Odysseus yearned to touch his wife again. He wanted to feel her soft weight in his arms. He wanted to breathe the fresh, herby smell of her body. Somewhere there must still be a world that that did not stink of men’s sweat and fury and fear. A world where a man might think of other things than killing and dying.
Wearily, dreading that he was locked inside this world of blood for ever, never to see Penelope and his son again, Odysseus rose to meet another intolerable day.
His head was still heavy with the dream when Menelaus came to visit his lodge. He brought with him a small, grey-bearded man with a gammy leg and a canny glint in his eyes. Odysseus couldn’t recall having seen him before.
‘This is Prylis,’ Menelaus said. ‘He’s a farrier with the Lapiths. He’s come up with an interesting idea. I want to discuss it with you.’
Inwardly, Odysseus groaned. The malevolent energy of Menelaus’ renewed appetite for the war figured large among the many things he found hard to bear these days. He remembered the younger son of Atreus as he had been all those years ago on his wedding day in Sparta -- open-hearted and generous, tender with love for his bride, at pains to compensate for his brother’s aggressive manner, magnanimous in his hour of triumph. Of all the contenders for Helen’s hand, Menelaus had been the worthiest to win her, and it grieved Odysseus to reflect on what life had made of his friend.
He gestured for the two men to sit down. ‘So what is this idea?’
‘One that might win us this war,’ Menelaus smiled.
Odysseus studied the small man dubiously. ‘I’m ready to listen to anything that might get me home,’ he said.
Flattered to have the attention of these mighty men, and made garrulous by it, Prylis told how he had been a pirate and soldier- of-fortune in his younger days. He had sailed eastwards with Pirithous and Theseus, through the Hellespont and into the Black Sea, where by ill chance he had been taken captive and sold into slavery But like all Lapiths, he was skilled with horses and had proved his worth as a horse-breaker.
‘I got this leg from a Scythian brute of a stallion,’ he said, ‘but I held on anyway, and he came round sweet in the end.’
Prylis told how he had been sold on three times, moving south and eastwards every time, till he was taken into the service of a general in the army of a warlike people called the Assyrians, who lived between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates at a big place called Babylon.
Yes, Odysseus had heard of the people, but where was this leading?
The Assyrians were great warriors, he was told, and they had invented clever engines of war such as had not yet been seen in Argos or Crete. These engines were for use against fortified cities such as Troy, and there was one of them that had taken his fancy because it was called the Horse. The thing was built like a lodge on wheels and covered with dampened horse-hides to protect it from fire. The men who travelled under its shelter would push it along till they reached the gate of the city they were attacking, and then they would wield a huge battering ram against the gate until it fell open before them. If the Horse was built strongly enough the people on the walls could do nothing against it.
Prylis himself had seen a great city fall this way, and he would have gone on to say more but Menelaus interrupted him eagerly. ‘Surely it’s not beyond our powers to build such a horse?’ he exclaimed. ‘If one great city should fall to an engine like that, why not another?’
Odysseus’ cousin Sinon had been listening with interest to what the Lapith had to say. ‘It wouldn’t be too difficult to build such a thing,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of timber in the mountains and we could soon flay a few horses.’
‘Troy could be ours within the week,’ Menelaus put in. ‘What do you say?’
Stroking his beard, Odysseus gave the matter thought. He had been puzzling for years over how they would ever break through the massive walls of Troy yet such an idea had never occurred to him. Could it really be so simple? He began to play out the pictures in his mind.
Then he quickly saw the difficulty.
‘I can imagine cases where the thing might work,’ he said, ‘but consider the site on which Troy stands. For the ram to burst open a gate the horse must first come within reach of it. The Trojans are still strong enough to keep us from the wall with their chariots and foot-soldiers. And even if they weren’t, how could men push a heavy wooden engine up that steep ramp? It would have to be pulled not pushed, and how could that be done while under attack from the walls?’ Smiling, he shook his head. ‘It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t see how we could make it work -- not yet at least. Not till the Trojans are much weaker than they are today.’
Prylis frowned with disappointment, and Menelaus tried to argue for a time, yet both men only had to look at how steeply the walls of the city beetled on their ridge to see the strength of the objection.
Odysseus put a hand to the Lapith’s shoulder. ‘Who knows, friend Prylis, the time of your horse may still come. But there’s a lot of hard fighting to be done first.’ He looked up wryly at Menelaus before adding, ‘If we still have the stomach for it.’
That night he dreamed again. The goddess Athena came to him in his dream, fully armed and helmeted, wearing the aegis over her armour and carrying a golden staff. He gazed up in awe at her mighty figure and saw her grey eyes studying him with an expression of rebuke and disappointment. He could see Penelope and his son Telemachus cowering behind her, like hostages held beyond his reach.
‘You offered a horse to Poseidon, Odysseus,’ the goddess said. ‘Why do you not offer a horse to me?’
Odysseus jumped awake and could not sleep again. He lay on his bed pondering the dream.
Once again he considered what Prylis had said about the wooden siege-horse of the Assyrians, but he could still find no way round the objections he had raised to the idea. If the ramp had been less long and steep, and if the gate had not been so well guarded by its bastions, it might have been done. The way into Troy could have been battered open. But as things stood . . .
Not for the first time, Odysseus cursed old Aeacus of Aegina for having done such a good job of rebuilding the walls of Troy. He turned over in his bed and closed his eyes, looking for sleep.
And then he remembered the other dream. Again he saw the Argive captains climbing inside the reassembled body of the horse that had been sacrificed to Poseidon. Again the horror of that image kept him from sleep.
Eventually he got up and went to walk along the shore where the breakers were rolling in off the heavy swell of the bay to scatter their force against the strand. By the time the dawn light began to break across the turbulent eastern sky, Poseidon’s horse and the Assyrian horse had come together in his mind and Odysseus knew what must be done.
Several weeks later, as a fresh breeze from the east blew the early grey daylight across the plain of Troy, the watchmen on the tower of Ilium rubbed their eyes at an astounding sight. Apart from a seaward drift of smoke where fires were burning out, there were none of the usual signs of activity around the Argive camp. The curved prows of the ships that had lined the coast of the bay beyond the palisade for the best part of a year had vanished. Nor could the two watchmen see any vessels riding the waters of the Hellespont beyond.
For a moment they looked at each other in disbelief. Then one dared to say out loud what both were thinking: ‘They’ve gone! The Argives have gone.’
Deiphobus was lying asleep with one arm stretched out across Helen’s breast when his two surviving younger brothers, Capys and Thymoetes, came to wake him. Heavy-headed, and still bad- tempered from having discovered Helen too far gone with opium the previous night to be more than a desultory partner in his bed, he found it hard at first to take in what he was being told.
‘Are you sure?’ he demanded. ‘It could just be some sort of stratagem to lure us out beyond the walls.’
‘The scouts say not,’ Thymoetes insisted. ‘The lodges are burned, the ships are gone and there’s no one in the camp. It looks as though they’
ve taken the chance to get back home now that the weather’s turned.’
Allowing himself to begin to believe, Deiphobus uttered a little laugh. ‘Didn’t I tell you they couldn’t stand the thought of another winter out there? We’ve beaten them. In the name of all the gods, we’ve beaten them!’
But Capys was frowning. ‘There’s one strange thing about it.’
‘What’s that?’ Deiphobus demanded, immediately suspicious.
‘They’ve left something behind them on the beach. A horse, the scouts said. A great wooden horse.’
‘What do you mean -- a wooden horse?’
‘Just that. It’s a huge thing by all accounts, made of wood, in the shape of a horse. The scouts said they’d never seen anything like it before. They say there’s an inscription carved on it, but none of them can read. We’re about to go down to the coast to take a look, but we thought you’d want to see it for yourself.’
Helen had been disturbed by the voices outside the chamber. She stirred uneasily on the bed when Deiphobus came back to finish dressing, and asked what was happening.
‘It looks as though your Argive friends have seen sense at last.’
Helen sat up, holding her head between her hands. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Their camp’s empty. The ships are gone.’ Turning to look down where she lay with the richly woven throw gathered across her breast, Deiphobus caught the moment in which her disbelieving eyes began to flicker with alarm. ‘You don’t find the news to your taste? Perhaps you were hoping that Menelaus might come and carry you back to Sparta with him?’
When Helen turned her pallid face away, he saw how close to the mark his jibe had come. ‘What a faithless bitch you are!’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid you’re going to have to think again.’
Watching him stride out of the chamber, Helen found herself appalled by the thought of spending the rest of her days inside this city. She could hear the murmur in the streets outside as people came from their houses, roused by the news. Amid the barking of dogs a man was shouting somewhere. A woman began to sing one of the songs with which the whores used to taunt the Argives from the walls and her voice was soon joined by others. People were laughing and cheering everywhere.
It must be true then. Menelaus and Agamemnon had wearied of the cost of this long war. They had cut their losses and made off for home, leaving her alone among the Trojans, a worthless thing. Panic seized her then. Her mind filled with dark images. She could see what would happen. As time and wine and the drug erased her already jaded beauty, Deiphobus would tire of her. He would cast her off. She would be left to survive as best she could, passed on like a drab from man to man, because there would always be someone eager to brag that he had taken his pleasure with Helen of Sparta, Helen of Troy.
Helen got up from the bed, shivering in the morning light and crossed to the casement. From that high place in the palace buildings of the citadel she could see across the wall out to the plain where people were already running to dance in triumph on what remained of the Argive camp.
For ten years the people of this city had suffered the anguish of war on her account, and now their trials were over. But Paris was dead and Hector was dead, and Antiphus and Polydorus and countless others were dead with them. And King Priam was a broken man, trembling and rheumy, and all but dumb with grief. Yet the people would sing and dance and make merry with wine now because they had survived, and they need no longer wake up each morning wondering whether they would be dead or widowed before the end of the day.
The war was over, and it had been neither won nor lost. It had merely ground to a halt like the derelict thing it was. And, for now, she -- the chief cause and prize of all those years of struggle -- was forgotten in the shocked relief of its ending.
She was alone with her terror.
Beyond the palisade, the camp was a squalid tip of burned-out lodges, broken chariots, discarded equipment, and half-eaten bits of food over which the vultures and the pie-dogs squabbled. Smoke drifted across the mess, gusting in dirty billows along the beach where they could see the tracks carved into the sand by the keels of the Argive vessels as they were pushed back into the sea. The charred hulk of the ship that had been fired when Hector broke through the palisade and stormed the camp, still lurched on its props like something that had been disembowelled. In the growing heat of the morning, a fierce stink was lifted by the breeze across the strand from the open ditches of the latrines.
And over everything loomed the enigmatic figure of the horse.
Built of trunks and planks from the fir trees of the Idaean Mountains, it stood on thick splayed legs, each of them the girth of a tie-beam from a barn. The shipwrights or master-carpenters - whoever had constructed this astounding beast -- had smoothly jointed the thighs into the sinewy bulges of its shoulders and haunches, and the great swag of its belly curved like a barrel between. The sweep of its tail reached down to the platform on which the horse was mounted, acting as a counterweight to the forward thrust of the arched neck and the long, princely head, which hung some thirty feet high where the carved mane bristled between its ears. Its eyes were bulging, its hollow nostrils flared. There was a spring and vigour to its lines which seemed to lighten the inert tonnage of wood from which it had been hewn. And the sheer scale of the thing compelled silence for a time, as though this horse had broken loose from some paddock in the realm of the gods to cast its majestic shadow over the world of mortal men.
An inscription had been carved along one flank. King Priam, who had insisted on being carried down to the beach to witness the dereliction of the Argive camp, read the words aloud: Offered to Divine Athena that she may favour us with a safe journey home. Then he turned, smiling, to Deiphobus. ‘It seems you were right. The Argives are gone at last.’ Tears broke from the rims of his eyes. ‘Would that my son Hector had lived to see this day.’ Impatient that the old man should think first of his dead brother when this hour of triumph was entirely his own, Deiphobus turned away and saw Capys looking up at the massive horse with suspicion.
‘What about this thing?’ Capys said. ‘Why would they leave something as improbable as this behind?’
‘It speaks for itself,’ Deiphobus answered. ‘It’s an offering to the goddess. The Argives always looked to Athena for help and protection.’
‘Then why should we trust it?’ Capys asked, ‘I think we should burn it. I think we should make a burnt offering of it and cleanse our shore of the last trace of them.’
A murmur of assent rose from the people gathered round the royal party. What better way to be rid of these long years of war than an immense bonfire in which the horse would be incinerated along with the rest of the rubbish polluting the shore? They would burn their air clean.
‘But the horse belongs to the goddess,’Thymoetes said. ‘Might it not be an unlucky thing to desecrate her property?’
King Priam frowned up at the huge, noble head of the horse.
‘It is a thing of great beauty,’ he said uncertainly.
‘And it’s the emblem of our triumph.’ Deiphobus jumped up onto the platform of the horse and stood by one foreleg to address the crowd. ‘If they’re lucky, Divine Athena may grant the Argives a safe journey home, but she’s denied them victory here. I say we should keep this horse and bring it inside the walls so that our children’s children may look on it and remember how we Trojans fought to save our city.’
The mood of the crowd shifted at his words. Here was the new order in action.
Everything was possible once more.
Deiphobus turned to look at his father, who was nodding his old head beside him. ‘The gods have favoured us,’ Priam said, ‘and we should be thankful for it. We will take this idol to the temple of Athena and consecrate it to her there.’
But the thing was easier said than done. Logs were pulled down from the Argive palisade and used as levers and fulcrums. With enormous effort the front edge of the platform was lifted high enough for the first of many rollers
to be slid under it. Thick ropes were made fast about the horse’s neck and extended with knots until two long lines of men could get a grip on them and begin to haul the horse across the strand towards the dismantled gateway of the palisade.
Yet the thing was immensely heavy, and as the sun rose higher, the heat of the day increased. Hour after hour, the horse jerked clumsily forward on its rollers, but the ground was uneven and progress slow. Men were often hurt in the scramble to replace the rollers and keep up such momentum as they gained. At each upward gradient, the weight of the horse increased, and where the land sloped downhill, it had to be restrained from behind rather than dragged from the front. Not till the middle of the afternoon, after sustained effort by changing shifts of men, did it stand at the foot of the ramp leading up the ridge to the Scaean Gate. By then it was already evident that they would never be able to haul the horse to the top of the ridge unless an efficient system of winches and pulleys was installed. Even, if they succeeded, the crenellated parapet above the gate would have to be demolished to accommodate the height of the horse’s head.
For some time many among the haulers had been grumbling that the whole enterprise was insane and not worth the trouble it was costing them. But Deiphobus had been determined from the first that the horse should be brought into Troy as a symbol of the city’s strength and his zeal had kept them going far into the day. Now even he was disheartened by the scale of the effort still required.
Capys looked up at his brother from where he panted above a water-skin. ‘We should have burned the thing in the first place, like I said.’
‘Or we could just leave it out here on the plain,’ Thymoetes suggested.
Feeling his own arms aching from the strain of the turn he had taken at the ropes, Deiphobus imagined Agamemnon and Odysseus laughing over this struggle to drag the horse inside the city. He frowned up at the great weight of wood that threatened to defeat him. Perhaps his brothers were right.
The War At Troy Page 42