She saw at once what the man was after. Should things go amiss, any identifiable token given as a pledge would render her complicit in the death of Pelagon, and it had always been her policy to keep such things deniable. Yet in an intrigue as perilous as this the demand was not unreasonable.
Clytaemnestra slipped from her finger a ring on which two jewelled serpents were entwined. ‘This once belonged to a Lydian queen. My husband sent it to me some time ago with a letter informing me of his great victory at Ciazomenae. Give it to Aegisthus. Tell him that it belonged to one of his forebears, as once did Mycenae itself. It is all the earnest he needs.’ Dropping the ring into Nauplius’ outstretched palm, she said, ‘Conceal it about your person and leave this city at once. And do so in a way that makes it plain to all that you have incurred my displeasure.’
Smiling, Nauplius bowed his head.
‘Play your part well,’ she said, ‘and I shall play mine. In good time both of us will have our satisfaction.’
But when he looked up again, Clytaemnestra had already turned her attention back to the wax tablet. It might suit her purposes for her husband to die in Phrygia but there was no relying on it, and it was no part of her plans that he should be defeated at Troy and return empty handed. She was thinking, therefore, that if his army was not to be trapped between Priam’s host and the Hittite Empire, Agamemnon must be swiftly informed of the changing situation. So even before Nauplius had bowed out from her chamber, she was ringing the small silver bell that would summon her scribe.
The Last of Troy
Menelaus was woken from a fitful sleep by the trembling of the earth beneath his bed. For a few seconds, expecting the painted walls to collapse around him, he lay listening to the deep grinding roar, feeling it shake his lips and skin. Then there was only dust falling through the silence.
After a time he heard shouting outside and the noise of his own Spartan soldiery as they scrambled to get out of the building. He knew that the tremor might have been no more than a shrugging of the ground before the earth opened up beneath him. He knew that he too should make haste to get out into the clear. But he could not bring himself to move. Listening to the noise of the quake had been like listening to the stupefying pain of the world, and it was too much for him. He lay motionless on the bed feeling as if the moral lethargy that had seized his heart since entering this city had now infected every limb.
Yet the question that had kept him awake for most of the night remained unanswered: having already failed to kill his wife in the heat of passion when he discovered her in bed with Deiphobus at her side, how could he bring himself to kill her in cold blood?
Yet it would have to be done. Once he stood before the host with all that mighty pressure of expectation fixed on him, he would have no choice but to bring the sword down — just as Agamemnon had been left with no choice when he stood before the host at Aulis. Thousands of men had already died in this war. They had died for the sake of his honour, and if the sack of Troy was the chief reward for those who had come through, the recapture of Helen was certainly another. And because no single one of them could be allowed to take her for himself, all must have the satisfaction of watching her die. Menelaus had assented to that judgement and it must be carried out. It must be done that day
As he lay striving with these thoughts, he became aware of a sound somewhere outside the room in which he had slept alone. Someone was pummelling on a door with both fists and the knocking was going unanswered. Menelaus got up from the bed, pulled his cloak about his shoulders and went out into the hall. Everyone had rushed from the building for fear it might collapse — everyone but himself and Helen who was hammering at the locked door along the corridor. Her voice was muffled by its thickness but he could hear her crying to be let out.
Menelaus crossed to the door, unlocked and opened it. Helen saw his broad figure blocking the doorway, his face expressionless, his features darkened in the gloom by the greying, gingery beard which covered the familiar scar across his cheek. He was almost a stranger to her now.
When he said nothing she gasped, ‘We have to get out of here. You must let me out. Please … I’m very afraid.’
‘Does it matter so much,’ he said dully, ‘whether you die now or later?’
Her lips were quivering. She lifted a hand to her mouth. He heard the whimper of her breath behind it. ’Help me, Menelaus,’ she whispered. ‘You know me. You’ve always known the depths of my fear.’
‘You were not afraid to betray me.’ His voice was measured and cold. ‘You were not afraid to flee from Sparta and bring shame on my house.’
‘But that’s not true,’ she came back quickly. ‘I was terrified. Every step of the way I was in mortal dread.’
‘Yet you didn’t let fear stop you.’
‘I lacked the power. I was in the hands of a god.’
‘You are in the hands of a god now. If Poseidon wants us he will certainly take us.’ Scornfully he shook his head. ‘In any case, any lying whore might claim as much.’
‘I have wronged you,’ she gasped, ‘I freely acknowledge it. But not once, never once in my whole life, have I ever lied to you.’
He saw the truth of it in her eyes. Helen was shivering in her night-shift but her chin was held high. The silence of the plundered mansion waited round them. Sensing his uncertainty, she said, ‘Did you think I was lying when I implored you not to leave me alone with him, when I begged you to let me accompany you to Crete that day?’
His hands had clenched into fists. He made to turn away from her, to shut the door on her again, but words crowded at his lips demanding to be spoken. ‘In the name of all the gods, Helen, we were happy together in Sparta,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Our life was good. We ruled together over a contented kingdom. We had our child, the child we loved - the child that you abandoned.’
He might have struck her with the words.
Helen stared up at him, trembling. ‘And can’t you see that the guilt of it has tormented me all my days?’ she cried. ‘Do you think I will ever forgive myself?’
Confronting the full scale of her pain for the first time, he felt his own heart shaking. His eyes were casting about the darkness of the room, looking for his rage. He found only confusion.
‘Yet you threw it all away,’ he gasped. ‘And for what? For what?’
At a loss to offer any explanation of a choice she had long since come to regret, Helen shook her head. ‘It was madness,’ she whispered. ‘When Paris came to Sparta he was already possessed by the madness of Aphrodite. Her madness was too strong for me.’
‘And Deiphobus?’ he demanded. ‘Do you blame the goddess for that too?’
‘I blame her for nothing. We are what we are and must answer for ourselves.’ Hope was absent from her voice, yet when her eyes looked up at him again they were filled with entreaty. ‘But there are powers stronger than reason, Menelaus. Are you sure that such a power doesn’t have you in its grip right now?’
His hands opened, and closed again, grasping at the air.
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘What kind of fool do you take me for?’
‘I have never thought you a fool,’ she said. ‘I have never believed you to be anything other than the truest and kindest of men. All the folly in this was mine.’
He stood uncertainly, confronted by both her pathos and her honesty. She had not yet asked for his forgiveness but if, as he suspected was about to happen, Helen fell to her knees and did so, he could no longer be sure that his heart would not vacillate. Quickly he sought to harden it.
‘I’ve heard enough of this. Come noon today you’ll have the justice of the gods. And so will I. So will I.’
He was about to close the door on her then, locking her in with her guilt and fear, with all her tragic beauty; but through a sudden catch in her breathing emerged a single, urgently uttered word: ‘Wait.’
Menelaus stopped, knowing that he should not stop. Unable to prevent himself from hoping that a thing might still be said t
hat would bring their whole wretched story to a better end, he turned to look back at the wife he had loved as he had never loved anyone else before or since.
Helen stood before him with her hands clasped together at her mouth and her shoulders hunched as though hugging herself against the cold.
‘No one can escape the justice of the gods,’ she whispered. ‘What I hope to find is their mercy.’
In the dream Odysseus had come home to Ithaca and Penelope was running towards him down the cliff-path to the bay where his ship was moored. He had jumped over the side into the waves and was walking ashore through the surf to greet his wife with open arms, but as she approached’ more closely her face fell. She halted in her tracks. He saw her eyes gaping with horror. Puzzled, he looked down, following the direction of her gaze, and saw that the hands and arms he held out to hold her were still drenched with blood. He watched it dripping from his fingers. He saw it staining the water round his thighs. Looking back at his wife, opening his mouth to explain, he saw at once that words could make no difference — such an embrace of blood could never be acceptable. Penelope stood transfixed, shaking her head, holding up her white palms in a gesture of self-protection. Then the sea was rising and his balance was gone. With shocking force, saltwater slapped and splashed around him. Odysseus jumped awake aboard his lurching ship.
Unable to bear the smell of death in the city, he had decided to sleep on his ship where it lay moored on a strand of the bay. But a freak wave thrown up by the tide must have lifted the vessel where it stood on its keel and tipped him from his pallet to the scuppers amidst a boil of surf. Still emerging from the vague region between dream and waking, Odysseus heard how the dark sea sizzled and hissed across the turbulent bay. Then he took in the grinding of the earth beneath the rattle of shingle and knew that Poseidon had stirred.
When the strand was still again, he stumbled to his feet, looking towards the city. In the sulphurous light of the dawn sky it was impossible to tell from that distance how much more damage Troy had suffered. And then, so vivid had been the impact of his dream, he glanced down at his arms, expecting to find them still running with blood. He stood for a time, shaking his head, puzzling over the strange elision between the dream and the world. Had he been dreaming of water before the wave broke over him? Had his dream in fact invoked the wave, or had the sea pre-empted his dreaming mind?
Because there was no answer to such questions they left him uneasy, and he felt queasier still at the thought that the dream was Poseidon’s work.
Once, long ago in Sparta, he had called down the curse of Earth-shaker Poseidon on all who failed to defend Menelaus’s right to take Helen as his bride. But the oath had been sworn on the joints of a horse that had come reluctantly to the sacrifice, and from the moment in which he was required to swear it himself, Odysseus had suspected that the oath must come home to haunt him.
And so it had proved. Once again, as had been the case countless times since leaving Ithaca, Odysseus was tormented by the memory of the conversation in which his wife Penelope had perceived with devastating clarity the bind in which he found himself.
‘So I am to understand,’ she had said, ‘that you devised this oath as a means to help my uncle Tyndareus solve the problem of choosing a husband for Helen without antagonizing all the other contenders for her hand?’
‘That was my intention, yes.’
‘And you did so on the understanding that Tyndareus would then persuade my father to countenance accepting you as my husband?’
‘I did it for you.’ he urged. ‘You know how bitterly your father was opposed to me. I thought his brother’s counsel might change his mind. And the plan worked.’
‘Except that you too swore the oath,’ Penelope reminded him.
‘Palamedes insisted on it before all the others. I could hardly refuse. And there seemed to be no risk. No one was about to provoke the anger of the god by breaking the oath. As far as I could see, there was no reason why Menelaus and Helen should not be left to live happily in peace.’
‘But you don’t always see as far as you think you can see. And now the oath you devised to bring us together is tearing us apart.’
It was true, and the truth was underwritten by the logic of the gods who have an insatiable taste for irony. So for ten years Odysseus had devoted all his resources to winning this war, yet his heart had never truly been in it. Not when his twelve ships set sail from Ithaca, leaving Penelope alone on the cliff with the infant Telemachus in her arms. Not when he was luring the young Achilles to abandon his wife and child on Skyros in order to win undying glory in the war. Not when he finally contrived the death of Palamedes, whom he had always hated in his secret heart far more than he hated any of the Trojans. Nor even when he conceived the stratagem of the Wooden Horse as a means for the host to find its way inside walls so strongly built that they might stand for ever. And least of all now when he saw how all his efforts to negotiate a sane surrender of the city had been betrayed.
Odysseus had come to the war with only one intention — to return home as quickly and as profitably as possible to his wife and son. But as he stood in the thin light beside his toppled ship, with the waters of the bay shaking around him, he was possessed by a sickening conviction that returning home might prove as arduous as winning the war had been. And the man who returned to Ithaca would not be the man who had left; and who could blame his wife if she could not find it in her heart to welcome the grim stranger he had now become?
Agamemnon came down from what had once been King Priam’s bedchamber to find his men jumpy and anxious to be gone. Having been woken from a drunken sleep by the shaking of the earth, they were afraid that the ground might move beneath them again with greater force. A bitter wind was blowing across the city. Through the livid dawn light, clouds heavy with rain hurtled low above Mount Ida. Some of the Argive ships which had been loosely beached on the night of the invasion bobbed and yawed in the turbid waters of the bay. Others had been knocked from their stays by the wave that came with the quake. Mariners were already down there, assessing the damage to masts and spars, or putting out in fishing smacks to retrieve the vessels that had broken loose. Everywhere he looked Agamemnon sensed the growing agitation to be gone from Troy.
He felt it himself. This city belonged to the dead now not to him. Impervious to everything, having endured the last indignity of a callous death, they had scarcely stirred in their piles while the ground trembled under them. And there were too many to move. Even if anyone had the stomach for the task, it would take days to clear the streets and burn all these corpses and there was still looting to be done.
Meanwhile the shrieks and moans of the women captives had begun to play on Agamemnon’s nerves. He was standing at the wall of the citadel looking down across the lower city when Calchas came striding towards him, staff in hand, with Antenor at his side, grim-faced and recalcitrant. They were the last people he wanted to deal with now, but they had taken advantage of the confusion caused by the earth-tremor to force an encounter and there was no escaping them.
‘Is this how the High King of Argos keeps his word?’ Antenor demanded. ‘Are we to believe that boys and pitiful old men went down fighting rather than plead for their lives? There are ten thousand ghosts in Troy. I pray that every one of them will come out nightly from the Land of Shades to haunt your dreams.’
‘If your friends are dead,’ Agamemnon growled, ‘it’s because you gave them into my hands.’
‘On the strength of your word that their lives would be spared.’
‘War is war, Antenor. You are king in Troy now. Learn what it means to be a king. If you would rule men, make them fear you first.’
‘There’s no one left for me to rule,’ Antenor almost shouted the words back at him. ‘Troy is dead. It’s become a city of the dead. I have no desire to be a king of corpses.’
‘Then go your ways, man, and count yourself lucky that you have your life still.’
Confronted by such i
ndifference, Antenor’s will collapsed in that moment. Helplessly he opened his hands and all the agony of Troy was resumed in his voice as he gasped, ‘I can’t find my wife. I’ve looked for her everywhere.’
Again Agamemnon snorted. ‘I’ve had trouble enough these past ten years pursuing my brother’s wife. I have no time to look for yours.’
Calchas said, ‘Theano is priestess to Athena. Her person is sacred to the goddess.’
‘Then let the Goddess protect her. She’s no business of mine.’ Agamemnon turned to stride away but he had taken only a few paces when he was halted by the cold authority in the priest’s voice.
‘The High King would do well to take care how he speaks of the gods. Already they begin to turn away from him.’
A tangle of broken veins flushed at Agamemnon’s cheeks. He turned to glower at Calchas with narrowed eyes. ‘Are you threatening me with curses, priest?’
‘Earth-shaker Poseidon has already made his displeasure plain,’ Calchas answered. ‘The omens now say that he has made his peace with Athena.’
‘Divine Athena has always taken my side.’
‘There has been sacrilege in her temple,’ Calchas answered. ‘Her image has been plundered. Her priestess is missing. And the gods pursue their own ends,’ he added quietly, ‘not ours.’
Agamemnon’s rage combusted then. ‘The gods have given this great city into my hand. What clearer message do you need of their favour?’
‘What the gods give,’ Calchas answered, ‘they can also take away.’
‘The same holds true of kings,’ Agamemnon snarled. ‘If you value my favour, Calchas, you’d better look for more propitious omens. And you, Antenor - be certain of this — Troy, as you truly say, is dead. Before we Argives leave this land we shall do what Heracles and Telamon failed to do. We shall tear down these walls, stone by stone, so that they can never rise to trouble us again. Priam is no more. His seed is extinguished from the earth. We have seen the last of Troy. Now there is only one King of Men.’ Agamemnon stood panting in his rage. ‘Be thankful for his mercy.’
The Return From Troy Page 10