by Peter Tonkin
‘I have observed,’ said Odysseus as Achilles and Patroclus went out, ‘that the gods seem to protect those who are most active in protecting themselves.’
‘Indeed,’ said Briseis. ‘Though remember, we have to add King Mnestheus to the rituals now. I will alert Gul-Ses.’
‘Not before I have looked at the body in more detail,’ said Odysseus. He rose and stood gazing down at her. ‘Not before I have looked at all the bodies.’
Briseis seemed to take Odysseus’ words as a challenge. She stood up at once. ‘I should like to view Mnestheus’ body too,’ she said. ‘And I will also be accompanying you when you examine the bodies of my husband and my brothers.’
‘That is hardly an activity suited to a woman, let alone a princess,’ sniffed Aias.
‘Oh! I see,’ she answered. ‘When men are bleeding, screaming and fouling themselves like babies, it’s a woman’s place to tend them, no matter how bloody and filthy the process becomes. But looking at dead people? That’s man’s work is it? Especially if he was the one who slaughtered them in the first place, no doubt!’
ii
Aias did not answer, but his expression made it very clear what he thought Briseis’ main function should be – and how much he regretted having missed the chance to inflict it on her. Then, after that lingering, threatening look, he turned and began to consume the last of the bread and honey.
‘You’ve made a dangerous enemy there, Princess,’ said Odysseus as the pair of them left the megaron with me close behind.
‘Given my current situation,’ she answered, ‘almost all men can become dangerous enemies. All it takes is a little lust.’
Odysseus had no real answer to that, but I thought to myself that the princess was doing my captain a disservice with such suspicions. The combination of Achilles’ and Odysseus’ honour would protect her from Aias and men like him as surely as the strongest citadel or the thickest armour. Indeed, I thought, the only man who might overrule the pair of them and place her in the danger she was talking of was High King Agamemnon himself.
My mind drifted away from what she had said to the manner in which she had said it. It struck me that the princess was almost disturbingly self-contained. The sounds of the grieving and terrified women I had heard yesterday and last night returned to my thoughts. Dead husbands, fathers, sons and lovers had made the captive women almost prostrate with sorrow. And of course, each one of them was in the same position as the princess, fearful that they would become the playthings of their lustful captors at any moment. And yet Briseis, who had lost a husband and three brothers, seemed self-controlled and calm. Was that, I wondered, suspicious in itself? Was it simply proof of the young woman’s personal fortitude and royal breeding? Or was there some other reason for her unruffled calm that we had not yet discovered?
That thought led inevitably to another. I had seen but not really considered the change in the princess’ demeanour today. Now the blunt manner in which she was addressing her current situation, combined with her apparent willingness to work with Odysseus, began to make me wonder what lay at the root of this change? And the answer of course was glaringly obvious, so much so that the fact that she in turn had been fooled could not begin to obscure it. She was elated because she had arranged a successful escape for Glaucus, had sent a message to Sarpedon. Her sex and beauty had come dangerously close to blinding me to her other qualities of leadership and cunning and the fact that she was an implacable enemy. I hoped Odysseus shared my suspicions. If not, he would underestimate her. Fatally.
These thoughts were sufficient to take us to the entrance of the blood room. Elpenor and Perimedes stood guard here, though it seemed to me that mounting a guard, even last night, was depressingly like a stable hand closing the gate after his favourite horse has bolted. And it seemed that the gods themselves must have put that comparison in my mind, for just at the very moment we were about to enter the blood room, Patroclus appeared, hot-foot from Achilles. ‘Pedasos is missing,’ the prince gasped. ‘Xanthos, Balios and the others are still there, but Pedasos has gone.’
‘Who is Pedasos?’ demanded Briseis. ‘And why is he so important?’
‘Pedasos is one of Achilles’ horses,’ said Odysseus. ‘He’s as fast as the wind and if he’s gone, then I have a very good idea who stole him and where they’re heading for.’
This observation was met with silence. It was patently accurate. Equally true was the fact that we all recognised – if Glaucus has stolen one of Achilles’ horses, then there was nothing whatsoever we could do to catch him. Patroclus turned away, absent-mindedly rubbing his left arm. We three went past the guards into the blood room, picked up a couple of the brightest lamps and moved towards the bed which bore the physician’s corpse.
I looked around as we crossed the little way to the old king’s death bed. The half-dozen nurses permitted to enter the place last night were still here, beginning to look weary and a little desperate, though they had only been trapped away from the ablutions since the dark time before dawn and there were in fact a couple of chamber pots standing in the darkest corners. Then Odysseus claimed my attention as he stooped, placed his lamp on the floor, took hold of the covering on Mnestheus’ bed and straightened. ‘The first thing we can be sure of,’ he said, standing with the bed-covering in one hand, looking down at the old king, ‘is that he was not killed here.’
‘Not here?’ queried Briseis.
‘Not in this bed. Almost certainly in the blood room but not in this bed.’
‘How can we be sure of that?’ I asked.
‘The blood on the bedding and the ground nearby is too little in volume and all in the wrong place,’ explained Briseis, her tone one of mounting revelation as she came to understand Odysseus’ point.
‘It’s almost certainly Glaucus’ blood,’ nodded Odysseus. ‘As it was his bed to begin with. You see the blood stains are in the area we would expect for a leg-wound such as his. And its colour suggests that it dried out some days ago, unlike the stain on Mnestheus’ tunic. I should remark in passing, I think, that the blood alone reveals that Glaucus’ wound was far closer to being fully healed than it appeared. I should have noted that had I been in the blood room more often myself and examined the wound unbandaged, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. As with Achilles’ missing horse. However, to return to the matter in hand, the blood on Mnestheus’ tunic is at his ribs, up by his right armpit and the knife. There’s a lot of it there on his tunic but none on the bedding and so I calculate there will be a lot more on the floor somewhere. Probably somewhere nearby.’
‘On the assumption that someone who had just killed the physician is not going to want to carry the corpse too far,’ I suggested.
‘Not that we’re likely to find it,’ said Briseis. ‘The blood room must be just about the perfect place to stab someone. Most of the floor’s splattered with blood in any case.’
***
We all paused in our deliberations and looked around once more. It was easy enough to see what the princess meant. The makeshift beds, full of bodies in various stages of disrepair were organised into rows designed to derive maximum benefit from the lamps and torches amongst and above them. Glaucus’ bed was at the centre of the row nearest to the doorway, a detail that had once seemed unremarkable but which now seemed significant. Who, I wondered, had decided to put the Lycian prince so close to the escape route he had clearly used last night? Or, as with our apparently cunning murderer, had the escape just been an opportunity grabbed without much thought or planning? I raised my head further and looked deeper into the room, as I turned these thoughts over. The pathways between the beds were marked with the footprints of the physician’s helpers who were still attending them. But the footprints only existed, or so it seemed, because of the blood that was spread across the flagstones. If some of it was Mnestheus’, how would we ever tell?
‘The floor may indeed be soiled with blood,’ Odysseus was saying to Briseis. ‘But, as is the case wit
h the bedding, most, if not all, of that blood would have been shed at least a day ago; some of it longer ago than that of course, coming from the beginning of the siege in the lower city rather than its end up here in the citadel and the palace. And, I assume, the floor would have been swabbed in the interim, if not properly scrubbed and cleaned. Mnestheus’ blood will be fresher. Perhaps even still sticky if there was enough of it.’
Briseis leaned down and ran her fingers over the stained tunic. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘This isn’t still wet or some of it would have been bound to get on the bedding. But it’s not quite dry either.’
‘We are, perhaps, fortunate that the blood room is cool,’ nodded Odysseus.
‘I’d have said it was cold,’ I observed. ‘Almost as cold as the Temple of Teshub.’
‘That,’ said Odysseus, ‘is no doubt because the temple is so far underground. The priests’ hiding place would have been colder still. When we find the deep cistern that contains the city’s water supply will be colder even than that. But let’s not allow ourselves to be distracted. Your highness, do you know who Mnestheus’ most important assistant was? Other than yourself, of course.’
‘That one over there,’ she answered. ‘Calix. He’ll have been the leader of the nurses permitted to stay in here overnight, no doubt.’ Without hesitation, she called to him. Like Mnestheus, like all of the other male helpers, I realised, Calix was old; too old to be involved in the fighting. Yet he seemed sprightly enough as he hurried to answer his princess’ summons. He was short, stooped, unshaven with thinning hair that straggled in rats’ tails to the neckline of his tunic. But he had a nose like the beak of an eagle, two heavy white eyebrows seemingly set in a permanent frown above a pair of clear blue eyes. And, when I glanced down at them, hands that were almost as large, callused and powerful as Odysseus’. ‘Princess?’ he said as he arrived. His cool gaze swept over Odysseus and me with little approval. ‘If you’re thinking of asking me about any of this you’ll be wasting your time,’ he said. ‘No-one here saw anything. I’ve asked around already because I liked the old king. No-one saw any of it.’
‘How could that be?’ asked Odysseus.
‘Like these,’ the gesture with those big square hands encompassed all the wounded lying in the room, ‘we need to eat and sleep occasionally. Use the latrines rather than the piss-pots. King Mnestheus put us on a rota, like watches on a ship, so there was always someone in here while the others rested or ate. Last night, though, he sent us all off at once. That was unusual but he said we’d all been working so hard for so long… And to be fair, it was quiet – the wounded were all asleep as far as I could see. He said he’d be fine keeping watch on his own. Mistake, clearly. But good for us when they sent me and my men back in, telling us that we wouldn’t be let out until dawn or later.’
Odysseus glanced at Briseis then continued, ‘Sending you all out was part of the plan to help Glaucus escape no doubt. He just didn’t realise that by ordering everyone else to go away he was also putting himself at risk. But I can’t see how the murderer was able to creep in here and hide himself.’ He paused and looked around the blood room. ‘I would calculate that whoever murdered the old king must have been close-by, however he managed to get there,’ he said. ‘Calix, could you examine the nearest beds while I look at the body?’
Calix glanced at Briseis who gave a curt nod. ‘Very well,’ said the old man. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Anything unusual,’ answered Briseis.
‘Almost certainly another corpse,’ added Odysseus. ‘And a great deal of blood.’
‘I’d be hard put to follow a blood trail if they left one,’ said Calix, gesturing at the red-crusted floor. ‘But another corpse shouldn’t be too difficult.’
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‘How can you be so certain?’ asked Briseis as Calix moved grudgingly away.
‘The knife and the blood are both suggestive of course,’ said Odysseus. ‘And what they suggest fits in with what I would expect to find.’
Odysseus sank into a crouch and Briseis did the same, lifting the hem of her robe clear of the soiled floor then leaning forward to examine the knife and the bloodstain. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘The knife is on the right side of his chest, the handle behind the arm. The bloodstain runs forward across the breast and slightly upward towards the left shoulder…’
‘What does that tell you, Highness?’ I asked.
‘It tells me that poor Mnestheus was bending over a bed,’ Briseis explained. ‘He must have been reaching down to tend its occupant when the person in that bed reached up and stabbed him. Not a wounded patient, therefore, but someone pretending to be one. So the bed’s original occupant must also be nearby and is very likely to be dead as well, given that he didn’t raise any alarm.’
‘The expression on Mnestheus’ face seems to support that theory,’ said Odysseus.
‘Yes!’ agreed Briseis. ‘The look of surprise. He was clearly not expecting to be attacked. He simply had no warning…’
She had just taken a breath to add more thoughts and observations when Calix called, ‘Princess! Here!’
Calix was crouching beside a bed further down the line. It looked to be about the same distance from the doorway as Glaucus’. The beds between were occupied, but the patients in them were deeply unconscious. ‘All of the patients in this row and the next one back are kept in the deepest possible sleep,’ said Calix. ‘Mnestheus insisted on giving them distillations of poppy, mandragora, hemlock and valerian. It seemed logical enough – they were the ones whose wounds were worst and whose suffering we needed to ease most effectively. They were also the ones we needed to be able to get to quickest. That’s what he said. Now of course I see that there might have been a different motivation. Still, it probably meant that this poor boy never knew what was happening to him.’
He pulled the covering back to reveal the body of a slim young man. His face and head were bandaged but it was just possible to see the outer edges of a fearsome wound that must have torn the right side of his face wide open from hairline to jawline, nose to ear. The left side was only partially covered and looked agonisingly young, as well as utterly white. The only touch of colour was a half-open eye which was an unusual, almost golden, shade.
‘This is young Timaeus, son to the Captain of the Gate,’ said Calix sadly. ‘His father, Theron, is in the next bed. Theron was commander of the West Gate. He brought young Timaeus with him. Both fought bravely but in vain.’
‘His mother is Hepat, my servant who also tends poor King Euenos,’ said Briseis. ‘I cannot say how sad this will make her…’ She stopped speaking and took a deep breath to steady herself. Then she added, ‘Thank the gods she will still have her daughter Thalia to comfort her when she finds out.’
The young man’s throat had been cut with such care that it might almost have been the work of the physician himself. The right side, beneath the bandages designed to hold his face together, had been opened with almost surgical precision. ‘The blood has pumped away, caught in the bed-covering so that it flooded onto the floor instead of spraying everywhere,’ said Odysseus. An observation that gained authority because of his battlefield experience. He had, after all been liberally sprayed with blood yesterday.
‘I see that,’ said Briseis a little unsteadily. ‘But there’s also this huge puddle filling most of the right side of the bedding below the boy’s blood.’
‘That will be Mnestheus’,’ said Odysseus. ‘You see how it was done? The killer crept in, probably while Mnestheus was helping Glaucus out. He must have selected this hiding place because young Timaeus was the smallest occupant nearby, so the fact that there were two in the bed would not be too obvious. He slit the boy’s throat in case he stirred and gave the game away, did so with the smallest incision in case the pain of a larger cut woke the victim, controlled the blood as best he could, guiding as much of it as possible up here under the straw pallet beneath the boy’s head. Then he lay down and pulled the
cover up over himself. He waited for the old man to return, then he started to groan as though he was in agony. Mnestheus would have hurried over…’
‘Fearing that too much disturbance too soon would set you on Glaucus’ trail too quickly…’ Briseis inserted her observations into his analysis as though they had done this countless times before. But of course the observation had two edges. I wondered whether she could suggest it with such certainty because she had made it part of her plan. But then I glanced at her and my thoughts shifted onto a different track once more. Looking down at the dead youth with his ruined face, her eyes were luminous with unshed tears. How could she be so moved, I wondered, by the death of the gate captain’s son when I had yet to see her shed a tear for her husband or her brothers?
‘But the instant Mnestheus stooped down, the knife went in. He would have died at once,’ Odysseus was saying.
‘And the murderer, also wishing no-one to notice anything unusual, put the corpse in Glaucus’ bed and crept away. Leaving his knife in place. I wonder why he did that?’
‘Why don’t you try and move it, Princess? I believe you’ll find the experience instructive.’
Taking him at his word, Briseis went back to Mnestheus’ corpse, took the dagger firmly by its handle and pulled. Fruitlessly, as it turned out. ‘It’s somehow wedged in place,’ she said. ‘I can’t move it at all, let alone pull it free.’
***
It was Odysseus himself who eased the bronze blade out of the old king’s side, some time later when the corpse had joined the others he wished to examine on the capacious altar in the temple of Teshub. It took some time and effort because the blade was so long. Only the fact that it was so slim and narrow stopped it being a sword. It must have very nearly skewered the old man’s chest from one side to the other. The king of Ithaka seemed to transform into his general’s mind as he examined the weapon, hefting it in one hand and then the other, eyes narrow, clearly deep in thought. When he put it down I picked it up and copied his motions, but I learned nothing at all. Perhaps he too had learned nothing – but I doubted it. Then, with the help of Gul-Ses and a couple of his acolytes, he eased the blood-stiffened tunic off. As he did so, he said quietly to Briseis, ‘Princess, I think you might find this of interest too.’