The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Then he turned away again, shouting for Talthybius. ‘Call my captains together,’ he demanded of the herald. ‘I want them all in council. The last of the looting must be done by noon and the ships loaded. Then the host will gather at the Scaean Gate to witness Helen’s execution. As soon as she’s dead and the offerings are made, every ship’s company will start work demolishing these walls; and once they’re razed to the ground, the city will be put to the torch. I want to see nothing here but smoking ash and rubble. Then, and only then, shall we make sail for Argos.’

  An hour later all the captains except Odysseus and Menelaus were gathered in the ransacked throne room of Priam’s palace where they were waiting for Agamemnon to appear. Though the earth had not shifted again, Acamas and Demophon hovered uneasily within reach of the doorway. Even garrulous old Nestor was unusually silent except when he muttered impatiently about this waste of time. He demanded an explanation of the delay from Talthybius, but the herald merely glanced away, answering that the High King was in conference and would join them shortly.

  ‘In conference with who?’ Acamas asked dryly.

  But before Talthybius could speak, Demophon said, ‘Or is he still making his offerings on Cassandra’s altar?’

  Diomedes was sitting at the edge of the huge round hearth, nursing a thick head from the previous night. Impatient of the younger men’s laughter, he demanded to know where Menelaus and Odysseus had got to, and whether there was to be a council that morning or not?

  ‘Word has gone out among the Ithacans to bring Odysseus here,’ the herald answered. ‘He should join us quite soon. As for the King of Sparta …’

  ‘The King of Sparta is here.’

  All the men in the room turned to look at Menelaus who stood between the twin pillars of the doorway, wrapped in a vermilion cloak, his face anxious and drawn. ’Where is my brother?’

  ‘The High King has not yet deigned to join us,’ Diomedes scowled.

  Menelaus nodded, sensing the impatience in the room. ‘It’s just as well. I need to speak with him before this council meets.’

  ‘I wouldn’t interrupt him just yet if I were you,’ Demophon smirked.

  But Menelaus was already making his way through the hall and up the stairs to the upper floor. He came out onto the wide landing just as Agamemnon emerged from the apartment where he had been alone with Cassandra since returning from his encounter with Antenor and Calchas.

  ‘All right, I’m coming,’ the King muttered gracelessly, brushing back his hair with big hands. ‘Is everybody here?’

  ‘I need to talk to you —’ Menelaus said, ‘— privately, before you go down.’

  Agamemnon appraised his brother with narrowed eyes, sensing his urgency. ‘Is something wrong?’ Without answering, Menelaus followed him into the apartment where he saw the slight, dark figure of Cassandra pulling on a dressing-gown as she walked past the open inner doorway of the bedchamber. He looked at his brother, who nodded and crossed the room to shut the inner door.

  ‘Well, what is it?’ Agamemnon frowned.

  Swallowing, Menelaus said. ‘I have changed my mind.’

  ‘What do you mean - you’ve changed your mind?’

  ‘About Helen.’

  Agamemnon’s face darkened. ‘It’s too late to hand her over to the Spartans, if that’s what you’re thinking. The word has already gone out that Helen will be executed here at Troy. It’s what you led me to understand would happen and the entire host is now expecting it. I’m not about to disappoint them.’

  Menelaus said, ‘You don’t yet understand me. There will be no execution. Not here and not in Sparta. Helen will not die. Not by my hand or by anybody else’s. We are reconciled, she and I.’

  Agamemnon stared at his brother in disbelief. Visibly his breathing quickened. He looked around the room as if to make sure that he was quite awake and all of this was actually happening.

  His nostrils flared, but still, as he walked towards a table where his unbuckled sword-belt lay, he said nothing. He stood for a time, patting the table with the flat of his hand. Then he looked back at his brother with a thin, derisive smile at his lips.

  ‘You are reconciled?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see,’ Agamemnon nodded. ‘So you asked your brother to raise all the armed might of Argos and bring it across the sea in a thousand ships so that we could spend ten miserable years fighting for your honour over a faithless wife who has humiliated and disgraced you, only to tell me that you’ve changed your mind?’

  ‘This war was never about Helen,’ Menelaus said quietly. ‘No one knows that better than you. You wanted Troy’s wealth and Helen gave you all the excuse you needed to seize it.’

  Agamemnon glared across at his younger brother with violence in his eyes.

  ‘Do you think I care nothing for the honour of the House of Atreus?’ His voice was shaking as he spoke. ‘Do you think I care nothing for you? Do you think I didn’t wake in my sweat night after night thinking of how that cockscomb Paris was making a mockery of your name in every squalid tavern from Epirus to Ethiopia? Believe me, if Troy had been of no more account than a brigand’s filthy rat-hole, I’d have crushed it just to show the world that no one lays a finger on anything that belongs to me or mine and gets away with it.’ Agamemnon was panting now. ‘And what return do I get for my loyalty? Apparently untroubled by the fact that your wife opened her legs for Paris, and then again for his brother Deiphobus and, for all I know, might have played the two-backed beast with old King Priam himself - untroubled by any of this, you stand before me like a sickly boy and tell me that you mean to take her back!’ A vein throbbed at his temple as he shouted ‘Have you gone quite mad? Have you lost all sense of honour?’

  Menelaus stood with closed eyes under the withering assault.

  His hands were clenched, his knuckles white as he said, ‘There are things that count for more than honour in this world.’

  Agamemnon brought his fist down on the table-top and shouted, ‘Without honour a man is nothing. Nothing! He is less even than a worm. Men piss on those who do not prize their honour. In the name of all the gods, Menelaus, don’t you remember what our father did to our mother when she betrayed him? Didn’t you stand beside me watching her drown? Everyone there could see that Atreus loved the woman and that she had broken his heart, but he knew what his duty was to the honour of our house. He knew she had to die and that the world must watch her die.’

  There were nights when still, as a grown man, Menelaus woke sweating with the anguish of that memory. He could clearly see the way his mother’s hair had splayed beneath the surface, and how her breath bubbled from her open mouth, and the outline of her body wobbled in the green depths as though merging into water as the act of drowning protracted itself. His eyes were closed now, gripped in darkness, rejecting the memory as he had sought to do many times before.

  Through clenched teeth he said, ‘I am not our father.’

  ‘Indeed you are not,’ Agamemnon shook his head in disgust. ‘Atreus would be ashamed to acknowledge you as his son.’

  ‘If I am indeed his son,’ Menelaus retorted. ‘If either of us is, for that matter. Who knows who our father was? Certainly Atreus didn’t, which is why he turned against us. Have you forgotten that? Or have you never dared to look it in the face?’

  In fact, only silence filled the room, though it felt in that moment as though the whole space had burst into flame. Neither brother had ever admitted such a thought to the other since that night, nearly thirty years earlier, when the question of their paternity had first been raised. They were still small boys then, watching the quarrel between their father Atreus and his brother Thyestes, who had been vying for the throne of Mycenae after old king Sthenelus had died. When Atreus won the contest, Thyestes had vented his fury by poisoning all their minds.

  ‘The throne might be yours now, brother,’ Thyestes had shouted, ‘but are you so sure about your sons? It may interest you to know that your Cretan whore
of a wife has warmed my bed more times than I can remember while your back was turned.’

  The boys had seen those drunken words cause the immediate banishment of Thyestes, the death by drowning of their mother Aerope, and the start of a gruesome cycle of vengeance that would contaminate their imaginations for the rest of their lives. Yet neither of them had spoken of them until now.

  Trembling at what had happened, Menelaus snorted and glanced away. ‘In any case,’ he gasped, ‘I would die sooner than become the monstrous sort of man that Atreus became.’

  In a blaze of rage, Agamemnon seized the scabbard of his sword-belt in his left hand and drew the sword with his right. The blade hissed against the leather. His voice was shaking as he said, ‘Humiliate yourself before me if you must, but I’ll cut the breath out of your throat sooner than let you shame the House of Atreus before the host.’

  Then the door to the bedchamber opened and Cassandra was standing in her robe, studying them, dark-eyed.

  Without turning to look at her, Agamemnon crossed the room, holding the blade out before him till its point was pressing at his brother’s throat.

  ‘Tell me that you’ve heard me,’ he said with a trembling fervour. ‘Tell me that we’ll shortly go down together and you will inform my captains that Helen’s execution will take place before the Scaean Gate at noon.’

  With the bronze point pressing so closely that it puckered the skin of his neck, Menelaus shook his head.

  ‘Do this thing for me, brother,’ Agamemnon gasped, his hand quivering a little, ‘because I swear I will kill you if you do not.’

  Menelaus said quietly, ‘As our father was killed by the will of his brother?’ He endured the menace in Agamemnon’s gaze. ‘Is that what you want — for the curse on our house to carry on looking for death after death down all the generations? Then kill me if you must. I can’t prevent you and I have honour enough not to beg for my life.’ He stood, panting with defiance. ‘But this much I tell you: for all her frailties, I have always loved my wife. Even when I stood above her with a sword in my hand, I knew that I loved her and the knowledge was strong enough to stay my hand. Helen is as life itself to me. I’ve been a dead man all these long years since she left me. And I would rather die now than live without her for another day.’

  Agamemnon stared along the blade of the sword in disbelief. A single panting sigh disturbed the spittle at his lips. Unable to countenance the unflinching gaze confronting him, he turned his head and looked, as if for guidance, to Cassandra, who observed the scene with an aloof, sibylline smile.

  ‘What shall I do?’ Agamemnon gasped.

  Cassandra shrugged. ‘Of all the Argives who came to Troy, this was the only man we had wronged. But you are the King. You must give him the justice you think fit.’

  Absolving herself of the matter, she turned away into the inner chamber. The sons of Atreus were left alone together with the ghosts of their tormented ancestry beating about their heads. Downstairs the captains waited. The bitter wind blew across Troy, gusting in the alleys, disturbing the hair of the dead. And all that Agamemnon need do to make this wasteland complete was push the point of his sword into his brother’s throat. The honour of the house would be served and men would fear his power all the more for having seen him take his brother’s life. Meanwhile — he saw it almost as clearly as if the thought had summoned it - in some dark corner of the Land of Shades, the vindictive ghost of Thyestes would be smiling at this further harvest of the curse that had haunted their house since it had been founded, more than half a century ago, by the ruthless treachery of King Pelops.

  The rage racing through Agamemnon’s veins had become indistinguishable from pain. He was remembering how, as boys, he and Menelaus had sworn never to violate each other’s trust. It was on the night when they had hidden in the darkness of the water stair at Mycenae before being smuggled out of the postern gate to seek refuge with Tyndareus in Sparta. Earlier that night their father Atreus had been murdered, Thyestes had seized his throne, and the two frightened boys could only vow always to be true to each other as they fled. But now, all these grim years later, after all they had endured, they had arrived at this bleak moment where Agamemnon stared at his brother in silence, trying to love him as a brother should love his brother and found that he could not.

  But neither could he bring himself to murder him.

  Agamemnon lowered the blade and threw it clattering across the room. ‘Get from my sight,’ he snarled. ‘Take ship with your Spartan harlot if you must. But let neither of you ever set foot in Argos while I live.’

  Having walked hurriedly in silence through the gathering of fractious and puzzled captains in the throne room, Menelaus came out of the palace just as Odysseus began to climb the steps towards him. Both men were dazed and distracted, staring at each other, almost as though struggling for recognition, like friends unexpectedly re-met after a separation of many years.

  With the sudden, liberating realization that he was throwing off a shadow that had oppressed his life for far too long, Menelaus spoke first. ‘This is well met,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have left Troy without speaking to you.’

  Odysseus listened in bewilderment as Menelaus tried to explain himself, but so strong was the memory of this same man looming over Helen with a bloody sword in his hand that he found it difficult to take in what was happening.

  ‘So Helen still lives?’ he said.

  ‘We are leaving together on the tide.’

  ‘And Agamemnon knows this?’

  Menelaus nodded, almost impatiently. ‘Odysseus, I don’t know if we’ll ever meet again,’ he pressed. ‘Helen and I can never return to Argos after this.’

  Again it took a little time for the truth of things to penetrate.

  Odysseus felt a drizzle of rain blow at his face as he said, ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Eastwards I suppose. Perhaps to Egypt.’

  Reflecting wryly on the ironies that seemed to rule all things now, Odysseus said, ‘Then may the gods go with you.’

  He would have walked on by, but Menelaus lifted a hand to prevent him. ‘I have done you a great wrong,’ he said. ‘I should never have brought you out of Ithaca to this war. It was envy, more than need, that made me do so. Envy of the love that I saw between you and your wife.’ Biting his lip, he looked up into his friend’s troubled frown. ‘When you get back home to her, tell Penelope that I beg her forgiveness.’ Swallowing, he offered his hand.

  Odysseus studied it with neither reproach nor sympathy in his eyes. Around them, on the steps of the palace and out across the square lay the lax bodies of the dead. From beyond the temple of Athena the head of the wooden horse looked down on them with a few tattered garlands still blowing from its mane. Menelaus saw the raindrops shining among the hairs of his friend’s beard. Then he was amazed to hear Odysseus uttering a bitter chuckle as he walked away.

  Aeacus had done his job well sixty years earlier when he built the walls at Troy, for as well as withstanding the shock of more than one earthquake they had resisted the longest siege in the history of warfare; and though the Trojans had themselves weakened one section when they broke open the masonry of the Scaean Gate in their eagerness to admit the wooden horse, everywhere else those gleaming limestone ramparts still stood strong. So it took longer than Agamemnon had hoped to tear them down.

  As he laboured among his men, Odysseus was thinking that if the High King had given the matter any thought, he would have let the men of Troy live long enough to do this demolition job. As it was, the weary Argive army, anxious only to get away with its loot as quickly as possible, must now set to with rams and crowbars, battering and prising at the stones. Odysseus knew it was more than mere chance that his Ithacans had been assigned the formidable task of pulling down the eastern bastion with its deep well from which the citadel had drawn its water supply. The high brick superstructure had been toppled easily enough but as they chipped and heaved at the dressed stonework amidst a cloud of
dust, Sinon could be heard muttering that this was what came of questioning the morality of that vindictive brute Agamemnon. Once a man’s blood was shed, you couldn’t squeeze it back in, he said, and the same held true for a whole host of corpses. Odysseus would have done better to keep his mouth shut rather than trying to salve his conscience by publicly arraigning the High King’s ruthlessness.

  Meanwhile, on the far corner of the bastion, Odysseus and Eurylochus were supervising an attempt to bring the masonry down by undermining it; but the foundations had been laid so deep, and the blocks were so large and closely fitted, that after an hour of digging they had made no larger profit from their work than to turn up the cracked skull, mottled bones and rotten leather corselet of some unlucky foot-soldier who had died in that place in an earlier war.

  At the sight of that vacant skull, Odysseus was overwhelmed again by a black sense of the futility of human endeavour. Who could now tell how much wit and love and courage might have flourished inside that cup of bone before its owner came to fight and die beneath the walls of Troy? And the Troy at which he had fought was older than Priam’s Troy, probably older than Laomedon’s too. So how many wars must have been fought hereabouts, over how many centuries? And must another Troy rise one day above the rubble of these walls only to be destroyed in turn as some new army raised its might against the city? Did nothing change? And would his own skull be dug up like this one day, unrecognized?

  The Lion of Mycenae was already congratulating himself that his name must live for ever, and already the bards were at work, turning history into myth, slaughter into song; but as he stared back at the cracked eye-sockets of the skull, Odysseus looked forward only to the redeeming obscurity of a time in which there would be no living memory of the terrible thing that had been done at Troy.

  So when Eurylochus broke the haft of his spade against another course of limestone footings and threw the useless tool away, grimacing up at Odysseus, he saw to his astonishment that his leader was standing above him, stripped to his breech-clout in the heat, with tears brimming at his eyes, as though the skull he held in the palm of his hand had once belonged to a well-loved friend.