by Ben Blake
*
“As the High King summoned, so have you come,” Talthybius said. He stood in the centre of the megaron, a silver-worked sceptre in his hand. “Only two kings are missing. Telamon of Salamis has sent his son Ajax to represent him. Do we accept him in his father’s place?”
Seated in two long lines on either side of the hearth, the rulers murmured assent. They knew why Telamon was absent: he was simply too fat to travel now. There was no need to say so aloud. Such disrespect was unseemly – and besides, Ajax was very large.
“Idomeneus of Crete is unable to attend,” Talthybius said, due to unrest in his homeland. His cousin Meriones is here in his stead. Do we accept him as his king’s voice in council?”
There was another murmur, less certain this time. Several kings crossed their arms over their chests and didn’t speak at all. The crater-headed man gave no sign of noticing. Neither did Talthybius, perhaps as much from choice as convenient blindness.
“Then we are assembled,” the Herald said. “I declare this Gathering of Kings open. Let none speak except that he carries the sceptre,” he raised it above his head, “and then briefly, and with respect to gods and men.”
He turned to Agamemnon, bowed deeply, and placed the silver-inlaid rod in his hand. Then he withdrew, back towards the doors where the priests had gone after performing their auspices, moments before. Talthybius stopped short of them though, lurking in the shadows at the edge of the hall, ready to answer if his master called.
Seated at the very foot of the line, Odysseus watched these events with a carefully bland expression. He’d tried to judge the mood of the other kings over the past two days, with limited success. Some were easy to read, like Menelaus with rage and humiliation burning in him every moment, though often it was subsumed by sorrowful maundering. Or Leitus of Boeotia, bursting as always with a fury his small frame seemed hardly able to contain. Leitus was extremely short. Odysseus suspected his endless antagonism towards everything must have something to do with that.
But a few exceptions aside, the kings had kept their thoughts private, hidden behind meaningless smiles and empty words. Even Nestor hadn’t been able to divine anything. The aged king of Messenia sat near the head of the twin lines, only a few seats from Agamemnon himself, as befitted a king of his power. Odysseus wished he and his friend were close enough to whisper.
But the High King was standing, and there was no time to waste on wishful thinking.
“You know the insult that has been done to us,” Agamemnon said. He was wearing a chiton patterned in rainbow stripes, and a gold circlet decorated with oak leaves. Peacock, Odysseus thought, keeping the contempt well away from his lips and expression. “Paris of Troy slipped into Sparta like a thief, and like a thief made off with my brother’s wife, Helen. We are told she will be returned in exchange for Hesione, as though we are merchants haggling over prices or trades. Trojans may be merchants, but we are not. After their betrayal, I am not of a mind to indulge them in this.
“Hesione is Telamon’s wife, in any case,” he went on. “The mother of his son, Teucer, brother to great Ajax there. Sending her to Troy would break up a family. I’m not of a mind to do that, either.”
That was a weak argument. Troy had been asking for Hesione’s return for more than twenty years, almost since the day she was taken from the Plain by Heracles and Telamon. If the only reason to refuse was to keep the family together, then why had she not been sent back before Teucer was born? Before Telamon raped her, to put it bluntly?
“None of that matters,” Agamemnon said. Odysseus’ eyebrows lifted in surprise before he could control himself. “What matters is the insult to Greece. The Greensea isn’t a place where weaklings flourish, and if we allow this to stand we will be seen as weak indeed. What, the whole of Greece, united, did not dare defy a single city? We must force Troy to hand Helen back, by any means required. What my brother does with her then is his decision,” he nodded to Menelaus, “though I, for one, would not blame him if he had her whipped through the streets and then given to his men for sport.”
He looked down the two lines of lords, and then said, “My belief is that we, all the Greeks, should assemble an army to break Troy and fetch Helen back. Before others around the Greensea decide we are weak.”
He sat down. That was brief, Odysseus thought. Brief and to the point, with little time wasted on irrelevancies. The High King held out the sceptre and a servant came to take it, by which time Diomedes of Argolis had already risen to his feet. There was a susurrus of surprise as he was given the sceptre. Diomedes was not normally so forward, at least not in councils.
“Break Troy?” the golden-haired man repeated. “You’ve never been there, High King. I have. So have others here today. And I’m sure they will tell you what I do: Troy cannot be broken. Her armies are strong, especially in chariots, with those magnificent horses to pull them. Did you know,” he asked the kings, “that they use three horses to a chariot? They have horses to spare, and every one of them is Olympian-born.
“Troy’s spearmen are hardly less formidable, and she draws them from all over Troas. Break Troy?” Diomedes snorted. “We would likely break our own teeth trying, and for nothing.”
Agamemnon began to stand up, face tight with anger, but Leonteus was on his feet ahead of him. A servant conveyed the sceptre across the gap between kings, then withdrew in silence.
“What I hear is that Paris took Helen from Sparta without a single life lost,” the king of Pieria said. Legend claimed there was a spring of clear water in that country which bestowed wisdom to any man who drank from it. Odysseus supposed it might be true, but if so then the kings of the land didn’t know where it was. They hardly ever had a full set of wits.
“If that’s true,” Leonteus said, “where were the Spartan guards? Who did Menelaus set to watch his wife? Did he assign no one to keep her safe? Or are Laconia’s soldiers now so inept that they cannot protect a single woman?” He shook his head. “My country sits at the border of Greece, my lords. I deal with the threat of bandits every day, and I know this: one never leaves a treasure, or a woman, unguarded. I wonder why I am being asked to fight, far from my home and against an enemy who may be as powerful as we are, because one man couldn’t take care of his wife.”
Odysseus winced as the hall erupted in shouts. The white-robed priests came gliding back in, but they’d have a hard time restoring order after that little barb. Couldn’t take care of his wife; there was a phrase which could mean more than one thing. People would already have wondered why Helen wanted to leave anyway, as she apparently had. What had made her unhappy? Was Menelaus simply not enough man for her?
If someone said that bluntly, there might be blood on the tiles of the megaron before the day was done. There might have been already, if the insult had been at the other son of Atreus. Agamemnon would have responded with violence: Menelaus only glowered, his broad face flushed.
The angrier kings were still on their feet, refusing to be calmed. Odysseus tried to catch Nestor’s eye and couldn’t. He signalled for wine as Leitus was finally cajoled into his chair, still fuming over something that had been said to him in the middle of the yelling. Odysseus hadn’t heard what it was.
Peleus had the sceptre when the room was quiet again. He’d grown fat with age, if not as grossly as Telamon had, and hadn’t risen when so many others had done. “Leonteus makes a fair point, but,” he added hastily before the shouting resumed, “it doesn’t affect the central issue. Troy has stolen our most beautiful woman, a queen famed across the Greensea for her beauty. If we do nothing, who else will think they can goad us?”
“Exactly what I was saying,” Agamemnon muttered. He didn’t have the speaker’s rod, but he was High King, so nobody challenged him over it. Besides, he’d always been surly. His peers had learned to let him grumble at times, to forestall a larger explosion later.
Now Nireus of Rhodes had the sceptre. “What does it matter if Helen is beautiful? I never saw her befo
re in my life.”
Ajax bounded to his feet and snatched the sceptre from his hands. It was impressive to see Ajax bound: the palace seemed to shake with the weight of the man. “It matters that she’s Greek! I will not accept sitting here listening to a kopros-faced weasel while a Greek queen is despoiled by a Trojan!”
“What will you do?” Menestheus asked mildly, though also without the sceptre. “Storm Troy on your own?”
“If I must!” Ajax bellowed.
The gods save us from men who think with their muscles. Ajax was a decent man, actually, much easier company than his overbearing brute of a father, but he wasn’t the longest spear in any fight. The probability was that Leonteus was right, and all the Greek armies together would have a Titan’s task trying to overthrow the power of Troy.
“What happens if outsiders think Greece is weak?” Agamemnon had the sceptre again. “Leonteus, your land is on the northern edge of Greece. Those raiders you spoke of are Keltoi, or else Thracians sneaking in to steal. How long will it take them to decide your armies are not to be feared anymore? Troy deals with both peoples. Word will spread.”
Curse him, Odysseus thought, that’s actually a good point. To judge by his frown, Leonteus knew it too.
“As for beauty,” Agamemnon continued, “The Trojans will parade Helen around the Greensea if they can, and beyond. To Hattusa, or Colchis. And people will say, ‘There goes a queen the Greeks couldn’t keep, for all their armies and their swagger.’ Our trade will suffer because others don’t believe we have the strength to protect shipments.”
Nestor stood up. He was far from the largest man present – though he was among the oldest – but the mutters and catcalls died as he held out his hand for the sceptre. Agamemnon moved to hand it to him, not bothering to wait for a servant. That was real respect, the kind of thing earned only by wisdom and long life. The hall was quiet.
“The High King makes a good point,” Nestor said. That caused more murmuring, but the old man wasn’t finished. “Especially in mentioning Hattusa. The Hittites are still a power to consider. We mustn’t forget what happened in Miletos.”
There was silence. All of them remembered Miletos, though Odysseus didn’t think any of the kings had ever laid eyes on the city, except himself. They knew the story, though. Greeks had taken the city, made themselves its lords, and then been smashed into the dirt when the Hittites came to avenge their vassals. There had been no survivors, not even women or children taken as slaves. Every single Greek in or near the city had been killed. Today Miletos was an Anatolian city again, filled with disparate peoples from all over the Greensea… but not from Greece. The memory of so much spilled blood was too fresh for that.
As though thinking of stories had summoned him, Thersites moved in the shadows at the far end of the hall, pen in hand. Odysseus wouldn’t have recognised a normal man, but Thersites’ deformed shape meant it could be no one else. The man did manage to put himself about. One day Odysseus might wake up to find the bard standing by his bed, a quill in his hand as he prepared to take notes for a song or a poem he had in mind.
“We mustn’t be intimidated by it either,” Agamemnon said. He didn’t sound very certain though.
“Well,” Nestor said, “if you’re not intimidated by power, High King, perhaps you should sail your fleet to Egypt and set flames in the streets of Thebes. Or better yet, climb Olympus itself and throw down Zeus with your spears. No? I thought not. Power is to be respected. As you know, since you realise what will happen if Greece is thought to be weak.”
“We have to do something!” Ajax bellowed, making the walls shudder.
“I would be very interested in knowing what Menelaus thinks,” Nestor said, “since he has not spoken a word so far.”
He didn’t raise his voice, but the hall fell silent once more at his words. Every head turned towards Menelaus, sitting slouched in his chair to Agamemnon’s right. When the big man looked up Odysseus; first thought was that he’d been drinking, but then he changed his mind. Menelaus looked like a man who hadn’t enjoyed a good night’s sleep in a week, or eaten a filling meal. A man tormented by Furies every night and Harpies by day.
Menelaus stood up, looming over the kings with shoulders lowered like a bull. He was still flushed, either with wine or rage, or perhaps both.
“I want her back.” His voice was thick with barely-suppressed rage. “I want her back and on her knees before me. I want that Gorgon-faced prince of Troy to spend years screaming for mercy in my dungeon. And I want to world to know it, every man and child around the Greensea; I want them to know what it means to anger Menelaus of Sparta, And all the Greeks.”
“We did not come here for you,” Nireus said caustically.
Menelaus launched himself at the man, and Nireus threw himself forward in reply. It was always that way; a Greek king who failed to meet a challenge would be bullied for the rest of his life. He was much the smaller man, but still fought furiously against the other kings and Agamemnon’s servants as they struggled to keep the two men apart. Menelaus almost managed to reach Nireus before Ajax caught his arm and hauled him away, with no apparent effort.
Nireus had been one of those who sought Helen’s hand. He’d never had much chance, perhaps, coming from far-off Rhodes as he did. But the memory of rejection might lie beneath his reluctance to help Menelaus now, and the speed with which he’d leapt at him. One woman had already caused a great deal of division among the Greeks.
She might cause much worse yet.
“This will stop,” Agamemnon said. His voice carried even over the uproar. “I will not accept this behaviour in my hall – no, not even from you, brother! Can none of you see? This is a gift from the gods. We stand at the moment of decision for all Greece. Do we rise, and grow? Take the farmland and wealth we so badly need? Or do we cower and sidle away, unwilling to deal with thieves and liars as they deserve, and condemn ourselves to a slow and slinking decline as Troy and Egypt grow great around us?
“Troy is mighty.” He looked around at the kings. “But Greece is mightier yet. And I would gamble my fortune and my life on our fighting men against any in the world, whether Trojan or Hittite, or Assyrian from the far lands of the sunrise. Who tells me I am wrong?”
A moment, and then Odysseus stood up. He heard the disparaging mutters as the sceptre was carried to him, and ignored them. He was the peasant king, the shepherd, but he could make them listen. He had to.
“If this is the moment of decision,” he said, “when we Greeks decide on war against one of the powers of the world, then we need our greatest men here to help us make that choice. Our High King is present, and the wronged husband. The warriors Diomedes and Ajax stand with us. But with respect to them, the greatest warrior in Greece is not here.”
He let the murmur pass again. It was more approving this time. “Where is Achilles? Was he not summoned?”
Eyes turned to Peleus, who shifted on his chair. “He was.”
“Then where is he?”
“He didn’t reply,” Peleus said uncomfortably. “Or come, as I told him to. His mother’s doing, I think. She wrote the letter to him.”
“Then he may not have known he was needed,” Odysseus said. “My lord kings, I have two suggestions to make. First, that we send for Achilles, at once, and bring him here to ask his opinion. If Troy can be taken it’s he who will know how. Who else has fought so often in Anatolia?”
Heads nodded around the room, and then Agamemnon said, “And the other thing?”
“Ask the advice of the Oracle at Delphi,” Odysseus said.
The nods were firmer this time. He could see the kings thinking: before they risked their fortunes and lives in war against Troy, they wanted to be sure the gods were on their side. Without Olympus’ help there was no chance Troy would fall, none whatever. It was a reasonable request, one Agamemnon could not possibly deny without losing the support of half the room. The High King’s jaw was clenched in frustration.
“Let me add
to that,” Nestor said. “Send five kings to Delphi. The High King must go, of course, and Menelaus as the wronged party. Ajax should go, since his father’s taking of Hesione has led to this. No, my friend, I lay no blame,” he added when Ajax seemed about to erupt. “And deeds of decades ago should not be offered as an excuse for insult today, in any case. But I should go to Delphi, as one who doubts the war’s wisdom, with Diomedes to make the five. We will decide on behalf of all Greeks, if the other kings will permit us.”
They didn’t like it, but clearly not all of them could go to Delphi. The little town was used to holding the Pythian Games every two years, but the unexpected descent of twenty kings would overwhelm it. Besides, they could only ask the Pythia, the prophetess of Delphi, one question. Only the five need go. Slowly they conceded the point, heads nodding all around the megaron.
Odysseus was careful not to glance at Nestor as he sat down. The other kings knew they were friends, and knew too that they were probably the cleverest of all the Greek kings. They often forgot Odysseus, and forgot Ithaca, but when they were reminded they admitted that he was shrewd. Now, with the two of them having stood and spoken as they had, some of the other lords would be wondering how much of it had been planned.
All of it, was the simple answer. But quietly, back in Messenia before they came to Mycenae on separate ships. Nestor had agreed that much rested on how Diomedes decided, but there wasn’t a chance to speak with him before the Gathering. What they needed was time. A few days might be enough to persuade him, or for other kings to feel the beginnings of doubt. The Trojans might even lose their nerve, and agree to hand Helen over. It was possible; no mortal man could foretell the future. A week, or a month, might change everything.
“Very well,” Agamemnon said. His jaw was still tight with tension. “The five of us will go to Delphi, and ask the Pythia what will happen if Greece goes to war with Troy. But,” he smiled thinly, “I want a service from you, Odysseus, in payment for the journey you force me to make.”
He felt his stomach plunge. “What service?”
“A journey of your own,” the High King said.