by Ben Blake
Chapter Fifteen
Women and Bulls
After the summons came, the king went up the hill to his palace alone. He used one of the servants’ doors, as he often did, slipping in unnoticed except for a single maid carrying laundry to the washroom out back. She nodded to him and carried on with her business: this had never been a formal palace. The king went upstairs, into the nursery, and stood staring down at his son for a long time. His wife found him there, late in the afternoon.
“Was it what you expected?” she asked.
He nodded without turning around. “Yes.”
“The kings will gather in Mycenae?”
“Yes.”
She came closer, putting a long-fingered hand on his shoulder. “That will not commit you to anything. Why do you fear it so?”
“Because of the High King,” he replied. “Because of what he is, and longs for. Agamemnon wants to be the man who breaks the cage which holds Greece. The cage of too little land, too few farms. He dreams of seizing territory across the sea, a land greater than Crete was, as rich as the delta of Egypt. He and Menelaus used to talk about a conquest there, did you know that?”
“I expect it was Agamemnon who talked of it,” she said, “and Menelaus who listened, and followed along.”
He laughed, a short hard sound. “Yes. I expect it was, at that. But the Greek kings would never follow him there, and he knows it. So he must look elsewhere, and there aren’t many places around the Greensea that are large and productive enough for his dream.”
“And one of those is Troy.”
“One is Troy,” Odysseus agreed. “Priam has given Agamemnon a perfect excuse. I would never have thought he’d be so stupid. Troy is mightier now than she was thirty years ago, or even ten. In another generation she’ll be a power to rival Hattusa, or Thebes itself, if she has peace to grow. Now, with one act of folly, she has put all that at risk.”
He could feel her thinking, and then she said what he’d thought she would. “But why do you fear this?”
“Because Ithaca will be dragged in. A war against Troy will be too large a thing for any Greek king to stand aside.” He drew a breath, nodded at the cradle. “And because of him.”
The baby boy slept on, oblivious to the conversation. Telemachus wasn’t even a month old yet, and was still at the stage where he looked like any generic baby. To someone else’s eyes it would likely be hard to tell if he was a boy or a girl. But Odysseus thought he knew every crease of the boy’s flesh already, every fold of skin and crinkle of eye. He drank the sight of his son the way a bird drinks from a pool in a hot summer.
He and Penelope had been married a long time now, years in which she had three times carried a baby and three times lost it, always to tears and bitter grief. Odysseus had done his best to comfort her, hiding his own keening sorrow; when he wept it was alone, out on the hills as he watched over flocks, or in the cold hours of the night when he cried in empty rooms before going back to bed. Penelope almost certainly knew some of that. Wives picked up their husbands’ moods, and she more than most.
Then she had fallen pregnant again, and the weeks had turned into months without disaster, with no return of the familiar pain. They had begun to see the faint light of hope in one another’s eyes as Penelope’s belly swelled. And Telemachus had been born, a little small perhaps but healthy, a pink crying thing that changed the world forever.
Had changed Odysseus’s part of the world, at least. Other things remained the same, among them the endless hunger of Agamemnon for glory, for a name to ring down the ages.
And this war wasn’t even necessary. There were Greek colony towns in the west now, small as yet but growing rapidly. Several had appeared on Sicily, using soil made fertile by the looming volcano, Etna. Further north there were more on the mainland, in Locri and Hesperia, built in narrow valleys much like those in Greece itself. Odysseus had been there, seen the black earth for himself; he knew how productive those towns would one day become.
Beyond that were more lands, long coasts washed by the gentle Greensea and fed by great rivers. Hardly anyone lived there, except a small band of tribesmen now and then. The land was free, or as near as mattered. All the Greeks needed to do was sail there and claim it. Instead the Atreides thirsted for a ruinous war in the east, against an enemy stronger than any other on the Greensea except Egypt itself. And if Troy was thrown down, Odysseus wouldn’t bet against Agamemnon’s eyes turning south to the pyramids before many years had passed.
“If I must go to war,” he said at length, “I cannot be here to protect him. I’ve made the trade agreements we needed. There’s no reason for me to go sailing again, or to leave Ithaca at all. I had planned to be here, to watch him take his first steps, and to grow.”
“Then persuade the kings not to go to war.”
“Persuade them,” he said, and gave that bark of a laugh again. “You know what they call me, love. The shepherd king. They tolerate me when they must, but they don’t listen to me.”
“That’s not all they call you,” Penelope said. She could be harsh sometimes, when she thought he was being self-indulgent. “They call you chorikos, the peasant. They say you spend your time with your arm up an oxen’s arse helping it give birth, or rolling in the manure of your sheep. And you do, when it’s needed. It never bothered you before.”
“We didn’t have him before,” Odysseus said, with a gesture toward the sleeping child.
“Then speak better than you have before, for his sake,” Penelope said implacably. “Find the winged words that will sway them, pour Olympian doubts into their hearts. Sow the dragon’s teeth that gnaw at their heart for war. Find a way to turn this evil aside.”
He was silent for some time then. His fear threatened to swallow him, but her words had brought him back to at least a semblance of normality now, and he could think. Nestor would help him, of course: it was the old king of Messenia who had warned Odysseus about events at Troy, three weeks ago now. Menestheus might join them too, though that depended on what he thought Attica could gain from war. His was a crowded country even by the standards of Greece. And then there was Diomedes, the warrior lord of Argolis. If he argued against war there might be a chance to prevent it.
But the kings who would vote for war were more numerous. Agamemnon and Menelaus certainly would, the two sons of Atreus; there was no doubt of that. Telamon of Salamis would join them, angered by Priam’s constant demands for the return of Hesione. Agapenor did whatever Agamemnon asked of him, like a trained and faithful hound. Thalpius of Elis just liked to fight, as so many others did, including Schedius and Prothous – neither of them popular men, and both would be loath to defy Agamemnon because of that. They didn’t have enough friends to risk the anger of the High King.
“It’s going to depend on Diomedes,” he said. “If he decides on war I don’t think it can be stopped.”
“Then go to Argolis and talk to him,” Penelope said. She took his hand and lifted it to her lips. “You’re a good man, husband. Whatever happens, Telemachus will grow up knowing he has a father who loves him.”
“If he grows up knowing his father at all,” Odysseus said. He shook himself though, refusing to let the dark mood take him again. Penelope was right. The struggle was not yet lost.