postern and I hoped King Eremanthus had not shared Idas’ fate.
Once the charred gates were open, there had been no place for chariots; or, I thought, for heroics. It was all grim footwork and shoulder-to shoulder, face to face, street fighting as the Achaean armies chopped and carved their way through the narrow alleyways of the lower city, up to the citadel and, eventually, into it. And then into the palace it had been designed to protect. Unlike me, who was bare-headed, both men still wore their helmets, the general’s in bronze with a golden crest topped with sea-green feathers that made him easy to identify, Elpenor’s with panels of boars’ tusk sewn on leather. Both men walked with their hands on the pommels of their sheathed swords. We could still find ourselves in the middle of a battle after all. Walking unawares into a trap was all it would take. And I already had a sense of the building that suggested there were more than a few places to hide and wait concealed, lying in ambush.
***