The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

by Iliffe, Glyn

  ‘Thus speaks the man whose father failed to defeat Thebes, leaving his son to finish the task. Do you want your children to endure another war like this one, Diomedes, just because you don’t have the ruthless courage to expunge your enemies? Scorn my words if you wish, but unless you want a new Troy to rise from the ashes then Astyanax must die!’

  Calchas thrust the staff back into Agamemnon’s hand and returned to his seat, letting his doom-filled words settle on the Council.

  ‘I say kill the boy,’ Little Ajax grunted.

  His words were met by a smattering of nods and murmurs of agreement.

  ‘Too many Greeks have died because of Troy, my own son among them,’ said Nestor. ‘Astyanax must die. We have no choice.’

  Neoptolemus stood up and pointed with a snarl at the child in Agamemnon’s arms.

  ‘Kill him and be done with it!’

  Others stood now, angrily voicing their support in an attempt to drown out the wailing of the Trojan women. Eperitus saw the smile on Agamemnon’s face, and before he knew what he was doing he stood up.

  ‘No. He’s just a child. Give him to me and I’ll bring him up as my own son.’

  Silence fell on the assembly and every eye turned on Eperitus. In an instant, Odysseus was standing beside him with his hand on his arm.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he hissed.

  ‘Trying to save the boy,’ Eperitus replied, his voice low but filled with determination. ‘And if you allow this murder to go ahead, Odysseus, you’re just as bad as they are.’

  Odysseus looked into his eyes and bit on his lip, unable to reply. Then Agamemnon put the child back down in the dry grass and stared at Eperitus with an icy gaze.

  ‘You heard the Council,’ he said. ‘The boy has to die. There’s no debate on the matter, Eperitus; it’s already decided.’

  ‘I’ll not stand by and watch you murder this child in cold blood, just like you did Iphigenia!’

  He saw the shocked reaction on the faces of the Council, who seemed to collectively sit up and suck in breath. But his only thought now was for Astyanax: if he could at least fight for the boy, he might make up in some small way for his failure to save his own daughter. He fixed his stare on the Mycenaean king, whose usually aloof façade had given way to a look of intense hatred.

  ‘Then your desire is granted,’ Agamemnon seethed. ‘You will not stand by and watch him killed. You will be the one to kill him!’

  ‘Never,’ Eperitus snapped.

  ‘I order you to do it!’

  Eperitus spat on the ground and drew his sword. Several of the kings reached for the hilts of their own weapons, while the guards behind Nestor and Menelaus raised their spears and aimed them nervously at the Ithacan. Then, seizing the long tail of hair behind his neck, Eperitus sawed through it and tossed it at Agamemnon’s feet.

  ‘I don’t answer to you any more, Agamemnon. None of us do. The oath we took has been fulfilled and you’re no longer the King of Men. You’re just the king of Mycenae now, and I’m not a Mycenaean!’

  ‘Eperitus is right, he doesn’t have to follow your orders any more,’ Diomedes said. Then, slipping a dagger from his belt, he sawed off the long mane of hair that had not been cut since the start of the war and flung it onto the dirt. ‘And neither do I.’

  Agamemnon was speechless with rage and his fury only seemed to increase as one by one the other kings, princes and captains who formed the Council began cutting away the tails from the back of their own heads and throwing them into the circle. When, at last, Menelaus and Nestor did the same, he finally realised that his hegemony over the Greeks had ended.

  ‘This doesn’t change the boy’s fate,’ he said. ‘You, the Council, decided that he should die, not me alone. And if none of you has the courage to do it, then I will throw him from the walls myself.’

  Eperitus stepped forward to protest again, but Odysseus pulled him back to his seat.

  ‘Agamemnon’s right. The decision was taken by the whole Council; you can’t defend the boy against all the kings of Greece.’

  ‘Give Astyanax to me,’ Neoptolemus announced before Eperitus could react. ‘If he’s going to grow up to avenge his father, then as Achilles’s son I’m the one who stands to lose the most if he lives. Besides, Andromache is my woman now; I don’t want her pining for a bastard child when she’ll be bearing sons for me.’

  ‘And do you think she would ever forgive you for killing him, Neoptolemus?’ asked Odysseus. ‘More likely she’ll put a knife into you when you’re sleeping. No, I’ll kill the boy.’

  Eperitus watched incredulously as his king crossed the circle and picked up the small child, wrapping his faded purple cloak about him.

  ‘Odysseus, no!’ he said, rushing forward and seizing his forearm. ‘What are you doing?’

  Suddenly Odysseus’s face transformed with rage and he shoved his captain hard in the chest, sending him staggering backwards to collapse between Little Ajax and Teucer. He tried to get up again, but the two men held him fast.

  ‘I’m a father,’ Odysseus said, tight-lipped as he faced the Council. ‘This is not something I do with pride; I do it with shame. But I’ll do it because it has to be done – not for you, Agamemnon, nor the Council, but for the future of Greece.’

  He pushed his way out of the ring of commanders and walked slowly towards the Scaean Gate, turning once to stare back accusingly at the members of the Council. They looked away guiltily and Agamemnon picked up the tablet from where he had put it down in the grass.

  ‘We have unfinished business,’ he said, looking down at the markings on the tablet. ‘Yes, here we are. The weight of gold found in Troy was –’

  His words faded into the background as Eperitus tried to see Odysseus through the ring of seated men, but Little Ajax and Teucer kept him pinned between them. They would not let him go, he realised, until Odysseus had reappeared on the walls and thrown Astyanax down to his death. Quickly his mind scanned back over what had happened, wondering if there was anything he had not understood, some statement that could justify Odysseus killing a child. But there was nothing, nothing at all. He felt numb, unable to comprehend what was happening. Once again, he was lying helpless while a child he had tried to protect was murdered.

  A woman’s scream shook the Council from its half-hearted dissection of the plunder list. All heads turned to the walls, then higher still to the top of the tower that protected the Scaean Gate. There stood Odysseus, Astyanax held high above his head. The child’s white clothes blew in the westerly wind, and then with a howl of anger Odysseus hurled him down to perish on the stones below.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  THE DEAD CHILD

  Shaking off Teucer and Little Ajax, Eperitus sprang to his feet and ran from the shocked assembly towards the gates. The child’s body lay among the wreckage of stone beneath the tower, his head dashed in but with surprisingly little blood spattered over the huge blocks on which he had fallen.

  ‘Wait!’

  Eperitus turned to see Peisandros’s stocky physique sprinting towards him.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ the Myrmidon commander asked as he caught up with him. ‘I mean, if you’re going to confront Odysseus about this, then give me that sword first.’

  ‘We’re old friends, Peisandros,’ Eperitus replied. ‘You know me better than that by now.’

  ‘Angry men have been known to do rash things.’

  Eperitus shook his head, but handed Peisandros his sword anyway. ‘I just want to know why. Why would he do that?’

  Peisandros stared down at Astyanax’s body. ‘I don’t know, but I’m coming with you.’

  They ran through the gate and entered the doorway that led into the dark interior of the tower. Eperitus’s eyes adjusted quickly and spotted the wooden ladder ascending to the next floor. The two men climbed it but found the room above empty except for a pile of spears in one corner and shields stacked against the foot of the wall. A dusty shaft of grey light fed
into the gloom from a hatchway above and without hesitation Eperitus continued climbing. He reached the top of the tower and saw Odysseus standing against the parapet, looking out at the smoking ruins of Troy. As he clambered through the narrow square in the wooden floor, half-followed by Peisandros, Odysseus looked at them both and raised a finger to his lips. The angry words that Eperitus had been about to hurl at his king fell dead.

  ‘Are you alone?’ Odysseus asked them.

  They nodded, mystified, and then Odysseus leaned across and tipped the stack of shields forward to reveal Astyanax, alive and smiling at them. Peisandros almost fell back through the hatch.

  ‘But –’ Eperitus said. ‘But –’

  ‘You saw me throw him from the walls?’

  Peisandros rushed back to the opposite wall and looked down at the body still on the stones below.

  ‘Come back from there, you fool,’ Odysseus ordered. ‘Do you want the Council to see you?’

  ‘But how’s it possible?’

  Odysseus raised his eyebrows. ‘Most things are possible, with a little deception. After you tried to save Astyanax, Eperitus, I remembered there was the body of an infant on the rocks by the gate – he was thrown down from the walls just as the Council was convening this morning. When I took Astyanax through the gate, I simply picked the boy’s corpse up as I went past. Once inside the tower, I swapped Astyanax’s princely garments for the plain sackcloth the dead child was wearing, then threw him down from the top of the tower. The head was already a mess, but I’m hoping nobody will look too closely at the body. The hardest part was carrying them both up the ladder – Astyanax under my cloak, and the other dangling by his ankle.’

  Peisandros knelt by the child and offered him a thick, dirty finger. Astyanax took it and pulled, laughing at the Myrmidon.

  ‘So what are you going to do with him?’ Eperitus asked. ‘You can’t leave him here. He’ll just be found and thrown from the walls anyway. And if the Council find out –’

  ‘I didn’t have time to think about that,’ Odysseus confessed, ‘but I think I have the answer now.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You, Peisandros. Neoptolemus is your leader and Astyanax’s mother has been allotted to him.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you smuggle the boy on board with you and take him back to Phthia. There’re plenty of soldiers doing the same with other Trojan boys; I’ve seen it – they haven’t the heart to throw them from the walls, so they’re disguising them as girls and taking them back to Greece. You can do the same and bring Astyanax up among your own family.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And make sure you tell Andromache that her boy is safe, so she can watch him grow up from a distance. But Astyanax is never to know his true identity, you understand?’

  ‘Well, of course, but –’

  ‘That’s settled then,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘You’ve always been a good man, Peisandros. I’ll make sure you get a little extra from the plunder, too. Just to help you feed the additional mouth when you get home, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Peisandros sighed.

  Astyanax tugged at his finger and giggled, causing the Myrmidon to laugh out loud, despite himself.

  As they walked back to the ships at the end of the day, with the sun already melting into the distant edge of the Aegean, Eperitus turned to his king.

  ‘You took a big risk for the sake of that child. A child you’ve never even seen before, and the son of your enemy.’

  ‘I hold no enmity towards Hector,’ Odysseus replied. ‘He was just a man fighting for his homeland, and now his soul is in Hades where it can’t harm any more Greeks. If I took a risk, it wasn’t for Astyanax’s sake.’

  ‘Then whose?’

  Odysseus smiled at him.

  ‘Yours. When I realised why you wanted to save the child – because you’d been unable to save Iphigenia, and because that failure has eaten away at you for ten years – I knew I had to help you. If I took a risk in doing what I did, then I did it for your sake Eperitus. Who else’s?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Eperitus said, quietly.

  They reached the Ithacan galleys, which were turning black against the crimson sunset.

  ‘And now,’ Odysseus said, looking up at the muddle of masts, cross spars and rigging, ‘I suppose we had better think about going home.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Despite not appearing directly in The Iliad or The Odyssey, the story of the wooden horse is probably the most iconic and familiar of all the myths associated with the Trojan War. The idea of a simple trick succeeding where ten years of brute force had failed has an appeal that has stood the test of time. Naturally, there isn’t a thread of historical evidence for the horse – after all, mythology is not history – though many have tried to interpret it in more realistic terms. Perhaps the most convincing is the suggestion, first put forward by the Romans, that the horse was a metaphor for an ancient siege tower. I preferred the courage and desperation of the original story, with the surviving heroes of the Greek army (except Agamemnon, of course) hiding in a wooden horse and hoping their enemies will take the bait.

  The oracles that foretold the fall of Troy are less well-known. To the ancient Greeks the gods were as much a part of life as working, fighting, eating and sleeping. The fact that everything rested “in the lap of the gods”, as Homer puts it, was unquestioned, so to have the outcome of the war depend on the fulfilment of divine prophecies was only natural. As ever, there are a variety of different versions of who predicted what and when, so I have chosen the ones that I believe best suit the story I’m trying to tell.

  In the original myths, Helenus is a genuine seer whom the gods entrust with the final oracles that point to the fall of Troy. He even appears as a warrior, if only briefly, in The Iliad. But with two prophets already in the book – Calchas and Cassandra – and innumerable fighting men, I decided to rob him of these virtues and make him a charlatan instead. Though Odysseus was not sent to fetch the bone of Pelops, and the guardian of the tomb is entirely my own invention, he was sent to fetch Neoptolemus from Scyros and steal the Palladium from Troy. Disguised as a beggar, he entered the city, met Helen and gleaned important information from her before returning later with Diomedes and making away with the effigy.

  Even with all the oracles fulfilled, Troy would not have fallen if Odysseus had not thought up the greatest military ruse of all time. This makes him the most effective hero of the whole siege and recognises that wars are ultimately won by brains rather than brawn. He also had the idea of leaving behind a man to persuade the Trojans the horse should be taken into the city rather than burnt on the plain. In the myths this job was done by Sinon and not by Omeros, who does not appear in any of the original tales.

  One of the drawbacks of trying to condense such a vast collection of stories into a comparatively short narrative is that much has to be cut out. Regrettably, one such edit was the tale of Lacoön. Yet another Trojan seer, he protests the folly of bringing the wooden horse inside the city walls, but is cut short when Apollo sends two sea-serpents to crush him and his twin sons to death. The horrified Trojans take this as a sign that the horse is to be accepted, whatever their suspicions.

  The horrific sack of Troy, with its widespread murder and rape, is typical of the end of any great siege where the victorious warriors take out their pent up anger on the city’s population. Aeneas was one of the few males to escape – though not with the help of Odysseus – and according to the Romans his ancestors later went on to found the city of Rome. Antenor and his family also escaped (with the help of Odysseus), but poor Astyanax did not. Some versions have the boy murdered by Neoptolemus, others by Odysseus. I have been kinder to both Astyanax and Odysseus in my account.

  You will not find Eperitus in any of the myths. He, his love affair with Astynome (who appears in The Iliad as Chryseis) and his feud with his father are all inventions of my imagination. I wanted at least one major character whose fate, unlike those of Odys
seus and the others, is entirely in my own hands!

  And so the war is over, but not the adventure. In fact, the greatest chapter in the whole saga is just about to begin. As Odysseus turns toward home he is ignorant of the new challenges the Fates are lining up before him. From man-eating songstresses, seductive witches and one-eyed monsters, to the very depths of Hades, he must call on all his courage and wit if he is ever to return home to his beloved Penelope.