Vengeance at Aulis (The Trojan Murders Book 2)

by Peter Tonkin

  In any case, as we rolled the body from side to side, lifted, laid and eased her tunic up past her waist, her modesty was protected by a simple undergarment which had become somewhat soiled and went a long way to explaining the odour hanging around the body, just as various insects, ants and spiders scuttling out of folds in her clothing and flesh explained the whisper of sound I believed I had heard. In order to ease her tunic over the stub of the arrow we had to roll her over and sit her up. I took hold of her head, being the nearest to it, and held it as steady as I could until Odysseus eased the garment over it and laid it aside. As well as the undergarment around her loins, she was wearing a strophium bound round her chest just beneath her breasts. The cloth band was loose because the chest around which it had originally been wrapped was much flatter now. There was a large, ragged, blood-rimmed hole in the front of this that matched the much smaller wound in the back from which the arrow-shaft was still protruding. ‘We need to pull this out,’ said Odysseus. ‘Is it likely that the Goddess will mind?’ He asked the question in all seriousness. The request was a courtesy at the very least. I had never discussed his belief in the gods with him but I supposed him to be sceptical rather than anything else. He was after all, a man who liked the kind of proof you could see, touch or arrive at through logical reasoning rather than by blind credence. Even so, the atmosphere in the temple and the absolute conviction of the High Priestess and everyone else nearby had a disturbing effect.

  ‘No,’ said Karpathia. ‘Proceed. We would have had to take care of it at some stage of the cleansing rituals and preparation for her funeral rites in any case.’

  v

  By the time the High Priestess had finished speaking Odysseus had taken hold of the arrow and done his best to pull it free – but he found he was unable to do so. ‘Elpenor,’ he said at last. ‘I had supposed it would be easy enough to pull this out, as many of the bones nearest to it are broken, but I was wrong. You’re far stronger than me – stronger than anyone I know except for Prince Ajax.’

  The massive warrior took the shaft surprisingly gently in his huge fist and, while the captain and I held her in the sitting position, he used the massive strength he had acquired as an oarsman to pull the arrow right out. I had expected a sucking sound followed by an issue of some sort of liquid. Neither of these things happened. The binding beneath her breast, however, slipped down to her waist now that there was nothing holding it in place. At last we could lie her on her back. After I had placed her head in a steady position, I took the linen sheet and folded it over her waist while Odysseus examined the arrow Elpenor had handed to him. He had brought the head end which he’d discovered in the bushes and the two pieces fitted together perfectly.

  ‘But you see,’ he said, as though speaking to himself, ‘the break is not square. The shaft has split along the grain leaving two sharp ends. That would surely only have been done if the arrow was being pulled and twisted until it broke. We know it was pulled or pushed because that is the only way in which the flights could have penetrated the poor woman’s chest. But, as Elpenor and I have already demonstrated, the power needed to accomplish this is considerable. We further know that the force needed to break the shaft in this way must have been even more considerable than I first suspected, because the flights and the head prove that this was an arrow of the highest quality, such as kings, princes, generals and only the richest could afford. The sort of arrow I have seen men risk their lives to scavenge on the battlefield. And the head is barbed – a proper hunting arrow; recognisable to a certain circle of men perhaps – hence the pause at the edge of the grove of the Goddess to cut it free and discard it’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘surely that would be wasted effort, Captain, because whoever is responsible for this was going to bring back to one part of the camp or another, a stag with golden antlers. Never mind the arrow – who is ever going to forget that?’

  Odysseus gave a weary grin. ‘Well reasoned, lad. So, at some stage or other we will have to return to these woods in search of a pair of golden antlers which have been cut free and hidden.’

  ‘But in the meantime, what have you actually discovered?’ wondered the High Priestess.

  ‘We have discovered precisely what happened I think,’ answered Odysseus. ‘And it is this. A lone huntsman, well equipped, with a well-trained horse, came to your woods on the afternoon before the storms started. He was hunting deer and ended up tracking your stag. We know he was alone – otherwise the precautions he took such as hiding the body and discarding the arrow would have been a waste of time and effort. I have already explained how we know he was well equipped and riding a well-trained horse. He tracked the stag to the top of the cliff and shot it there. But the moment he loosed his arrow your fearless young priestess here leaped out from behind a bush where she had been hiding unsuspected, and threw herself in front of the holy animal. The huntsman’s arrow – fired from an extraordinarily powerful bow – went through the girl’s chest and deep into the stag’s side. The wounded animal and the dying girl went over the cliff together, linked by the shaft of the arrow. The stag’s antlers caught in the cliff-face so that when it landed the girl was underneath it. Its weight squashed her and drove the arrow deeper into the animal. In its pain and panic it pulled itself up, forcing the arrow flights deep into the dead girl’s chest before the arrow-shaft finally split apart. Then it dragged itself to the foot of the great cypress you say is most holy to the Goddess. The huntsman came down from the top of the cliff, saw there was nothing to be done for the girl and covered her with the crushed bushes, then he went after the stag and did to it all the things I described in the clearing from slitting its throat to pausing and cutting the arrowhead free. And that, apart from the fact he must have hidden the golden antlers somewhere and probably got soaked as the storm broke on his way home, is that.’

  ***

  ‘The High Priestess seemed pleased,’ I said as Elpenor guided the captain’s chariot back towards Aulis through the rain. ‘Which is not surprising. Not only can she prepare her heroic young priestess for her funeral now, but you have also told her everything about the man who murdered Nephele except his name. You certainly narrowed things down; there can’t be all that many hunters so richly and excellently equipped. And if we can find more arrows like that one we’ll have narrowed things even further…’

  ‘And if we come across a tent that has a pair of golden antlers decorating it, we’ll have done better still,’ he teased. ‘I don’t think you’ve quite grasped how many men in Agamemnon’s army might fit into that description. I can think of twenty kings and princes without actually exercising my mind. And beneath them there are their generals and assorted commanders. Take Achilles as we’ve spent a bit of time with him today. With Achilles you have Patroclus of course, then you have the generals of the various Myrmidon divisions: Menesthisos, Euodoros, Peisander, Phoenix and Alcimedon. That’s seven in all – all equally excellent hunters, all equally well equipped, I’d say; all equally keen to keep their men well fed. Multiply the twenty kings and princes I’ve just mentioned by Achilles’ seven associates and you have one hundred and forty suspects before you even start looking at the problem closely!’

  I refused to be downhearted. ‘But Artemis must be as pleased as her High Priestess,’ I said. ‘Surely, if we keep a careful look-out we will see the hand of the Goddess guiding and helping us.’

  ‘I find that the gods help those who work hardest at helping themselves,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we certainly do that, Captain,’ I said. ‘Further, the Goddess has to be put into a better mood by the fact that the High Priestess will have completed the rituals of cleansing and finished the rites of funeral very soon. Then we can be certain that the Goddess has welcomed her priestess to herself.’

  We fell silent then and Elpenor urged the horses into a faster trot. The rain eased almost immediately, and by the time we reached the city’s western gate, the clouds were beginning to depart – in a straight line stretchi
ng across the sky from the northern horizon to the southern horizon. It was as though Helios the sun god was wearing the thick overcast as a cloak and pulling it away after him as he guided his golden chariot down into the west. The sky over the bay and the island beyond it was clear, calm and blue.

  ‘There,’ said Elpenor. ‘That looks as though you’ve satisfied the Goddess after all, Captain.’

  Odysseus grunted, unconvinced, but I thought the massive oarsman was probably right. I went to bed content that night, therefore, looking forward to the coming dawn with some excitement.

  But when I got up next morning, I found myself at the centre of a dead calm under a blazing sun in an atmosphere so thick and heavy that I found it hard to breathe.

  The Goddess, if she existed, was clearly not satisfied after all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  3 - The Hand of the Goddess

  i

  There were those who saw the hand of the Goddess in the way that matters worsened so swiftly from such a promising beginning. At first, it looked as though the change in the weather was positive and yet Agamemnon’s mood and those of his highest commanders remained dark and unpredictable setting a tone that soon spread through their armies like a plague. With little else to do, the High King and his closest advisors began to revisit their plans for the voyage that they expected to be undertaking as soon as the wind returned to blow from a more favourable quarter. They also began to review their decisions as to how best to divide the loot they would get from the sack of Troy, seeking to strike a balance between those who supplied the greatest number of warriors, those who added most to the war-chest and those likely to be the most important in battle. This confronted them with the names of the kings and princes who had yet to fulfil their promises to send ships or soldiers or both; a lack of commitment the volatile Agamemnon began to interpret as a direct attack on his standing and authority.

  Furthermore, the restless leaders soon began to suspect that the oppressive calm was destined to last as it sometimes did at this season, and a dead calm was no more helpful to their plans than the storms it had replaced, for it was too hot to row the warships for any distance – and towing the fat, square-sailed, wind-reliant freighters full of their horses, equipment and supplies was simply out of the question. As time went on, Kalkhas the army’s soothsayer, was summoned peremptorily and consulted repeatedly. But he only gave one worrying prognostication after another.

  Right from the beginning it seemed to me, as someone born and raised in Aulis, that we were stuck here, helpless, until the next new moon at least, whether this was the work of the Goddess or not. All that had really changed was that we had traded a constant chilly drizzle on the wings of an easterly gale for windless, burning days and sweltering nights. We had moved from too much water to nowhere near enough. My own situation also underwent an unexpected and nearly fatal change. The main reason for this was that the High King suddenly insisted Odysseus should return to Ithaka at once and complete his organisation of the Cephallenian fleet he had promised to bring from those islands off the western coast, of which Ithaka was the most important.

  I sensed something sinister in the atmosphere on that first morning almost immediately after I woke. I had spent the night sleeping aboard the beached Thalassa as we arrived back at camp too late for me to get past the guards on the gates into Aulis and my chances of going home were therefore non-existent. The city fathers, Father amongst them, had instituted a curfew and closed the gates at sunset soon after the first lethal confrontation between outraged citizens and drunken soldiers on the hunt for amenable companionship; preferably, but by no means exclusively, female. High Priestess Karpathia was not the only local dignitary who had enjoyed increasingly discordant face-to-face negotiations with High King Agamemnon. And the result of these negotiations was that the gates were locked and guarded every evening. They were hardly comparable with the great gates of Troy, but they were quite sufficient to keep all the soldiers, their kings and commanders, firmly outside the city.

  I had just climbed down onto the sand at dawn on that first windless morning, therefore, and was standing assessing the change in the weather when King Nestor came hurrying up, his face folded into an unaccustomed frown. ‘Is your captain aboard, lad? I’m looking for him.’

  ‘No, Majesty,’ I replied. ‘Have you tried his tent?’

  ‘Yes. He’s not there. Have you any ideas? High King Agamemnon wants to see him.’

  ‘No, Majesty. May I help you search for him?’

  ‘Yes. I want to ask you something anyway.’

  ***

  We set off side by side and I had to hurry to keep up with the sprightly monarch. Unlike more pompous kings and princes such as Prince Palamedes of Euboea and Prince Aias of Locris, Nestor did not stand on his dignity – if he saw a task that needed doing, he was in action. Where a lot of the others seemed to delegate everything to soldiers, slaves and servants, Nestor just got on with it himself, even though as the High King’s most trusted advisor he was effectively in the top rank of commanders, and one of the few that senior whose army was sharp and well-trained. This was because it was in the hands of his sons the Princes Antilochus and Thrasimedes. The other young generals, Achilles and Diomedes, were the same, always in action and regularly training alongside their troops. Odysseus was also always in action of course, though his troops had yet to arrive. Unlike my captain, however, Nestor made no allowances for my damaged limbs and eyes. ‘What’s this I hear about Odysseus getting mixed up in the murder of a priestess from the Temple of Artemis?’ he demanded as we rushed through the encampment.

  ‘The High Priestess Karpathia asked him to look into the matter,’ I answered. ‘She was the mysterious beauty you told us had been looking for him yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. I see. Well, it’s all over the camp. What did he discover?’

  I told him everything about the previous day’s adventures, my sentences getting shorter and eventually broken as I ran out of breath, weakened by the speed we were moving at and the increasingly sultry atmosphere we were hurrying through.

  ‘So, he’s certain the girl was killed by one of our hunters?’ demanded Nestor when I arrived at my last gasp.

  ‘At the moment he shot the sacred deer, yes, Majesty,’ I wheezed. ‘And the killing of the deer has apparently upset the Goddess almost as much as the death of her priestess.’

  ‘So,’ continued Nestor after a moment, ‘this High Priestess, this Karpathia, has convinced Odysseus that Artemis is taking personal revenge on the whole army because of this, and will not relent until the guilty man admits his sin and sacrifices one of his own children in recompense?’

  ‘That’s what the High Priestess and Pythia her Oracle believe. I am less certain about what the captain believes.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the High Priestess wants Odysseus to help her unmask this culprit and so appease the angry goddess?’

  ‘Even though he does not actually believe that the Goddess Artemis is really causing anything that is going on now or is likely to happen in the future. Yes.’

  ‘Hmmm. Of course, for once it may well turn out to be irrelevant what Odysseus believes. It is, however, crucial what Agamemnon thinks and decides. And, beyond that, even, what the army thinks. And, in my experience, the situation will not be helped by this change in the weather.’

  ‘How so, Majesty?’

  ‘It promises so much, presents such a welcome change, and still it will do more harm than good unless it changes again soon. I remember when I was with Captain Jason on the Argo we had a spell of weather like this. At first we thought fine, there’s no wind but the sun’s up and the sky’s blue – we’ll just furl the sail, break out the oars and row. But rowing under a sun like this is hard work, even when Hercules is helping, and we were soon parched. Then we realised how little drinking water we had aboard. That’s why we went ashore in Mysia, just up the coast from Troy; a fatal mistake as it turned out. Hercules’ young companion Hylas found a spring of clean water
leading down to a sizeable lake, then the simple-minded boy managed to drown himself in it. We found him floating face-down wrapped in pondweed. There was some talk of naiads tempting him in too deep but it looked like a stupid accident to me. Hercules left the ship as a direct consequence and by Zeus we could have done with him later…’

  ‘So, surely, Majesty,’ I ventured, fearing that this was the beginning of another of the old king’s endless reminiscences, ‘the High King will want Odysseus to do what the High Priestess wants.’ I gasped a breath but managed to proceed before he could answer. ‘The faster the guilty man is unmasked and the blood debt settled, the better,’ I said, with absolutely no idea of how naive I must have sounded to the elderly politician.

  ii

  I began to discover my failure to understand the workings of power almost immediately. Odysseus was still not in his tent so I followed Nestor on up the hill to Agamemnon’s more palatial accommodation as the old king gave me a set of instructions about what I was to do if Odysseus wasn’t in the High King’s tent either. All of which came to nothing, because he was there after all. I couldn’t see him but I recognised his voice which I could hear though the leather walls. ‘Off you go, lad,’ said Nestor as he walked past the guards at the entrance. ‘I hear him inside.’

  I turned obediently away, but the conversation from inside the tent – which was quiet but intense – caught my attention. So I went to the first unguarded section of that leather wall, squatted there, and started to pay proper attention to what I could hear while pretending to take my ease and try to catch my breath, prepared to lie that I had no idea I was so close to the command tent if challenged.