Beware of Greeks

by Peter Tonkin

The men obeyed, turning the corpse on its side to untie its belt – a task complicated by swollen leather and slippery knots. Lying like that, it was almost possible to believe that there was nothing amiss with the face as it was presented in profile with the left side hidden. But as soon as the belt was free, the chiton slid off the marble-white body as easily as the skin off a shedding snake. One of the sailors reached for the dead man’s loin cloth, but Odysseus stopped him. They laid the body back, face down, and stood clear, one with the belt and the other with the sodden tunic. The absence of the tunic revealed a slit in the left side of the corpse’s back that seemed to match the hole in the chiton. The wound pouted slightly, its lips parted to reveal a deep dark throat that reached beneath the shoulder-blade into the dead blue barrel of the chest.[IW1] The captain leaned forward and pushed the flesh on either side. The lips parted slightly and a stream of clear liquid came out immediately followed by a foam of bubbles.

  Odysseus rocked back on his heels once more. ‘Turn him over,’ he ordered. ‘But be careful not to disturb his loin cloth. The poor man has suffered enough indignities without that.’ He swung round to face me. ‘Well, boy, what do you make of it?’

  ‘Nothing more than I can see, Captain.’ I replied. ‘We have here a man about whom we know nothing except that the gods struck him down, seemingly by causing him to be stabbed in the back, though for some reason I cannot fathom there seems to be no blood from the wound. No more than there is from his missing leg. Who he was and what he did before his death, why he died and how he ended up floating on a raft missing half a face or half a leg eludes me entirely. I’m sure that no-one under Olympus could ever know.’

  ‘What if I told you I had answers to almost every question you might ask?’

  ‘Were you anyone other than Captain Odysseus I would doubt you.’

  v

  ‘Diplomatically phrased,’ laughed Captain Odysseus. ‘Let us begin and see whether I can dispel those doubts.’ He paused for a moment seeming to put his thoughts in order. ‘We begin not with who he was—that may come later—but with what he was. This will explain why I called for your attention in particular. He was, like you, a rhapsode. Observe the knee above the missing left leg. It is twisted. The thigh above it is thin compared with that on his right leg. But the shoulder on that side—the left—appears stronger with calluses in the pit of the arm. Furthermore, the sandal that remains is unevenly worn. Although a shark or some similar beast has robbed us of proof-positive, it is clear to see that he was, like you, crippled. And, furthermore, using a crutch.’

  ‘By no means every crutched cripple is a rhapsode, Captain,’ I said, even though I was amazed by what he had observed—that I had overlooked—and what he had made out of his observations.

  ‘True,’ he answered. ‘But there is more.’ He leaned forward and parted the eyelids on that one remaining eye. The eyeball itself was covered in a milk-white cowl. ‘Crippled and half blind—perhaps wholly so,’ he observed. ‘Though again, the seas have robbed us of proof-positive.’ He gestured to the gaping pit on the opposite side of the dead face.

  ‘That’s easy to say, Captain, but…’

  ‘Ah. The final proof to persuade the young sceptic. Look at his right hand and compare it with your own.’ As I did so, he continued his commentary. ‘You see the calluses on his fingertips and thumb? His are more developed, but, like yours, they come from plucking lyre-strings.’

  I looked at Odysseus, simply stunned. Now that he mentioned it, I could see everything he described, and was convinced by the sense he had made of his observations. It all seemed almost childishly simple—I could hardly understand how I had missed so much that was so obvious to him. But he had only just begun.

  ‘A rhapsode of experience, perhaps of standing—as the quality of his chiton might well prove. It certainly proves that he was stabbed in the back and almost definitely died from the wound. But where is the blood, I hear you say; when a man bleeds to death there is a lot of blood. And so there must have been. But as my wife and household servants would be quick to explain, the most efficient way to clean a garment of blood is to wash it in cold water. And it will not have escaped your notice that we fished him out of an entire Aegean Sea full of cold water. But we can take matters one step further, I believe, for the efficiency with which the sea has cleaned off all but the faintest trace of blood proves that he was stabbed and immersed immediately afterwards. The body is damaged, both historically and recently, but none of the damage suggests he was stabbed on a cliff-top and hurled over the edge. It is unlikely he was stabbed on a beach and swam out to deep water as he died—or that he was stabbed by a river and literally washed out to sea. No. He must have been stabbed aboard some vessel or other, therefore, and pushed overboard at once. A proposition further supported by the fact that he remained alive long enough to pull himself onto this raft that the Fates supplied for him, and to secure himself to it by anchoring his belt to the sturdy splinter that held him safe even in face of an attack by a shark. The fact that he could not pull the missing limb to safety further suggesting that it was crippled and not fully under his control. Let us hope that Poseidon looked kindly upon him and allowed him to die gently from the stab-wound before the shark arrived.’

  The sea-blue eyes lost focus. He seemed to go into some kind of trance. ‘But where was this fatal vessel when the rhapsode met his end? Just outside the channel beyond Euboea Island which lied close on our right hand. Either approaching or leaving Phthia, bound to or from Skyros.’ He pulled the two rings out of his purse and held them up. ‘We have here the seals of King Peleus and of King Lycomedes,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘But what was a common rhapsode doing with the seals of kings around his neck?’ I wondered.

  ‘Their presence suggests that he was not such a common rhapsode after all,’ he answered. ‘But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves, for the shark was not the only sea-creature that attacked him. Some thing or things had the opportunity and the leisure to eat half his face. The opportunity was clearly presented by his dead head lying half in and half out of the water. But the leisure…’ He looked up at the two sailors who still stood holding the belt and the tunic. ‘How long do you think it would take to reduce his face to what we see here?’ he asked.

  ‘At least two days,’ offered the man with the belt.

  ‘Three?’ suggested the one with the tunic a little hesitantly.

  ‘I agree. Three days. So our deceased rhapsode was stabbed and thrown overboard from a vessel heading one way or the other between Phthia and Skyros as it passed beyond the opening of the channel between the mainland and this island some three days ago.’

  ‘But why?’ I demanded. ‘Why in the names of all the gods kill a rhapsode?’

  ***

  Odysseus paused. He took a long breath. ‘You still do not understand.’ he said sadly.

  ‘What more is there to understand?’ I asked.

  ‘Almost everything,’ answered Odysseus. ‘Everything of real importance, certainly.’ Utterly unexpectedly, he commanded, ‘Sing me the epic song you were singing when we first met. The one about Hercules at Troy.’

  ‘I will fetch my lyre…’ I said obediently.

  ‘No need for that,’ he decided abruptly. ‘Just sing.’

  ‘Sing, Muses of the anger of Hercules,’ I began, ‘black and murderous, costing the Trojans terrible sorrow, casting King Laomedon into Hades’ dark realm leaving his royal corpse for the dogs and the ravens.’

  ‘Stop!’ he ordered and, when I had obeyed, he continued, his voice low, his brow wrinkled with thought. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Word for word.’

  ‘It is what I always sing,’ I said, also frowning – but with confusion rather than thought. ‘I wrote it and I learned it, just as I learned the songs that Stasinus taught me. Word for word.’

  ‘And you still do not see,’ he prompted gently. ‘You do not understand the importance…’

  ‘No, Captain.

  He
shook his head. ‘That you, the youngest amongst us should share so much understanding—or lack of it—with the oldest. To King Nestor and men of his generation, things seem so simple. Because they only see surfaces. If a thing is then it is as it appears to be—no more and no less. Caused or created by the gods, immutable, unquestionable. They see no alternatives. They see everything face-on, no other possibilities admitted—or even considered. If they come up against a wall, they must either go over it or through it. They have no concept of finding a way around it.’

  ‘Captain…’

  He gave a sigh of frustration and his expression reminded me of my father’s when he tried to explain something to his slow-witted children. ‘Oh very well! Consider. You are King of Phthia or King of Skyros. You know that the overbearing, unforgiving High King Agamemnon of Mycenae is gathering an army and will soon send emissaries to you demanding aid, troops and money. Like the King of Ithaca you cannot afford to have such a powerful man as your enemy. But you wish to consult your closest friend, a nearby king, before Agamemnon’s messengers arrive. You need, therefore, to send a long, complex message and expect an equally lengthy reply—each one of which must be as dictated—word for word; perfect.

  I nodded, understanding his point. The only type of record keeping other than a messenger’s memory I had ever come across were the marks on clay tablets I had made under the tutelage of the Cretan record keeper in the warehouse at Chalcis and they were only useful for recording the details of ships’ manifests and the contents of warehouses—unless one was a High King, immensely rich and powerful, keeping a scribe handy to aid communication with other High Kings like yourself.

  ‘Who better to be your messenger than your rhapsode?’ Odysseus continued. ‘After all, his whole existence turns around learning one lengthy song after another—all word-perfect. Who else in almost any court of any king could be relied upon to learn and carry such a message? And, on his arrival be invited into the royal presence at once to perform his songs and entertain the court? How easy would it be therefore to pass on secret messages? As was, in fact done three or four days ago. Either King Peleus or King Lycomedes gave their rhapsode a message to be taken to the other. But someone knew how the message would be carried and wished to stop it. They went aboard with the rhapsode and whoever else was in the embassy if there was one, and at some point three days ago they stabbed the rhapsode in the back and pushed him immediately overboard. The rings identify the sender and the recipient of this lost message, but not which is which. However, if we wish to discover why the deed was done and learn, perhaps, who did it, we will find our answer at one court or the other. And we will start with Phthia of course, because both King Nestor and I have immediate business there.’

  2 – Phthia

  i

  The harbour at Phthia was a wide bay with a sandy bottom that sloped up to a golden curve of beach. A jetty reached out from the heart of the beach like an arrow behind the curve of a flexed bow. Thick planks had been secured between wooden piles driven deep into the sea-bed, reaching far enough out for seagoing vessels to tie up against. At the landward end of the jetty there was a path across the sand beaten hard by passing feet, and beyond that a narrow roadway leading up the slope of a hill towards the walled town at whose centre stood a citadel crowned with King Peleus’ palace. In the brightness of a clement afternoon, the white walls and red roofs gleamed hospitably. The marble porticoes of the temples offered comfortable shade from a sun struck, windless day. The gates of the citadel stood wide and the palace itself, walled and columned with the famous white marble of Thassos, seemed cheerfully welcoming. There was nothing sinister about the place at all.

  The two kings strode down the gangplank and set off side by side, their entourage at their heels. Gifts and other necessaries followed close behind, mostly on the shoulders of the oarsmen. They all set a good pace up the increasingly steep thoroughfare—far faster than anything I could match, especially as I was laden with one bag containing my own immediate requirements and another which carried my lyre. In fact, the only person there moving more slowly than me was the murdered rhapsode. Odysseus ordered that he should be brought ashore with us and had caused him to be wrapped in a sturdy piece of linen kept aboard to mend the sail. Four men carried the corpse along the jetty, across the beach and up towards the gleaming palace which the captain calculated might well have been his home. However, if he proved to be a stranger here, he would be coming with us on the next leg of our journey. The captain had shared his thoughts with me as readily as he shared his smiles.

  ‘Our mysterious guest must be familiar to one king or the other; perhaps both if he was a regular messenger between them. Let us begin by seeing whether he is Peleus’ man. Knowing where he was coming from will help us discover who came with him. After all, the man who stabbed him is most likely to have been among his companions. You see the reasonable steps leading from one point to the other? In a sequence to which we might apply the term Logos, logic.’

  I was indeed beginning to see the faintest glimmer of his new method of reasoning. I had been astonished by the effects he achieved by applying it to the dead rhapsode aboard his ship. The thought of observing him as he applied it to the mutilated corpse in the courts of two ancient kings while he attempted to unmask the poor man’s murderer filled me with even more excitement than that which I had felt on first hearing Stasinus sing.

  Phthia was not yet on a war-footing so the gates to the city and those to the citadel stood wide and the guards were almost friendly. The town between was a bustle of domesticity and commerce and the kings passed through without earning a second glance. Men and women came and went around us, most carrying baskets to and from the agora. The wares displayed at the market there emphasised a fact that I was already aware of—that the town relied less on imports carried up from the harbour and more upon goods and foodstuffs brought in from the fields and hills that lay behind the place. Fertile lands stretched almost as far back as Mount Pelion and what was grown there fed many of the cities along this coast.

  The guards at the citadel gate had already been warned about my cloth-wrapped companion and so one of them unhesitatingly guided us across the palace courtyard and through a small side entrance, one of several leading off the modest, marble-flagged square. Having been given no other instructions, I followed the corpse. The palace was a relatively modest building from the outside, but the simple length of the corridor that led inward and downward allowed me to speculate that there was more to the place than met the eye. Beneath the striking hilltop stronghold there lay a maze of tunnels that would have challenged even Theseus had there been a Minotaur hidden somewhere within them. An apt enough thought, I calculated, because some years earlier King Peleus’ close friend and confidant King Lycomedes had welcomed Theseus to Skyros, only to have the aged king tragically fall to his death off a cliff.

  The tunnel, lit by occasional flaming torches in sconces along the walls, led past the openings of other tunnels and, between these, one dark cell-like room after another, many prepared as makeshift sleeping chambers with beds, tables and lamps, all currently unlit. This was unusual enough to draw my attention. Most of the palaces I knew of had large chambers or megarons which served as dining halls by day, places of feasting and entertainment in the evening and dormitories by night. The only palace I could think of that shared this unusual design was King Priam’s palace at Troy; soon to be sacked and razed to the ground if High King Agamemnon got his way. After the welcoming warmth of the afternoon above-ground, the tunnel we were following seemed chilly and dank. There was a dead smell to it—of damp rock and old smoke. I shivered—as much at my gloomy thoughts as at the atmosphere which must be one of the most unsettling in any palace. But then, I thought, I had yet to visit King Lycomedes’ palace on Skyros. Perhaps that too would seem more welcoming on the surface than it proved when you went further in. It never really occurred to me to wonder how King Peleus had known to have the extra accommodation prepared. Nestor
and Odysseus had sent ahead no warning of our imminent arrival.

  Beyond and below the sleeping chambers there were store rooms but they all seemed empty of people at the moment, if well-stocked with provisions. Our guide passed all this without comment—as taciturn as our cloth-wrapped companion. Eventually we arrived at small room that contained nothing more than a table and a couple of lamps with flames high enough to illuminate it. Odysseus’ sailors put the corpse on this and stood back. Our guide then led us outward and upward. I found that, had I been Theseus myself, I would have needed neither Ariadne nor her thread. Theseus of course discovered he no longer needed Ariadne almost immediately after he had used her to aid his escape. He abandoned her on the island of Naxos, leaving her on that deserted lump of rock friendless and alone until she grew desperate enough to hang herself. Perhaps, I thought, he deserved that last long drop the Fates had in store for him on Skyros after all. In the meantime, it seemed to me that I could see the pattern of the tunnels like a picture in my head, far more clearly than I could see the real world around me. By the time we returned to the courtyard, I was confident I could find my way through them once again. In the courtyard we were greeted by a tall, clean-shaven, well-dressed man whose aristocratic features and air of decisive command marked him both as a nobleman and as a soldier. ‘Where is it?’ he demanded of my guide.

  ‘In one of the cellars, Lord Hypatios,’ answered the guard.

  ***

  Lord Hypatios looked around the courtyard, then summoned a couple of men from the unit guarding the gate. ‘You will take me back to where it is,’ he said to the man who brought us out of the maze of corridors. He turned to the first of the gate guards. ‘You will take Captain Odysseus’ crewmen to the kitchens. There is food being served there.’ He turned to the second. ‘And you will take the rhapsode to the king.’

  Lord Hypatios followed our erstwhile guide back the way we had just come. The first guard took Odysseus’ sailors in tow and headed one way. The second one looked at me and jerked his head, indicating that we should go another way entirely. Without a word, he set off and I had no option other than to follow him. Less than pleased to be missing out on a meal that the sailors were enjoying, nevertheless I limped after him as quickly as I could.