Chapter Sixteen
Menelaos struggled to free his arms from the bedclothes but the blanket, sour with sweat, had wrapped itself round and round him like a python. The grey half-light shifted and swayed before his eyes as dim shapes took form then dissolved on the edge of his sight. Somewhere close by he could hear a woman gasping, her breath hoarse and loud in his ears as her panic rose. He knew any moment now the screams would begin, the crunch of breaking bone, the dull, heavy thud of her body on the floor …
He woke in the dark, sweating and shaking, gripped by the dream till he remembered where he was. Sikyon. Of course. They were safe in Sikyon, with that silly old king and Tantalos and Klytie. And her beautiful sister Helen. They’d been there three days now.
He forced himself to breathe more slowly. Listen to the night noises, he told himself. They’ll help you back to sleep.
Somewhere in the palace a loose shutter stirred in the wind. Tap … Tap, tap, tap … Tap, tap. His whole body tensed as he listened. A gust of wind slammed the shutter closed with a crack like a whiplash and he gasped in shock. Fool. He’d been holding his breath.
Relax.
Now he could hear steps in the corridor, coming this way, a snatch of conversation. Then a muffled grunt and a sound like someone dumping down a sack of wheat.
Silence.
More steps, and a scratching noise on the other side of the door. He lay rigid, his heart pounding. The scratching continued. He struggled out of bed.
“Who is it?” he whispered through a crack in the bolted door.
“Agamemnon. Open up.”
He fumbled the bolts across.
Agamemnon pushed past him, closed the door and leaned against it, panting. “I thought you’d never wake.”
“I’m sorry.” Menelaos flushed. “I wasn’t asleep. I was too scared to move.”
“Scared of your own brother?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t–”
“Hush. Keep your voice down. I’ve had to kill the guard.”
“What?” Menelaos grabbed his brother’s hands and found them sticky with blood.
“Tantalos has betrayed us. He’s bribed the Sikyons with gold. Thyestes sent a great bag of it this afternoon with one of the scribes. Palamedes – Nauplios’s son.”
“Palamedes? The treacherous scum–”
“Not at all. Palamedes also smuggled a letter to me from his father, to warn us.”
“Are you sure he–?”
“Hurry up. Put your boots on. Where’s your sword?”
“It’s in the corner,” whispered Menelaos. He groped around, his fingers weak as jelly.
“Come on.” Agamemnon was already half through the door. “Make haste.”
Menelaos paused. “My cloak,” he exclaimed. He tugged it out from the tumble of bedclothes and tiptoed into the corridor.
In the oily glow of the corridor lamp, he could see Agamemnon waiting for him beside a huddled figure near the top of the stairs. Menelaos stepped gingerly over the body. The guard twitched, his hands jerking and groping at the empty air and his breath rattling in his throat.
“He’s more or less dead,” said Agamemnon in a matter-of-fact tone. “Push him further along so they can’t spy him from below.” He set off down the stairs.
Menelaos heaved at the body, the salty-sweet reek of blood filling his nostrils. He ran down the stairs after his brother on shaking legs.
A voice called out from somewhere below them and they froze.
“In here,” whispered Agamemnon. He tugged at a small door set in the wall of the landing. They squeezed into a cupboard full of brooms and leather buckets. Heavy footsteps stumped up the stairs past their hiding place – three, four men at least. Agamemnon waited until the guards had almost reached the top of the staircase. “Now,” he said, thrusting the door open.
They hurled themselves down the remaining stairs as the guards started yelling. Two spears hit the wall beside them as they sped round a corner towards the outside door. Another guard thrust his spear across the open doorway and they charged straight through, catapulting him across the alleyway outside. Agamemnon thrust his sword up under the man’s ribs and spun him back into the arms of their pursuers.
They reached the circuit wall beyond the palace storerooms, gasping for breath. In the moonlight Menelaos could just make out a rope ladder and he scrambled up it with Agamemnon close behind. Agamemnon flung it down again on the far side and Menelaos slid rather than climbed down, the coarse fibres burning his hands. Agamemnon joined him, breathing hard.
“Down here,” he said. “Second alley on the left. First on the right. Confound the man. Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Palamedes. With the chariot.”
“Palamedes?” Menelaos stared at his brother and back at the empty alleyway. “Are you sure we can rely on him?” he said. “He’s only a bureaucrat’s son. Why would he risk his life for us?”
Agamemnon gave him an odd look. “Don’t be a fool. He’s our–” He stopped, shaking his head. “This is no time to explain. Trust me.”
“No, no, I do, I’m sure you’re right.” What had Agamemnon been about to say? “But where’s the chariot?”
A horse whinnied nearby.
“The incompetent idiot,” exclaimed Agamemnon. “He’s in the wrong alley. Trust a clerk not to be able to count.”
They ran down the alleyway and round a corner. Agamemnon seized the reins from Palamedes’s hands as they leaped into the chariot, and slapped them hard against the horses’ backs. He eased the chariot through the narrow streets, the horses’ flanks brushing against the walls on either side. At last they cleared the final straggle of houses and Agamemnon lashed the horses into a canter.
They were already well down the ridge when Menelaos heard the distant thunder of hooves behind them.
“They’re after us,” he shouted.
“They still have to catch us,” Agamemnon replied, urging their own horses into a gallop.
Menelaos listened for a moment over the creaking and jolting of the chariot as it bounced and swayed over the uneven road. “It’s no good. They’re gaining on us. I think they’re on horseback.”
Palamedes glared at him, his face working, but said nothing to break the grim silence he’d maintained since they left the town.
“Riders?” cried Agamemnon. He squared his shoulders. “Then we’ve nought to worry about. Messenger boys, couriers, riffraff.”
Menelaos strained his ears. “I think there are more than a few of them. And if we keep on this road, they’ll catch us long before we reach the coast.”
“There’s nowhere else to go,” Agamemnon replied.
“Can we head inland? Or hide somewhere?”
The horsemen were very close now, maybe only a bend or two away. Just as the ridge flattened out, a small farm track twisted away to the left and Agamemnon heaved the panting horses round, the chariot skidding in the thin mud. They pulled over into the shelter of a grove of trees and watched as the horsemen poured past the end of the track on their way down to the sea.
Chapter Seventeen
Six days later, footsore, dirty and profoundly hungry, they paused on the crest of a ridge leading north towards the Korinthian Gulf. The horses had been replaced by a meagre supply of food and a rather unwilling donkey, while the chariot, with cracked wheels and broken axle, had long since been thrust into a small ravine. Their boots, thin and fashionable enough for palace wear, had survived while they could still ride had the horses, but this last high, snow-choked pass all but destroyed them.
The first stages of their journey hadn’t been too arduous. Low passes and damp, swampy valleys studded with lakes led them westward round the south side of Mount Kyllene. Progress had been slowed by the need for secrecy and as yet they had managed to avoid all but a few travellers. From one of these had come the donkey, a poor exchange for two Argos-bred warhorses, Agamemnon had argued. But as the owner of the donkey explained, horse thieves – and
horse thieves they must surely be – should be grateful for whatever they could get.
Palamedes squirmed about in a vain attempt to protect his backside from the pain inflicted by the donkey’s bony spine. Sitting astride had been a miserable business and sideways, as he was now, wasn’t much better. That wretched boy, Menelaos, kept peering round at him as though he were indulging in some unwarranted luxury, riding this horrible animal instead of walking. But it was perfectly obvious his own boots had fared the worst. Agamemnon hadn’t complained once, even with his feet bound in rags, so what gave his younger brother cause to feel hard done by? And that limp the boy was affecting – all part of a play for attention.
But sore feet and an empty belly were the least of his problems. Palamedes still couldn’t believe how he had ended up in this ghastly mess. Father had weathered the coup with ease, and despite his private reservations, had been one of the first to clasp Thyestes’s knees. And the journey to Sikyon and back to convey Thyestes’s demands and deliver the secret letter to Agamemnon should have taken only a day and a night; Father had been most explicit about that. Meet with Agamemnon and leave, he’d insisted. He would be furious.
Palamedes gazed down at the azure-blue sea two thousand feet below. Perhaps, when they reached the coast and that tiny port at the foot of the ridge, he’d find a ship, a fishing boat, anything that floated so he could smuggle himself back to Korinth and out of this appalling danger. Though a port meant people and he was well aware – they all were – that there would be a high price on their heads if they were caught by Thyestes’s men. But if he was quick and clever, he’d manage to escape. And if the worst came to the worst, he’d turn these two in and claim the bounty.
If only he hadn’t offered Agamemnon his chariot. If only Agamemnon hadn’t demanded he meet them with it in the town. If only … But Agamemnon was a hard man to deny. He was as stubborn as Atreus and already had a vast opinion of himself. Yet his appearance – that stocky build, those black curls – owed nothing to Atreus; they came from his wretched mother and who knew whom she might have consorted with?
Aunt Aerope. Palamedes gritted his teeth as he squinted into the sun. The source of all the trouble that had overtaken his family. High and mighty daughter of the king of Crete, higher and mightier wife of the High King of Greece – how condescendingly kind Aerope had been to his own mother, with what hypocrisy she had refrained from reminding her she was only Aerope’s half-sister, only the daughter of a concubine, when every look, every gesture, every privilege had emphasised the accident of birth that separated them.
And then, through her wantonness, Aerope had dragged Mother, dragged his whole family, into shame and disrepute when they’d had every right to expect a glorious future.
All those years Father had to spend slowly building up his career again, all the palms he had to grease, all the fools he had to flatter, all the veiled and not-so-veiled insults he had to shrug off. Palamedes stared with bitterness at the back of Agamemnon’s head. He had kept his place in court, for all he was the son of a murdered whore; even Menelaos, spawn of whatever dregs Aerope had fornicated with, had been dragged forwards and made much of, cavorting about the palace last summer with that vicious, ill-bred young Ithakan.
While Mother, good, kindly, modest, upright Mother, had been sent to their family estates down in Argos, no longer an asset to Father’s advancement but an impediment. He could still remember how she’d wept.
Agamemnon was gesturing to their left at another, parallel ridge. Near its base Palamedes could make out the high mudbrick walls and clustered orange roofs of a small town.
“Aigion,” said Agamemnon with satisfaction. “The ruler there is a loyal sort of man. I’m sure he will help us.” He folded his arms across his chest, as though waiting for compliments.
If help was so close to hand, they might as well eat the rest of the food. “I’m hungry,” said Palamedes, the gnawing ache in his stomach overwhelming his thoughts.
Agamemnon turned round and glared at him. “Hungry? You’ve just had breakfast.”
“That was eons ago.”
“Eons? Hardly. My brother’s not hungry. Are you, Menelaos?”
“Not at all,” said Menelaos.
Typical, spineless acquiescence. “Because, no doubt, he took more than his fair share,” Palamedes pointed out. “As he has done before.”
“You both received exactly the same portion,” said Agamemnon. “I divided it myself.”
“I’m taller than he, therefore–”
“I’ve walked as far as you,” interrupted Menelaos, mulishly. “Or rather more, since–”
“Be quiet, both of you.” Agamemnon glared at them. “Dear gods! Here am I, leading you both through the most dangerous mountains in Greece in the face of overwhelming odds, and what thanks do I get in return? Nothing. All you do is whine about your wretched appetites. I’m hungry. He had more to eat than me. I’ve walked as far. You’re unheroic, pathetic, and a disgrace to my honour.” He turned his back.
“Sorry,” said Menelaos in a small voice.
Palamedes fiddled with the donkey’s reins. Did that mean they weren’t having anything to eat? Because Agamemnon’s pride had been ruffled? How small-minded. He grunted in frustration under his breath.
Agamemnon must have chosen to hear it as an apology. “Very well,” he said, in a superior voice. “We’d best be on our way.”
Chapter Eighteen
The steep path down the ridge took such a direct route, Palamedes was forced to dismount rather than face the indignity of being thrown over the donkey’s head. Perhaps, he thought, when they’d found a way of crossing the deep valley to their left, there might be some kindlier track, a zigzag perhaps, and he could remount. But no such track appeared.
Suddenly, they glimpsed a man coming up the path towards them. Menelaos scuttled off the track to hide behind a low outcrop of rock and Palamedes wasted no time joining him, his heart pounding. For some reason Agamemnon, by now leading the donkey, had stopped where he was, in full view. The idiot – what was he thinking of?
“Greetings, friend,” Agamemnon said as the man reached him, his voice carrying easily to their hiding place.
“Greetings to you too, and may the gods be with you,” said the man, in the flat-vowelled dialect of northern Arcadia.
“And with you. Does the path divide, or does it go straight on to Aigion?”
“Eh?”
“The path.”
“What d’yer mean?”
Palamedes peered round the edge of the rock. Agamemnon was shifting his weight from one foot to the other while the man scratched his ear.
“The path – to Aigion.” From the tone in his voice, Agamemnon must have decided he was dealing with a halfwit.
“Oh,” said the man at last. “Do you mean Aigeira? You talk a bit strange.” He leered, toothless, at Agamemnon. “You’re from foreign parts, eh?”
“No, I said Aigion, not Aigeira,” said Agamemnon, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Indeed? Well, if that’s where yer going, it’s on the other side of them mountains over there.” The man pointed to the west.
Through the trees, Palamedes could see a massive, pine-covered mountain range, its precipitous slopes slashed with ravines. His heart sank. So much for Agamemnon’s route-finding.
“You go back up to the pass and down again. Head towards the setting sun. Then it’s another ten days’ walk.” The man picked his nose and greeted the results with a satisfied sigh. “Who told yer to come this way?”
“Some fool …” muttered Agamemnon, the second part of his sentence too low to catch. Well, the only fool within spitting distance was Agamemnon.
“So why would you be wanting to go to Aigion?” said the man, his face tight with curiosity.
“My sister married a man from there. They went to live in his parents’ house. She, er, I thought it would be good to see her again.”
“Not in trouble, are yer?” said the man,
giving him a sly grin.
“No, I am not.” Agamemnon stuck his jaw out. Palamedes had seen him do it many times when his temper was roused. But was it temper this time, or fear?
“Fine. None of my business. But I wouldn’t expect too big a welcome round here. They’re a greedy bunch and travellers are fair game by their rules. They’ll have yer arse in tolls and if you can’t pay, they’ll have yer ass instead.” At that the man burst out laughing, though Agamemnon showed no signs of sharing his amusement. “Oh well,” the man said at last. “I’d best be going. Good luck.”
He set off at a quick lope, but around twenty paces up the hill he turned. “Oh, if you’re in such a panic to see your sister,” he called out, “follow yer nose straight down this ridge to the port. A quick ship with a good wind will get you there in half a day.”
Palamedes stared after him till he disappeared. Not that there was much point hiding any longer – he and Menelaos must have been in full view once the man had passed the rock. He clambered to his feet, brushing the pine needles off his clothes.
“How far is it to that town?” said Menelaos, scrambling out from behind him. “What did you say its name was?”
“That is no longer our destination,” said Agamemnon, with his chin still high in the air.
“Why not?”
Palamedes hid a smirk. Menelaos was an even bigger nincompoop than his brother but there was one person here who couldn’t be bluffed.
“The danger is too great,” Agamemnon replied. “I have been ascertaining the political situation – as a good leader does.”
Menelaos’s jaw dropped. “Danger? Has Thyestes bought their loyalty too? What are we going to do?”
Palamedes thrust his thumbs into his belt. What indeed?
“I have another plan. A good leader always thinks ahead.” Agamemnon planted his feet a good hip-width apart and clasped his hands behind his back. “We will avoid the town. This path will take us straight to the sea. There we will find a ship to take us west.”
Murder at Mykenai Page 7