The Song of Troy

by Colleen McCullough

  ‘But this council must have happened in midsummer!’

  ‘Yes, sire. But the fleet couldn’t sail because the omens were inauspicious. The high priest, Talthybios, finally gave the answer. Pallas Athene was causing the contrary winds to blow. She hardened her heart against us after her Palladion was stolen. She demanded reparation. Then Apollo declared his anger too. He wanted a human sacrifice. Me! By name! Nor could I find the priest in whom I had confided. Odysseus had sent him on a mission to Lesbos. So when I told my story, no one believed it.’

  ‘King Odysseus hadn’t forgotten you, then.’

  ‘No, sire, of course he hadn’t. He simply waited for the right moment to strike. They flogged me and cast me in chains and left me here at your mercy. Boreas began to blow, they could sail at last. Pallas Athene and Apollo were placated.’

  I got up, stretched my legs, sat down again. ‘But what of this wooden horse, Sinon? Why is it here? Is it Pallas Athene’s?’

  ‘Yes, sire. She demanded that her Palladion be replaced by a wooden horse. We built it ourselves.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Kapys suspiciously, ‘didn’t the Goddess simply demand that you return her Palladion?’

  Sinon looked surprised. ‘The Palladion had been polluted.’

  ‘Go on,’ I ordered.

  ‘Talthybios prophesied that the moment the wooden horse rested inside the city of Troy, it would never fall. All its former prosperity would return. So Odysseus suggested that we build the horse too big to fit through your gates. That way, he said, we could obey Pallas Athene, yet make sure the prophecy couldn’t be fulfilled. The wooden horse would have to remain outside on the plain.’ He groaned, moved his shoulders, tried to sit more comfortably. ‘Ai! Ai! They shredded me!’

  ‘We’ll bring you in and tend you very soon, Sinon,’ I soothed, ‘but first we must hear the whole tale.’

  ‘Yes, sire, I understand. Though I don’t know what you can do. Odysseus is brilliant. The horse is too big.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ I said grimly. ‘End it.’

  ‘It’s already ended, sire. They sailed, I was left here.’

  ‘They sailed for Greece?’

  ‘Yes, sire. In this wind, an easy business.’

  ‘Then why,’ asked Lakoon, still very sceptical, ‘were wheels put on the beast?’

  Sinon blinked, astonished. ‘Why, to get it out of our camp!’

  Impossible to doubt the man! His suffering was too real. So were those whip weals, his extreme emaciation. And his tale fitted together without flaw.

  Deiphobos looked up at the mighty bulk of the horse, and sighed. ‘Oh, what a pity, Father! If we could get it inside –’ He paused. ‘Sinon,’ he said then, ‘what happened to the Palladion? Polluted?’

  ‘When it was brought into our camp – Odysseus stole it –’

  ‘Typical!’ said Deiphobos, interrupting.

  ‘She was displayed on her own altar,’ Sinon went on, ‘and the army was assembled to see her. But when the priests made the offerings to her, she was three times enveloped in flames. After the fire died down for the third time she began to sweat blood – big drops of it oozed out of her wooden skin and rolled down her face, down her arms, from the corners of her eyes as if she wept. The ground shook, and out of the clear sky a fireball fell into the trees beyond Skamander – you must have seen it. We beat our breasts, we prayed – even the High King himself. Afterwards we discovered that the Goddess had promised her sister Aphrodite a favour – that if the wooden horse was placed inside Troy, then Troy would marshal the forces of the world and conquer Greece.’

  ‘Hah!’ snorted Kapys. ‘Too, too convenient! This brilliant Odysseus thinks of making the horse too big, then sails away! Why should they go to so much trouble only to sail away? Why should they care what size the horse was? They sailed home!’

  ‘Because,’ said Sinon in a voice which indicated that he was rapidly coming to the end of his patience, ‘next spring they’re coming back!’

  ‘Unless,’ I said, rising from my stool, ‘the horse can be brought inside our walls.’

  ‘It can’t,’ said Sinon, sagging against the side of the car and closing his eyes. ‘It’s too big.’

  ‘It can!’ I cried. ‘Captain! Bring ropes, chains, mules, oxen and slaves. It’s early morning. If we start now, we can get the beast inside before darkness falls.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ Lakoon yelled, face a mask of terror. ‘Sire, no! Let me at least petition Apollo first, please!’

  ‘Go and do what you feel you must, Lakoon,’ I said, turning away. ‘In the meantime, we’ll start fulfilling the prophecy.’

  ‘No!’ shouted my son Kapys.

  But everyone else roared on a whoop, ‘Yes!’

  It took most of the day. We attached ropes reinforced with chains to the front and sides of the massive log platform, then harnessed mules, oxen and slaves; with almost infinite slowness the wooden horse moved down the road. Painful, frustrating, exasperating work. No Greek – no man! – could have counted on our stubborn persistence in the face of such a task. At every bend the thing had to be backed to and fro a dozen times to keep it on the cobbles and off the sward, for the wheels were only bolted to the table; there were no axles in the world strong enough to take such a mountain of weight.

  By noon we had drawn it to the Skaian Gate, where, sure enough, we could see for ourselves that the head was five cubits taller than the arched roadway above the vast wooden door.

  ‘Thymoites,’ I said to my most enthusiastic son, ‘tell the garrison to bring picks and hammers. Break down the arch.’

  It took a long time. The stones laid down by Poseidon Builder of Walls didn’t yield readily to the blows of mortal men, but they crumbled fraction by fraction until a large gap existed above the open door of the Skaian Gate. Those harnessed to the creature drew on the roped chains; the mighty head went forward again. As the jaws crept closer and closer I held my breath, then screamed a warning: too late. The head stuck. We prised it loose, demolished a little more, and tried again. But it would not pass through. Four times in all that noble head jammed before the space was wide enough. Then the gigantic thing rolled groaning and ponderous into the Skaian Square. Hah, Odysseus! Foiled!

  To be sure, I decided that the horse must be towed up the steep hill and brought inside Troy’s wellsprings, the Citadel. Which took twice as many beasts of burden and what seemed aeons of time, though the cityfolk put their shoulders to it too. The Citadel gate had no arch over it; the horse just squeezed through.

  We brought it to rest for good in the verdant courtyard sacred to Zeus. The flagstones cracked and split under its huge weight and the wheels sank into the ground amid fragmented paving, but the replacement for the Palladion stayed upright. No force on earth could move it now. We had shown Pallas Athene that we were worthy of her love and respect. Then and there I vowed publicly that the horse would be kept in perfect condition, and that an altar would be erected at its base. Troy was safe. King Agamemnon would not return in the spring with a new army. And we, when we had recovered, would marshal the forces of the world to conquer Greece.

  Came Kassandra’s crazed laughter; she ran from the colonnade, her hair streaming unbound behind her, both arms outstretched. Howling, wailing, screeching, she fell to clasp my knees.

  ‘Father, get it out! Get it out of the city! Leave it where it was! It is a creature of death!’

  Lakoon was there, nodding grim confirmation. ‘Sire, the omens are not good. I’ve offered Apollo a hind and three doves, but he has rejected them all. This thing spells doom for our city.’

  ‘I have seen it. Father speaks the truth,’ said the elder of his two sons, pale and shivering.

  Thymoites sprang forward to defend me; my own temper was rising, and the voices around grew afraid.

  ‘Come with me, sire,’ said Lakoon urgently. ‘Come to the great altar and see for yourself! The horse is accursed! Chop it up, burn it, get rid of it!’

  Hustling his t
wo sons before him, Lakoon ran to Zeus’s altar, far outdistancing my old legs. Suddenly, attaining the marble dais, he screamed. So did his sons, leaping and shrieking. By the time one of the guards reached him, he was down in a huddled heap and moaning, his arms plucking at his writhing sons. Then the guard skipped backwards very quickly and turned a horrified face towards us.

  ‘Sire, don’t come near!’ he cried. ‘It’s a nest of vipers! They’ve been bitten!’

  I raised my hands to the crimsoned depths of the firmament. ‘O Father of the Skies, you have sent a sign! You struck Lakoon down in front of us because he spoke against your daughter’s offering to the people of my city! The horse is good! The horse is sacred! It will keep the Greeks from our gates for ever!’

  They were over, those ten years of war against a mighty foe. We had survived and we still owned ourselves. The Hellespont and the Euxine were ours again. The Citadel would have golden nails again. And we would smile again.

  I led the Court into my palace and commanded a feast; our last misgivings laid to rest, we gave ourselves over to rejoicing like liberated slaves. Shouts of laughter – songs – cymbals – drums – horns – trumpets floated up from the honeycomb of streets below the Citadel, while from inside the Citadel the same noises floated down. Troy was free! Ten years, ten years! Troy had won. Troy had driven Agamemnon from its shores for ever.

  Ah, but for me the best sight of all was Aineas! He hadn’t gone to see the horse, nor stirred from the palace through all our travail. He couldn’t very well avoid attending the feast, however, though he sat with face set and eyes smouldering. I had won, he had lost. The blood of Priam still existed. Troy would be ruled by my descendants, not by Aineas.

  33

  NARRATED BY

  Neoptolemos

  They shut the trapdoor on us well before dawn, and we who had experienced darkness every night of our lives discovered what darkness really was. Opening wider and wider, my eyes strained to see, yet still there was nothing to see. Nothing. I was struck blind, the world a blackness tangible and unendurable. A day and a night, I found myself thinking – if we were lucky. At least a day and a night crouching in one spot without so much as one pinprick of light – no way to tell the time from the sun, each instant an eternity, ears so finely attuned that men’s breathing rolled like distant thunder.

  My arm brushed against Odysseus; I shuddered before I could stop myself. My nostrils twitched with the smells of sweat, urine, faeces, malodorous breath, despite the covered pails of hide Odysseus had issued between each three men. I understood now why he had been so adamant about it. To have been soiled by excrement would have been beyond any of us. One hundred men struck blind – how did some men survive a lifetime of blindness?

  I thought, I will never be able to see again. Will my eyes recognise light, or will the sheer shock of it dazzle me back into permanent darkness? My skin was tight, I could feel the terror licking all around me in the pit as one hundred of the most courageous men alive were stricken with mortal dread, incarcerated. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth; I reached for the water skin, anything to be doing something.

  We did have air, cunningly filtered in through a maze of tiny holes punctured all over the beast’s body and head, but Odysseus had warned us that we wouldn’t see light through these holes while there was daylight outside because layers of cloth shielded them. Finally I closed my eyes. They ached so much from trying to see that it came as a welcome relief, and I found the blackness easier to bear.

  Odysseus and I sat spine to spine, as did everyone. We ourselves were the only back rests our prison possessed. Striving to relax, I leaned on him and began to recall every girl I had ever met. I catalogued them meticulously – the prettiest and the ugliest – the shortest and the tallest – the first girl I had bedded and the last – one who had giggled at my lack of experience and one who had had barely enough strength to roll her eyes at me after a night in my arms. Girls exhausted, I began on all the beasts I had killed, the hunts I had attended – lions, boars, deer. Fishing expeditions in search of grampus and leviathan and vast serpents, though all we found were tunny and sea bass. I relived my days of training with the young Myrmidons. The little wars I had fought in their company. The times I had met great men, and who they were. I told over the tally of ships and Kings who had sailed for Troy. I thought of the name of every town and village in Thessalia. I sang the lays of the Heroes over in my mind. Somehow the time did pass, but snailed.

  The silence deepened. I must have slept, for I awoke with a jerk to find that Odysseus had clapped his hand over my mouth. I lay with my head in his lap, my eyes starting from their sockets in panic until I remembered why I couldn’t see. A movement had aroused me, and as I lay collecting my wits it came again – a gentle jolting. Rolling over, I sat up, groped for Odysseus’s hands and clasped them tightly. He bent his head, his hair against my cheek. I found his ear.

  ‘Are they moving us?’

  I felt his grin against my face. ‘Of course they are. Not for one moment did I doubt they’d move this thing. They fell for Sinon’s story, just as I knew they would,’ he whispered.

  The sudden activity broke the suffocating inertia of our imprisonment; for a long time we felt brighter, cheerier as we lurched and jerked along, trying to work out our speed, wondering when we would reach the walls, wondering what Priam intended to do about the fact that the horse was too big. And for this span of time we rejoiced in being able to speak to each other in low but normal voices, sure that the noise our conveyance made as it groaned along would drown us out. We could hear our progress, though we couldn’t hear men or oxen. Just the roaring, squealing turning of all those wheels.

  It wasn’t difficult to determine when we reached the Skaian Gate. Movement ceased for what seemed like days. We sat praying silently to every God we knew that they wouldn’t give up; that they would – as Odysseus had insisted they would – go to the lengths of demolishing the archway. Then we started to move again. There was a grinding, sickening jolt which knocked us sprawling; we lay still, our faces pressed against the floor.

  ‘Fools!’ Odysseus snarled. ‘They’ve miscalculated.’

  After four such jolts we began rolling once more. As the floor tilted, Odysseus chuckled.

  ‘The hill up to the Citadel,’ he said. ‘They’re escorting us to the palace, no less.’

  Then all was silent again. Come to rest with a mighty groan, we were left to our thoughts. The huge thing took time to settle like a leviathan into mud, and I wondered whereabouts exactly we had come to this final halt. The perfume of flowers came stealing in. I tried to estimate how long it had taken them to haul the horse from the plain, but could not. If one cannot see sun or moon or stars, one cannot gauge the passage of time. So I leaned back against Odysseus and wrapped my arms about my knees. He and I were placed right next to the trapdoor, whereas Diomedes had been sent to the far end to keep order (we had been told that if a man started to panic, he was to be killed immediately), and I wasn’t sorry. Odysseus was rocklike, unshakeable; just having him at my back calmed me.

  When I let myself think about my father, the moments flew. I hadn’t wanted to think about him, fearing the pain, but in the anticlimax of our last wait I couldn’t hold out. And was shorn of any pain at once, for when I opened the shutters of my mind to admit him, I could feel him physically with me. I was a small child again and he a giant towering far above my head, a God and a Hero to a little boy. So beautiful. So strange with that lipless mouth. I still bear the scar where I tried to cut off my own lip to be more like him; Grandfather Peleus caught me at it, and whipped me soundly for impiety. You can’t be someone else, he said to me. You are yourself. Lips or no lips. Ah, and how I had prayed that the war against Troy would last long enough for me to go there and fight alongside him! From the time I turned fourteen and counted myself a man I begged both my grandfathers, Peleus and Lykomedes, to let me sail for Troy. They had refused.

  Until the day when Grandfa
ther Peleus came to my rooms in the palace at Iolkos with the grey face of a dying man and told me I might go. He simply sent me off; he didn’t mention the message Odysseus had sent him, that the days of Achilles were numbered.

  As long as I live I’ll never forget the lay the minstrel sang to Agamemnon and the Kings. Unnoticed, I stood in the doorway and drank it in, revelling in his deeds. Then the harper sang of his death, of his mother and the choice she offered him, of the fact that he considered it no choice: live long and prosper in obscurity, or die young and covered in glory. Death. That was the fate I could never associate with my father, Achilles. To me he was above death; no hand could strike him down. But Achilles was a mortal man, and Achilles died. Died before I could see him, kiss his mouth without needing to be lifted an immense distance upwards, my feet far off the ground. Men told me I had grown to almost exactly his height.

  Odysseus had guessed a great deal more than anyone else, and told me as much as he knew or suspected. Then he told me of the plot, sparing no one – least of all himself – as he explained to me why my father had quarrelled with Agamemnon and withdrawn his aid. I wondered if I would have had the strength and resolution to watch my reputation marred for ever, as my father had. Heart aching, I swore Odysseus an oath of secrecy; some inner sense was saying to me that my father wanted things to remain as they were. Odysseus assumed this was an atonement for some great sin he thought he had committed.

  Yet even in the decent darkness I couldn’t weep for him. My eyes were dry. Paris was dead, but if I could kill Priam for Achilles, I might be able to weep.

  I dozed again. The sound of the trapdoor opening woke me. Odysseus moved like lightning, but he wasn’t quick enough. A faint, dazzling light was seeping through the hole in the floor, and legs locked together flashed against its brilliance. There were sounds of a muted scuffle, then one pair of the legs tipped over. I sensed a body hurtling earthwards; from below there came a soft thud. Someone from the horse couldn’t endure his incarceration one moment longer; when Sinon on the ground outside pulled the lever which opened the trapdoor we had no advance warning, but one of us was ready to escape.