Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

Chapter Twenty

  Fame Will Be Won

  “Perhaps you can tell us now,” Nestor said later, “why you’ve been in such a foul mood since the Gathering.”

  The five of them were seated around a table partway down the mountain, in the town that provided accommodation and food for visitors to the Oracle. Far below the Pleistos river was a string of pale blue, splashed with white. On the far hillside deer browsed a slope patched with stands of trees, pines and cypress mostly, with wild grasses between.

  Nestor could see twenty cairns from where he sat, easily. Most of them were simple piles of rock, only a few feet high; just enough to serve as markers, and no more. They appeared everywhere, some on the slope among the grazing deer, others by the road up from the river, more under the eaves of the woods. Each one marked where a god had been seen, or a dryad brushing her hair in the fading of the day. There was no holier site in the world than Delphi. Not even Egypt held a place so sacred.

  “I suppose so,” Agamemnon said, after a moment.

  The High King didn’t look well enough to argue for long. He was pale and his face drawn, as though he’d suffered a series of sleepless nights or a bout of dysentery that had left him weak. Menelaus was no better, and Diomedes was drinking wine at a prodigious rate, pouring straight from the jug with no water added at all. It was Ajax who was worst off though, slouching in his chair and not meeting anyone’s eyes. He picked at the figs and olives but left the meats alone, and the wine. Nestor suspected the big man was afraid that if he ate properly he’d throw up again.

  “Well?” he said.

  “It’s that goat-spawned devil in Crete,” Agamemnon said. “Idomeneus. He sent his cousin to the Gathering in his place. It turns out he had a reason for that.”

  “Unrest in some of the villages, wasn’t it?” Menelaus asked.

  He really was slow sometimes. If there was nothing more to this than the story Meriones had told, Agamemnon wouldn’t be so furious about it. The High King shook his head. “I don’t think so, brother. That was just a tale spun to deceive us. Idomeneus has a higher aim.”

  “Which is?” Nestor asked. He was growing tired of teasing out words one by one, but he didn’t dare push harder. Agamemnon might turn that temper onto him.

  “First, he demanded equal authority with me over any army sent to Troy,” Agamemnon said.

  Ajax dropped a handful of raisins with a bellow. “What?”

  “I don’t think he was serious. He just wanted to remind me how badly I need those Cretan ships. And I do need them,” Agamemnon admitted gloomily. “We can manage without, but it will take us longer to transport our troops, or else we’ll have to spend a summer building enough galleys to take everyone in a single voyage. Either way, we lose time. Idomeneus knows it.”

  “Troy will use any time we give them to build their defences,” Diomedes said. “To train soldiers, too, and to call for help from allies. We can’t afford to gift them a year for it.”

  “I know that,” Agamemnon said dangerously. “I am not a complete fool.”

  No, Nestor thought privately, but you’re making a good try at it. Aloud he said, “So what was his real demand?”

  “He wants to marry my daughter,” Agamemnon said. “Iphigenia. He demands it, however courteous his words. That’s his price. I will have to hand her to him if I want his ships.”

  “I’ll tear his fawning tongue out with my hands!” Ajax erupted. “I’ll pop his eyeballs like grapes! I’ll – I’ll –”

  He tailed off, perhaps running out of words. Or perhaps he remembered that he was the one who’d vomited back in the Pythia’s cave, and any threats from him just now sounded ridiculous.

  Nestor looked out over the narrow valley, considering. Idomeneus had been one of those who hoped to marry Helen, before she picked Menelaus as her husband. The Cretan king had lost his wife some years ago, with no children to show for the union. He must be forty by now, and he looked it, a careworn and weary man entering middle age with no heir to groom to replace him. Those things made some men restless. Idomeneus must be wondering why he fought so hard to hold power if he had no one to leave it to.

  Iphigenia was young enough to give him children by the dozen, if he wanted so many, but she wasn’t merely a brood mare. She would tie Idomeneus to the great families of mainland Greece, something Helen would also have given him. Any Cretan king would feel rather isolated from the stream of events in Greece, always on the outside looking in, and sometimes forgotten. Marriage into the Atreide dynasty would give Idomeneus a chance to change that.

  This must be what the Pythia had meant in the cave. Nestor’s memory had returned, once he was out of the cloying fumes of the cave and in the fresh air again. Beloved daughter… love her, lose her. Send her away to sorrow. The sacrifice Agamemnon must make, for the war he longed for.

  “Clever of him,” Nestor said.

  Agamemnon glared, and then tossed his head like an angry bull. “Yes. I suppose it is.”

  “You don’t have to accept the demand,” Diomedes said. “Not from the mountain boar of Crete.”

  “I do if I want this war,” Agamemnon said. “Because I need the ships, and because if Crete stands aside from the fighting we might destroy Troy, but at the cost of losing control of the Greensea to Idomeneus. We would trade one obstructive enemy for another. And I do want to destroy Troy, after what we heard in the cave. Do we agree on that?”

  “Yes,” Ajax and Menelaus said immediately, at the exact same time. Nestor said “No,” and Diomedes only looked troubled.

  “What do you mean, no?” Agamemnon demanded. “You heard the prophetess. Troy’s fate is ours to control, we Greeks. If we go, Troy will fall.”

  “That’s not quite what she said,” Nestor replied. “No, High King, I don’t mean to insult you. But we should be very clear on precisely what the Pythia said. I heard her say Troy’s fate lies in the hands of the Greeks, but I did not hear her say the city will fall if we assault it. She said that Troy may rise, or she may fall. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Troy may rise like Susa,” Diomedes put in, “wherever that is. Has anyone heard of it?” None of them had. “Or fall like Hattusa, she said. But Hattusa hasn’t fallen. I didn’t understand that part.”

  “Neither did I,” Menelaus agreed.

  Agamemnon leaned forward. “We can’t expect to comprehend every word she spoke. It was Apollo’s words we heard, spoken through her mouth: that’s the point of the Oracle, after all. But we can understand a lot. Troy’s fate lies in the hands of the Greeks, she said. What more could we ask than that alone? If we go to Troy we lay our hands on the strings of destiny. Our hands, not Trojan ones. Isn’t that reason enough to go?”

  Diomedes was nodding, Nestor saw with dismay. He tried to speak but Agamemnon wasn’t done, and the High King drove right over him.

  “Fame will be won that rings down the ages,” he said. Agamemnon’s eyes were closed as he dredged the words out of his memory. “That should be enough too, but there’s more. Greece’s name will be written in letters of fire that burn for thousands of years. We’re warriors, my friends. Our forefathers built these kingdoms with sweat and spears, and we’re being told we can build a Greek empire that will last eternity. How can we turn away from a future like that?”

  Diomedes was nodding again. Menelaus had been from the start, but then, he always agreed with his older brother. Nestor could remember when Agamemnon had first begun learning the spear, and little Menelaus had toddled into the tiltyard at Mycenae to watch, eager as a puppy to join in. As for Ajax, after his embarrassment in the cave he was always going to vote for war now, to prove he wasn’t afraid. A man like him could do nothing else.

  It all depended on Diomedes, just as Odysseus had said when he came to Nestor for help in forming a plan. If the king of Argolis opted against war, the lords here would be split three to two, and Agamemnon would have no mandate to launch his attack on Troy. If he voted for, then Nestor’s would be the only dissenti
ng voice, and the die would be cast. The Greeks would be going to war in Anatolia, for a prize he doubted they could win.

  He tried desperately to think of an argument against it, and his mind snagged something the Pythia had told them. “She said this would only happen if “all Greece” joined the war. That means Achilles and the Myrmidons, and it means Crete too, I’m afraid.”

  “I know it,” Agamemnon said, voice level.

  He had decided, then. Agamemnon would send his young daughter to Greece to marry a middle-aged king he detested, in order to gain Cretan support for the struggle to come. The girl’s mother would be livid; Clytemnestra was reputed to have a vicious temper, and it was an open secret that she believed Agamemnon saw their children more as tools than as people to be loved. This would not help change her mind. Agamemnon knew that, and he was going to do it anyway. Nestor felt a wave of dismay and fought it off. If there was still a chance to turn this Fate aside it had to be done now, before they left this little town.

  He opened his mouth, and a voice behind him said, “My lord?”

  It was one of Agamemnon’s guards, a soldier clad in cuirass and helmet even here, in the most sacred place in Greece. He waited for his king’s nod before he continued. “A messenger has come, my lord. From the east. He says he carries tidings for you.”

  Agamemnon nodded. “He has been searched?”

  “Thoroughly, yes.”

  “Then bring him to me.” The High King turned back to his companions. “News from Troy, I wager. Now we will see. Perhaps they are ready to give up, before we even raise a spear.”

  Nestor doubted it. The Trojans would not abduct Helen and then cave in so easily: it made no sense. He hoped he was wrong, if only because it would end this lunacy before it could begin… except that Agamemnon would be encouraged to believe there was nobody who could stand against Greece, and the next time someone upset him he’d demand revenge even more loudly than now. If it wasn’t war on Troy it would be war in Egypt, or Phoenicia, or even far across the Greensea in wealthy Carthage. But all he could hope for was to win time. Prevent this war, and perhaps something else would happen to prevent the next, until finally Agamemnon died and a saner man became High King.

  Nestor would be long dead by then. Most of the task would fall on Odysseus, and Menestheus in Attica. But Nestor had a feeling, as he watched the messenger approach, that they weren’t going to have the chance.

  A dove cried, right above the kings’ table. Nestor turned his head in time to see it sweep away, a pale bird with black-barred wings, and his spirits sank even lower. Doves were sacred animals, always to be found where a god was present, or had been. That one had called out so close to the men had to mean the gods were watching what was about to happen.

  He turned back to the messenger, hands suddenly cold.

  “My King.” The man knelt a few yards from Agamemnon, and Nestor felt his brows rise. Anatolians knelt, Carthaginians and Egyptians did, but Greeks were content to bow. But evidently Agamemnon had begun insisting that his servants kneel, as though before a foreign potentate. There were implications, if so. Perhaps Agamemnon believed that being High King entitled him to greater respect than an ordinary king.

  And perhaps that would lead to trouble, one day. But not today. The messenger was still kneeling.

  “What news?” Agamemnon asked.

  “Word from the east,” the man told him. “We’ve heard from two merchants now that there are stories of a great battle between the Hittites and Assyrians, fought somewhere beyond the mountains. One called the battle Sinjar, the other Keshad. Both agree the Hittites were defeated, and badly.”

  The High King leaned forward. “How badly?”

  “It seems their entire chariot force was destroyed,” the man said. “Trapped in narrow ground by ranks of spearmen, according to one of our people, though we can’t confirm that. Half their spears were lost in the retreat – perhaps a good deal more than half. Word in Halicarnassus is that the Assyrians are advancing on Hattusa itself.”

  “By the Lord of the Black Cloud,” Agamemnon breathed. “The Hittites are broken. This is an omen! A sign from Zeus himself.”

  Nestor closed his eyes for a moment. He knew now there was no point in further protest. Not just because Agamemnon would never listen, but because the gods were playing this game, beyond doubt. The dove removed any doubt of that. When the gods involved themselves there was nothing a mortal man could do but try to ride the storm, or he would be broken like a ship caught in surging currents. Menelaus and Ajax were watching the High King with shining eyes, convinced this meant the gods were on their side. Even Diomedes looked awed.

  The gods were tricksters though, as likely to lure a man on and then betray him as they were to keep their faith. Agamemnon was a fool if he thought he could trust them. But saying so would gain nothing. Not anymore.

  Agamemnon picked up his wine cup. Colour had returned to his face now, and he was smiling widely. “We go to Troy!”

  “To Troy!” Menelaus repeated, ever the sycophant, and Ajax bellowed, “Troy shall fall!”

  Diomedes echoed him a moment later. All the choices had run out. Nestor remembered abruptly the words spoken by the priest in Thessaly long before, over the body of the great boar Peleus had speared. From this moment the world turns towards war. Antenor of Troy had been there that day, to plead for the return of Hesione. That princess had become an open wound, dripping poison between Troy and Greece. Now here they were, preparing for war to rescue the woman Troy had stolen in desperate response.

  He reached for his cup and held it up, managing a smile that he thought looked genuine. He supposed it didn't matter. Even Agamemnon hadn’t yet tried to choose which thoughts he would allow a man to have, in the privacy of his own mind. What counted were a man’s actions. In this case, whether he brought his ships and armies to the war in the east.

  Nestor would do so. Ride the storm, or be broken.

  “To Troy,” he said.