‘Go,’ she reprimanded him lightly. ‘Disrobe.’
Like an obedient boy, he turned to do as he was bidden, shuffling off his sandals and pulling his dark red linen robe over his head and shoulders. Admiring the lines of her figure where she bent over to gather towels from a chest, he slipped out of his kilt and drawers and stood naked in the steam from the bath, suddenly conscious of the aches and pains locked into his limbs. He flexed the sinews of his arms and pushed his hands back through the mane of his loosened hair. Though he had put on weight since Clytaemnestra had last seen him this way, he was still, he thought, a handsome figure of a man; and if his skin was etched like a butcher’s block with the many wounds he had taken, they were all honourable scars, the signature of his valour and virility.
‘Look,’ he said, displaying his body, arms outstretched, as she came towards the massage table with a bundle of soft towels in her arms, ‘here is a map of the war at Troy. I have good tales to tell about each of these scars.’ With the tip of a stubby finger he traced the white ridge that ran along his upper right arm, almost from the elbow to the shoulder. ‘This is the gash I got from a Trojan spear on the day they drove us back to the ships. The host panicked when they saw me bleeding. Odysseus and Diomedes also took wounds that day, and Achilles was out of the fight, sulking in his lodge. For a time I thought it was all up with us.’
But she had, it seemed, discouragingly little interest in his story. ‘Get into the bath,’ she urged. ‘You can brag of your valour to me while you soak.’
In mock offence he pouted his lips at her. She answered with a haughty toss of her head and laid the heaped towels carefully on the table. Turning away from her, Agamemnon walked across the tiles towards the bath. He was about to step down into its soothing heat when he was struck by another thought. He looked back to share it just in time to see her standing as a fisherman stands at the prow of his boat when he casts a net. Then something swooped in a widening loop towards him. It came at him through the air like a silent cloud of bees, and before he had time to understand what was happening, the meshes fell in a gauzy shower over his head and shoulders, and then dropped down across his arms and thighs. Perplexed and shocked, he was raising his arms to push the coarse grey blur away from his body when she tugged with both hands on the slender length of rope she held and the net tightened around his limbs.
He was shouting now. Still able to keep his balance on his bare feet, but tangled like a maddened bear inside the trammels of the net and scarcely able to move his arms and legs, Agamemnon twisted his body round to confront his wife. He saw Clytaemnestra walking towards him with a sword gripped in both hands. Its pommel trembled close to her chin; the blade angled down in front of her breasts; but his eyes were fixed on the pallid mask of hatred that was her face.
In the moment when Agamemnon saw that his wife was about to murder him, she raised her arms above her head and brought the blade down with all her might, through the toils of the net, into the broad target of his chest where he felt the breast-bone shatter.
He might have fallen then from the force of the thrust, but his ribs were caught on the blade and the pressure of her grip on the hilt supported him. For a few seconds they stood together, face to face, conjoined by the sword, staring into each other’s eyes as the steam rose round them. Both were sweating in the moist air, though neither was now entirely in this world.
Agamemnon coughed, choking on something deep in his throat that should not be there. Harm had been done to his breathing. The channels of his ears were loud with noise. Each part of his body had begun to panic like a routed army. He knew that he could no longer count on the strength of his legs.
Leaning forward, with a twist of her wrists Clytaemnestra tugged the sword free; and felt the frisky spatter of blood across her face.
He staggered as his head went down. Now he was spluttering on the froth of blood and spittle bubbling in his mouth. Agamemnon raised his chin and saw, through the mesh of the net, an unsightly red smear staining her cheek as she wiped the back of her wrist across her eyes. Was she wounded too? Was the blood his or hers? No matter, for he was trying to spit his throat clear of obstructions so that he could breathe again when the sword came back at him.
The blade swung in lower this time, held in only one hand, yet entering his naked belly with alarming ease. The force of it winded him. Sodden air gushed upwards from his punctured lung. As the sword slid out again terrible things had already begun to happen in places he couldn’t see. Nor could he even raise his arms to hug himself. A huge tidal wave of self-pity pushed Agamemnon down to his knees. Blood had splashed on the tiles. He knelt in a gathering pool of it, gasping and wheezing there. This was no way for the King of Men to die. There was neither justice nor glory in it. He refused to die like this.
Summoning his failing reserves of strength, Agamemnon lifted his head; but his eyes were bleary with tears when he looked up again.
He saw the figure of a woman standing near him and, in a quick flurry of relief, thought that he recognized Cassandra. Yes, she would come to help him now when help was needed. She would comfort and succour him. She would wipe this mess from his mouth and take him to her breasts where her nipples stood dark and sweet as figs. He tried to hold out his hand to her but the toils of the net prevented him. In a sputtering of blood he whispered her name.
‘Have patience,’ the woman hissed, ‘your Trojan whore will lie beside you soon enough.’ And he heard the hatred there and saw that he was mistaken, for the face that stared at him was the face of Clytaemnestra after all.
And there are two figures standing before him now, neither of them clear, neither of them quite stable. They are looking not at him but at each other and both their mouths are agape. They might be shouting, both at the same time, but he cannot be sure because of the hollow roar gusting through his ears. One of them is his wife wearing a bloodstained gown; but the other? A man, yes, but who among his subjects could stand and look on and do nothing while this dreadful harm was done to him?
Before Agamemnon can make out the features of that face, his own head droops on his neck and he is vomiting blood and bile and the wine he has drunk. His beard stinks of his dying. He wants to lie down. That’s all he wants, and it’s little enough to ask when he is in such pain, but someone has crouched down in front of him and is holding up his chin in the tight pluck of a finger and thumb. Through the trammels of the net a man’s face sneers into his own. As if against a strong gale, a voice is asking, ‘Do you know me, cousin?’
Agamemnon knows only that time and breath and light are running out on him.
When he shakes his head he is merely trying to clear the thick, obstructing slobber from his throat, but the man takes it for an answer.
‘I am Aegisthus,’ he hisses, ‘son of Thyestes. Now do you know me?’ He holds up the bronze blade before Agamemnon’s bewildered eyes. ‘This is the sword with which my mother killed herself. This is the sword with which I took righteous vengeance for my father by slaying yours. And this, dear brother in treachery, is the sword with which I mean to cleanse the world of you.’
But Agamemnon is no longer present to feel the blade intruding on his flesh. He has been watching Troy burn again; he has seen Menelaus and Odysseus, Ajax and Diomedes laughing at his side, and his mighty fleet of ships flexing their oars against the glitter of the sea; and here now is his father, King Atreus, grim-faced and resolute as he watches his wife drowning in the Bay of Argos. And then, only a moment or two later, after a little, clumsy fall over which he has no control at all, Agamemnon is down there in the water with his mother, feeling the warmth beneath the surface, letting it enter him, becoming it, as Poseidon grips him by the hair and tugs him down into green shadows and the last light spins away.
PART TWO: The Book of Athena
The World Turned Upside Down
Of all these things we Ithacans remained in ignorance for some considerable time after the fall of Troy. A brand from the burning city had been u
sed to light the beacon fire on Mount Ida. Within minutes it was spotted by the picket of Argive scouts camped on a mountain peak sacred to Hermes on the island of Lemnos. From there the fanfare of flame leapt across the Aegean to the rock of Zeus on Mount Athos, and thence down the mainland, from summit to summit, through Thessaly to Locris, from there into Boeotia and Attica, and on across the Saronic Gulf until at last a beacon was lit on Mount Arachne. That blaze was seen by the watcher on the crag at Mycenae, and there the fiery signals stopped.
Having all the information she needed, Queen Clytaemnestra was possessed by no urgent desire to share it further. So the western kingdoms of Argos would have to wait for runners to bring the news; and Ithaca must wait still longer, for the Ionian Sea was tormented by gales throughout that wintry month, no ships were putting out, and we might have been as distant from the Peloponnesian mainland as we were from Troy itself.
Then the winds abated and the seas calmed down. A Phoenician merchantman, damaged by the gales and blown off course for the island of Sicily, put in for repairs at a haven on Zacynthos. Two days later an Ithacan fisherman who had been stranded there returned to our island with the news that the Phoenician captain had heard about the fall of Troy just as he was putting to sea again from Crete. It was rumoured that the Trojans had been completely wiped out and that the Argive host had taken a stupendous quantity of plunder.
Telemachus and I were in town on the morning that the excited fisherman pulled his boat up on the strand, so we were among the first to hear the news. I jumped up and down in the sand and gave a little skip; then I turned and punched Telemachus in the shoulder. ‘Did you hear that?’ I shouted, amazed that he was not more excited. ‘We’ve won. It’s over. Troy’s done for. It can’t be long before they all come home.’
‘Be quiet, Phemius,’ he said, and he turned to the fisherman — his name was Dolon — asking whether there was any news of his father. Unfortunately, Dolon was not the brightest of men, and he was passing on what he had learned at third or fourth hand, so none of us could make much sense of what he had to say about the crucial role played in the fall of Troy by a cunning horse belonging to Odysseus. It wasn’t long before Antinous and Leodes, two of the young men of the island who had been drawn down to the strand by Dolon’s shouts as he drew his boat ashore, accused him of spreading fanciful gossip.
‘No, no, it’s true,’ Dolon protested. ‘They were dancing on Zacynthos when I sailed. Already they are feasting in Same. It’s true, I tell you. It’s all true.’
‘But my father’s alive?’ Telemachus pressed. ‘They said he was alive.’
‘Oh yes, Odysseus is alive,’ Dolon answered with a grin that exposed his few remaining teeth, ‘he’s alive all right and no doubt covered in gold these days. We shan’t know him when he comes back. He’ll be chiming like a herd of goats with all the gold dangling about his person.’
Antinous, who had been drinking wine, sneered at Telemachus, saying, ‘I can’t think why you’re so excited. You won’t know him anyway. And I can’t see Odysseus being at all happy about sharing your mother’s bed with you.’
Telemachus glared up at Antinous with his mouth open and his fists clenched, but this handsome lout was well over a foot taller and more than ten years his senior. If it came to a fight, there was no doubt which of them would win, and both of them knew it, which was why, in the absence of Odysseus, Antinous took malicious pleasure in keeping warm the bad blood between their two families.
Antinous was the son of a prosperous baron called Eupeithes who kept court in the north of the island on the far side of Mount Neriton. He was a distant kinsman of King Laertes, but there was little warmth between them, and Odysseus had not been surprised when Eupeithes contributed two small ships to the Ionian fleet but declined to go to the war himself on the grounds of ill health. Some years earlier the man had revealed a cowardly and duplicitous side to his nature when he came sweating into the palace late one afternoon seeking refuge from the wrath of his own people. Soon afterwards a band of shepherds were hammering at the outer gate demanding that he be handed over to them.
Things only came clear when a spokesman for the shepherds was admitted to the palace. He claimed that Eupeithes was in league with a gang of Taphian pirates who had recently despoiled several villages on the coast of Thesprotia. Some kinsmen of the northern Ithacans who had settled there a generation earlier had refused to pay these pirates for protection. Days later they had seen their crops and houses burned and their cattle and sheep run off. Three men who tried to resist the pillaging had been cut down. And when King Laertes demanded to know what any of this had to do with his cousin, the shepherd answered that cattle bearing the brand of one of the Thesprotian farmers had been found among Eupeithes’ herd.
Though Eupeithes at once denied the charge, his guilt had been immediately evident to Laertes and Odysseus. They were unconvinced, however, that he deserved to die for his unsavoury part in the affair. ‘Let me reason with him,’ Odysseus suggested, and Eupeithes soon found himself entangled in the devices of a subtle mind. Beguiled by his kinsman’s understanding manner and mistaking it for sympathy, he ended up confessing that he had been a fool to get mixed up with the pirates in the first place. Moments later, he saw the sense of it when Odysseus muttered that the only way that Eupeithes could now save his skin was by paying generous compensation.
Relations between the two men had been uneasy ever since, and when he was recruiting warriors for the fleet he would take to Troy, Odysseus had been in no doubt that he would rather leave such an unreliable character at home than have him fighting at his side. Briefly he considered drafting Eupeithes’ eldest son Antinous, but the boy was not yet twelve at the start of the war and Odysseus guessed that he would probably turn out to be more trouble than he was worth. So Antinous had stayed at home, where at every opportunity he took pleasure in humiliating Telemachus.
The two of them stared at one another now, Telemachus quivering where he stood, Antinous smirking down at him. Beside them Leodes gave a little snigger of contempt. Flushing, Telemachus turned on his heel and walked away. I was about to follow him when I saw our friend Peiraeus among the people hurrying down to the strand where the fishwives had begun to sing and dance. Anxious to divert attention from what had just happened, I called out the news.
‘Now you’ll really have something to sing about,’ he said as we caught up with Telemachus. ‘You’d better start working on a song for when Odysseus gets back. It can’t be long now.’ Then he took in the taciturn frown with which Telemachus was staring at the sea. ‘You don’t seem too cheerful about it. Why the long face?’
But though Telemachus flushed again, he failed to answer.
‘Antinous is a fool,’ I said. ‘Take no notice of him.’
‘What did he say this time?’ Peiraeus asked.
When Telemachus still said nothing, I muttered ‘It was nothing. Just some stupid remark about our not recognizing Odysseus when he gets back.’
‘But he’s right,’ Telemachus snapped. ‘I won’t know him, will I? I’ve no idea what he looks like. He’ll be nothing more to me than a glorious stranger.’
Again he turned away and walked on ahead of us, taking the path that led around the hill towards the southerly shore where the pale glare of a wintry sun shimmered across the sea. Peiraeus and I looked at one another, wondering whether to follow him, both of us aware that in his injured pride the boy might stay glum and sullen for hours now, even with us, his friends.
‘Aren’t you going to the palace to tell your mother?’ Peiraeus called after him.
‘She’ll find out soon enough,’ he said without looking back. ‘You can tell her.’
‘But she’ll want to share the joy with you,’ I protested. ‘What shall I say you’re doing?’
Telemachus stopped in his tracks for a moment. I watched him struggling with his feelings, a turbulent eleven-year old with a fearsome frown, who eventually pushed back the shock of tawny hair that fell across
his brow and said, ‘Tell her I’ve gone down to the Cave of the Nymphs. Tell her I’m making an offering for my father’s speedy return. Tell her what you like. I don’t care.’
In the event, I discovered later, he did neither. Instead he walked to Arethusa’s Spring where he stood scratching the back of a fat sow that the swineherd Eumaeus had penned away from the rest of the herd while she suckled an early litter. From there he could gaze southwards across the sheer fall of Crow Rock to where the island of Zacynthos lifted its blue-grey blur on the horizon. A strait of water separated the island from the mainland, and it was through that strait that his father’s fleet of ships would sail on the day of their return.
Telemachus had been looking forward to that day for as long as he could remember; yet now that it was at hand he was filled with unexpected trepidation. What if he didn’t like the man? After all the marvellous things he had been encouraged to believe about him, wasn’t he bound to be a disappointment? Still worse, what if his father should take a critical look at him and form the same low opinion of his son as Antinous held? Again Telemachus flushed at the thought. Big as Antinous was, he should have bloodied his nose down on the strand and taken the punishment it brought, rather than turning away and saying nothing. What would Odysseus, sacker of cities, the hero of the war at Troy, make of a son who backed down before a bully’s jibes?
With her farrow beginning to snatch at her teats, the sow snorted and waddled away across the grass towards the shade of a holm-oak, where she dropped her hind legs and collapsed, grunting, onto her side. Squealing, the piglets clambered over one another in their haste to plug their small snouts to her belly.
Telemachus was staring at them, wishing he was older, wishing he was bigger, when a voice behind him said, ‘Niobe’s a good old sow. Farrowed a dozen she did, and she’s still suckling the lot.’ He turned and saw Eumaeus standing there with his grandfather, old King Laertes, leaning on his staff at his side.
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