The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  The Dolopians were a restless people who had travelled from the far west a generation or two ago and settled about the shores of Thessaly. Now, under their king Lycomedes, some of them had felt the urge to move out to the Scattered Islands in the eastern sea and they had established a stronghold of their own on the windy island of Skyros. The move happened not long after Peleus had established his kingship over the Myrmidons, and feeling the strong call of island life, Thetis had wanted to go with them.

  For a time it had been a struggle between them. Born on an island himself, Peleus knew the nature of the call, but he was king over a mainland people now and it was his wife’s duty to remain with him and provide him with an heir. Was it not enough that he had already shifted the court to the coast for her sake?

  He had understood her need for the sea. He was content for her to hold to cult practices which he did not share, and which -- though he did not say it -- he did not greatly trust. But she must respect the constraints imposed by royal duty on their life. They would remain where they were in Thessaly.

  Meanwhile Peleus had been kept busy enough. Once he was secure on his throne he had harnessed the power of the Myrmidons to settle his score with Acastus. A swift, brutal campaign took them through Magnesia into Iolcus. Acastus was killed in the fight and his mad wife was quickly put to death. Giving thanks to Zeus and Artemis, who had a powerful cult centre in Iolcus, Peleus was declared king there and made Iolcus his new coastal capital.

  Having learned the laws and customs of the Myrmidons, he set now about harmonizing them with those of Magnesia, trying to run a peaceable kingdom, and giving judgement in the quarrels with which his warlike men filled the boredom of their peaceful days. Also there was always a pressing need to raise money. To feed and clothe the royal households, to pay his retainers, arm his warriors, carry out his building projects, repair his ships, and make expensive offerings to the gods, all of this took a lot of gold. What could not be raised as tribute must be found elsewhere, so in company with the ageing Theseus, he turned pirate in the summer months and took to raiding the merchant ships and rich estates of the eastern seaboard.

  He made his reputation as a valiant warrior and a generous king on those voyages, though his exploits never ranged as widely as those of his brother. Telamon had already sailed on Jason’s Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece, and had become a close comrade to Heracles, who was renowned and feared from Epirus to Paphlagonia as the boldest, most vigorous and, at times, the maddest hero of the age. Having already made a further expedition round the coast of the Black Sea into the land of the Amazons, Telamon and Heracles were now mounting a campaign against the Phrygian city of Troy.

  Telamon tried to talk his brother into joining forces with them, but Peleus lacked his restless appetite for battle and was reluctant to risk his kingdom’s hard won wealth in what promised to be an unprofitable attack on a bankrupt city recently visited by plague and earthquake. But neither did he wish to look weak in Telamon’s eyes. In the end the decision was made for him by a wound he took in a ship-fight that spring. A Sidonian sword cut his right hamstring as he leapt aboard the galley, putting him out of action for months.

  That was also the year in which his sixth child died in early infancy, and the grief of it was more than he could bear. A marriage that had begun so inauspiciously was now eroded by mutual disappointment, and its passion had faded as its tensions increased. Peleus was often given cause to puzzle over what Cheiron had said about Thetis entertaining immortal longings, but it seemed to account for her restlessness and the way her spirit sometimes chafed against his own more practical concerns. These days she seemed to take comfort only in Harpale’s company, and Peleus grew to resent the power that the little Dolopian exercised over his wife’s imagination. Harpale soon learned to stay out of his way, though her name frequently cropped up in conversation with his wife, reproaching him like the sting of a sea-urchin for the island life she was denied.

  Of Thetis’s failure to provide him with an heir it became ever harder to speak, so when he finally decided to consult Cheiron about his injured leg, Peleus went against his wife’s wishes and raised this other, graver matter with him too.

  Cheiron listened carefully as he applied thick poultices to his son-in-law’s leg. He asked questions about the practices of the cuttlefish cult, and took a particular interest in the part that Harpale had come to play in his daughter’s life. Knowing something of the Dolopians, he asked Peleus whether there had been any unusual signs of the use of fire in his daughter’s rites. Peleus was unable to answer, however, because he was now excluded from all that part of his wife’s life. His own service was to Zeus, to Apollo, and to the goddess, whether worshipped as Athena in Itonus or as Artemis in Iolcus; but as to his wife’s most secret mysteries, he was as ignorant as his horse.

  Cheiron nodded. ‘Remain here till these herbs have shared their virtue. Had you come sooner I could have done more, but now you will always walk with a limp. Still,’ he smiled up into his friend’s face, ‘if you had been your horse I would have had to cut your windpipe!’ He fastened the bandage and sat back to wash his hands. ‘As to the other matter, I will reflect on it.’

  When Peleus travelled back down the mountain he brought with him a Centaur woman called Euhippe, who wept such fat tears when they left the gorge that Peleus guessed that the old king’s pallet of grass would be a lonelier place after the parting. She was a small, round woman with a shyly attentive manner, and large, surprisingly delicate hands. Overtly she was to be taken into the household as a nurse for the care of Peleus’s wound, but he soon intended to make it known that Euhippe was a skilful midwife too.

  By the time he returned to his palace at Iolcus, Thetis was already over two months pregnant. Moody, and still prey to sickness, she at once made it clear that she would have nothing to do with the little mountain woman, whom she dismissed first as her father’s hairy brood-mare, and then, after the cruel pretence of a closer look, as his jaded nag. Peleus protested. There was an unholy row between them that night, and silence for two weeks after.

  Then the sickness passed, they talked and made love again, only to resume the queasy truce their life had become. Thetis still refused to include Euhippe among the women of her bedchamber, but the Centaur found an unobtrusive place for herself in the royal household and her medical skills soon won her grateful friends. After successfully treating one woman for a rash around her midriff, and another for a dangerous fever, she gained a reputation as a wise woman and became a great favourite among the Myrmidon barons and their wives. Only Thetis, as her belly grew rounder by the month, continued to ignore her existence.

  If she feared that Euhippe had been placed to spy on her, then her fears were justified, for on the occasions when she came to examine his leg, Peleus questioned her closely about anything she had learned of his wife’s activities. For several weeks she found nothing unusual to report, but in the eighth month of Thetis’s pregnancy, Euhippe made friends with a young woman who was complaining of intense pain from her monthly bleeding. Euhippe gave her a potion made up of guelder rose, skullcap and black haw for immediate relief, and advised her to return soon for further treatment. When she came back, they began to chat, and it emerged that the girl served as a handmaid in the cuttlefish cult. Through cautiously worded questions, Euhippe learned that there had been nothing outwardly wrong with any of Thetis’s babies -- no fevers or defects, nothing that would account for their early death. It was a mystery, the girl said, unless the Goddess had called them back to her.

  When Euhippe asked her casually about Harpale’s role in the cult, the girl flushed a little, looked away, and said that her own degree was lowly and she was too young to be initiated into such matters. Nor was she prepared to speculate.

  ‘But there was a smell of fear about her,’ Euhippe decided. ‘She may not know much, but she knows more than she was letting on, and it frightens her.’

  With his own suspicions now confirmed, Peleus asked E
uhippe to keep her ears open, and eventually more emerged through one of the baron’s wives. It was this woman who first dared to speak of witchcraft, but she did so darkly, casting her suspicions only on the Dolopian, not on Thetis herself, and in a way that left Euhippe feeling the woman meant her to report what she said.

  Knowing that Thetis had once offended this woman, Peleus suggested that she might be spreading rumours out of spite, but Euhippe merely shrugged.

  ‘You truly believe that something terrible is happening?’ he demanded.

  ‘For you it would be terrible,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘I may be wrong.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  Euhippe thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  ‘Then what am I to think,’ he demanded, ‘what am I to do?’ ‘You need do nothing. Not until the baby is born.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Let us wait in patience. When the time comes we will see what to do.’

  The truth of what happened at that time was known only to Peleus himself and he would not speak of it -- not, that is, until some six years later when Odysseus arrived at his court for the first time. By then the child -- Peleus’s seventh son, and the only one to survive -- was already in the mountains with Cheiron, learning how to live. Peleus lived alone in his gloomy palace under the patient, mostly silent care of Euhippe, and for a time his melancholic condition had been the talk of Argos. Telamon and Theseus had both tried to shake him out of it and failed. Cheiron was too old to come down from the mountains, and Peleus lacked the heart to seek him out. So the King of the Myrmidons wasted in his loneliness, limping from hall to chamber, hardly speaking, and increasingly reliant on trusted ministers to handle the affairs of state. Old friends like Pirithous and Theseus died. Power shifted south to Mycenae. People began to forget about him.

  Then Odysseus ran his ship ashore on the strand at Iolcus. King Nestor of Pylos had encouraged him to come. Everyone responded to the lively young prince of Ithaca, he’d said -- perhaps old Peleus might. ‘Why not see if you can’t tempt him to join you in your raid along the Mysian coast. Peleus was a good pirate in his day. He might be so again.’

  There was, Odysseus quickly saw, no chance of it. The man could barely lift a smile let alone a sword. Shrugging his shoulders, he had made up his mind to cut his losses and push off at dawn, when Peleus looked up from his wine-cup for the first time in nearly an hour and said, ‘It was good of you to come. Everyone has forgotten how to smile around me. You seem to do little else.’

  ‘It costs me nothing,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘Does it disturb you?’

  Unsmiling, Peleus shook his head. After a time he began to talk and a god must have entered him, for once he began it became unstoppable. That night witnessed a huge unburdening because Odysseus was the only person to whom Peleus ever spoke about what happened between himself and his wife. Odysseus listened in spellbound horror to a tormented account of how, at the prompting of Euhippe, he had cleansed himself before Zeus, begged forgiveness of the Goddess, and broken in to the sacred precinct around the sea-cave where Thetis held her rites. It was the dark of the moon after the birth of the child. Pushing aside the drug-intoxicated women who tried to stop him, Peleus entered the cave and saw the dark figures of Thetis and Harpale standing under a primitive wooden idol to the Goddess beside an altar of burning coals. Harpale held a finely meshed net of mail. Thetis was unwrapping the swaddling bands from her howling baby, and Peleus saw at once what they intended to do. If he had he not come in time to prevent it, she and Harpale would have done what they must have done many times before -- they would have seined the child with fire, passing its tiny body back and forth along the shimmer of hot air above the altar’s glowing coals until it was immortalized.

  With a howl of execration, Peleus drew his sword, cut Harpale down where she stood, and snatched the baby from its screaming mother. Had the child not been squalling in his grip like a small storm, he might have killed Thetis also, but by the time he could lift the sword again the frenzied moment had passed and he could not bring himself to do it. Thetis saw the conflict in his face. Astoundingly, she released a small, frustrated laugh.

  With the baby tussling in his arm, he stared at her as at a mad woman. She held his gaze, and they stood unmoving in the heat and sea-smell of the cave, knowing that the infant might have been spared its flames, but the fire that Thetis had lit had instantly consumed all traces of their love for one another.

  Heart-broken, and unwilling to command the death of Cheiron’s daughter, Peleus had her kept under close confinement for a time. The child he gave to a wet-nurse, one of Euhippe’s friends, a Centaur woman who had been brought back from a hunt, freed at Peleus s insistence, and now lived with one of the palace cooks. It was she who named her tiny charge Achilles, the lipless one, because his lips had never been warmed into life at his mother’s breast. But Peleus found it hard even to look at his son because the child’s cries always recalled the horror of that night. On one thing, however, he was resolved -- that Thetis should never come close either to the child or to himself. So in the end, on the understanding that she would die if ever she returned to Thessaly, he gave her leave to do what she had always wished to do and Thetis joined her mother’s people on the remote island of Skyros.

  ‘But the boy lived,’ Odysseus said at last, filled with sympathy for the man who sat across from him, staring at the dying embers of the fire. ‘You have a son and heir.’

  ‘Whom I hardly know,’ Peleus answered, ‘and who knows nothing of me.’

  ‘That can be repaired. You can recall him from Cheiron’s school at any time.’

  ‘To live in this darkness with me?’

  ‘The child might lighten it.’

  Sighing, Peleus searched the young Ithacan’s face. ‘Fortunately, it was prophesied that the boy will be a greater man than his father.’

  Odysseus said, ‘Then he will be a great soul indeed.’

  Warmed by the company of this new friend, Peleus asked Odysseus to stay with him in Iolcus for a time. The Ithacan gladly agreed and the two men talked often together, exchanging stories of former exploits and discussing the changes in the world now that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, had reclaimed the throne in Mycenae and was expanding his power to such an extent that he must soon be acclaimed as High King of all Argos. They talked of lighter matters too and Odysseus had at last got his host laughing merrily one evening when the arrival of another visitor was announced.

  As a bastard son of King Actor, Menoetius was loosely related to Peleus by marriage, and he had sailed around the straits from the Locrian city of Opus in search of help from him. Menoetius had a six year old son who was in trouble, having killed one of his friends when an argument over a game of knucklebones turned into a fight.

  ‘There’s no great harm in the boy,’ he said, frowning, ‘apart from his passionate temper. And it breaks my heart, but I can’t keep him with me in Opus. There’s blood guilt on him now, and the father of the boy he killed loved his son as much as I do mine.’

  Peleus nodded. ‘So what are you asking of me?’

  Menoetius asked if he might bring his son into the hall, and when permission was given, Peleus and Odysseus found themselves confronted by a scrawny six-year-old with a thick shock of hair and a downcast gaze firmly fixed on his own freshly scrubbed feet. Remembering how his own early fate had been shaped by the death of another, Peleus said, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  Briefly the small face glowered up at him in sulky defiance, then immediately looked down again, saying nothing.

  ‘His name’s Patroclus,’ Menoetius said, ‘though, as you see, he hasn’t brought much glory on his father so far.’

  ‘There’s still plenty of time,’ Odysseus put in lightly.

  Menoetius looked back at Peleus in appeal. ‘I hear that you’ve sent your own son to the Centaur?’ When Peleus nodded again, he added. ‘I was wondering if you thought he might
be able to sort this boy out.’

  ‘He sorted me out,’ Peleus said quietly.

  ‘But that dreadful business at the wedding of Pirithous . . . when they got drunk . . .’ Menoetius saw Peleus frown. He hesitated and began again. ‘I mean, weren’t you already a man when you went to Cheiron.’

  ‘I was more of a man when I came away. As were Pirithous and Jason, though they were sent to him as boys. And I might have been a better man still if I’d stayed among the Centaurs.’ Peleus shook his head. ‘But that was not my fate. As it is, I was glad to send my son to Cheiron. And since then a number of my Myrmidons have done the same.’ He turned back to where Patroclus shifted uneasily on his feet. ‘Look at me, boy.’ Grimly, Patroclus did as he was bidden. ‘Would you like to hunt and learn how to talk to horses? Would you like to know the magic locked in herbs, and how to sing and finger the lyre so that the animals come out of the trees to listen?’

  Uncertainly Patroclus nodded.

  ‘I think I’d like to go to this school myself,’ Odysseus smiled. Astounded by himself, Peleus said suddenly, ‘Then come up the mountain with me tomorrow.’

  Odysseus looked up, surprised at the transformation in his friend. Some god must be at work here. He felt the hairs prickle at the nape of his neck. But he smiled and nodded. Why not? Yes, he would be glad to go.

  Peleus turned back to Menoetius. ‘It’s time I went to see how my own son’s doing. You’ve done the right thing. Leave your boy with me.’

  Apart from a tree that had been struck by lightning and the number of scruffy children to be fed, Peleus found the gorge hardly changed since the last time he had been there. But Cheiron felt much older, his cheeks were hollower than Peleus remembered, and the wrinkles deeply pouched about his eyes. His movements were slower too, though he was still limber, and his hands trembled as he offered a libation of mare’s milk in thanksgiving for the return of his son and friend. He welcomed Odysseus warmly among his people, and smiled kindly at Patroclus, questioning him a little, before packing him off to play with some of the other children by the stream. A boy was sent to search for Achilles in the woods and, as they walked to the cave, Peleus explained why Patroclus had been sent to him. But Cheiron merely nodded in reply, and then shook his head over the way Peleus was limping across the rocks. ‘You should have come to me sooner,’ he said, ‘then as now.’