The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Glancing away, Aegisthus said, ‘I wish I could share your confidence.’

  ‘Trust me,’ she answered. ‘I know my son.’

  ‘Even though you see so little of him?’

  When Clytaemnestra stirred impatiently, Aegisthus added, ‘You should listen to me. Orestes is a little too full of himself. Just because his voice has broken he thinks he’s already a man. And he’s rather too close to the sons of people we have no reason to trust. I’m thinking in particular of young Pylades.’

  ‘Pylades will shortly be recalled to Phocis by his father. I have already seen to that. And Orestes will be kept well apart from him in Midea.’ She looked down at the angular cheekbones and deep-set, kinetic eyes of the man lying next to her. ‘You should be easier with my son,’ she said. ‘Make allowances for him. Show a little more patience and be his friend.’

  Drawing a deep breath, Aegisthus nodded his assent, though privately he considered that, for all the stern control she exhibited, Clytaemnestra’s feelings were still too raw and protective where her children were concerned. Nor were they always realistic. There were things he might tell her if he chose, but they would only arouse an anger he had already learned to fear and further increase the invidiousness of his position; so he was reluctant to press the issue of Orestes any further at this time. In any case, there were influential figures at large inside Mycenae who presented a more immediate threat to the success of their plans than did Agamemnon’s moody son. With Orestes gone from the city it would be easier to concentrate his mind on dealing with them.

  ‘We should decide,’ he said, ‘when to make our move against Idas and that tiresome old fool Doricleus.’

  Clytaemnestra rested the long fingers of one hand on her lover’s shoulder. ‘Calm yourself. Everything is in place. We’ve discussed this already. If we act too soon we’ll alert Agamemnon’s supporters in Tiryns and elsewhere.’

  ‘And if we leave it too late one or other of them is sure to inform him that all is not as he thinks in Mycenae.’

  ‘The timing will be exact.’ There was a hint of impatience in Clytaemnestra’s voice. ‘Idas and Doricleus are watched. There’s no reason why they should suspect that anything is wrong; and I’m quite sure that Agamemnon will give plenty of notice of his arrival so that I can arrange the kind of triumph he expects.’ Lightening her tone a little, she added, ‘We can leave him to determine the pace of events without knowing what he’s doing.’

  But she sensed that this unexpected ratcheting of the tension between them had left the man lying next to her more anxious than herself. Clytaemnestra moved further down into the bed to caress his hairless chest. ‘Agamemnon is no more than a stone in my shoe,’ she smiled. ‘And Mycenae is ours already. Come, be easy on yourself. Take me in your arms. Make love to me.’

  Far across the Aegean, Agamemnon watched The Fair Return go about and sail to the aid of Sinon’s stricken vessel, but he had no intention of slowing his own progress along the Thracian shore. There were many reasons why he wanted to get back to Mycenae quickly now and that grisly business on the Chersonese had delayed him long enough. With the seas already running high and dirtier weather threatening from the east, he was anxious to make landfall as far west as he could before darkness fell. At the very least, he might put in on Thasos. With luck he might even find shelter for the night in the lee of Mount Athos.

  When he turned to gaze ahead he saw Cassandra standing at the prow of the ship where the wind blew through her hair and spindrift softly broke against her face. Since her mother’s death she had withdrawn into long elusive silences that would have troubled him more if the strength of their improbable alliance had much depended on the power of words. As it was, Agamemnon made allowances for her grief and told himself that she would soon grow warm at his side again when she heard him lauded by the adoration of the crowds.

  He recalled the image of Cassandra weeping with her sister Iliona beside their mother’s funeral mound as the final offerings were made. A cold wind had sliced out of the north, tugging at their robes and blowing smoke into their eyes. At the foot of the cliff, wave after wave smashed against the rock-face, each shaking the air with the force of its impact and falling back with a thunderous detonation. Seabirds clamoured overhead. With the wind thudding and sucking about her ears, Iliona shivered at her sister’s side, venting her grief but, as yet, a mere novice — as Cassandra was not — in the mysteries of pain.

  To avoid further trouble, Agamemnon had insisted that the serving-women who had helped Hecuba with the blinding of Polymnestor should be put to the sword. So with the possible exception of that increasingly strange fellow Odysseus, it had seemed to him that of all the people assembled on the bare headland, the two sisters were alone in mourning the queen’s bleak death.

  Again, standing at the stern of his flagship, Agamemnon stamped his feet against the cold. Remembering how discomfited he’d been by the sullen stare of Polymnestor’s sons, he was wondering whether he should have finished them off lest one day they come to Mycenae with vengeance on their minds. But it was their crazy grandmother who had blinded their father, not he, and he wanted as little as possible to do with the whole unchancy affair. The sooner this accursed Thracian shore was at his back, the happier he would be.

  Meanwhile, if truth were told, he was feeling damnably lonely. Menelaus was gone, banished somewhere over the eastern horizon, and the brothers might never see each other again. Grown gloomy and lugubrious since his son Antilochus had been killed only days before the city fell, garrulous old Nestor had sailed from Troy on the same day. Odysseus was now delayed in Thrace by the damage to Sinon’s ship and was, in any case, no good company these days. Meanwhile Diomedes and Idomeneus had opted for a swifter route home, sailing southwards along the Asian coast before striking out for Argos and Crete.

  It seemed that with the final triumph over Troy had come the breaking of the always uneasy Argive fellowship. Worse still, for all the treasure in the bellies of his ships, a curious, dispiriting emptiness had entered Agamemnon’s heart. It baffled comprehension. Was he not now the most famous, powerful and wealthy monarch in the entire western world? Had he not led the largest army ever raised to the most complete of victories? He had achieved everything he had set out to do and thereby made himself into something closer to a god than to a mere mortal man. Was his name not immortal now? Heracles and Jason and Theseus had been great heroes in their day, but their day was done and this was the time of Agamemnon, Lion of Mycenae, Sacker of Cities, King of Men. Bards would sing of his deeds for ever. All of this was true and indisputable. Then why this sense of vacancy, as though his soul went hungry still? And how was it that he could find no consolation for that nameless deficiency except in the arms of Cassandra? The thought of it both alarmed and excited him, and all the more so because she had rebuffed his recent advances as though her pain was physical.

  He was well aware that his men both wondered at the power the Trojan woman exercised over his moods and were dismayed by it, but none among them dared to speak of it within his hearing, and Agamemnon had taken to keeping his own counsel these days.

  Meanwhile with every sea-mile that passed beneath the keel Cassandra’s world was changing round her. As a princess of Troy she had rarely strayed outside the palace or the temple precinct. The air she breathed there was closeted within painted walls, heady with incense and the perfume of cut flowers. She had always been a child of the city, so when she first stepped aboard Agamemnon’s ship, her heart had quailed at the prospect of a long exposure to the turbulent emptiness of sea and sky. She feared that her mind might dissolve in those volatile, windy spaces, for her prophetic spirit depended on her contact with the earth, and with such knowledge gone from her, what was she but a helpless woman like all the others who had been carried away from Troy to serve these coarse new masters with the labour of their flesh?

  Her terror increased when they made landfall on the Thracian Chersonese and she realised that there were forces at w
ork there that she had not foreseen. No prophetic pictures had prepared her mind for the horror of watching the murdered body of her brother Polydorus fetched up out of the sea. So she had stared at that poor corpse lying pallid and sodden on the deck of the ship, and knew herself overwhelmed less by grief for a brother she had hardly known than by the fear that her gift had left her forever.

  It was her mother who had put her panicking spirit back inside her skin, for once Hecuba had accepted this latest and, as it turned out, final loss, a resolute calm had settled over her like a snow-field. All the women around her were awestruck by the change. The Trojan Queen was less a person now than an elemental force pursuing the line of least resistance as she set out to fulfil her own inexorable purposes. And as handmaid to the vengeful Fury that possessed her mother’s soul, Cassandra had done everything that she was told to do. Strength had come with obedience. But she had known from the first that, one way or another, her mother must die for this. And she knew too that the choice to die was the only real freedom left to either of them now.

  So she had come away from Cynossema with her clarity of mind restored. In spirit she already belonged to death, so there could be, she believed, nothing left in life to fear. Once she set foot on the earth again, her powers would return and she would be told exactly what the god required of her.

  The tempest that struck as The Fair Return pulled away from the land of the Cicones was the worst the Aegean Sea had endured for years. In a tumult far more violent than the storm that had driven the Argive fleet back to Aulis a year earlier, bolt after bolt of lightning seared the sky, setting the spars alight so that the struck ships combusted like torches of oily tow. Awash among the billows, they foundered under a black sky thick with rain and loud with thunder. Men burned and drowned. Ships sank, taking their treasure to the bottom with them. By the time the seas subsided four days later, few of the surviving vessels were still in sight of one another, and fewer still knew where they were. Meanwhile, Poseidon and Athena had looked on with satisfaction.

  Agamemnon was luckier than most of his fleet. Having a stronger ship and more oars at his command, he had made good headway since leaving Thrace and was able to take shelter in the lee of Mount Athos before the storm broke.

  He fretted impatiently there but at least his weary oarsmen could rest rather than wasting their strength against the swell. But by the time his ship approached the dangerous promontory of Caphareus at the southernmost tip of Euboea he had begun to comprehend the full scale of the damage wreaked by the storm. All along the coast of Euboea smashed carcases of ships lay propped among the rocks. The waves were littered with wreckage and corpses, one of which lay floating on its back with an ankle tangled in the rigging of a spar. Though the flesh was puffy and discoloured, the features were still recognizable as those of Aias the Locrian, the man who had tried to ravish Cassandra as she clung to the Palladium in the temple of Athena at Troy. When one of the crew asked whether they should haul the body in and take it back to Locris for burial, Agamemnon merely scowled and shook his head. ‘Divine Athena has taken her vengeance for his impiety,’ he said. ‘It would be unlucky to interfere.’

  In any case, he had larger troubles on his mind. By the time they had doubled the cape he had counted the wreckage of at least sixty ships, and who knew how many more might have sunk without trace? He was appalled by the losses, and amazed by them too. Hadn’t that brilliant young schemer Palamedes made sure that all the dangerous rocks and shoals of Euboea were marked by beacons? So how was it that so many ships had been driven aground?

  With suspicions darkening his mind, Agamemnon considered putting in at Eretria to demand an explanation of King Nauplius, but there would be time enough for that once he had disembarked at Aulis. Meanwhile his mind was fixed on the violent events more than a hundred miles to the north in Thessaly. Before he could allow his troops to disperse he needed to know whether or not they were urgently needed to halt the Dorian invasion.

  As soon as he had docked at Aulis, he despatched Talthybius to Mycenae with instructions for the preparation of his triumphal return; then he summoned a council of the Boeotian and Locrian barons who had remained in Argos throughout the war. His intention was to gather as much information as he could about the struggle to throw back the Dorian invaders. In particular he wanted to find out whether it was truly the case that these barbarians were equipped with stronger weapons than any his own forces could command.

  Almost all the news he received was bad. Neoptolemus and his Myrmidons had arrived too late to lift the siege of Iolcus, which was now firmly under Dorian control. Fortunately, Peleus had contrived to escape by sea as the city fell. Old and lame as he was, he had begun to organize a campaign of resistance to further incursions, and his depleted troops were greatly heartened by the return of the Myrmidons. Though the situation remained confused, as far as everyone knew, he and Neoptolemus were still holding the line in southern Thessaly.

  Yet the mood among the Locrian contingent in Aulis was apprehensive. Their land would be the next to fall if the invasion was not halted and they were alarmed by many reports of the way bronze swords shattered against iron helmets and quickly broke in hand-to-hand fighting against iron blades. At the moment only the leaders of the Dorians were equipped with such invincible armour, but if the smiths forged enough of this weaponry to arm the entire Dorian horde then it could only be a question of time before all Argos fell.

  ‘If they can make such weapons,’ Agamemnon declared, ‘then so can we.

  When he was reminded that the Argive smiths did not yet understand the magical processes by which iron was made, he demanded to know why no effort had been made to capture a Dorian smith and torment the secret out of him.

  ‘That’s easier said than done,’ an old Locrian baron answered him. ‘Their forges are behind their lines, far to the north of the fighting, and every smith who knows the secret is hamstrung to prevent him wandering off and selling his knowledge.’

  ‘So at the end of the day we’re fighting against cripples!’ Agamemnon blustered.

  ‘Yes,’ the Locrian answered, ‘but cripples who know how to make men of iron.’

  Agamemnon came away from the council angry and frustrated. When he had first sailed from Aulis ten years earlier he had left behind him a strong, peaceful and united empire. With Priam defeated and his line extinct, only Hattusilis, Emperor of the Hittites, could compare with the Lion of Mycenae for strength and power, and his interests lay far to the east. Everything, therefore, should have been right with the world. Jubilation and acclaim should have been waiting for him here in Aulis. He should have found himself surrounded by crowds of dancing women and children, throwing flowers and singing paeans, not this worried bunch of old men muttering of trouble in the north. But the Dorians were clearly a formidable new foe. It couldn’t be long before Neoptolemus called for his support in the struggle to keep them at bay; yet many of his own best fighting men had died under the walls of Troy and only the gods knew how many more had drowned in the storm. When the rest of his army got back home it would be in no mood for further fighting. Nor could Agamemnon be sure that, when all the losses were accounted for, there would be enough profit left from the war at Troy to finance another distant campaign.

  In any case, he would have his hands full closer to home. With Menelaus banished, Sparta must be quickly placed in safe hands. Only trouble could be expected out of Euboea, and whichever of the sons of Theseus replaced Menestheus on the throne of Athens, Agamemnon now doubted that he could rely either on Acamas or Demophon for much support. They had not forgotten that Attica had been mighty in their father’s time. Were Agamemnon to move his own forces northwards against the Dorians, Mycenae could soon be under threat at his rear. And somewhere amidst all this unanticipated turmoil, Aegisthus was still on the loose, harbouring his hatred for the sons of Atreus, eager to avenge his own father’s death and to seize the Lion Throne for himself.

  Agamemnon’s anger wilted into gloom. He w
anted Cassandra and the comfort of brief oblivion he had found in her embrace in the nights before the Thracian Chersonese. Yet even as the desire rose inside him, he recalled with a lurch of the heart, that there could only be more trouble when Clytaemnestra learned of her existence. The prospect of that imminent collision further darkened his mind.

  The herald Talthybius travelled with as much speed as he could make along the muddy Isthmus road to Mycenae, breaking his journey for the night at a friend’s house in a small town where men were shouting over a cock-fight in the square. Neleus had once been a herald himself, in service first to King Atreus, and then later, as a matter of expediency, to the usurper Thyestes; but he was among the early defectors to the cause of the Atreides when Agamemnon was fighting to regain the throne, and had been rewarded with a comfortable retirement in this farmhouse looking out across the Gulf of Corinth. These days he took more interest in tending his vines and groves than in the machinations of courtly life, but he had an ear for gossip and it was through him that Talthybius learned of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of the bard Pelagon.

  After they had talked for a while of the degree to which King Nauplius of Euboea might be involved in conspiracies against Agamemnon, Neleus went on to warn Talthybius that it would be as well to warn his master that the son of Thyestes had also been seen travelling the Isthmus road.

  ‘Aegisthus? You think he’s up to something?’

  ‘When was he ever not?’

  ‘Does the Queen know of this?’

  ‘Who knows what the Queen knows?’ Neleus answered. ‘She’s always kept her own counsel. But her spies are all over Argos like lice on a mangy dog. If I know, then chances are that she does too.’

  Talthybius withdrew into silence, pondering both what he had been told and the tone in which it was offered. As her loyal appointee — it was on the Queen’s advice that Agamemnon had made him his chief herald many years earlier - he had secretly supplied Clytaemnestra with intelligence throughout the war; but the flow of information had been entirely one way. He had never received anything more than the occasional briefly worded demand in response. So he was now, he realised, entirely in the dark about recent developments in Mycenae, and the realisation left him more uneasy than he would have expected.