Heroes

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  ‘And you’re sure that it’s them?’ asked the queen.

  ‘As sure as I’m alive. I recognized the emblems on their ships and on their weapons.’

  ‘And. . him?’

  ‘He’s surely on his ship, the one with the royal emblem and the polished shield at the stern. His best warriors are on armed guard all around the ship. They’re on their feet, in the dark, in two rows: the first facing the ship and the second, back-to-back with the others, facing the sea and the countryside.’

  Aigialeia’s face lit up with joy and Diomedes, from his hiding place, felt his spirit fill with immense happiness. He was on the verge of revealing himself to the woman who seemed so joyous over his return. He hadn’t even felt such elation the night Troy had fallen after years of siege.

  Aigialeia said: ‘No. They’re not for him, the guards and the double row of warriors. He never protects himself. No one could ever surprise him in his sleep, not even by stealing up in bare feet on the sand. And no one could hope to save his skin after having roused him and challenged him to combat. If what you say is true, on that ship are the spoils of war. All the treasures that he took from the city of Troy. And, perhaps, something more important still. We must eliminate him before the people find out. We’ll say that the ships were full of pirates who had landed to sack the fields and to steal slaves and livestock.’

  The man answered: ‘The army is ready. Nearly all of his men are sleeping, exhausted from the voyage. We’ll wipe them out in their sleep and then it will be easy to crush the guards around the king’s ship. And when I have seized the treasure I will bring it to you.’

  ‘You fool,’ said Aigialeia, ‘you can’t defeat him with weapons! The din of the battle will infuriate him; he’ll leap out of bed with all his armour and mow you down like heads of wheat. Only I can sway him. I shall go to the ship wearing the dress of the ancient queens that bares my breasts. I will paint the tips of my breasts red, and when he has taken me, again and again, only then will he sleep in a slumber so profound that he won’t feel the air parting for my dagger as it plunges into his back. You will attack then, and you will not spare a single one of the comrades who fought with him under the walls of Ilium.’

  The man trembled and sweat poured down his face. He said: ‘And will you wear the dress of the ancient queens for me as well, the dress that bares your breasts? And will you paint the tips of your breasts red for me?’

  Aigialeia stared at him with her harsh, haughty gaze. ‘Perhaps. But now do as I’ve commanded.’

  Diomedes felt his heart splitting in his chest. For an instant he wanted to break into the room and slay them both, but fear stopped him. He did not know if he could plant his sword between the breasts of the woman he had dreamed of for years as he slept under his tent on the plains of Ilium. He realized that he would never be able to sit on the throne of Argos without her, nor sleep in his empty bed without going mad.

  He thought, in those moments of acute pain, that he had to reach his comrades and save them from the attack.

  His men were all that were left of his kingdom and of his family. There was no one in Argos who desired his return if his own queen were prepared to kill him. And if his own army was prepared to spill the blood of those who had fought for so long far away from their homeland and who had finally returned to embrace their wives and their children.

  He made his way back through the secret passageway at a run, and found Sthenelus silently waiting for him in the shade next to their horses.

  ‘We must return to the ships,’ he said. ‘The queen is plotting to kill me and to kill all our men by sending the army out against us.’

  Sthenelus did not move. He grasped Diomedes by the shoulders and said: ‘They’ll never win. We will wake our comrades and march against the city. You have conquered Thebes and Troy: no one can challenge you and get away with it. And when we have won you will choose a just punishment for the queen.’

  But Diomedes was no longer listening. ‘I wounded Aphrodite,’ he said. ‘I thrust my spear through her delicate hand as she stretched it out to protect Aeneas her son, and now the goddess of love has twisted Aigialeia’s feelings; she has filled her with hate for me. The gods never forget. They have their revenge, sooner or later.’

  ‘It’s better to die fighting, even against the gods, than to flee,’ said Sthenelus. ‘Tell me what you saw in the palace.’

  Diomedes told him everything, without holding back. ‘Do you understand now why I have to go? This is no longer our homeland! I left my queen in the royal palace when I departed for the war. I held her in my arms that morning, and kissed her. And she swore that she would make a statue in my likeness and lay it in our wedding bed and sleep alongside it until I came back. Now I find a monster who only looks like Aigialeia. .’ He bowed his head. ‘Yet even more beautiful, if such a thing is possible. Even more desirable.’

  They mounted the chariot; Sthenelus grasped the reins and urged on the horses. They galloped swiftly over the dark plain towards the sea, towards Temenium where the ships had been berthed and the comrades slept waiting for dawn.

  Diomedes woke them and called them to assembly. They were expecting him to announce their triumphal return to Argos, the city that they had left ten years before. Instead their ears heard bitter words, words they would never have wanted to hear.

  When the king finished, he asked them to forsake Argos and to follow him: he would bring them to a new homeland, to a distant land in the west where the memories of a futile, bloody war could not follow them. To a place where they would meet other women and father other children, where they would build a city destined to become invincible.

  ‘The world,’ he told them, ‘is very big, much bigger than we can imagine. We will find a place ruled by other gods, where our gods cannot persecute us. I am Diomedes, son of Tydeus, conqueror of Thebes of the Seven Gates and conqueror of Ilium. Together we shall conquer a new kingdom, a hundred times bigger than this one, and we will have plenty of everything we desire. We will drink wine and feast every night to drive away our memories.’

  Some of them, the youngest, the strongest and most faithful, went right to his side, swearing to follow him anywhere. Some pleaded to be allowed to join their wives and bring them along. Others, most of them, stood in silence, their heads bowed. And when the king asked them what they intended to do, they answered: ‘Oh lord, we have fought at your side for years without ever sparing our courage. Our chests and our arms bear the scars of many wounds but now, we beseech you, give us our part of the booty and let us go. It is only right that you leave the wife who would betray you, but we are not kings. We want to return to our houses, to reunite with our wives and with the children we left in swaddling when we departed with the other Achaeans to follow the Atreides under the walls of Troy. We want to grow old in peace, to sit in front of our homes in the evenings and watch the sun go down.’

  Diomedes entreated them: ‘You mustn’t stay behind! I supplicate you, leave with us. Either all of us should remain or all of us should go. If we stay, I will have to kill the queen and then live the rest of my days persecuted by her Furies, and all together we will have to combat against the Argives, against our own blood. And there will be more bitter mourning and more, infinite pain. If only some of you remain, you will certainly be overwhelmed and slain as soon as they realize that I am not there to defend you and guide you in battle. An evil spirit has taken possession of the palace and of the city. If this were not true, my wife, who adored me, would never have dishonoured my bed and my home. She would never have plotted my death.’

  This is what Diomedes said, but his words did not convince them. They had been waiting too long to return to their homeland and their families and now that they had arrived they couldn’t bear the thought of leaving once again.

  A slender crescent moon was rising at that moment from the waves of the sea and the stars began to pale. The time had come. The men embraced one another, weeping, as the booty was lowered from the ship, the pl
unders of war to be divided.

  There were bronze tripods and urns, jewels of gold and of silver. Pelts of bears, lions and leopards, finely engraved shells from the sea, helmets, shields and spears. And there were women with high, rounded hips, with black eyes still moist with regret for all they had lost.

  The king took very little for himself. He kept the golden armour which had been gifted him by the chief of the Lycians, Glaucus, after they met in battle, and he kept the divine horses he had taken from Aeneas. Only he and Sthenelus knew what was hidden in the hold of the royal ship; the reason why Diomedes could promise his men that the city they would found would be invincible, a kingdom destined to reign over the world.

  Diomedes bid his comrades farewell and turned to Sthenelus to give him the orders of departure for the fleet. But Sthenelus turned towards those who had decided to stay, and said: ‘I shall remain here with them. I want to see the sun rising over the sky of Argos. I want to enter through the southern gate, to see the people and the market where we played as children, chasing after one another with little wooden swords. I’ve fought long enough. Not even for you, my friend, could I return to sea and face the weariness, the cold, the solitude.’

  Diomedes understood. And although he felt oppressed by immense sorrow, he knew that his friend was not speaking out of fear. He simply could not abandon their remaining comrades to their destiny. He would enter Argos with them and he would die with them. He was the other half of Diomedes, as Patroclus had been the other half of Achilles: and so he had to remain with his men, those who would not take to the sea again.

  ‘Farewell, my friend,’ said the king to him. ‘When the sun rises high in the sky of Argos and over the palace of Tiryns, look up at it, touch the door jamb for me as well. And if you see Aigialeia. . tell her that. .’

  He could not go on. Emotion overcame him and his words died in his throat.

  ‘I’ll tell her, if I can,’ said Sthenelus. ‘Farewell. Perhaps we’ll meet again one day, but if we don’t, remember that although I’ve decided to remain, I am your friend. Forever.’

  And thus the son of Tydeus, Diomedes, left the shores of the land which he had desired so fervently, to face the sea once again.

  It was still dark when they weighed anchor but the sky was turning lighter at the horizon. He ordered his comrades to row as fast as they could and to hoist the sail. He wanted to be far off on the water when the sun rose: he couldn’t bear the sight of his beloved land as he was being forced to abandon it and he didn’t want his comrades to suffer for the same reason or to regret having followed him. He donned the golden armour of Glaucus and stood straight at the stern under the royal standard so that all of them could see him and take courage.

  When the aurora rose from the east to illuminate the world he was far away: on his right loomed the high rocks of Cape Malea.

  He would never know what fate befell the comrades who remained behind. In his heart he hoped that they had been spared and that, with Diomedes gone, the city would no longer have any reason to destroy valiant men, formidable warriors.

  But I imagine that a wretched destiny awaited them, no different from the fate of Agamemnon and his comrades when they returned to their homeland. The only word that was ever heard about those men was that Sthenelus had become Aigialeia’s lover. I believe that it was the queen herself who spread this story. Since she could no longer reach Diomedes and kill him herself, she hoped that Rumour — a winged monster with one hundred mouths — could overtake him more rapidly than her ships, shattering his mind and making him die of desperation.

  Sthenelus died with his sword in hand, honourably, as he had always lived, toppled from his chariot by the cast of a spear or perhaps pierced through his neck by an arrow. The horses harnessed to his chariot were no longer the divine steeds that Diomedes had taken from Aeneas and he could no longer fly like he had over the plains of Ilium, swifter than the Trojans’ arrows, faster than the wind. A man of no worth, perhaps, tore the armour from his shoulders as he fell, crashing into the dust. And watched as his soul fled, groaning, to the Kingdom of the Dead.

  2

  The sun had set and all the paths of land and sea had darkened when Agamemnon’s fleet cast anchor at Nauplia. Victory weighed more heavily upon his shoulders than defeat would have and the gods had chosen for him to behold his homeland under the veil of night as well.

  He descended from the ship and breathed in the unforgettable odour of his own land. For a moment that scent rushed to his head like the aroma of a strong wine. But then it swiftly called to mind his daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed on the altar to propitiate their departure for war ten years before, and he realized that all the glory he had won, that the priceless treasure that he was bringing back — the one and only reason that he and his brother Menelaus had set off this war — were not worth the breath of his lost daughter.

  How bewildered were her eyes as they took her to the altar! He remembered how she had drunk the potion that would numb her, believing that it would induce the sacred sleep of prophecy. ‘The goddess will appear to you in a dream,’ they had told her, ‘because you are pure. To you she will reveal the reason for her ire. She will tell you why she will not send favourable winds and allow the fleet to depart. When you awaken you will reveal her words to us.’

  He, the Atreid, remembered how he had turned away from the altar when the priest grasped the flint knife he would use to open the vein of her neck. He had to be present so that the sacrifice would be accepted, so the gods would be satisfied with his pain and with the life of a still-innocent child.

  He thought of how the demon of power invades the soul like a disease. A king is branded by the gods, cursed by a destiny impossible to avoid. Kings are made to do things that no other man could do, in good and in evil. They give death like the gods and suffer like mortal men, and they cannot count on one or on the other.

  I have long pondered on what Agamemnon did to achieve his ends and I have asked myself if it is possible for a man to go so far solely to lay claim to power. Still today I cannot answer that question. But in the light of what happened later, perhaps an explanation does exist; perhaps his intentions were good, perhaps he thought he could save his people from total disaster and ward off the end awaiting them all.

  As king, he knew that the war would bring death to thousands of his people’s sons. As king he showed them that he was prepared to offer the life of his most beloved daughter.

  If this is true, then his death was a terrible injustice. After suffering all that a man could suffer in his life, he was made to suffer the most shameful death, the same that would have befallen Diomedes had he not been so prudent.

  Agamemnon had the Trojan prisoners disembark, and among them Cassandra, daughter of Priam, but left the spoils of war on board the ships; he would send men and carts the next day from Mycenae to load it all up and bring it to his palace. His charioteer accompanied him, as did all his most trusted comrades, the noblemen who had fought by his side during the whole war. The others remained on the beach to sleep and wait for the booty to be divided up the next day so they could return to their families. They could not go home empty-handed after having been away for so long.

  Silence shrouded the countryside, but as the armed column passed, the dogs sleeping in front of the sheep pens and the farms awoke and started barking, and a horn sounded from on high. But its long, wavering blow was full of anguish, as if it signalled the passage of an invading enemy.

  When Agamemnon came within sight of Mycenae, he realized that the city was expecting him: armed guards on the bastions held flaming torches, and more torches were burning at the sides of the great gate. The coat of arms of the Mycenaean kings, two gold-headed lions facing each other on either side of a red column over a field of blue, stood out on the huge architrave, on the gigantic jambs, over the wide black opening. The king was moved to see his emblem, the symbol of the mightiest dynasty of the Achaeans, but the dark gateway below loomed before him like the door to t
he House of Hades. The soldiers on the bastions clanged the spears against their shields to greet him, as his horses plodded up the ramp that led to the palace.

  Beyond the gate, to his right, more torches illuminated the tombs of the Perseid kings, the first to have reigned over the city. They had descended from Perseus, the city’s founder, he who had defeated Medusa. The sacred enclosure had been restored when the new Pelopid dynasty had come to power, signifying continuity and respect for tradition. On the other side of the valley, the enormous stone dome of Agamemnon’s own tomb rose on the mountainside, the tomb he had prepared for himself before he had left for the war. One day he too would rest under that immense vault, wrapped in white linen, his face covered by a golden mask that would perpetuate his features through eternity. . if it was the will of the gods to grant him a dignified death and the honour of solemn funeral rights, at the end of his existence.

  But no one stood along the street, the sounds of the horses’ hoofs and the chariot’s wheels rang against dark walls and closed doors. The hinges of the gate groaned behind him and it swung shut suddenly with a loud clang. Many of his comrades put their hands to the hilts of their swords. The eyes of Cassandra, who stood beside him on the chariot, were as empty as the circle of the new moon. But as he was about to descend in front of his home, she touched his arm. He turned towards her and she whispered something into his ear. Agamemnon’s face turned white with the pallor of death: only then did he realize that he had been tricked. He realized that the Achaeans had fought for ten long years in vain and he understood that the princess was giving him the chance to save his life. But his was a life worth nothing now.

  He entered the palace and the maidservants knelt and kissed his hands as though he had been away just a few days, off hunting boars. Then they led him to the bath chamber to ready him for meeting the queen. Cassandra and his comrades were taken to the throne room.