The Songs of the Kings: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

  His throat felt tired and he was hungry. A few gifts had been deposited on the square of felt before him, a wheat cake covered with sesame seeds, some figs, a small stoppered jar which might contain honey, a handful of terra-cotta beads painted in different colors and pierced to make a necklace. He needed a short song of praise to round things off, then he would rest for a while. The Ajaxes would do. Big Ajax had never given him the silver clip he had been promised, but the pair had come with two bronze arrowheads—one from each— and explained their new idea of a wreath of leaves worn on the head to honor winners in the Games.

  They would do, yes, but what was one to say about them? The small one was a rapist of note. He launched into a list of Little Ajax’s successes, all carried out in style, without once breaking the rules, no recourse to weapons, no maidens rudely seized and violated when they had taken sanctuary at the altar of a god. And his inseparable companion, Big Ajax, the Imperturbable, the Peacemaker, mighty in battle, the man who had dreamed up the idea of the Games Day. These two men had bequeathed to humanity a totally new type of headgear, the garland of entwined leaves, eternal symbol of victory.

  3.

  One man had remained to keep the dogs off. The corpse was lying with face to the sky, or what was left of the face—the eyes had gone, and the nose and most of the right cheek had been gnawed away. It seemed to Calchas, as he looked down, that these eyeless sockets had the same staring look of possession as when the living voice had spoken and the throat labored to bring out the goddess’s words, tell of the devouring of the hare’s young and warn the assembled chiefs. The dried blood was caked on his neck where the vein had been severed. This was no savaging of the dogs; his killers had slashed the throat that had betrayed them; he had been killed for speaking out of turn, for saying something that was not in the story, not part of the plan. But it was in the spaces between human plans that the gods conveyed their messages; he had been a vehicle for the goddess and in stopping his mouth they had tried to stop hers. The dogs were at the bidding of the Mistress, at her bidding they had brought this poor murdered creature up to the light again. For what purpose? Calchas felt again the ache of uncertainty, like a physical pain somewhere unlocalized in his body. “We must get back,” he said. “I must talk again with the King.”

  At this moment, looking towards the sea, he saw a man running along the shore close to the water, sweat shining on his naked chest and arms. And now, as though to encourage the diviner in his resolve, the sun rose clear above the headland and was briefly defined as a perfect disk, containing its shape, a shape that lasted for moments only—already, as they began to return along the shore, it was lost, streaming off in a brilliance without form, not touching yet the western sky, which was cold-colored and hazed with thin mist.

  “The summer is waning,” Calchas said, as if speaking to himself. Did truth lie in the short-lived, perfect sphere? Or in this slow spreading of rays, this formless brightness? Was there one single, perfect thing to say to Agamemnon, if he could seize upon it?

  Before they were back in the camp the sun had cleared away those lingerings of night in the west and laid a long stripe of silver across the water that shimmered as the wind moved it. The hulls of the chariots drawn up on the shingle flamed in the sun and the neurotic horses tossed their heads in the wind. And already Calchas was faltering. He would not go at once, it was never wise to speak or act precipitately, he would wait for the right moment, the right formula. Customary fears and doubts, customary quickening of self-contempt.

  “Look, there goes the versatile Odysseus,” Poimenos chose this moment to say. Odysseus, head lowered and seeming lost in thought, was walking slowly in the direction of Agamemnon’s tent.

  “The versatile Odysseus?” He looked at the boy’s bright face, felt again the old conflict, the fear of losing this last resource, so precious to him, the bleak need for truth, even though destructive. Something else too, more recent: the jealousy of contested possession. “That is a term that belongs to singers. You listen to him often, our Singer, as you go about the camp?”

  “Sometimes, passing by, I stop and listen for a while.”

  “Poimenos, you will never get the truth of things from Singers. They have interests to serve, their voice is a collective voice. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think so, yes. The stories they tell belong to everybody.”

  “No, I mean their Songs are about what people already believe or what it is wished they should believe. Here at Aulis we have an army that must be kept together or the expedition will fail. Odysseus the versatile, the resourceful. Yes, these words describe him. But then come the words that don’t, though they seem to follow naturally enough. Loyal Odysseus, faithful Odysseus, Odysseus who is using his great talents in the service of Greece.”

  The boy was silent; his expression had not changed but he had glanced aside. Calchas hesitated a moment, aware of the beating of his heart. This was not the way, he knew it. The specter of loss and desolation loomed between him and the boy’s averted face. But he was driven to go on. “The loyalty and fidelity exist only in the Song. This Greece doesn’t exist except in the Song. Odysseus is lord of Ithaca. Do you know where Ithaca is? It is over there, far to the west. It is a small island, very small. You haven’t seen Ithaca, but I have seen it. When I first came to Greece, on the voyage to Megara, we ran into a great storm and the ship was blown far off course. We had to enter the Gulf of Corinth from the west.”

  He paused again, looking at the boy closely. Poimenos’s eyes were on him now but there was no comprehension in his face. These names of seas and cities, these points of east and west, would mean little to him. The only sense of place he had was the place in a story, someone else’s story. Calchas turned a little, into the wind, looked beyond the boy at the hills across the narrow water and the very faint striations of cloud in the sky above. Rifts in the cloud were smooth, not ragged, they made no shapes for him, only a strange confusion of liquid and solid. Again he sensed the waning of summer, cooler weather coming. Someone was grinding wheat not far away, he could hear the grating of the heavy stones, one above the other.

  “I saw Ithaca from close by,” he said. “It’s just a rock standing up in the sea. There is nothing there, no great buildings, no industry of any kind. No stories belong to Ithaca, except only that it is the birthplace of Odysseus, son of Laertes. It has no past. On Ithaca Odysseus is nobody, lord of kelp-gatherers and swineherds and a few barren crags. Suppose, for the sake of comparison, we think of another island, let’s say Lemnos. Lemnos lies in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. That is the sea we are looking at now, this one here before us.”

  He pointed, and with habitual obedience Poimenos followed the direction of his finger. “Has this island of Lemnos got stories belonging to it?” the boy said.

  “It is rich in them. It is larger than Ithaca and more populous, it has fertile plains and wooded valleys and wide pastures. It has deposits of minerals and metals. But even more important than all this, it is in just the right place. It dominates the approaches to Troy from the west. One who could take possession of Lemnos and establish his rule there could control the trade that passes through the narrow water below the walls of Troy. That is where the gold is embarked, the gold that comes down from Thrace.” He pointed again, northward this time. “Now don’t you think that versatile Odysseus would rather be king of Lemnos than king of Ithaca?”

  “Yes, I do.” The boy’s face wore again the look of innocent enthusiasm that Calchas loved and felt driven to discourage. “I would like to hear them,” he said, “these stories belonging to Lemnos.”

  The diviner made a gesture of impatience. “I want to tell you meanings, not stories.” This came out in a tone harsher than he had intended. With a strange feeling of helplessness he knew again that this was not the way, it would not hold the boy to him; Poimenos was outside the cage of meanings altogether, it was he himself who was imprisoned in it.

  “Do you think this w
ar is about Helen?” he said. “That’s just a story. People intent on war always need a story and the singers always provide one. What it is really about is gold and copper and cinnabar and jade and slaves and timber. Great wealth will fall into the hands of those who conquer Troy and occupy her territories. Imagine what dreams of wealth would fill the mind of Odysseus, sitting on a rock far away on the wrong side of the sea. Agamemnon will want to come back, he is lord of a powerful kingdom. But why should Odysseus think of returning? He has a son, Telemachus, who can rule in Ithaca for him. His heart is set on conquest in the East. On his own, with the small force he has been able to muster, what can he do? But in alliance with Crete, Thebes, Pylos, Mycenae . . . you see? Then this wind comes, things begin to slip away, he must hold them together, he will do or say anything, it is his only chance. You see, don’t you, Poimenos?”

  It sounded like an entreaty. He fell silent, looking straight before him, away from the sea, towards the flatlands of the south. There was some different quality in the light, some thickening in the air above the lion-colored plain. After a moment or two he understood what it was. Here and there, across the whole expanse of the land, as far as the distant foothills, they were threshing the wheat, and the chaff was rising in pale gold puffs of cloud, lifted and scattered by the wind. He tried to discern shapes in these, but the blown chaff was too thin, too quickly dispersed. “That is the versatility of Odysseus,” he said, “and it is something you will not hear from the Singer.” He felt tired, defeated. This was just another story, after all, drabber, less entertaining, than those the boy liked. For some moments longer he studied the faint golden graining in the air above the plain. Then he said, “We must go and visit the smith now, to see how work on the knife is proceeding.”

  “If you will give me leave,” Poimenos said, not quite meeting his master’s eye, “I will not go with you. I have set snares for quail up on the hillside and I want to see if we have caught anything. The young are grown enough now, they are easier to catch than the older birds. But they flutter in the trap and crows can get them if they are left. I have seen this happen. Crows always start with the eyes, as if they must blind the birds before they can eat them. And then, there are plenty here in the camp who would rob the traps if they came upon them.”

  It was by far the longest speech Calchas had ever heard the boy utter. He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Very well. We can hope for a brace of quail to roast on the fire when dark comes.”

  As he made his way towards the compound where the smith had his forge, he thought how strange it was that Poimenos should be so casually aware of animal and human rapine in the matter of quails, and yet take the Songs of Kings and Heroes with what seemed no smallest degree of question.

  The smith had taken over the ruins of a building on the edge of the camp, originally a house of some kind, now no more than a shelter for goatherds, with broken-down stone walls and the remnants of a thatch. This last he had torn down to prevent fire, and he had set his shallow, clay-lined furnace in an angle made by the walls.

  As he came forward now, Calchas noticed for the first time that he was slightly lame—his right foot dragged a little. He was dressed in his usual leather apron, but his thick arms were uncovered and his hands were bare. “So,” he said, and grinned, revealing a mouth with not many teeth remaining and these not promising to remain long. “The diviner has been sent to make sure that Palernus the smith is doing his work properly.”

  “It is not that,” Calchas said. “The King does not doubt you are a master of your trade.” He felt always an uneasiness bordering on dread in the presence of the smith, with his shaven head and fire scars and the concentric rings of his guild mark set on his forehead like a staring third eye. One who could distill metal from stone, cast aside the dross, separate the elements of nature that had been joined since the creation of the world. This was magic, it set him apart. “No, it is not that,” he said again. “Agamemnon takes close interest in the progress of this knife.”

  The smith nodded, still grinning. “And so he sends you, his diviner. Come round this way.”

  He led his visitor to the angle in the walls where the furnace had been set. Two slaves were crouched there, on either side of the brick hearth, shaven-headed like their master, naked save for loincloths. One was armed with pigskin bellows. The mouth of the bowl-shaped hearth roared with heat.

  “It has taken me this time to set up the forge,” the smith said. “The bricks, the sand, the clay for the lining, all had to be taken from the ship. We have got a good place for it, sheltered enough from the wind, not too much.” He winked briefly with a bloodshot eye and made a slight movement of the head. “This wind serves us well, we will hardly need the bellows. You would say the wind wanted it.”

  “Wanted it?”

  “Her death. First it maddens us, so she is summoned. Then it blows on the fire to make a good heat for the knife.”

  Calchas made no immediate reply. He heard the seething of the draft at the bottom of the hearth and saw the red pulse of the charcoal. The heat came against his face. He thought for a moment of what it might be like for the two naked men crouched so near it. “So the work has not properly begun yet?” he said.

  “Brother, the work began when I heard the King’s words and understood what was wanted. You can report that the fire is ready and the mold made and the copper and tin chosen. Come, see here.”

  He turned to a rough platform that had been made by pushing broken stones together and bent down to feel under a square of cloth that was lying there. After a moment he straightened and held out in both hands a short, reddish-colored bar with a soft shine to it. “I keep it well covered,” he said. “Copper is soon corrupted, the damp of night puts a green coat on it. Tell the King how tender I am with his copper, even before it goes to the fire. This ingot came with us from Crete, it was smelted from weathered copper stone, as pure as ever you could find in a natural state, washed and washed again by the rain since first it pushed up from the womb of earth. Tell the King this.”

  “I will, you can rely on it.”

  The smith grinned again. “And he can rely on the knife. A special knife for the King’s daughter, and also for his diviner, Calchas. Here is the tin.” He moved aside, took from the base of the wall, against which it was leaning, a square sheet of metal. It gleamed in the light as he raised it and Calchas saw a brief, rippling image of his own face in the surface. “Tin has a voice,” the smith said. He twisted the sheet a little in his scarred, thick-fingered hands, and it emitted a high, squeaking sound like some small mammal in fear. “This tin has never been mixed or alloyed, I swear by Hephaestus. We could not bring the ore with us, it is too heavy. And there is none to be found here. Besides, tinstone would be the devil to smelt on a makeshift furnace like this one. Has Calchas the diviner ever seen melting tin?”

  “No, not that I can remember.”

  “Your tin is a timorous metal. It runs everywhere, it finds every thinnest crack to hide in, it flees away down slopes that look dead level to your eyes.”

  He tilted the sheet as if inviting Calchas again to seek his reflection; but the diviner looked sharply away. “I will come tomorrow at this same time,” he said.

  “Stay and see the work. You will see me smelt these two metals together and cast the bronze. Tell the King I will bond eight parts of copper with one of tin.”

  He twisted the sheet again, and again it made the sound of a small creature in some extreme distress. It seemed to Calchas that the heat was intensifying. The air above the furnace was blurred with it. His vision was momentarily affected, so that the rings of the tattooed eye in the center of the smith’s forehead appeared to turn slowly on their red center. Dread of the smith and what the smith seemed to know clutched at him. He thought of the half-eaten face and the slashed throat, the Boeotian squirming on the shingle as the dancer stepped round him, of his terrible failure to understand who must win that fight. It was then, he thought, while the life ebbed from Op
ilmenos, then that the gods withdrew their favor from me. He felt the beginnings of nausea.

  “The best mix,” the smith said. “Less tin than that and the bronze will not hammer well, Calchas the diviner will not get a keen blade.”

  The feeling of nausea grew stronger. “I will make this known to the King,” Calchas said, and he turned and went half blindly out from the enclosure of the walls.

  4.

  The threshing of the wheat, which Calchas had seen as a haze of gold over the plain, continued in the days that followed, the days of waiting for Iphigeneia. Squads were sent out to seize the grain wherever it could be found; and the country people, faced with the prospect of starvation in the winter, grew cunning in concealment, leaving their granaries bare, carting off the grain in sacks during the night, hiding it in gullies and thickets. A man was beaten to death by his neighbors for taking a bronze incense burner, a thing he had no earthly use for and could not easily dispose of, to lead the soldiers to one such cache.

  The straw was left, as always, in soft conical heaps, taller than a man, bright gold in the sunshine at first, soon bleaching to pale yellow. The wind swept across the open space, loosened the binding of the heaps, threw up the straw in clouds which rose and fell, drifting over a wide area, getting caught in ruts and hollows and in the short, sun-scorched grass of the plain. There was a period when the land seemed textured with it, as if this pale glinting yellow was the natural color of the earth. At this time too the foothills that lay beyond the plain had exactly this same shade of faded gold, so that the eye was carried on a single tide of color to the horizon. From the sparse settlements scattered over this great expanse the only sounds that could be heard above the wind were those of pain: the tormented braying of an ass, the squealing outcries of gelded hogs.

  The altar was built under the supervision of Croton and his two assistant priests, who were allowed as many men as they needed for it. The crest of a short rise was chosen, beyond the confines of the camp, clear all round for maximum viewing, important both for the spectators and for Zeus himself, as Croton pointed out: in the open, under the wide sky, where the god could get a sweeping overall view, not in some thicket or cave or hole-in-corner place, haunts of Hecate and her devotees and all the obscene practices of the night.