Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

  *

  “He summons me,” Idomeneus said. “Like calling a dog to heel! I tell you I will not have it!”

  He threw the parchment down on the floor, which didn’t really work. The sheet fluttered gently to the tiles, impervious to his anger. Servants around the room cringed and sidled backwards if they could, putting an extra few inches between them and their king. Idomeneus’ temper was well known. Servants had been injured before, by fists or flying crockery.

  He wheeled and strode out onto the roof terrace, just to get away from the cringing, and all the eyes that wouldn’t look at him. Being there calmed his anger, at least a little. Sometimes it did. This was one of the buildings which had survived the earthquake twenty years ago more or less intact, and Idomeneus liked to look over the city below and remember that Minos had once stood at this parapet, with the crimson pillars of the upper storey behind him.

  There was a double-headed axe at each corner of the terrace, the labrys that had been the symbol of Crete in the days of its glory. It still was, really: the Greeks called Idomeneus Lord of the House of Axes, among other names. The palace was different, too – an anaktora, it was called here. The Minoans had built in an open style, fearing no attack while their navies ruled the seas. As the palace stepped down the hillside and became the city, Idomeneus eyes were drawn to wide stairways, rectangular pools of cool water, and rooftop platforms exposed to the sun. Knossos was a beautiful city, if one liked that sort of thing. Idomeneus didn’t, not really, but he did prefer this airy palace to the cramped castles of the mainland, where he always felt the walls were pressing in on him.

  “I am not his subordinate,” he growled, to no one in particular. “That kopros eater mistakes me for one of the whining curs of Greece.”

  “So stop whining,” Meriones said behind him.

  Idomeneus glowered at his cousin, not that it did any good. The other man had suffered worse setbacks in his life than a glare from his king. He would look rather like Idomeneus, tall and angular, were it not for the hideous scar on the left side of his head, which in truth was more of a crater than a wound. The earthquake two decades earlier had trapped him under falling rubble, some of which had caved in his skull and really ought to have killed him. Somehow Meriones had emerged rasping with thirst and smeared in dust, but otherwise perfectly healthy. He was the only man brave enough to follow Idomeneus onto the terrace in one of his rages, or to tell him the truth when that was unpleasant.

  He still looked appalling, though.

  “I am not whining,” Idomeneus snapped. “I am complaining, and give my body to the dogs if I don’t have a right to. That tyrant in Mycenae is getting far too self-important. Atreus was the same in his day, and a bad egg comes from a bad crow, they say.”

  “Whining, complaining,” Meriones said, “it’s the same thing in the end. You know very well that Agamemnon can be as arrogant as he wants, but he still can’t force you to attend this meeting. What’s it about, anyway? Helen?”

  “Of course Helen,” he said, still angry. “There’s no other reason to summon the kings, is there?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know of one. But Agamemnon would find a reason if he needed one, for whatever scheme he’s hatching this time. You’re right about him, cousin. He isn’t to be trusted.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Idomeneus said, aggrieved. Meriones gave another shrug, as though to say he knew that, and the king wheeled away again and stalked to the stone balustrade, fighting to control his temper.

  Damn Agamemnon to Hades for his pride. Damn him and damn him.

  Crete could be as powerful as any of the kingdoms of the mainland. More so than any, in fact, as it had been before. Even today the island boasted cities to rival any in Greece – Phaestus, Kato Zakros, Knossos itself – and innumerable smaller settlements: it was known as the Land of a Hundred Towns. It contained some of the richest plains, the lushest mountain slopes. Yet still, it was only a shadow of what it had been when Minos ruled here, before Zeus turned the sky black and Poseidon threw a wall of water against the land. You could still see the line, where the sea had reached. Idomeneus had stood on that high-water mark and shuddered at his distance from the shore.

  In the end Crete was a maritime nation. The sea could be an enemy, but it was also the island’s best friend, a provider of food and protection from attack. And Crete lay halfway between Greece and Egypt, between Greece and Phoenicia too, a natural place for galleys to stop as they journeyed across the Greensea. It should benefit from passing trade just as Troy did. Again, once it had, when Minos ruled in Knossos. But to do so it needed control of the seas, and when Minos fell it was the Greeks who built ships to replace the ones smashed to matchwood on the north coast of Crete. It was they who dominated the waves now.

  His hands gripped the balustrade.

  On the wall behind him, at the top of the crimson pillars, a carved bull’s head glowered over the terrace. It was huge, many times life size, black with blood red eyes that sometimes seemed to gleam in sunlight, as though alive. Idomeneus had often felt it was watching him, or the spirits of the dead Minoan kings were, with contempt in their shrivelled souls.

  He was half what Minos had been. A quarter as much. But he could be more, if the Fates were kind.

  “I don’t want to go to war,” he said. “Certainly not in Troy. Those walls would stand against a hundred Cyclops.”

  “So don’t go,” Meriones said. “Don’t answer the summons.”

  “Agamemnon would go insane. He’d likely bring his fleet here on the way to Troy, just so he could burn the harbour of Knossos to teach me a lesson.” His knuckles whitened where they clutched the stone. “It grieves me to say it, but we’re not strong enough to stop him.”

  Meriones said nothing to that. He knew it was true better than anyone, being captain of Idomeneus’ armies, including the ships. The Cretan navy could inflict terrible losses on Agamemnon’s fleet, but not enough to stop them. Knossos would still burn, which meant Idomeneus couldn’t simply refuse the High King’s summons, though that admission gnawed at his innards like wormwood. He had to find another way.

  Temper fading, his mind began to work.

  “The loss of trade from the Trojan Road has hurt us,” he said finally. “Caused unrest in the villages and towns.”

  “Not much of it,” Meriones began. Idomeneus cut him off with a raised hand before he could go further.

  “Enough that I have to decline the High King’s invitation,” he said. “With regret. Matters here require my attention, though of course I have as much desire to see the Trojans whipped as any king. Instead I’ll send you, cousin. You can make my excuses, and listen to the discussion in my place. I doubt they’ll protest too much, at least not to your face.”

  Meriones lifted a hand to touch the caved-in part of his skull. “Because few men can stand to look at me for long, yes.”

  “But Agamemnon will talk to you,” Idomeneus went on, thinking it through. “He’ll want Cretan aid, if he’s going for Troy. Hades, he’ll need it, especially in terms of ships. We can’t match the rest of Greece together, but we’ve a larger fleet than any single nation except Egypt.

  “So he’ll ask for our aid. And you, cousin, will tell him Crete stands ready to supply ships – fifty of them at least. No! Tell him a hundred. Perhaps not enough men to fill them all, if I have to keep some back to quell trouble in the villages, but promise the ships. At a price.”

  Meriones waited, and then asked quietly, “What price?”

  “A wife,” Idomeneus said. “Helen refused me, two years ago. I wasn’t really surprised, given the number of rivals for her hand, though I couldn’t believe she chose that hairy fool Menelaus. But anyway, she was a chance to bind Crete more tightly to the Greeks of the mainland, through marriage into the great kingdoms. To Laconia through Helen herself, and to Achaea by means of her sister Clytemnestra. And to Ithaca, I suppose,” he added as an afterthought, “if we count their cousin, Penelope. And ho
w the peasant king of that arse-spawned island won her, I don’t understand at all.”

  “What wife?” Meriones asked.

  Idomeneus turned to face him. It was an effort to unclench his fingers from the balustrade, actually, and more difficult not to let it show. “Iphigenia. Agamemnon’s eldest child.”

  The maimed man’s expression said he’d already guessed as much. “She can’t be more than fifteen.”

  “Old enough.” Idomeneus waved a hand. “Ideal, in fact. Neither you now I have children, cousin. Our line will die out unless we act, and we both lack wives. You because you never wed, and me because she died. I need heirs. Iphigenia is the perfect age.”

  “She is twenty-five years younger than you are,” Meriones said deliberately. “She will hate being your wife and she’ll tell her father so. Agamemnon will never forget what you made him do. Or forgive you for it.”

  Idomeneus nodded. That was the risk, right enough, but it was worth taking. Any king worth the name tried to make his country stronger, and there would always be danger in that. But he thought in this case it could be dealt with. His mind worked, foreseeing possibilities.

  “He won’t be able to spare the men to do anything about it, if he’s going after Troy,” he told Meriones. “And if he isn’t he’ll just refuse, and I’ll smile and say I understand, so nothing will be lost. But if he agrees… I get children, Meriones, and I gain allies so strong nobody will dare move against me. With that shelter I can begin to make Crete strong again, while the Greeks and Trojans smash each other into pieces.”

  “Risky,” Meriones said. A smile was growing on his lopsided face though. “But I like it.”

  There would be details to work out, of course. Meriones couldn’t simply demand that Agamemnon hand over his daughter for marriage: the High King would just knife him in rage. Delicacy was the key, and Idomeneus had never been very good at the soft approach. Well, he’d think of something. The new moon was a week away yet, plenty of time to hatch a plot.

  The Greek settlers on Crete, newcomers here really, told a tale of a dolphin woman named Amphitrite, who like all her kind was a shape-shifter. One day she was sunbathing with her friends on the beach, in human form, when Poseidon saw her and fell hopelessly in love. But she refused him, and in sorrow and loneliness he stirred up the seas and wrecked ships on all the shores of the Greensea, until at last the god persuaded her father Nereus to go to her. He found her hiding high on Mount Juktas, south of Knossos, and spoke so eloquently that Amphitrite relented, and she married Poseidon in a sea cave at the eastern end of Crete in the summertime. No sooner had the ceremony been held than the Earth-Shaker’s angst subsided, and the sea grew calm and tranquil once more.

  The indigenous Cretans, descendants of the old Minoans, told a different story. They said the seas had churned because a stone god rose to challenge the sky, only to be smashed into pieces which fell into the Greensea and threw up enormous waves. One of those fragments struck Crete and was transformed into a black bull with crimson eyes, which lurked beneath the earth until Theseus came from Attica and slew it.

  It was time for Crete to become the land of bulls again, and perhaps the marriage of Amphitrite could serve as a prophecy. The seas around the island would become tranquil again, and safe. And Idomeneus would be the new Minos, rising from the ruin of the old.