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Written and Illustrated by Peter Huby With that abhorred dismay that follows wilful bloodshed still, their fortune being to slay those whose blood cries out for theirs

From George Chapman. Book 24. Homer’s Iliad. 1611.

Children of Pelops

We must start somewhere, so we shall start here, though it is not the beginning. Picture a road crossing an empty plain, not a road exactly, a track. In the distance, high hills rise steeply out of the flatlands, not quite mountains, though there is snow in winter. Arcadia, the ark of god. The track is little used, though in springtime shepherds follow the same route when they move their flocks up to the hills from the plain for the summer, and in autumn, after the first rains, they return. Sometimes merchants may be seen, usually travelling in the company of other merchants because it is safer that way. Today there seems to be nothing on the road. High up, scarcely visible, birds of prey circle among gilded storm clouds. But there is something on the road, no more than a speck at first on the endless plain, a solitary two wheeled vehicle pulled by four horses. A faint dust rises behind it. The vehicle is a chariot, the kind of thing you might see in a race, lightly constructed, and in a race the four horses would run four abreast but today they are harnessed in two pairs, one pair behind the other, as if this were a carriage, and they are not running, but walking at an easy pace. The horses are of no particular colour, though they are not country nags. Sinews run like ropes beneath the skin and their eyes are wild. Pelops is nursing his team across this landscape, stopping to let them rest where there is a little grass or water. Pelops has friends in high places, and these horses and this expertly built car were given to him as a gift. Black moonless night finds him high among shattered sum- mits. Somewhere a brigand’s fire winks in the vast darkness. Pelops sits with his cloak about him, listening to the small movements of his horses in the darkness: the shake of a head, the rattle of a hoof against a dislodged stone. Somewhere, a thousand feet below him as he sits against his invisible outcrop, the plain lies tiny and remote. Pelops is on his way to a race.

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King Oinomaos rules over the city of Pisa beyond the highlands of Arcadia, and he is mad. His city sits within its ancient ruinous walls, in a broad stony valley where the Alpheos and Kladeos riv- ers meet among sand banks and braided channels. Oinomaos has two passions in life and one is his passion for horses and the breeding of horses, in particular the breeding and training of chariot horses. Herds of brood mares swirl across his stony pastures, or stand in the shallows of the Alpheos river suck- ing up the dragonfly larvae, and restive stallions fret and kick in their shit filled stables. The king’s other passion is for his own daughter, Hippodameia. Oinomaos is married with grown sons and cannot act upon his obsession with his own child, but neither can he contemplate the thought of her body possessed by another. Hippodameia is a beautiful woman, no longer a girl, but she is still unmarried because her father never permitted her to marry. He could not have said: she will never marry because I lust after her, my own daughter, and it has driven me mad, but he has made sure nonetheless that she has never married. Through these years he has committed no wrong upon his daughter‘s person, even though he is mad. You might say that she has suffered no harm by her father’s obsession, but there are many forms of harm. His wife, Sterope, knows and doesn’t know. His grown up sons know nothing, being young men. They race horses and study their father’s sudden rages. There is another story which says that the king would not allow his daughter to marry because an oracle had prophesied that whoso married Hippo- dameia would kill her father Oinomaos. Which do you prefer? Children of Pelops

Twelve or fifteen years ago, a young man called Marmax was the first to ride through the narrow gate into the city of Pisa seeking Hippodameia’s hand in marriage, when she was yet a girl. Like all young princes in that part of the world, Marmax has heard of mad king Oinomaos the horse lord, and his beautiful daughter. Apart from a few hutments on the river terraces, the city has never expanded beyond its walls and the place is a warren of shadowed lanes. The king’s crumbling palace gives on to a narrow way, and Oinomaos steps out into the street to greet the new arrival, dressed in his stinking horsehide coat, with his beard uncombed and his hair a birdnest, because he cares less than a fig. First he takes in the horse that the boy sits astride and then the four mares behind, before his glance flicks up to the open faced youth. It does not cross his mind to offer him any kind of hospi- tality, nor even to ask him his name, nor to invite him to get down from his horse, because he knows why he is here. He reaches up and grasps the bridle of the boy’s horse with such violence that the horse rears, almost unseating its rider, and shouts up at him: ‘You are here for my daughter. I know why you are here. You want to inherit my kingdom. You want to fuck my only daughter. She is thirteen, a child, and you want to fuck her. Am I right? Am I right?’ The boy is at sea and babbles pleasantries like a fool. ‘Now listen, boy, you can have my kingdom, you can have my daughter, but first you must race me. Can you drive a chariot?’’ Despite his confusion, Marmax’ head goes up dismissively at the question. ‘Listen everybody,’ Oinomaos shouts at the gathering knot of his people and other interested parties. ‘Listen. This young man has come for Hippodameia, he has come for my daughter. He wants to marry my daughter, and he wants my kingdom. What I say is this. He can have my daughter, he can have this land, but only if he beats me in a race. He must race me twice around the city walls in a four horse chariot and if he wins then he shall have what he seeks. In this race my daughter will stand beside him in his chariot and I shall stand beside Myrtilus, my charioteer.’ Now everybody who is listening, except the young suitor himself, understands that he has no chance at all because Oinomaos’ life

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is devoted to the breeding and training of chariot horses. He has recognisably human, some not. Twelve headless bodies rot in the the best horses anywhere, and his charioteers and his jockeys win same ditch and no one goes near, only dogs, rats. big money at the games in Olympia and Nemea. The other thing Why did they come, these silly boys, over so many years? If there they understand is that Myrtilus the king’s charioteer, is unbeatable. is no law but the king’s law and if the king is mad, then there is no No time is lost. Oinomaos is an impulsive animal. He likes to law at all, no protection. What is it that drew this sad procession of get things done and brooks no delay. princelings to their deaths? Some surely came with a high regard The sun is beginning to set over the distant sea before two char- for their own skill and the quality of their horses, convinced they iots and their restive teams are lined up outside the city wall. would win. Young men are strange, seeing only themselves in the world’s mirror. They think themselves immortal. Years ago, the king made a sort of hippodrome, a racetrack, which runs around outside the walls of the city and it is here that This time it is different, and the people of the city stand at their he trains and races his horses and his chariot teams. People enter- doors to mark the passage of the avatar. It is Midsummer’s Eve. ing or leaving the city along the roads which pass into any one of Oinomaos has grown older, madder, through the years, and its four gates have learned to look both ways before crossing this looks like a scarecrow as he gimps into the street. Hippodameia is racetrack: it is not unknown for the king’s chariots to run down older too, and a great beauty. Who can know how these years of hapless travellers as they try to cross. her father’s madness have marked her? Twelve times she has under- Oinomaos steps down from his car and walks over to where gone this thing, twelve times she has watched her father kill young Marmax is standing on the footboard of his own chariot with the men who came to marry her. She has stood on the footboard of a reins clutched in his hands. Hippodameia, a stick straight girl, who dozen chariots and watched her father eviscerate a stranger. She is familiar with her father’s fits and eccentricities, stands next to has watched the foul smokes rising from the hecatombs of butch- the young man, holding on to the rail, transfixed by apprehension. ered mares. The king beckons the boy down to listen and he speaks into his She passes each day through the city gate on her way to the well ear in a quiet conversational tone. with a pitcher, beneath the severed heads. Fetching water from the well is not a task for a princess, but she insists upon it. The daily ‘So. Good luck. If you win, she is yours, but if you lose, I meant drawing of water from the well gives her comfort. Each day, as to tell you before, I kill you.’ she passes below these relics, she spills a little water on the ground. At the end of the race, Oinomaos is standing with his chari- Pelops knows the stories; that is why he is here. He has heard oteer by his sweating, foam flecked horses as Marmax pulls to a them many times: Oinomaos and the twelve heads over the city halt. Steam rises from the animals’ backs, while their breath heaves gate: Oinomaos and Myrtilus, his unbeatable charioteer. harshly and a network of raised veins runs beneath the skin. Hip- podameia is flushed and shaken, and her hair is disordered from He does not get down from his car when the king appears in the speed of the chariot. Oinomaos walks over and, without cere- the narrow street like a carnival grotesque, with a small man behind mony, skewers the young man in the belly with a violent jab of his him. Pelops’ horses fill the narrow way, blocking out the light. The spear and hefts him out of the chariot, as if he were a sack, depos- legendary Myrtilus is smaller than he expected, built like a jockey, iting the dying boy on the earth. Later, he cuts off Marmax’ head no surprise, and Pelops looks him in the eye, this small man, and and has it set on a spike over the city gate. He sacrifices the mares he sees a flicker, some kinship. Further back, in the gloom of the which pulled the losing chariot and burns them on an altar, while house, a woman, watching. Marmax’ headless body is left in a ditch. His daughter is led away. He sees the old king emerge into the street from his tumble- This is the pattern. The years have passed and there are twelve down hall and watches him without deference or fear. Pelops is heads on spikes over the city gate when Pelops passes beneath, some

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cloaked in a kind of invisibility, so that when you turn away from ‘Why would I do such a thing?’ him it is hard to recall what he looks like. ‘Because I will give you half of this kingdom.’ He waits upon the king, who seems for a moment mesmerised ‘He will notice the missing pin.’ by the stamping horses. He is still looking at the horses as he speaks: ‘Make a false pin from wax. It has been done before.’ ‘I know why you are here.’ ‘With these horses you will win anyway.’ Pelops says in a calm expressionless voice: ‘I want to be certain.’ ‘Of course you do. We shall race tomorrow, not today. The sun will set very soon. Daybreak tomorrow then, midsummer’s day.’ ‘You want to kill him.’ Oinomaos looks at the four horses sidling restlessly in the ‘Everybody wants him dead.’ confines of the street, and he knows that time has caught up with Myrtilus watches the horses for a little while longer until the him at last, for these creatures are the creatures he has dreamed of sun sinks below the sea and it begins to grow dark, before turn- breeding all his life. ing away and setting off toward the town, where hearth fires are At a word from Pelops the horses scutter into a canter, send- already flickering. ing out a spray of stones and gravel. The noise of hoof-beats fills Pelops calls after him: ‘If you do these things, when I am king the canyon of the street as they break into a gallop and are gone. here and take Hippodameia to wife, you shall have her on that The red sun stands on the horizon, a vast vague disc, and Alpheos’ first night.’ moving shallows give back scarlet dazzle as the mazy current makes its way between stones. Swifts veer screaming and low over the surface and dragonflies dart and hover, their lace wings aglitter in the livid light. The dawn is blue grey and cold and the parapets of the city walls are peopled by a silent crowd. Pelops is standing by his car, wait- The horses stand about in the current. From time to time they ing, and his team of four are also waiting, when Oinomaos comes stoop to drink, or shake their heads against the flies, while Pelops driving his horses with great panache out from the city gate, with sits nearby on the trunk of a long dead tree, a tree carried to this more chariots and horsemen following. The king swings his team place by some forgotten winter spate. around at speed and brings it to a noisy halt in line with Pelops’ A few yards off, Myrtilus stands watching the horses, and when horses. Another chariot arrives at a more sedate pace, driven by he speaks, his eyes still on the horses, his voice is the voice of a for- Myrtilus, and comes to a stop a little to the rear. Hippodameia, muf- eigner. He has walked out from the city to see these creatures again. fled in a heavy cloak, steps down and walks across to where Pel- ‘I have never seen horses like these.’ ops is standing on the footboard of his own car. She stands facing him and very close, with only her shadowed face showing under ‘Nor will you.’ the hood of her cloak. The water chatters between stones and high up, the swifts cut Black eyes set in deep sockets, cheekbones. She moves closer their shrill arabesques. Pelops speaks again: ‘Tomorrow, do two and says in a low voice: My father says I must show you this.’ things for me. Let Oinomaos drive his own team, not you.’ She opens her cloak so that only he may see, and she is naked. ‘The king will want to do that anyway. Only in that first race, She fastens her cloak again and grasps the rail. years ago, did he allow me to take the reins, never since.’ Myrtilus walks across the track in front of the two teams of ‘Do one more thing. When you are making ready, pull out the horses, holding a flag, and pauses in front of Pelops so that he will lynchpin from the hub of the right side wheel of the king’s chariot.’

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know that this will be the signal. Pelops nods and Myrtilus takes and his sons carry him back into the city. They say that Pelops spoke his place at the edge of the track a few yards further along, and to the dying king and the old man cursed Myrtilus, his charioteer, raises the flag. Pelops looks across to the king’s transfigured face. who had betrayed him, and instructed Pelops to kill him, which The flag drops. suited Pelops’ purposes well. Gone, in sudden confusion, the king whipping his team into a Myrtilus, a trainer of chariot horses, and a student of the game, pounding gallop with practised skill, and Pelops, delaying a frac- knew that Pelops’ horses were no ordinary creatures and asked the tion, falls in a little behind and to one side of the king’s team. new king elect to allow him to drive them, just once, as a team; and so, one windy day, with low cloud racing in from the sea, he In this way, the two chariots make a wild circuit of the city, took the traces and drove away from the city, with Pelops standing beneath the eyes of the crowds on the battlements. The whole city next to him. They passed through the town lands, and the plough- is out, it would seem. The king will win, they are shouting. The king man, watching across the backs of his oxen, understood the mean- will win. Nothing will change. ing of what he saw. Hippodameia, her hood down and her hair blowing, is watch- There is a cape with high cliffs overlooking the sea, not many ing her father drawing ahead, flicking the long whip over the backs miles from Pisa and they stopped to let the horses rest, with the of his team. The wheels and hooves are a blur in the dust and the wind blowing and the surf pounding the base of the cliff a hun- half dark. She feels flecks of lather flying back from her father’s dred feet below. horses. Pelops’ car, where she rides, could be flying. There is treachery and there is treachery redoubled. Pelops They have come round into the second circuit, out in a golden turned away from the vertiginous prospect but Myrtilus remained cloud of dust from the cold shadow of the city wall and into the for a fatal moment looking out over the void and the vista of white- sudden glare of the risen sun, with Pelops well to the rear, when caps, like a man who understands his own fate. Pelops’ foot in the it happens. small of his back sent him arcing into space. He seemed to fall for The inside wheel of the king’s car parts from the axle, rolling a long time before he was lost among the breaking waves. He sur- freely away and the chariot lurches, dragging violently to the left as faced briefly in the boiling surf and then he appeared again, cling- the axle ploughs into the ground. The panicked horses go flat out, ing to a rock. Though Pelops could not hear for the wind and the the fragile frame of the chariot comes apart in a shower of finely tide, Myrtilus was cursing him, cursing him and all his generations, wrought debris. The king appears to fly for a moment as the terri- and then he was gone. fied horses pull him clear, and he is dragged along the ground by the traces tied around his wrist. With his free hand, even as he is being scraped along, he pulls out the short knife, which all charioteers carry in their belts, and slashes through the leather straps with Pelops became king in the city of Pisa and he was a strong king a single stroke. He kneels for a moment, then gets unsteadily to and brought neighbouring kingdoms under his sway, Elis, Olympia, his feet, somewhat bloodied, as his horses gallop into the distance. Arcadia. His reach grew long so that the whole part of Greece which Twenty yards behind, Pelops pulls his team a little to the left fell under his rule was called after him, Pelops’ island. Peloponnisos and urges them on. He rides the king down at speed and the old He married Hippodameia and the stories say they had many man goes down under the hooves and the iron wheel rims. children, but their names are mostly forgotten, save two: Atreus Hippodameia is looking back at the crumpled shape in the and Thyestes. roadway as it dwindles into the distance. She pulls off her cloak They say that queen Hippodameia ordered a mound to be built, and throws it behind her. outside the city, in which the heads of the slaughtered youths Oinomaos does not die immediately, though his body is broken, were interred, together with such bones as could be found in the

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tabooed ditch. Each year after, she invited twelve women to run a After Pelops killed my father, I would walk out at night wearing race around Oinomaos’ hippodrome. They say the race is still run, a long robe and stand over the place on the racetrack where he fell, though the city itself is long gone beneath gravel banks of the valley. and anyone watching would have thought that this was grief work, but I was standing with my legs apart, piss- ing on him. For a long time, when It sometimes seems to me that my life didn’t start until I bore my father was alive, I used my first child. I am great with child now, and some of my women to walk with a pitcher each think I should be past childbearing, but Pelops serves me well in morning to the wells out- that kind and I am happy for it. Eight children I have borne, and side the city, for water. I my eldest daughter, Eurydice, is married now and expecting her was a princess, you under- first. I have three daughters and the two younger ones, Antibia and stand, and the women at the Archippe, are still at home. wells never looked at me. I lost two. They would fall silent as I approached. All day, at the A man will say, I have three children and two daughters, mean- wells, the women laughed ing he has three sons. It is a tired joke among men and I have heard and talked, but never to it a dozen times. I like my daughters better. I understand them me. On my way back to better. Pelops has always been a stranger to me, even though we the house, as I passed under come together. Sometimes, when he rolls away, I cannot remem- the gate I would spill a lit- ber what he looks like. tle water for the heads. I My little boy Cleon is four years old and he is easy to love, but remember a time when the other boys are drifting away from me as they grow, turning into there was only one head, men, and men are a strange race. but in the end, there were Atreus my eldest boy is bold and turbulent and his younger twelve. brother Thyestes circles him like a hyena. They came from the same After I was married to womb, my two sons, yet they are enemies. Pelops and became queen, My father was strange, strange and terrible to me as a child. I asked him to build me His rages filled the house with fear but my mother managed him a mound across the river like a lion tamer and she could often turn him aside from his mad- from the town, and to bury ness, though not always. within it the heads which had grinned for so many My mother died the night before little Cleon was born and still, years above the city gate, after four years, I speak to her. I try not to speak to her when there and the bones from the are people about, but sometimes it happens, so that my women bodies, which had been think I am strange too. I heard old Chloris the cook say: she’s as thrown in a ditch and left mad as her father, but it is not so, although some of the things I unburied through those think and do might seem odd to others.

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years. These days I never think of them: they are safe inside their Mycenae, with its huge walls, no mean city, and he chafed in a small mound, safe beneath the tons of earth. way under Pelops’ eye, but he was growing old and was racked by sickness and seemed likely to die without heirs to succeed him. Pelops and I have never talked about my father’s death, but then, Contenders for his throne began to spring up, as if from dragons’ we have never talked at all.We have never talked of his ivory shoul- teeth, and Pelops feared a descent into war. der. I used to ask him but he would just shake his head. When we come together, I cleave to his body, but that is not the same He came in his own person from Pisa to Mycenae to speak with thing. I talk to my dead mother, I talk to my daughters, but there the dying king, and a certain understanding was reached. are always edges, limits, to what can be said. Inside myself I am Sthenelus sent an embassy to Delphi and Pelops fixed the ora- alone, but I think that must be true for everyone. cle, which cost him a small fortune. The oracle said that Sthen- I remember almost nothing of the twelve young men as elus should choose an heir from among the sons of Pelops. He they were in life: I picture blond hair on the back of a hand, the duly sent his two eldest boys, Atreus and Thyestes, to Mycenae, curve of a lip. I never really saw the young men, you see, except and when Sthenelus died in a bloody fit of coughing, Atreus, as for a short time when I was in the chariot next to them. I must the elder brother, was elected king. Thyestes stayed on in the city have seen them die I suppose. I look back and I wonder why my of Mycenae after his brother took the throne and made mischief. father needed me to be in the chariot when the race was run, Why Pelops sent both of his sons to claim the throne is a mys- when he killed those young men. To myself, I am nothing, but tery. Remember two things: remember that Myrtilus the chari- for others I must be something. I am a presence for them, not an oteer cursed the house of Pelops, as he was drowning in the surf: absence. remember too, that the brothers Atreus and Thyestes have no love I remember the races and the wild careering of the chariot. I for one another. remember hanging on to the rail in terror, with my hair blowing There are strange stories which tell of Thyestes’ treacherous across my face, barely able to see. attempts to dispute Atreus’ title to the Mycenean throne. They say At other times I was never allowed near the chariot teams, that finally God caused the sun to move backward in the sky, as a being a girl. sign of Atreus’ rightful claim. Some say one thing, some another, but no one denies that Atreus became king. The baby is sitting low in my belly these last days and her feet and elbows are busy. I feel her head, low down, as if she is wait- The young king Atreus married Cleola, about whom nothing is ing. She will be my ninth. Twelve would have been a better num- known, except that she died giving birth to their first child, a boy; ber, would have made good the deaths, but that is a foolish thought. and the baby died soon after. A year after Cleola’s death, the pirate Nauplius moored his boat in the port of Tiryns and walked up with his cut throats from the coast to Atreus’ fortress city, like a troupe of travelling players. They were blood brothers, Atreus and Nauplius, allies from boyhood, and for days after his arrival there was much drinking and bad behav- iour in the megaron of the palace in Mycenae. Pelops the king watched over Peloponnisos and its mountain- Nauplius leans unsteadily across the table and grabs Atreus by ous patchwork of petty kingdoms, and he was a fixer. As they came the shoulder: ‘I brought you a gift.’ of age, he married off his several children into other royal houses ‘A what?’ to make the kingdom of Pisa secure, as he thought. ‘A gift. You deaf, drunk?’ Nauplius looks about and says to the King Sthenelus, one of Pelops’ vassals, ruled over the city of room at large: ‘Where is she, my gift?’

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His drunken thugs look around, trying to be helpful. ‘Boss, boss.’ The War of Troy will not take place. Two young women, hardly more than children, in skimpy gowns There is no wind, no movement of air. Beyond the glassy miles and heavy jewellery, make their self possessed way between the of ocean, the city of Troy hangs like a mirage, awaiting its destruc- noisy benches. tion, and here, standing about on these beaches, an army of heroes ‘This is your gift, at least, this one is your gift.’ Nauplius takes avid to destroy it. hold of the taller of the two girls and pushes her toward him: ‘This There is no wind. The ships cannot sail. The War of Troy will is Aerope, a Cretan princess, king Catreus’ daughter.’ not take place. It has been weeks since the young princes arrived The olive skinned girl looks Atreus frankly in the eye, as a woman in the bay of Aulis with their hired battalions. looks at a man, and Atreus is confused. He is used to modesty in It was a fine thing, all those weeks ago, to see the black ships women, to obedience, lowered eyes, invisibility. This direct gaze is coming in from all parts of Greece, the hero princes standing by something new and troubling for him. the tall prows like heroes, while their conscripts pulled on the oars Nauplius rouses him from his vacancy: ‘And this is Clymene, to the beat of a drum . Famous names: Agamemnon, high king of Aerope’s sister.’ Mycenae, shepherd of his people, standing by his brother Menelaos, whose far famed wife has been abducted by the perfidious Trojan, Nauplius pulls the younger girl to himself and sits her on his Paris and who is now captive within the walls of Troy. And oth- knee. ers, whose reputations travelled before them: giant Ajax, Palame- ‘I shall marry this one as soon as we get back home, and you des, Odysseus of Ithaca. It was he, those years ago, when the young shall marry her big sister.’ Greek princes had gathered in the city of Sparta, hoping to win the hand in marriage of King Peleus’ daughter, Helen, who pro- Atreus is at a loss, confused, drunk. posed that the suitors swear an oath to defend the cause of whom- ‘I bought them, these beauties, from their father, cheap. He was ever Peleus chose to be his heir. going to feed them to the fishes. Whores, he called them. Catreus Who knows what Helen may have thought? Did she choose has no sense, just another jealous father. These girls have the gift, the fair skinned Menelaos for herself, or was this a dynastic affair make no mistake.’ fixed between Peleus, her father, and Atreus? He stands Clymene up from his knee and smoothes the thin Peleus had no sons, you see, and whoever married Helen would stuff of her gown over her ripening belly, and beams. become King of Sparta after Peleus’ death. When a king dies with- Atreus married his young bride Aerope and she bore him two out sons, it is a thing to be avoided, that he leaves no heir. sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. The young princes swore the oath Odysseus had drafted, and Menelaos, Agamemnon’s younger brother was invited to take the beautiful Helen as his wife, and to become heir to the prosperous kingdom of Sparta. And now, in fulfilment of that oath, the princes have come to the bay of Aulis in their ships; or perhaps they have come to win fame on the battlefield, or maybe to kill, rape and destroy, for the craic, as young men will. Picture this. A fleet of ships drawn up along a mile of beach, a thousand hollow ships, masts and rigging motionless, hatched Those unable to come themselves sent supplies. Anius, whose minutely black against the setting sun. conscience is bad, sent shiploads from Delos. For days together there was drinking and revelry on the beaches

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of Aulis, as new war bands came sweeping in to the bay to join the expedition. They ate and drank as if they planned to be inside Troy’s walls tomorrow. It was just a matter of waiting for a favour- able wind. A week passed, two, three, and the army was becoming restless. Food became dull, then scarce, and the camps squalid. Agamem- non called his generals together. Do? Wait. What else? The wind must blow sometime. Another week and he calls the warlords together again, and also the priest Kalchas, who is known as a seer. Kalchas is a Tro- jan and it seems that he has seen in his prophetic trances, the fall of his native city, and so he has joined the Greeks, left his family behind in Troy. The priest stands in the naked space and says: ‘There is a fault. The goddess is angry. We must make a sacrifice if we wish to call up the wind.’ Menelaus says: ‘We do that every day. Bulls, sheep. The men, chickens, rats, who knows?’ ‘No, A greater sacrifice than that, much greater.’ Agamemnon is struggling to keep up: ‘A man? Is that what you mean? Human sacrifice? No. No. Maybe our grandfathers did such things. Not now, not us.’ ‘Not a man.’ ‘Who then? A woman?’ ‘No, not a woman.’ Matters suddenly become clear to Agamemnon, who rounds on the priest: ‘Who tells you what the goddess wants? How can you know these things?’ Great Ajax, not known as a diplomat, says: ‘This is a girl child we are speaking of, not a son.’ ‘No. I will not do it. I will not order it done.’ ‘You are God’s anointed. To be a king is to bear the burden.’ Odysseus says: ‘Listen, king, if this wind does not blow soon we shall have mutiny, the army will disappear. Already, men are

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starting to leave, to go home. If this army breaks up, it will not come together again. The war of Troy will not take place.’ Kalchas says: ‘But it must. It is written. I have seen it.’ Silence. It is not possible, after these thousands of years, to imagine how it was that Agamemnon came to accept that he must have his daughter murdered. Kingship is no simple thing, not well understood, and a king may be called upon to suffer for his people, or a king’s daughter. Iphigenia was sacrificed on a makeshift altar by the sea, watched by the whole army; and that night, just before the dawn, the wind began to blow.

There was a time when poppies danced in uncounted thousands on the plains of Troy. The silhouettes of cloth sailed windmills turned against the setting son. Each year a great fair was held, and merchants came in their ships from the Euxine sea, from Egypt and Crete to sell their goods. Camel trains emerged out of the interior, loaded with merchan- dise. For a month, the plain was a vista of stalls and pavilions, flags and bunting. There was drinking and dancing and the sacrificing of animals to forgotten gods. Deals were done, marriages arranged. But all that was before the war. Now there is only the sound of the wind in the dry grass. In winter, the Scamander river runs noisily into the sea through broad gravel beds, and herons stand like priests in the slack water. Ranks of cloud, driven by the sea wind pass low overhead and the reeds move restlessly. The empty flood plain is a gift to the wind. Far away, where the country rises inland, stand the walls of the city. In the baking summer, the channels of the Scamander slow to nothing and the gravel banks are dry, bleached white under the noon sun, the herons long gone on their slow looping wings to the delta of the great river. The sea is a glittering band of blue. Far away, where the country rises inland, the walls of the city waver in the heat. In May, in the late Spring, tall Aliums bloom everywhere

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between the stones. If you kneel down so that your eyes are level with the flower heads, then the whole plain becomes a carpet of palest purple. May, when the winter storms are over, is the month when ships put out from their home ports and sail the dolphin roads. It is June now, a hot June morning, and where the Scamander finds its way to the sea, there are galleys in the offing, not a few, many, a fleet. A small rowing boat detaches itself from the mass of distant vessels, three sets of oars rising and falling in the slow swell. Priam has been expecting this. From his raised chair, high on the walls of the city he can see the smudge of shipping, though not the detail, because he is an old man and his eyes are not what they were. Hector, who is standing next to his father, points with his outstretched finger to the small boat as it approaches the shore and the oarsmen go into the water to pull it as far up the shingle as they may. The three who have been sitting in the stern sheets climb over the gunwale and wade ashore. Hector speaks to the old man: ‘Have you decided?’ ‘No.’ Hector is a dutiful son and does his best to hold his tongue, but fails: ‘If you do not give her back then there will be war.’ ‘There will be war anyway. We have talked about these things many times.’ Hector bites his lip and watches the chariots pass beneath, out from the gate and on across the plain toward the sea. Priam speaks again: ‘This is not about Menelaos’ wife. If we give her back, then the Greeks will demand gold in recompense for the injury done to them, and if we give them gold then they will demand more gold.’ ‘How can you know?’ ‘I know.’ ‘So will you kill these Greek emissaries when they arrive?’ ‘I haven’t decided.’ Odysseus is standing on the beach watching the approach of the chariots. Behind him, the oarsmen are standing by the boat. Who knows what they are thinking? They have been well paid, but Children of Pelops

sometimes money is too expensive. Menelaos is nervous: ‘Do they plan to kill us?’ Odysseus says: ‘We shall see. Not here I guess. These charioteers are not armed. If it were me, I should kill us as we passed into the city, shoot us to death with arrows from the city wall.’ ‘A chariot apiece,’ says Palamedes, ‘it looks better.’ There are people now, lining the road into the city and gathered along the wall tops. There are archers posted on the battlements above Skaean gate. The chariots come to a halt a few yards out from the gate and the crowds edge forward. Priam and his party are watching from above. Hector says: ‘Well?’ Priam: ‘Who’s that in the first chariot?’ Hector: ‘Menelaos. I met him you know, in his own palace in Sparta, ate his food, drank his drink. He was good to us, a nice man. I liked him. My brother Paris fucked his wife and then abducted her. You remember.’ Hector is in a rage and can barely speak, that it should have come to this. Priam: ‘And the second?’ The old man turns irritably: ‘Where is she?’ Helen is brought forward. Priam: ‘Who’s that in the second car?’ Helen: ‘Odysseus.’ Priam: ‘I’ve heard of him.’ Helen: ‘Clever. Watch him. When I was to be married, he persuaded all of my suitors to swear an oath that they would stand by whomever I chose to marry. They are here now, with their warriors, fulfilling that oath, standing by Menelaos. Priam: ‘These are brave men. And who he, in the third chariot?’ Helen: ‘Palamedes. Odysseus hates him, they say. He is a Cre- tan, with a Cretan’s olive skin. He’s too wise, too charming. I know.’ Priam flicks her a glance. They understand one another. ‘In the first chariot is Menelaos, my husband.’

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Priam blinks: ‘Quite.’ There is that about Helen herself, that she walks in the streets The crowds below are edging closer and the chariot horses are of the city and is not afraid, nor ashamed, as if she is somehow restive. The three Greeks, in their separate cars, are looking ahead known to them and understood. Perhaps she stands too for the bra- without expression. vado of Troy, a city which will bow to no enemy, a city, you might say, puffed up with arrogance. Troy controls the Black Sea trade, Hector: ‘Well? Do we kill them now?’ she controls the coastal cities and the wide lands of the interior. Priam seems lost in an old man’s reverie: ‘Let them in.’ The Trojans are a vain people, given to self regard, to foolish pride, oblivious to the coming storm. The interior of Priam’s throne room is high and echoing and bars of light falling from high windows are material in the faint But there are those who know that the world is a wheel and dust of the Summer air. Priam lies back on his throne like a child, that whoso rises to the top of the wheel shall be brought low again. picked out in the gloom by a ray of sunlight, while his sons stand It is a simple thing, easy to comprehend, impossible to believe, if to either side. They say the old man fathered fifty sons in his time: you are at the top of the wheel. Perhaps Priam understands these an exaggeration, but many, certainly, and daughters too. He likes things, but a king is the servant of events. his daughters better, many of whom are grown women with chil- This is a hard place for the three to stand, before Priam’s throne, dren of their own. As far as you can tell, the old man knows the names of all his children, and his grandchildren, a rare gift, in a man. Hector stands next to his father and, almost hidden behind the tall throne, stands Helen. The only other woman present, is Kas- sandra. She drifts silently among the men as if she were invisible. There are tears running down her cheeks. Sometimes she cries out, like a madwoman: ‘The wrack wind liveth.’ There is a stir as the three Greeks are ushered in from the back of the room and approach the dais. There will be no bowing, no formal greeting. Last night, they lodged with Antenor, one of Priam’s sons, in his house hard by the palace, but a mob from the stews of the city gathered in front of the house, and would have broken in and slaughtered the Greeks, had not Antenor himself come out and put them to shame for thus violating the sanctity of his guests. among his people. Helen moves a little further into the shadow. In the mind of the mob, the Greeks are here to take back the Spartan queen, and the mob is right, at least that is what the The Greeks know that their lives are in the balance, here among Greeks hope to do. It is a strange thing, that the people of Troy enemies. should have taken to this foreign princess when her presence threat- Menelaos has prepared some phrases to say, but he hesitates. ens to bring war down upon them. In stealing the Spartan queen, Odysseus whispers in his ear. ‘Be careful what you say to the club Paris disgraced the whole city and yet somehow he is not held to that can break your teeth.’ account. The man is known as a vain creature of no substance, a There are armed guards around the walls. This is Menelaos’ quar- wastrel, unlike his younger brother Hector, who is the rock upon rel, his wife, his the cuckold’s horns, but he already knows that the which the city rests, and yet they do not revile him for his crime.

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task that has been set is futile and what remains is to try to extri- cate themselves alive. Menelaos: ‘King Priam, you know why we are here, and all you lords of Troy know the reason. I have been wronged. I am here to seek redress for that wrong.’ Priam: ‘You are here seeking war. Why else do you have a fleet of ships at your back?’ Menelaos. ‘We have sent messages and received no replies. What should we do? I have been wronged, my wife abducted. The Greek nation has been insulted…..’ Menelaos is no speaker and is fumbling for more words to say, so Palamedes picks up his thread. Palamedes: ‘Among civilised peoples there are rules, things that are understood. A rule has been broken by the people of Troy. It is no more than just, that Sparta’s queen be returned to her lawful husband and that some recompense be paid.’ Priam: ‘How much is some?’ Palamedes: ‘We can leave that to Priam’s wisdom and his sense of justice, his instinct for what is right.’ Priam: ‘And when I, with my great instinct for what is right, have paid out for these wrongs we have committed, then maybe you will find yourselves creeping back to Troy in your black ships to tell me that my instinct has played me false and I must pay more.’ Palamedes: ‘King Priam, you must allow us to return with the Spartan queen to our ships, this at least, if a war is to be averted.’ Priam: ‘Must I? So, at last, a threat. As a matter of national pride, you must take the woman back to your ships. Otherwise….’ Priam barks: ‘Women do not cause wars. Greed causes wars, vanity, self aggrandisement. Stupidity causes wars. Perhaps war needs no cause.’ He hesitates, as if suddenly undecided, and then speaks again in a voice strident and angry: ‘This is mummery. You shall not have her. You Greeks are wolves and I believe your wolf- ish hearts are already set on the destruction of this city.’ Silence hangs for a long moment. ‘Do your worst. Sack the city if you can.’

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There is a great stamping and cheering in the room. The young oar banks rising and falling in unison until, at the last moment the men have been aching for this moment. long oars are raised and the prows drive up the shingle in an over- ‘And now, as it seems, we must go to war, why should I not have lapping cacophony of grinding timbers. you three Greek princes killed now, in this hall? You would not be A great cry goes up and the Greeks are over the sides like the first to be done to death in this place.’ cockroaches, running up the beach under their shields toward the Odysseus, chancy, says; Because you have the grace not to do so. crowds of Trojans hurling stones down from the sand hills which Priam, I believe you are ashamed of the part you must play, being rise behind the shore. The stone rain is murderous and the Greeks king. If you kill us now, in this place, unarmed as we are, you will are going down as they run. Such is the innocence of the Trojan never be quit of shame.’ people, the civilians, that they have come down from the city en masse to drive away these invaders. They stand in large crowds along Priam stands quicker than you might think for such an old the crests of the sand dunes, armed with the piles of stones they man, rage surging in his chest, but Hector catches his arm, holds have collected from the river bed. There are women and children down the fatal gesture. among them, and spirits are high, as if they cannot fail to drive Hector. ‘Odysseus is right. It were better to kill each other on away these foolish intruders. Such a thing as this is unheard of. the battlefield.’ When the first armed Greek, bloody and gasping, arrives among Another roar, a thunder of stamping of feet, but the three Greeks them at the crest of the dune and begins hacking at random with are allowed to pass, through the rent that chance has torn. his sword, the world begins to change. The name of this Greek is Protesilaos and he kills several before the citizens drag him down When the throne room has emptied and the young lordlings and bludgeon him to death with stones. He leaves behind a new have gone off exuberantly to spread the news of war, Priam is still wife and a half finished house on the plains of Thessaly. sitting on the throne, like a child. He feels Helen’s presence behind him, catches the slight sound of weeping. He speaks into the empty Another slashing killer arrives, and another, and the crowds of room: ‘And you, what would you choose to do, stay here in Troy or people begin to waver and fall back, infected by panic. It becomes return to your husband?’ a hunt. ‘It is not for me to choose. You should not ask me.’ The Trojans are flying back across the long stony mile that sep- arates the sea from the city gates, while behind them come the ‘You are right, and what would it mean? You did not choose to panting killers in their heavy armour. be here at all, or maybe you did, and I did not choose to cause a war, or maybe I did.’ Hector, unable to prevent the people of the city from coming out, as if to a carni- They do not move, he sitting on his throne, she standing silent val, as if they might drive the invaders back and unseen, with the tears streaming down her cheeks. Priam speaks, into the sea by throwing stones, has fore- giving voice to his thought. seen the rout that would follow this naïve ‘You know, the storytellers are telling your tale already, how you attempt, and has set his chariots in a line a came as Paris’ stolen bride to Troy and brought ruin in your train. few hundred yard back from the sea so that Storytellers use different words from the rest of us. I remember this: the fugitives can pass between and be pro- She has taken in her goings desolation as a dower. tected from the wolf pack. Streams of fugitives pass to the rear, while the Greeks come to a halt a little way off from the impassive ranks of the Trojan army. There is a pause along the whole The line of black ships comes in across the flat calm sea at speed,

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front as the invading Greeks arrive before the line of chariots and armed men, and come to a halt, breathless and sweating. It grows oddly quiet, except for the occasional jingle of chariot harness, the odd taunt carried on the air. The retreating crowds are passing on toward the city, leaving two armies, two lines of warriors Behind her flickering eyelids, the beast Achilles is pressing face to face. Many now standing will be dead before the nine years down upon her. His member is a thing of terror and she comes in of bloodletting are over. This war will come to stand for all wars. sudden convulsions, clinging to her husband’s naked back. Hector Beneath the nodding horse hair plumes, behind the cheek pieces comes with a jolt and lies for a moment, breathing audibly, before of the helmets, there are guessed-at faces. The Greeks wear their he rolls away from her body. hair long and they can often be recognised in this way. They lie side by side on the disordered bed, glistening with On the Greek side: red haired Agamemnon, high king, Mene- sweat, for this is June and the night is close and hot, loud with the laos, his brother and Helen’s lawful husband; Palamedes and Odys- sound of crickets. seus, Diomedes, Ajax the greater and Ajax the lesser, unkillable She becomes aware that he is sleeping, her giant husband, and Achilles in his telltale armour, with his lover Patroklos. Agamem- it always surprises her that he is able to fall back in a moment, thus, non is not present. into oblivion. Her own wakefulness is crowded with thoughts and Standing in their chariots, heavily armed, impassive behind memories of the dead, and tears come unbidden. She is a cham- their shields, the Trojans: Hector, prince of the gate, who will hold ber echoing with voices. off the destruction of the city of Troy until his death, Troilus the In the Spring that is past, when the aliums were in bloom by beautiful, Cycnus, Poseidon’s child, Paris, first cause of this pres- Scamander’s banks, Greek Achilles sailed down the sea coast in his ent mischief, Sarpedon, jewel among men. ships to destroy her father’s city of Thebes under Ida. The slaugh- And then there are the forgotten thousands who make up the ter was pitiless, they say. Her father died in the attack, and her Greek battle line, common men, tenant farmers, stone masons seven brothers, unthinkable, unbearable, a world gone down into and carpenters, husbands and sons, lured to this war by greed and the pit. There has been no news of her mother and imagined hor- visions of glory. Others have been forcibly recruited by their kings rors act themselves out nightly before Andromache’s eyes as she and princes. Some will survive, some not. All will be forgotten. gazes unblinking at the lamp, and when she sleeps at last, nightmares crowd in. She bears what cannot be born. For the rank and file of the Trojan host that opposes them, the case is different, for these are citizen soldiers defending their native Thebes under Ida was the city of her childhood and now lies city, though there are those among the contingents from Troy’s vas- smoking, and unpeopled. Those who escaped death or enslavement sal towns, who are less than convinced. There are black Ethiopians found their way to Troy and the city is full of refugees. She goes brought out of Egypt, who speak a language of clicks and puffs of down to the lower city in search of news among these arrivals but air, who don’t know why they are here at all. finds no clue to her mother’s fate. The history of this war, as it was passed down by poets and sto- There are fugitives in the city from Lesbos and from other places rytellers, is a history of the doings of princes and kings, and gods, destroyed by Achilles, from Phocaea and Smyrna. The smokes from and is thereby only half a tale. burning towns can be seen along the coast from Troy’s battlements. They watch from the walls as the smoke dims the sun, and they look out at the solitary chariot moving across the empty plain. It is Achilles, newly returned from the desolation he has created. Andromache sees him from the walls, everybody sees him,

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Achilles in his chariot, out on the shimmering plain, like a mirage Maybe he was wounded in the heel by an arrow and bled to death. in the heat, a wavering vision, a looping phantasm, a dream of the One story says that this arrow was shot by Paris, Priam’s son, desolation to come. Children turn into their mothers’ skirts and who had put the fatal curse upon his native city when he brought will not look, screaming at the sound of his name. Helen of Sparta back to Troy. In Andromache’s marriage bed, it is as if there were three: her- So perfect was his deed, the bard says, that piled so high the self, no more than a place of confusion, where the dead clamour fence of wrath around Ilion’s towers. like bats and her own fears and feelings come and go without cease: Hector, her husband, the guardian of the city, the bravest man They say Achilles was brought up among women and wore a in the world, who carries a whole race upon his shoulders. They dress, and that he was called to the war by a prophecy. As a grown come together, he and she, and she holds him, keeps him safe for warrior, he wore a woman’s ear ring. a moment, as he keeps them all safe. They say it was prophesied that his life would run along paral- But as she lies half attentive beneath the thrustings of her hero, lel paths, and he could choose to die a hero’s death in battle, or to there is another in the room: Achilles. When his shadow falls die in peace in his bed at a great age. He never made that choice, across her naked mind, her cunt grows copiously wet of itself and but fate delivered him, nonetheless. she comes like the waves of the sea. In later years, in a different story, Odysseus goes down to Hades There are times too, as she lies beneath her husband with her and speaks to the dead Achilles, who wishes he were still alive and eyes closed, when she pictures, behind her eyelids, Hector wear- not just a wraith among wraiths in the black fields of Asphodel, ing Achilles’ armour. She comes to a troubled climax, as if god had wishes he had chosen that quiet life and evaded his fame. sent her a dream. He came to the war, drew up his ships apart from the main Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, one day, Hec- camp of the Greeks, and for nine years, until he quarrelled with tor will fight Achilles to the death, out there on the plain, far from Agamemnon, was the cause of great destruction among the Tro- the gates, among the shifting mirages. jans and their allies. Many stories attach to the name of Achilles, so odd, so vari- In the fighting before Troy’s walls, Achilles threw down Troilus, ously encrusted that it is hard to think how they might all attach a Trojan prince. The wounded boy fell face down upon the stones to the same human being. Perhaps Achilles was never there, a fic- and Achilles straddled him, lifted up his armoured skirts and sodo- tional hero, no more than the sum of the stories told about him. mised him as he lay dying. Some say that his name is just an echo out of a lost past, that he It is said that women fought in the ranks of the Trojans. One was never a living man. such is remembered by name, Penthesileia, an Amazon and a ref- Others say that his mother was a sea nymph, Thetis, and some- ugee in the city, who slaughtered many Greeks before she herself times, during the war, he could be seen far out on the sandflats of was killed and had her eyes put out with a spear. Achilles fucked the Trojan coast among the sliding fans of the shallows, speaking the dead woman as she lay scandalously spreadeagled. to her. Try to imagine a sea nymph. God fathered Achilles upon Achilles. her. Imagine that, if you can. What can we make of such a man? First, best Greek? Some say that his mother dipped her newborn son in the river A giant, they say, a head taller than the rest, except for his cousin Styx, holding him by the heel between thumb and forefinger, thus Patroklos, except for Hector, the Trojan. making him proof against wounds, except where his mother’s fingers gripped. They say the smell of his mother’s womb clings to There is an ancient book, made up of twenty four lesser books, his heels and sweats from his instep. which tells of the war, and of a quarrel between Achilles and Agam- emnon, the commander of the Greek armies.

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Troopships are drawn up for a long mile along the beach fac- has just been woken from ing the city of Troy. The war flares up and sinks away, finds no sleep. He takes in the shape, drags on indecisively, for nine years. There are battles, skir- assembled crowd and mishes, but there is no resolution. The war becomes a way of life, the old man kneel- the camp of the invaders is a squalid shanty town full of the smell ing alone in the of latrines. They build a palisade to protect their ships and dig a space before his tent, ditch on the outer side . though he does not The Greeks take to raiding coastal towns allied to Troy, burn- yet know who this ing and looting and taking slaves, and the spoils from these raids frail old person is. are distributed by lot among the Greek princes, who then dole out The priest begins to some small part of this loot to their own troops. speak in a clear, carrying Following Achilles’ destruction of Thebes under Ida in the voice, so that all can hear. Spring of the ninth year of the war, it happens that, in the division This is no dodderer and the of the spoils, a young woman is allotted to Agamemnon, Chryseis, crowds are attentive: by name, the daughter of Chryses, chief priest of Apollo’s temple ‘King Agamemnon, I come which stands on the cape not far from the city of Thebes. here as a supplicant.’ Chryses, the girl’s father, as a priest, inviolate, survived the sack The army of Greece has destroyed of the city. He wandered, in his priestly regalia, weeping helplessly my city of Thebes under Ida. The but untouched, through the carnage. He watched his daughter men and boys are mostly dead, the being led away among the captive women. You might think he women and children carried off. would have thrown off his priestly regalia and died with the rest, I am chief priest of the temple but whoever heard of that? of Apollo there, and my life was This is him now, walking slowly and alone into the Greek camp, thus spared when Achilles and his hair thin and white, blue veins showing in his skeletal arms, far people sacked the town. gone in grief and years. He is wearing his priestly garb, the laurel My daughter Chryseis was taken.’ fillet around his head, holding his sacred wand bound with sheep’s wool before him as he makes his slow way between the smoky cook There is a world of anguish in this utterance and fires and the midden heaps of the camp. the gathered thousands find they are not immune to the break in his voice. A few understand exactly the cause of his grief. The Greeks watch him pass, and then, in ones and twos, out of curiosity, begin to follow this pious vision, so that by the time the ‘She is here in this camp, my daughter, allotted to you, King, as old man arrives in the space before Agamemnon’s tent, half the part of your share of the spoils. army is there. Someone recognises the priest and the word goes As you love and fear my master, Apollo, Lord of the morning, round. Chryses kneels. Rain is beginning to blow in from the sea I am here to beg for her return. and the tent awnings rattle in the sudden gusts of air. The crowds I understand that you must have recompense and I have a list are half inclined to drift back to their fires but there is something here of those gifts which I can offer in exchange for my daugh- in the old man’s presence that holds them, and a sense of antici- ter’s release.’ pation gathers. His hands shaking from the chill rain, Chryses takes out a When Agamemnon appears, pulling aside the door flap of his damp document from a fold in his cape and begins to read out loud. tent and squinting into the flying rain, it is clear to everyone that he

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‘Two ship holds of amphorae filled with Lycian wine….’ void as he walks by the breaking waves. His footprints in the wet A sound goes up from the thousands, for this is a rare offer. sand are obliterated behind him by the seethe of the sea. Young captive women command no great price in the camp. In the Greek camp, they are standing in the fitful rain with ‘…a line of a hundred Turkish mules…’ their backs to the cookfires, warming themselves. Cheering. The boys are impressed. Lucky man, our king. Solon comes from Pharae in the South of Greece and he is listening to the gossip, for he was asleep on his cot, next to his dog, ‘…two thousand sheepskins, cut and dressed.’ and did not see Agamemnon abuse the old priest in front of half Whooping and whistling. A rare bird this priest, and rich. They the world. All are agreed that this was a provocation, a thing born cannot imagine that the king will refuse such excess, which would of hubris. In the deepening twilight, other campfires flicker. He buy a hundred girls, and they begin to move away to get back to begins to shiver, his teeth rattle. their tents and out of the rain, but they pause as Agamemnon Somewhere a drum. walks across to the kneeling figure. Standing over him, the king begins to curse in a loud voice: ‘Get you gone, old man, and if I Chryses is howling into the darkness. Solon is dead before catch you here again, I’ll take your holy stick and thrash you till the dawn, next to his dead dog, sunken, bloodless, as if he had your bones cry out.’ never lived, and others follow, stolen away, who knows how. They die in the night and those that do not die listen to the sounds of He begins to kick the old man as he kneels so that he must dying all around and strive unsleeping to be among those that live. scramble away across the mud. Everything is dying. A mass of goats crushed together in a pen are ‘As for your daughter,’ he shouts after the stumbling priest in found dead on their feet, slit eyes staring. his battlefield voice, ‘She will bear my children and empty my pis- New grave pits are dug beyond the beached ships, and the main spots, till her gums are empty of teeth.’ track that runs through the camp becomes a corpse road. The liv- The onlookers are exchanging glances, puzzled by this rant. ing bear the dead in makeshift litters to the pits. Clouds of lime rise like white smoke behind these silhouetted figures and the bur- Chryses limps away through the crowd, viciously disgraced, and ial parties return white faced from the sepulchre. they pat his shoulders and voice a rough sympathy as he moves off. They are nonplussed by this foolhardy harangue, but they have Days pass and the soldiers sit casting dice and waiting, fearful heard what has passed and there can be no undoing what has been of the night. The talk is that some have died of the fear of dying, done so publicly. so that men are afraid of being afraid. The rain is sharp as Chryses limps away from the camp. He On the tenth day of the visitation, a party of princes, Achil- makes his way up the deserted beach, his solitary figure shrink- les, old Nestor, Odysseus, Ajax, and Kalchas the priest, walk into ing into distance, until he is lost to sight. The day grows darker as the wide space before Agamemnon’s tent. The army understand, the cloud comes in off the sea and the strands of livid daylight are and the warriors make their way between the tents, gathering in obscured. a great silent circle. He prays under the sound of the seething shingle, the ramp Achilles takes a step forward and begins to speak: ‘We are dying. and ebb. Greece is dying. If this pestilence does not pass from among us, the Trojans will walk into a graveyard.’ ‘Apollo, God’s first son, you have seen me abused by these barbar- ians. I am your priest. Bring down plague upon them. Let them die.’ He gestures Kalchas forward to speak but the seer is reluctant. Kalchas is a Trojan by birth but left the city when its destruction His prayer becomes wordless and pure, arcing upward into the was revealed to him in a dream. He is a traitor, a coward, undone by visions of Troy’s agony. His family are still there, still in the city.

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Kalchas sleeps little, and when he sleeps he dreams of his grandchildren, prey to self loathing, and wishes he had the courage to return. The enemy’s whore. He speaks at last: ‘Who will defend me when I say that which is in me to say?’ Achilles fixes his eye on Agamemnon, who has emerged from his tent and stands watchful as a cockroach. Achilles: ‘Me. While I am alive no one will lift a finger against you.’ Cloud shadows run across the wide space as the seer’s voice becomes audible again : ‘We stood here nine days ago and listened and watched as Lord Agamemnon abused the priest of Apollo. We know this to be true. That same night Greeks began to die. This is God’s vengeance. We shall not outlive this pestilence, none of us, unless the priest’s daughter is returned to her father and proper atonement made to Apollo. He will not suffer this insult.’ A profound roar rises from the gathered thousands, Agamemnon, uncrushable, strides toward Kalchas in his rage, as if he intends to kick another priest out of the camp, but the princes move to block his way, leaving him uncertain, stranded in an empty space; but still, in his pride he does not see. ‘Never, not once, a good word from this mountebank, this traitor to his city. Here he comes peddling this story that it is me that is at fault, that it is me who called down this plague by my lack of reverence.’ He turns about and about as he speaks, catching the eyes of men in the front ranks of the crush, and this is his gift of kingship, that he can win them over. ‘My Chryseis, my girl….. ’ His voice trails to silence, and they are touched by his melan- choly. Maybe he has feelings for the girl, they think, beyond rou- tine lust. He walks about, inviting them to share his conviction that he has been wronged, affecting a thespian wistfulness. It is ridiculous, but no one laughs. ‘But…. as I am king, I must be seen to do right. I must be seen to protect you soldiers as well as I may, to keep you safe. Children of Pelops

‘Take her, take her back to her father.’ Agamemnon spreads his arms wide, the picture of kingly magna- nimity. They feel they have been delivered. There is a breathing out. Agamemnon cannot resist: ‘But…..’ It was never going to be so simple. ‘…if I am to lose my prize, then I must have another, another such straight backed beauty, or bullion enough to match her value.’ Achilles again. ‘You must give her back to the god with an open hand. This is not a beggars’ market.’ Agamemnon: ‘Listen to me. Either you princes make me a gift or I come to your tents and take what I choose.’ Achilles: ‘You haggle like a cattle king on a dunghill. When Troy is taken, when we caper along her wall tops, then you shall have all, everything your greedy heart desires, but for now, serve the god. Do what is right.’ Agamemnon is a fool, understands nothing of what he is doing, a stupid boy intent only on defiance, ascendancy: ‘You shall not outfox me, Achilles. Tonight I come to your tent to take what is rightfully mine.’ Everybody understands. Achilles has a concubine, Briseis, one of the many women he has widowed, everyone knows this, for he parades her on his arm around the camp and seems to dote on her. She is a minnow in the open jaws of leviathan. Achilles shakes his head in disbelief: ‘Oh shameless, shameless. Who would obey this merchant, this moneylender? We did not come here for gain, claw king. We came to fight in the name of Menelaos’ vendetta, to save the honour of the House of Atreus. These Trojans have done me no wrong, never laid waste my crops, nor stolen my cattle. I am not minded to stay here to help amass loot for you.’ Agamemnon: ‘Go then. I shall not beg you to stay.’ In these moments it seems that Agamemnon is throwing away his war and everyone sees this, except him. He cannot help himself.

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‘Run then, boy. You are nothing to me. Tonight I come to your Matters have gone awry and they can think of nothing to say, tent to take Briseis, your captive tart. I shall take her so that you that will mend the case. They drift away. The day wanes to dark- know that I am greater than you, so that others will fear to face me.’ ness and the night is full of signs, portents. Agamemnon is a dolt, a callow canting boy, yet death hangs In the dark before the dawn, Achilles can be seen far out on off his lip. Achilles is gone into his rage and his sword begins to the sand flats, where the moon reflects herself in the wide sliding scrape clear of the scabbard. panes of ankle deep water, and a glimmering lacework of foam Old Nestor steps into the deadly space, and for moments makes and remakes itself, speaking to Thetis, his invisible mother, together he does nothing but stand there, waiting. The sword drops urging her to speak to god, urging her to bring down more ruin back into the scabbard with an audible sound. At last he speaks: upon the army of Greece. ‘Priam and his sons will surely rejoice to hear this schoolboy bick- The ship bearing Chryseis, the priest’s daughter moves away ering. The army of Greece is dying and you squabble like children. from the coast, the rising and dipping oar banks making a glittering path across the moonlit calm. I am old and I have fought alongside far better men than you. You should be ashamed, that it has come to this.’ The plague passes away. The whole army growls its approval, and Nestor can continue: ‘Agamemnon, are you the shepherd of your people or are you just another grasping ruffian?’ I am not a young woman. Since my mother died, five years ago, The army growls once more, a complex layered sound, full of come midsummer, I have been my father’s helper. He is a priest shouted insult and obscenity, the sound that may precede sudden at the temple of Apollo that overlooks the sea, outside the city of chaos. Thebes under Ida, and we led a quiet life, my father and I. ‘And you, Achilles, do not seek to challenge Agamemnon. He is He thinks I am a virgin. I shall be forty in a year or two, though god’s anointed king. Pull him down and you pull down the world.’ people say I look younger. The life of a temple handmaid is not a A shout here and there, and then a silence, the silence of uncer- life of heavy toil and there are no calluses on my palms . We are tainty, indecision, but finally it is Achilles who breathes deeply, all virgins, the handmaids, that is what people think, or what they mastering his rage. say at least. Some maybe are too old to recall whether they are vir- ‘Very well, King Rat. I shall give up the girl, but nothing more. gins or not. I am the youngest of the temple virgins. Attempt more than this and I shall kill you. My father comes from a wealthy family, traders in amber and But I shall fight no more against the Trojans. tin from the edge of the world. The men in his family: his father, his uncles and cousins, are sly hypocrites and, after all these years, I shall watch you die before the walls of Troy and do nothing. I still must peel their fingers from my thigh. My father is differ- I shall watch Hector destroy you and I shall do nothing, not me, ent. He is like a woman, no not like a woman, like someone from not my ant warriors. You will crawl to my tent to beg.’ another age. He is given to silence. I have seen him holding a The princes are not moved to speak, though they have the right. dying swallow in his hands. He was silent when my mother died, for months together, and I thought he would never find his way back from his silence. His voice, when he intones the prayers is the voice of the god. These days he stands by the hour before Apollo in the half dark of the temple.

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The image of the god is the size of a child, made from wood, Using the twigs he had brought, he sparked up a small fire black from a thousand years of candle smoke, with gouged eye sock- beneath the pot, and after a little while I became aware of a sweet- ets, but so ancient, so hacked and abused as to be barely thought of ish smell . as a god, something you might burn in the hearth on a cold win- ‘This glue is made from the sap of acacia trees,’ he told me in ter night. There are dozens of ancient nails, driven into its eyes, as his husky, little used voice. if, long ago, someone had tried to destroy its divinity. He let the bundle of vellum sheets unroll on the ground. Between The life of the temple is regular and the temple is wealthy. I each lay a square of gold that caught the dawn light. This was gold know how wealthy because part of my work is to keep the temple beaten to an airy thinness, finer than silk tissue, no more than gos- accounts. Like many temples, we depend upon the rich, and my samer. He licked his finger and lifted a filament for me to see, and father’s family are ostentatious donors. We have a gardener, women it rippled in the faint movement of air, like a little golden flag. ‘See.’ to do the laundry, women to sweep the temple floor and clean the guest rooms, though we receive few guests: my father’s cousins, the With a soft brush he painted the acacia glue around the tip of odd pilgrim, the odd traveller posing as a pilgrim. Service to the a horn, but slowly, so as not to alarm the heifer, while I spoke in stranger is a sacred duty. her ear and held my hand over her nose. His hands, I noticed his hands, the curve of his thumbs as he draped a small sheet of the I grow vegetables in the shade of the cypress trees which stand gold leaf over the place he had painted with the glue, then patted it in a grove outside the compound. The summer sun can be fierce. down with a pad of cloth. He painted another little patch, pressed The temple virgins sing at midsummer and midwinter, when a another little gossamer flag home, and continued in this way until sacrifice is made, usually a heifer, supplied by my father’s brother, perhaps half of the horn was covered. With his pad of cloth he and it is traditional that the animal’s horns are gilded. buffed the whole surface, sending glittering, unglued particles of There is a man in town, who is a gilder, at least that is one of gold into the air, and the gilded horn shone in the newly risen sun. the skills he has. One of my father’s cousins usually gives a hand- He began again on the second horn, and I watched the deft- ful of coins for this man to come and gild the horns of the sacri- ness of his hands, his thumbs. I watched the veins in his forearms. ficial beast. As he worked he spoke to me: ‘It is made in Egypt this gold I had never watched him work, until, one midsummer my father leaf and comes to Troy by ship. I used to buy it from a merchant asked me to walk the heifer down to the temple gate, and to wait there. Now, because of the war, no ships ride at anchor in the road- for this man. It was hot, I remember, though the sun had not yet stead, and this is the last of my gold leaf.’ risen. It was the year my mother died, and I was still in my mourn- He made a wry face and smiled at me, slightly. When the work ing clothes and my shaven head had only just started to grow back. was done and the heifer stood resplendent under her golden horns, He appeared along the track under the olive trees, walking, I tied a coloured ribbon, which I had brought in my bag, to her leading his donkey and he smiled as he approached, but did not forelock. The gilder and I drank water from the same flask. seem given to needless talk. We tethered the heifer that was to die, ‘Here.’ inside the compound, beneath an ancient plane tree, for the day was already hot, The gilder unpacked the donkey’s panniers and He reached out and held my forearm with one hand, while he laid out his things on the ground: a small iron pot on a trivet, a roll flicked in a shape on my skin with his glue brush. He pressed on of what looked like sheets of vellum, some soft brushes, a bundle the gossamer gold and when he brushed away the fragments, a of twigs, some cloths. glittering flower bloomed on my flesh. I stood by the heifer and put my fingers over its wet nostrils so A knowledge came to me in that moment, and we walked that it would not be afraid on its last morning. together across the temple compound into the twilight of a guest room. The shutters were half closed against the heat. He put down

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what he was carrying and I took off my black mourning dress, as if everything had been arranged, and stood before him, naked. The Agamemnon’s bed is narrow, a soldier’s bed, and when he had soft brush was warm as he twirled it around my nipples and when done, he pushed me away so that I fell to the floor. I walked out he patted the gold into place and dusted it off, they stood pain- of the royal tent to the tent where the other captive women slept. fully erect. There are polished copper mirrors in the guest rooms and I looked at myself and my gilded nipples, as if I were a goddess. He asked for me the next night, but it was not the thing I had When his hand moved down between my legs I almost stumbled. imagined. He told me to strip naked and stand by him, where he sat on the edge of his low bed. He pulled me to him as I stood, so The day that the Greek ships ran ashore on the town beach was that his face pressed between my thighs, and put his hands around a day we had been expecting. the backs of my legs. His big hands moved up to my buttocks and Nine years the Greeks had been living in their shanty town down to my calves, slowly, up and down, kneading my flesh, and before Troy’s walls, and we knew that they had destroyed other at first, his fingers strayed between my buttocks as his hands rose, places along the coast. Two ships full of Greeks had come to The- and I was caught up, but by little and little, his movements were bes under Ida in the first year of the war, demanding food and becoming vaguer. I stood there, my skin cooling, and he with his money, and the town council had voted them all that they wanted. great head pressed between my thighs and his killer’s hands around Everybody knew they would come back again, and the next time, the backs of my knees, was asleep. they would be looking for more than food and money. I was in his tent often, through the day, because that was what It was mid morning and my father had walked into the town. he wanted, and his generals came and went, so that I began to rec- The temple precinct was silent, just myself and one of the garden- ognise them and their ways of speaking, and to see how it was with ers, who was weeding the edges of a gravel path with his hoe. The Agamemnon the king. first I knew was when the daylight darkened. Above the town, Sometimes he would push me down on the rugs, but mostly he columns of smoke were rising high into the sky, obscuring the seemed only to want me there, my presence seemed to be enough. sun, and I knew at once that the day had come. The gardener ran He would stand behind me as I sat, and press my shoulders and the off through the gate and my belly spasmed with fear. I remember back of my neck with his great fingers, all the while arguing with standing there, watching the smokes eclipse the sun, and waiting. one of his soldiers, great Ajax or Palamedes or Odysseus. Achilles It takes ten minutes to walk into the town from the temple, came maybe once or twice during those weeks, a big man, bigger but no one came, no fleeing townspeople, no Greek soldiers, and even than Agamemnon. though I was very frightened for myself and for my father, I began And sometimes, at night, other captive women were brought to hope that perhaps no one would come at all. The temple stands in and they were very noisy in their transports, and I was shocked on a headland overlooking the sea and anyone fleeing the city at how noisy they were. Maybe they were play acting. would take a different way. I have never properly understood what happened next. It was a It was late afternoon when they appeared on the track that wet afternoon, and I could hear the rain driving against the sides runs beneath olive trees to the gate. There were four of them, four of Agamemnon’s tent. The king was asleep on his narrow cot, and young men, and they had been drinking. They were laughing and snoring, when one of his heralds came in and touched his shoul- pushing one another about like children. der. He sat up, rubbing his face like a child. Something was hap- I saw my father later, as we women were being lead out of the pening, I could feel the presence of the whole army outside, as if burning city. He was sitting on the ground in his regalia, untouched, some great creature were crouching out there in the rain and then among the corpses. He saw me and I saw him. I heard a voice, my father’s voice, a voice from another world, clear and carrying, speaking out in the open space before the king’s tent, where meetings were held. The wind and the rain were rattling the

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tent walls, so that the voice came and went between gusts, but I thought I heard this: ‘I am chief priest at the temple of Apollo.’ Agamemnon went out into the rain, pulling a cloak around himself, and as the tent flap opened and closed behind him I glimpsed an old man kneeling in the mud, my father. I was a slave, a captive here in the Greek camp, forbidden to do anything that was not commanded, so I sat there, straining to hear that voice again. And then: ‘My daughter Chryseis was taken.’ It was my father’s voice, but the words were lost beyond the rattling of the rain. Later, the king came back inside the tent, pulled off his wet things and pushed me down on the rugs. The other women told me later that Agamemnon had kicked and abused my father and driven him from the camp. They told me that he had come asking for his daughter’s release and offering a king’s ransom in exchange, but I have learned to be wary of such gossip. They also said that Agamemnon was wrong to abuse a priest of Apollo, and that no good would come of it. They said I was lucky to have such a father. When they began to die of the pestilence, things changed. No women came in the night and Agamemnon sat in his chair through the day, drinking wine. He grew solid with drink, like a log of wood. When he turned, he swung his head like a bull and he blinked very slowly. He taught me a game and we played this game for many hours during those strange days, facing one another, with a tray of sand between us and piles of black pebbles and white pebbles. Once I understood the rules, I gradually became better at this game than he was, and I think he liked it, that mostly I won and mostly he lost. He laughed when he lost. Outside, they were dying, but there was no sound of lamenta- tion, no women’s voices, only silence. A meeting was called in the space before the tent. I heard the foreign sounding voice of the Trojan traitor priest. I heard the voices of Achilles and Agamemnon, snapping and snarling at one another, and the groaning and sighing of the army, like some vast chorus in a play. Children of Pelops

He was the king and he could behave as he liked, in his own tent at least. When he came back inside, he slapped me with his open hand, sending me spinning to the floor. His hand was hard, like a plank of wood. The black eye and the bruises on the left side of my face, lasted a month and I am still a little deaf in my left ear. The next evening, they came up to Agamemnon’s tent from the sea, as it was growing dark, to take me down to a ship, which was backing its oars a few yards from the beach. They carried me until they were chest deep in the water, when other hands lifted me aboard and sat me down on piles of heavy fabric, amid a confusion of tripods, cauldrons and jewellery. A vertical bar of moonlight glittered across the breathing back of the sea. There was no wind and as they rowed through the hours I could hear the dip and rise of the oars, the occasional murmur of a voice, a low bark of suppressed laughter. The warm smell of sweat came to me in the darkness. I watched the moon go down, aware of the pain in my face. I woke in the half dark before the dawn to see my father, in his temple finery standing on the beach, watching them wade ashore with the treasure, with his people standing about holding torches, and I remember thinking how good this would be, for the temple accounts.

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We stood side by side, my father and I, watching the rising and see that this is madness; but Agamemnon is king, god’s anointed, falling of the oars, as the Greek boat pulled away from the shore. even though he thinks and acts like a witless boy. We stood for a long time, until the vessel was a mere speck, and I He catches up his royal mace, his kingly staff, made by the god did not know if this was what I wanted, to be here, standing next Hephaestos, they say, and steps out into the half dark morning. They to my father. I felt a pang of loss, and I wept. are there, his thousands, in their clans, Lokris, Kardamyli, Corinth, Looking back through the years, it grows smaller and smaller, Kiparissia, Koroni, Pharae, Pylos, Salamis,…… until it seems no more than a picture in a locket, and I sometimes ‘The thing is finished.’ he shouts. ‘Go home. God has told me wonder if it happened at all. I walk about in the town in my rega- that we shall never have the victory.’ lia, and the destroyed buildings have mostly been rebuilt, though the dead live on in memory and nightmares move from bed to There is a confused murmuring. ‘What did he say? No. What? bed in the darkness. What?’ When my father died I was elected chief priest, a thing unheard ‘Go, go!. The war is over.’ of for a woman. He strides forward and begins pushing at the front ranks with his staff like a child in a tantrum until they begin to fall back. Indi- viduals break away and begin to run down toward the sea, toward the ships. Odysseus is looking down at his own feet, at a loss in the face of this unlooked for folly, this calamity, but it is momentary. Pull- Chryseis is borne away across the dark back of the sea, and ing the staff from the king’s hands, he runs back down the beach, Agamemnon wakes in that same darkness, sweating and confused. calling and whistling as he goes, as if he were a shepherd, while The dream which has been standing by his bed, moves away. He the army begins to unravel. sits up, rubbing his unshaven face, and calls the heralds. ‘It’s a joke, boys, a test. A jest. Our king needs to know that His dream, speaking with the voice and in the form of old your hearts are still high.’ Nestor, has told him that today, this day that is gathering toward Odysseus is shouting now, as if this were the battlefield. He the dawn, is the day that the Greeks will have the victory. This is swipes at a fleeing snot nose, calls out to a clan chief he recognises, the day Troy falls. takes another swipe at a bunch of faint hearts. His bleary generals, summoned in the darkness from their beds, ‘Our king is testing you. Do you want to creep home like listen nonplussed as he recounts his dream. Nestor mumbles dip- whipped dogs? Is this what you want, to be remembered as straw lomatically while the rest roll their eyes, and then Agamemnon men, milk sops?’ makes this proposal. He calls across to a brigand chieftain he knows: ‘Get them back! ‘I know that Troy will fall today, and now you know, because Get them back to the meeting!’ I have told you, but the army does not yet know. I shall test them, test their spirit. I shall go out there and tell them this. I shall tell Over to his left, Ajax is cracking heads. The whole beach seems them that we are giving up this war and sailing back to Greece, to be full of men running down to the ships. The defection is and then we shall see what they do. We shall know if they are becoming general. resolved to fight on.’ ‘Back, back to the meeting!’ Odysseus closes his eyes in despair at this folly and the rest Odysseus is shaking with the effort of imposing his will upon exchange disbelieving glances, for even the most slow witted can these gangs of deserters, and there is no thought or intent in him

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but that he will stop them, stop them knocking away the props from beneath the ships, stop them pulling down the tents, stop them unshipping the oars. ‘Back, fuckwits, back to the meeting!’ He runs at arguing groups with the king’s staff above his head as if he will brain them all, and they scatter apart. Odysseus is not a big man but he has the build of wrestler, or a wall. Big feet he has, short legs, hard to push over. Small but big, as the poet says. Unlike his fellow princes who wear their hair in oiled ringlets, his head is shaved to the bone. He sees Ajax the lesser further down the beach, driving men away from the ships. The princes are waking suddenly to this sliding away of all order. Odysseus, the roaring engine of his own will, is pounding between the ships and the rout. ‘Back! Back! Back! Back!’ It seems senseless, what he is trying to do, to stem this tide, but comes a moment, an instant, when he catches the first flutterings of indecision among the defectors, the first slowing. He is shoving them now, using the staff to fend them back. Others are looking on in blank confusion. He is urging them back to the general space, using the king’s staff as a shepherd uses his crook, driving the waverers before him like sheep. The thousands are sitting and standing about restively, half attending to Thersites the funny man, and god’s Agamemnon is allowing the jester to speak. Now Thersites is what my father would have called a barrack room lawyer, but funny. He is the comic voice of the voiceless. He says what they want said, the thousands, but dare not. He is not an attractive man, Homer writes, bow legged, hunchbacked, a stut- terer no doubt, but not afraid to wrangle with his betters. He is a kind of jester, obscurely licensed to poke fun at princes. God- like Achilles hates him, but then Achilles is a great man, who has scarcely ever laughed in his life, and never at himself. Odysseus is another such, who has no time for this whining cripple and his endless jibes. Thersites makes Agamemnon laugh. Children of Pelops

Our funny man, having gimped forward into the general space, is delivering his comic patter to a half attentive audience. ‘What does he want, this king of ours, more loot, more Trojan tarts to fuck? Let’s go home boys, like he says, let’s go back home, and leave this pawnbroker of ours to his gold, to his piles of stripped armour, to his captured horses, his ransom moneys . Let’s see how he manages, when us poor beggars have gone home, when the piss is running down his leg and there’s nothing standing between him and Hector but his piles of loot. This is the man, remember, who has managed to quarrel with Achilles so that we must fight with half an army. This is the man who is only alive today because Achilles let him live. By chance, Odysseus has pushed through the crowd and arrived a few yards behind Thersites as he is speaking, and he does not even pause in his stride. He fetches Thersites a great theatrical swipe across his shoulders with the royal mace, that breaks bones and sends him sprawling, setting the whole army on a roar. This is how wars are fought, princes against the poor, the rich and ruthless against the poor and stupid. The enemy is not where you think. And yet, out of this seeming uncertainty, out of Agamemnon’s doubtful dream, and his brainless scheme to test his army, the day begins to take the form of the last day. Altars are burning the length of the beach and lowing bullock go down by the dozen while the priests are chanting their falsetto descants, one voice against another, and the sacrificial victims fold down spasming into their own blood. In the camp the clans are arming as if this were indeed the dawning of the last day. They primp and polish like bridegrooms, oil their ringlets like virgins. Swallows on a roof ridge, the army gathers into its clans, its war bands and conscripted battalions. It seems that, in some deep place, the day has been chosen. Outside the city of Troy, within sight of the walls, there is a low hill known as Ilos’ hill, the burial mound of some ancient king, with a wild fig tree growing at its base, and in these days of war, a hedge of sharpened stakes around its summit, and not far off there are two stone built cisterns which must once have served a spring that no longer flows: a place where the city’s warriors have gathered over

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centuries in time of need, and Hector, prince of the gate, is already pull himself aboard. He falls to his knees on the floor of the chariot here with Priam’s guard, watching as the contingents from Troy’s as it clatters away, leaving Odysseus to face the advancing spears. several districts march out from the city. The mercenary battalions The shave headed king looks about him, but there is no Greek of Lycians, Egyptians and black Africans are as noisy as parakeets. in sight. His enemies surround him like dogs around a wild boar. The weather has been dry for weeks and a shining dust, raised by Panic flickers in his chest momentarily before he goes in high the approach of this army, obscures the battlements. with his spear and takes his first man in the shoulder and a sec- Far off, in the direction of the sea, the Greek army advances ond, who has jumped down from his chariot, in the gut under the under a greater pall of dust, that rises high into the air like a storm rom of his shield. The gut man’s brother flies at him with his spear cloud and the host moves under its shadow. The long ranks of and the point rips through the layers of Odysseus’ leather shield, plumed helmets and horses appear and disappear as the army crests shearing through the fastenings of his corselet and cutting a long the undulations of the plain. gash across his ribs. A frieze of distant figures, dust and glint and the roar of many The brother turns away, leaving his spear lodged in Odysseus’ voices. shield and harness, thinking he has killed his man, but the stagger- This is not the day that Troy will fall, though resolution is not ing Odysseus spears him in the back, between the shoulder blades far away. This is the endgame, though no one knows, except mad so that the point comes out of his chest. Swaying on his feet, shave Kassandra, standing beside her father on Troy’s battlements, weep- head pulls the brother’s spear clear of his own shield and harness, ing. There will be deaths today, woundings, heroics. There will be and his enemies can see blood flowing freely down his leg. He temporary truces, duels and speeches. Dead bodies will be stripped backs away from the jackals, shouting for help in his battlefield of their armour and left in the sun. There will be fighting over the voice. He shouts again and backs away, and again. dead for possession of the corpse. Empty chariots will rattle across Great Ajax, carrying his long shield before him, materialises the stony plain. on his left side and a moment later, a bloodied Menelaos on his Noon. right. A chariot has made its way up close and Menelaos pushes Odysseus aboard. ‘Go.’ Not far from Ilos’ mound, Odysseus and Diomedes stand against advancing Trojans. They kill the two sons of Merops the seer. As Ajax and Menelaos are giving way, step by step as the chariot Diomedes is stripping his victim’s corpse, Paris, skulking with his peels around and off. bow behind the sharpened stakes that ring the summit of the Sunset. mound, shoots him in the foot and the arrow passes between the The armies are lost in the dusty glare of the setting sun. You tendons into the ground. Paris, still holding his bow, steps into the could mistake the distant roar of battle for the sound of the sea. open and makes a great show of laughing, but Diomedes is con- Greeks are falling back and the Trojans harry them as they retreat temptuous and shouts up at him. within the palisade. As darkness falls, it becomes clear that the Tro- ‘Fuck off, pimp, nobody. Women’s work, archery. I’ll have you jans are not returning to the city for the night. A constellation of in the belly yet, pretty boy.’ campfires burns on the plain. The Greeks are panicked. Odysseus stands over him with his shield as Diomedes sits work- Agamemnon posts the whole army between the ships and the ing the arrow out of his foot and grunting, while Trojan spearmen newly built palisade, and they labour far into the night shoring up edge closer. Diomedes is clammy white, nauseous, and his hands the defences. grow bloody to the elbows as he twists and pulls. The arrow head In the dim lamplit interior of Agamemnon’s tent, the gener- has three tangs and he gives a snarl as it comes clear. His chariot- als stand about in silence. It is clear to them all that the Trojans eer swings his car in close so that Diomedes can hobble across and plan to renew the attack with the dawn. To a man, the generals

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fear that, come the morning, they will be swept away. Old Nestor Agamemnon offers you gifts: whole cities, gold, women, horses. breaks the silence: ‘We need Achilles and his troops. We all know He will return the girl Briseis to you, untouched, he swears. this, and we all know why he will not fight.’ Achilles, if you cannot forgive the king, then pity the rest of us. Agamemnon, witless, terrified, jabbers into the silence: ‘Right, Kill Hector, it’s what you came here for.’ right, old man. Deluded I was. I admit it, a slave to stupid rage. I should never have quarrelled with noble Achilles. Achilles is looking at the ground, shaking his head violently: ‘I’ll have none of him Odysseus, I’ll have none of his gifts nor his I am more than willing to make amends. Gifts I’ll give him: promises. He is as hateful to me as the gates of Hades.’ gold coin, cauldrons, horses, tripods. I will return the woman Bri- seis to him and swear I never touched her. Other women too, from He is possessed by his rage and begins to spit and stamp and Lesbos. Cities, I’ll give him cities by the sea, Kardamyli, Pharae, roar and Patroklos holds him by the shoulders until the fit passes. and er….er… Seven cities I’ll give him, seven.’ It is a while before Achilles is master of himself. He grows quiet, breathing slowly and deeply, at Patroklos’ instruction. He is sobbing now. You know, my mother told me I had two choices, to fight and ‘And when we sack the city of Troy, he can take his pick of the die in this war, win fame and glory, or to go home and live a long spoils. All this I will do for him, if he will give up his wrath. Let and easy life. Well, I’ll tell you, I’m going home tomorrow, me and him only yield.’ my people. If the sailing is good, we shall be home in three days. He puts his head in his hands, weeping openly. The generals are I’ll give you some advice. Do the same, sail home.’ taken aback by this unmanly manifestation, by the sudden exces- sive generosity from a man known only as a tight fisted skinflint. As they trudge back to Agamemnon‘s tent, Ajax, who has said nothing at all, whispers in Odysseus’ ear: ‘See.’ Nestor, decisive, steps in: ‘Someone must go and speak with Achilles. I say Great Ajax and Odysseus should go, and let them The Greeks lay by the ships, armed, waiting for the morning go now, quickly. Let them take a herald.’ and the night is chill. It is Agamemnon who, in that first grey light, rides out through the gate in the wall of stakes and begins to kill There are no comments, no counter proposals, only an anxious Trojans, who have spent the night, as sleepless as the Greeks. He is nodding of heads. As they are pressing out through the tent flaps, a lion and he rides them down when they are hardly awake, while Ajax whispers in Odysseus’ ear: ‘No chance. We are lost bitches his people strip the corpses, leaving the naked cadavers white and barking at the moon.’ pitiable. Achilles is standing beside Patroklos as the delegation approaches. He is the man. It is an oddly self conscious moment, for these men know one another well, have stood in the same slippery blood, and the for- He steps down from his painted car, his armour clanking audi- mality sits uneasily. bly, as if he were some inhuman engine, slashing and roaring, des- perate to live down his humiliation, to obliterate his moments of Odysseus is blunt because, as a student of human nature, he weakness. knows the cause is lost: ‘Achilles, you know why we are here. We are terrified. Tomorrow morning the Trojans will sweep us away. The Greeks are pouring out onto the plain and the Trojans, You can see their camp fires beyond the palisade, hardly a spear yesterday’s bravado forgotten, are fleeing for the walls of the city. cast from where we stand. They will sweep us away and we shall Agamemnon hacks on toward Troy, at the head of his troops, all die, unless you forget your quarrel with Agamemnon and stand driving the Trojans before him, but somewhere he takes a sword beside us in the morning, you and your Myrmidons. slash in his forearm. He chops his way almost to the walls of the city, but it is as the winding down of a clock. From loss of blood, his movements grow vague and ponderous but he will not give

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over his hacking and slashing until he begins to stagger, so that ‘Take my chariot, take Automedon, my driver. He has some they must lift him into his chariot, and he is driven away. God’s sense. But listen, listen to me. Drive the Greeks off, then come Agamemnon is down, and the tide that was just now lapping the back. Do you hear? You are not me. Survive. Be with me when we walls of the city, begins to ebb. take the city.’ Hector emerges from the Skaean gate, fronting a wall of chant- The solid black columns of Myrmidons are chanting their bat- ing troops he has rallied, and an uncertainty grips the Greeks, that tle hymn and stamping their feet, freed at last from inaction. turns to panic within moments. They start to fall back. The tide is turning again. The Trojans are ranging far from the city, as the Greek battal- Patroklos/Achilles has been seen in the chariot, at the head of ions melt away before them, carrying the attack across the coastal Achilles’ troops, far up the beach, but coming on at a stolid run, dunes and threatening the ships. They have crossed the ditch which and the Trojans turn and flee through the smokes of burning ships. runs along the outside of the wall, pulled down a part of the palisade and are running toward the ships carrying fire. It is the crisis. They yell and push, panic stricken, through the gap they have made in the wall, but the Myrmidons drive a wedge between the Patroklos is running along the beach and he bursts into Achil- fugitives, trapping a terrified crowd within the palisade. Achilles’ les’ tent. warriors go to it like butchers. The remaining Greeks are through ‘You cannot let this happen. They are dying out there. Hector will the gap, leaving the ditch full of wrecked chariots and trapped horses. burn the ships. They have crossed the ditch, the palisade is down.’ Achilles’ chariot is pulled by three horses and his soldiers say Achilles stares at him and says the words he has long rehearsed. that the pair cannot be killed. A third trace horse leads the way. ‘I said this to our claw king, to god’s Agamemnon, remember? Automedon, Achilles’ driver, knows his trade and sets the chariot I said it would come to this.’ at the gap, flying over the wreckage at a gallop. ‘You cannot do it, Achilles. Spare me your schoolboy’s tantrums. They are out now, on the plain, running down the fugitives and What are you, a stone? We are going down, and you sit here like Patroklos is spearing them as they flee, with his black Myrmidons a pouting child. Diomedes is out of the fight, Odysseus, Agam- on either hand, and it seems to them that they are immortals, so emnon. This is your chance to be a hero. It’s what you came for.’ solid and unstoppable they feel. Achilles presses his temples between his hands. Not so. ‘If you will not fight, at least let me take the Myrmidons, let me There are Lycian mercenaries in their path, men who have turned wear your armour. The Trojans will see the whole Thessalian army to face their pursuers and are hold- with me wearing your armour, at its head, and think it is you. We ing their ground. Sarpedon, will drive them off.’ warlord of the Lycians, is a foreigner, a paid sol- Achilles, torn, agitated, looks down the beach to the smokes dier, a long way from rising above the burning ships. home, but he has ‘Do it. Do it now, quickly.’ He pushes his helmet at his lover made his name here and strides outside. The roar that goes up from the Myrmidons is on the plains of Troy. heart-stopping. He stands the ground, any ground, because it is in him to do so. Patroklos is a big shaggy chested man, almost as big as Achilles himself, fearsome in Achilles’ plated armour and his grim plumed His soldiers call him the son of Zeus. helmet, and he is avid to be gone, but Achilles holds on to him. If there is any man that Hector admires, it Peter Huby Children of Pelops

is Sarpedon, and there is a bond between them, though they speak forward, puts his hand on the shaft of his spear and looks down not a word of the other’s language. at his dying victim. Sarpedon watches the approach of the Myrmidons, and he is Sarpedon whispers: ‘We shall meet again today. Hector is the not the first to realise that the man bearing down upon him in man.’ Achilles’ chariot, wearing Achilles armour and carrying Achilles’ When Patroklos puts his foot on the dead man’s chest, and pulls shield, is not Achilles. out the spear, black blood gushes from the wound. Sarpedon tells his driver to advance at a trot beyond the Lycian Myrmidons come forward and begin stripping the corpse of its front line, no hurry now, toward his enemy. Patroklos, a bloody armour, while others simply jab their spears into the cooling flesh spectre, has butchered so many these last minutes that he is adrift, for luck. Sarpedon’s lieutenant, a man called Glaukos, who has an a man in a dream. arrow sticking through his arm, and has lost much blood, has just There is a wind that blows out of Africa in the spring, a wind watched a Greek push a spear into his dead captain’s eye socket. carrying thunderheads of red desert sand and when it rains, it is He walks out from the Lycian front rank, like a tourist and chops as if the sky were bleeding. It is starting to rain now, great bloody this despoiler down. Lycian troops have followed him, glittering drops, as if in token of some catastrophe. with hatred, to cut down the hyenas. The chariots pull to a halt alongside one another and Sarpedon The world is thus reduced to two sets of enemies murdering steps down with two spears in his hand. Patroklos does not even each other over the body of a dead man. Sarpedon himself, hacked step down, but spears Sarpedon’s driver in the belly, directly from and filthy, is lost beneath other corpses for a while, until Greeks where he stands in the car. The driver, Thrasymelos by name, who pull him clear and drag him off. Sarpedon was a prince, the son leaves a farm and ageing parents in Lycia, crumples into the well of god and his body is worth money. Glaukos thinks he sees this of the chariot and takes some hours to die. happen but can do nothing because of the spear men in his path. The bloody rain is coming on and it grows dark. Patroklos walks away, steps in to Achilles’ chariot and takes Sarpedon comes round the chariots, in a rage at this baseness, the reins from Automedon, and the driver wants to say: this is far and flings a spear at his enemy, but Patroklos leans away and the enough, prince. Who knows what my master Achilles will do if spear point buries itself in the neck of Achilles’ trace horse, driv- you die? ing deep into its flesh. Patroklos turns the car in a wide loop and sets the horses at a The horse falls forward to its knees and keels over, snorting gallop toward the Lycian soldiery and they scatter, fleeing before bloody froth, while the other two animals try to pull apart, rear- this mad assault. The contagion spreads and the whole body of ing, and fouling the reins on the cross bar. Automedon the char- Lycian troops begins to retreat. The Greeks’ heads go up as if they ioteer steps down and walks past Patroklos to cut the trace reins were hounds and they start to run after Patroclus’ chariot, in pur- free with his charioteer’s knife, cool as a cucumber. suit, killers all, across the bleeding, rain lashed plain. Sarpedon hurls his second lance but Patroklos ducks away and The gap between the hunters and the hunted is a hundred yards it passes over his shoulder. They stand only yards apart, unmoving and it seems again that Patroklos and his Myrmidons will run their for long moments, before Patroklos’ heavy ash spear flies from his quarry to the very gates of the city. fist, straight and deadly, a thing foretold. The bronze spear head, But once again, something happens, something so unexpected, as long as a forearm, passes into the lower part of Sarpedon’s heart so as to seem for a moment like a trick of the eye, as if rain had and he falls backward on to the stony ground like a log, with the run in from your helmet’s visor and blurred your vision. embedded spear standing upright. His fingers spasm for a moment Out of the fleeing mass, two chariots are turning back to face and a great roaring sound come out of his mouth. Patroklos walks their pursuers. In the first, stands the wounded Glaukos, with the

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arrow which he caught during the assault on the palisade, still in He steps up into his chariot and would be gone, in pursuit of his arm, and in the second, long awaited, Hector, prince of the gate. Achilles’ horses, for he must have the horses too, and the car, if he Gloukos survives the carnage of the next hours and I should is to become Achilles, but Glaukos stands in his path and turns like to record that he lives to go home to his vineyards and his sick him back to the fight, cursing him for a coward. wife, but it would not be true. Two days hence, Achilles will kill Gloukos has a plan, you see, a naïve plan maybe, but he is a sim- him, only half an hour before Paris shoots him in the heel. ple man. He thinks that if the Trojans win Patroklos’ corpse then Patroklos dies sooner. they can make a trade with the Greeks for the body of Sarpedon, his captain. He will wash Sarpedon’s wounds, give him a clean shirt, It happens very quickly: Patroklos is wounded as he passes in weep over him. He is weeping now. his chariot, by a panicky Trojan trooper who, having stabbed him in the spine, pulls out his spear and runs back to the safety of his The Greeks are advancing again, intent on retrieving Patroklos’ comrades. Patroklos is standing with a surprised look on his face, corpse before the Trojans defile it further, before Hector has the gripping the rail of his car, to prevent himself falling, when Hec- head cut off and set on a pole. Already, they have a strap around tor swings close by and pushes a spear into his belly. his ankles and are beginning to drag him back toward the city. Thus the key is turned in the lock. Patroklos topples backward Here is Greek Menelaos, advancing crabwise, until he is stand- from the moving chariot to the ground. Automedon the driver, ing astride Patroklos’s body, stamping and snarling, and jabbing at brings the two horse car round and pulls it to a halt ten yards to the craven jackals, who are not tempted to press their attack,.. but the rear. Hector is in the game again, with his people at his back. Mene- laos looks about him, and there is no support, no hedge of Greek He sees Hector begin to strip his victim of his armour before spears behind him. He thinks he is about to die, but here is great he is dead, unfastening the chinstrap of the helmet and working it Ajax, who else, like a hero in a poem, behind his tall shield, roar- clear of his head, pulling his body this way and that as he unlaces ing through like a wall, leading his Salamis hoodlums. the famous corselet. Patroklos, almost naked, is lying with his face in the dirt, his beautiful hair matted with blood, speaking, and Ajax fights under the sign of madness. He frightens his friends Hector leans down to listen. as well as his enemies with his unthinking recklessness. ‘He will kill you for this.’ Hector has met up with Ajax before, on the battlefield, three times, and he falls back, refusing to stand against him a fourth time. ‘Maybe I shall kill him.’ The day is nearly done and the rain clouds are breaking up. In Hector wrenches the last piece of bronze plate strenuously from the livid light, Myrmidon troopers carry Patroklos’ body back across beneath Patroklos, who dies with a shriek. the darkening plain, across the ditch, through the gap in the ruined The Trojan prince does an unlooked for thing, out there on the palisade and along the shore to Achilles’ tent. dark, rainy battlefield, and his troops exchange looks. He begins to take off his own armour, and there follows a strange moment when he is standing naked, over the naked body of his enemy, while the indifferent rain makes both bodies glisten, before he starts Two figures on an empty beach, yards apart, silhouetted against to enclose himself in the bronze he has stripped from the dead the twilight glitter of the sea. Greek. It is said that this armour was made by the god Hephais- Achilles, his face blotched, distorted by grief: ‘It was a quarrel tos himself, and Achilles was wearing it each time he slaughtered about a girl, no more than that.’ one of Hector’s brothers, and who can know what Hector thinks or feels as he laces himself up into his enemy’s harness, who can Agamemnon: ‘I was wrong. I am a fool. Delusion is all, blinds know what moves him? us all.’

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Achilles: ‘It would be wrong too, if I were to nurse my anger The Trojans are passing back into their city and somewhere forever.’ out on the plain, groups of Greeks are approaching at a walk, their Agamemnon: ‘I will give you gifts.’ shields over their backs. Hector can be seen standing at the foot of Ilos’ mound, not far from the wall. Nothing has been said, but Achilles: ‘It is all one. And now we must fight. I must find Hec- everybody knows he is waiting for Achilles. tor and kill him.’ Hector should go with the rest into the city himself and bar the gate. Everybody understands that he must live because he is needed within the walls, Troy’s survival rests on his shoulders, yet Achilles is riding in his chariot, ahead of his chanting ant war- here he is, beyond help, waiting to be killed. The Skaean gate rum- riors across the plain. He is looking for Hector, and how will he bles to a close and the great bars drop into place. not find him? The world knows that Achilles is immortal. ‘He will kill you. Hector is waiting, wearing Achilles’ armour, by Ilos’ mound, Come back into the city.’ Hekabe’s falcon voice screams from the within sight of the city walls, whose battlements are packed with wall top. sightseers, for everyone knows that Achilles is back. Everyone Hector is wearing Achilles’ armour, stripped only yesterday knows that Hector has killed Patroklos, his lover, and everyone from Patroklos’ body, still dark with the dead man’s dried blood. knows that Achilles will come seeking vengeance. The noon light is pitiless and inside his helmet sweat is running Old Priam is sitting in his chair that overlooks the Skaean gate, into his eyes. He is afraid, how not? with Kassandra, silent, behind him. Achilles has killed many of his Knots of Myrmidons, ant warriors, come to a halt at a dis- sons, but not this one, please god, not this one. tance, and making his way between them, Achilles, walking towards Andromache would not come, but sits in her room with their him with his two spears over this shoulder, like death himself, easy little boy, Astyanax, on her lap, playing a clapping game. in the fixity of his purpose. Pat a cake, pat a cake, baker’s man. Hector is a brave man, but as he marks the approach of his butcher, his body is shaking, spasming in fear. The creature within The story says that Hector had come up to the battlements wear- him recoils and he is gone, running away, panic stricken, with Achil- ing Achilles’ armour, to speak to his wife Andromache, on this last les at his heels. The ant soldiers are running too, closer in to the morning, before he walked out through the Skaean gate and on to walls so that Hector is forced away from the city, away from all hope. the plain. She had stood here many times in the past, high on the city walls, watching the distant dust of battle, waiting for her man. Like figures in a dream, the hunter cannot come closer to his Today, she was standing, holding on to their little boy as he wrig- quarry and the victim cannot draw clear of his pursuer. Under the gled to be out of her arms and down, because he had just learned to sun’s hammer, they make a circuit of the entire city, while along walk, and walking was his infant passion; but he stopped his wrig- the distant battlements the crowds watch in helpless fascination. gling and clung close around his mother’s neck when the golden This is the chase, the hunt, the primal drama. They make a sec- giant came to stand beside her. He had never seen his father in ond circuit at a pounding run, and impossibly, a third, when Hec- this glittering armour and this close fitting helmet with it’s nod- tor stumbles to his knees, his spears clattering to the stones, his ding plumes, and did not know it was Hector. The child began to chest heaving. He climbs to his feet and turns to face his destroyer. whimper, which made his father and mother laugh, though there was no laughter in their laughter. Achilles strips the dead man of the armour despoiled from Patroklos’ body only yesterday, piling it in the well of his own

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chariot, and then kneels by his fallen enemy, cutting through the Within the night time darkness behind the Skaean gate, Priam flesh between the tendons and the bones in his heels. He threads is sitting on the seat of a mule cart, next to the driver. Behind him a long cord through these wounds, which he must have brought is piled a treasury of gold: plate, jewellery, coin, bullion, so heavy with him from his tent for this very purpose, and loops it around that the springs of the cart are pressed almost flat. the axle of his car. Three times he drives his horses around the walls His wife, Hekabe, is standing next to the cart in her dressing of the city, dragging his victim, and the wailing from the wall tops gown, gripping her husband’s foot and shouting up at him. is universal. Achilles raises his arm in salute as he passes and they howl like the damned. Hekabe: ‘Your brain has turned. This is madness.’ Priam is a broken vessel, but what matter, he will be dead him- Priam: self soon enough. Kassandra has watched it all happen before, a Hekabe: ‘Do you really think you can do this?’ hundred times. Priam: Achilles takes off across the plain, dragging his victim, making Hekabe: ‘Give me the body of my son, you will say to this fuck- a cone of dust behind his car. ing monster, and I will give you the contents of my treasury?’ In the camp, he has his people build a funeral pyre for Patroklos Priam: no simple task, since all the trees for a distance of ten miles around have been felled long ago by the locust army. All the crops have Hekabe: ‘You saw what he did to Hector. He will crucify you. been burnt too, all the huts and cloth sailed windmills that once He will take your treasure and put your head on a pole.’ upon a time dotted the plain. The people are long gone, the fish- Priam: ‘Maybe.’ ermen, the millers, the families. Hekabe: ‘Maybe? Maybe? You won’t even get to his tent. You This is the wasteland. won’t get into the camp. The guards will pull you off this stupid Achilles’ people row a ship down the coast and cut wood enough cart and poke your eyes out with their spears and steal your gold. for a house -high stack. Patroklos’ body, washed, anointed and These are Greeks, animals.’ dressed in cloth of gold, lies in state at the summit of this moun- Priam: (to the keepers of the gate) ‘Open up.’ tain of wood. Each morning Achilles stands in his chariot, dragging Hector’s body around this monument. The story says that Hector’s body is miraculously preserved from the abuses it has suffered, but this is false. Hector’s body is So that was it; they pushed the gate open and we were on our scraped scarlet, his nose and ears rubbed away. Bones show through way, out into the moonlight. The voice of the old queen grew less at knees and elbows. as we drove away. The moon was at the full, round and white, easy to see by. Twelve Trojan captives, waiting to be ransomed, are led out and tied to stakes around the base of the timber stack, and since Niobe is an old mule, but steady. People say some funny things no priest can be found willing to perform such a rite, Achilles cuts about crossing mares with wild asses, but me, I like mules, I like their throats himself. their temperament. I watched Niobe being born. She has strong opinions, for a mule. I was much younger then. There were two in Achilles. the caul, but the weakling was already dead when they slithered out on to the straw. I was worried about the cart. It was cruelly overloaded, gold is

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heavy you know, and I was worried about the mule. The load is too I could not see how we might do this; I knew that the camp of heavy, I thought. Maybe we should harness two mules together, I Achilles’ Thessalians, his ant warriors, was somewhere to the left, wanted to say, but someone in my position does well to keep his beyond the main camp, but that’s all I knew. I did not suppose that mouth shut. we could simply find our way to the biggest tent in that part of The track across the plain isn’t exactly flat. It undulates, that’s the camp, and certainly, the going was soft across the edge of the the word, it undulates,….I was a philologist, you know, a student dunes, where there is no road at all, though that’s what we seemed that is, of language, in Egypt, before I was sold as a slave. I had a to be doing. Below and to our right, a thousand silent tents and passion for words. It happened a lot at that time, young men and huts spread away to the crawling edge of the moonlit sea. Here women were abducted by criminal gangs and sold into slavery…… and there a lamp illuminated the canvas wall of a tent like a lan- and where it swings around Ilos’ mound there’s a steepish bit, as I tern, casting unreadable shadows. remember, though it’s a long time since anybody drove a cart along The sound of a distant cough. that track, from the city to the coast. We were moving past our sleeping enemies as the moon was I must have been frightened, I suppose, driving across the setting among rags of cloud in the west. deserted, blue-grey battlefield in the moonlight. Shadows were The wheel rims were rolling deep in the sand, and I thought sharp edged and black. They’ve been dying out here for ten years, more than once that the cart was stuck fast, so that I must climb and they say that if you planted a tree at every spot where some- down to take Niobe’s bridle, to whisper to her that she could do body had been killed, then this would be a forest. Everybody in this thing, and to sing a soundless song into her ear, because she the city has somebody dead: son, husband, father. The city is full was trembling and sweating. Niobe, like me, is not young. Mules of widows, and old men like me. I was too old to be conscripted, are infertile, you know, they cannot give birth, and Niobe wanted even at the start, ten years ago. to be a mother. She did not know she was a mule, I think, but she There I was, jolting along in the darkness, next to the king. knew that she wanted to be a mother. In the old stories, Niobe There were no lights to be seen, no fires, no torches, just the faint gives birth to six sons and six daughters, but all of her children pale ribbon of the track stretching ahead, across an endless plain. were slaughtered. Priam is not a bad king, but what would I know? He fathered We were driving slowly between silent tents now, lost, but when fifty children they say. To look at him now, (and I glance sideways I saw the black-shadowed funeral pyre, high as a house, when I at him) you would hardly believe it. When Achilles killed Hector saw the dead men lolling away from the stakes they were tied to, his son, he killed the father as well. Collateral damage.. there was no doubt. He’s older than me, I think, Priam, or maybe he just seems older. I helped the old man down, walking behind him as he approached He’s lost a lot of his sons to this war, and now this. the awning of the big tent. A startled guard stepped out into his Two days ago, I was standing on the battlements, the same as path and the king said in a quiet voice: ‘Priam.’ The wide eyed sol- everybody else. I was too far round the walls to see the fight, to see dier backed into the tent and moments later Achilles appeared, Hector die, but a roar went up and everybody, even if they could pulling back the canvas, so that a little light fell on the old man. not see, knew it was over. It was a long moment, as they looked one another in the face. He came round the walls, about a hundred yards out, Achilles, With a shake of his head, Achilles held the flap wide so that driving his chariot, dragging Hector’s body behind. Three times Priam could enter his spacious tent, and I slipped in behind. he circled the walls, and each time he passed, he waved at us. He There were two men sitting, and the remains of a meal, and I waved. If this is a man, I would rather be a dog. guessed that one of the men was Automedon, the charioteer. They And now, here we were, on our way to visit him in his tent. moved away into the shadow by the wall.

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As Achilles turned to face the old man, Priam sank to the floor ‘Do not you provoke me, old man. I was minded to give back and clasped his hands around the knees of this man who had killed Hector’s corpse, but I could as easily cut your throat. I have already so many of his sons. It was a shocking thing to see. I had known killed your family.’ Priam only as sharp tongued authority, and I did not recognise the The old man puts his head down. broken creature, clinging to this killer’s legs, sobbing, fumbling to clasp his terrible murderer’s hands, and Achilles himself was moved Achilles gestures his henchmen out of the tent, and I slip out to weep and to put the old man away from him in horror. to watch. They unload the cart, piling up the ridiculous gold on the ground. A few yards off, some others are washing off the piece Priam remained crouching like a slave, speaking brokenly to of decaying meat that is Hector. They wrap the body and set it on the floor. a bier on the floor of the cart. ‘Give me my son. Give me the body of my son.’ Ludicrously, as if this were a meeting of friends, Achilles offers Achilles lifted the bird-boned ancient and sat him on a stool. the old man a meal, a camp bed under the awning of his tent, but ‘Think of your own father, and pity me, you who unstrung the we will have none of it, and are gone. The cart is more manage- limbs of so many of my sons.’ able without the dead weight of the gold, while Hector’s corpse, jolting behind us on its bier, is as nothing. Niobe is tiring, but she Achilles is shaking his head, forced up against his crimes by manages the return without complaint, seeming to recognise that this cringing ancient: ‘How can you bear to look at me, Priam? You the worst is over. must have a heart of iron.’ It is chilly dawn, and the last planets are fading, as we come The king rises unsteadily to his feet, agitated: ‘I will not sit in under the shadow of Troy’s gate. Only Kassandra, silhouetted on your tent, Achilles, while Hector lies unburied. I have brought you the battlements above, against the paling sky, watches our return. a great treasure. Accept this ransom, let me see him, give his body back It has been a long night for Niobe the mule. to me. Waste no time. Waste no time.’ There is a flicker of the old authority in his voice Like many of the stories which attach to the name of Achil- but Achilles crushes les, the stories of his death are told variously. Let us suppose that him flat. Paris, in the last battle, shoots him in the heel with an arrow as Achilles pushes forward beyond the ranks of his warriors into the press of the enemy. He goes down, with the long, tanged arrow head lodged in his heel, losing blood. Great Ajax, his giant cousin, stands over him with his seven fold shield bristling with spears and arrows, for this is Achilles, and every breathing Trojan wants to kill him, but wounded and helpless as he is, he remains a figure of terror and no one dares to come in close. Achilles is a big man but Ajax gets underneath him and lifts

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him on to his shoulders with a grunt. Odysseus arrives at a run, of Hector, prince of the gate, without whom this war had been beating back the spears. unthinkable. His tall, seven fold shield, stood as a sign, a symbol Ajax begins to hobble away under his burden, with Odysseus of bold resolution, steadiness in the storm, and Agamemnon, in fending off the jackals, but Ajax cannot go far, such is the weight awarding the prize to his wily advisor, has cast Ajax off, robbed of Achilles’ body, before he stumbles to his knees, panting. Incom- him of his honour. ing missiles snicker together in the air and an arrow is sticking Ajax wanders away, at a loss, baffled, his world suddenly empty up jokily from the horse hair plume of Ajax’ helmet. Achilles lies of meaning, until he finds himself among a flock of sheep, rieved back, scarcely conscious, his face a ghastly white and there is blood from distant Trojan farms and he takes out his sword and kills everywhere. He has taken a second arrow in his exposed arm and them one by one, because that is all he knows to do. He kneels another in his thigh. down amid this carnage, and with the point of his sword he digs a Ajax heaves him up again, with all the strength that remains hole in the earth. He sets the sword into the ground, blade upper- to him, and off they go, under the hail of missiles, and it seems most, stamping the soil back around the handle with his foot, and at every moment that he must fall again. With his last staggering tries to impale himself. He crashes over with the weapon in his gut, steps he crashes through the Myrmidon shield wall and falls to but kneels up again, mortally wounded, to bury the sword han- the ground. Achilles, dead, lies on top of him, so that others must dle afresh. At his third try the blade goes in through his armpit pull the corpse off. Ajax lies on the earth, spent, his breath heav- and into his heart, so that he dies the quicker, though his massive ing in great gasps. body convulses for many minutes. The first ant creeps across his open eye within an hour. It is late, and the day’s fighting comes to an end, and is not resumed on the day following, as if some truce has been declared. The war has been fought to a stand and Troy’s plain is empty. The heroes are dead, the war has lost its meaning. Achilles is burned alongside his lover atop the tall pyre. Such is the inferno, that bystanders must continually back away from the The palace doors are open wide, massive double doors, twice heat and the tents roundabout catch fire. The sacred occasion is the height of a man. Bolts of scarlet fabric have been rolled out disrupted by the toings and froings of soldiers intent on rescuing from the dark interior across the flagstones of the entranceway. their loot from these burning tents and there are fights between The day is grey, turbulent, and the fabric flaps and ripples across those who think this booty is properly theirs and those others who the ground like the sea, and would be carried away entirely by the are making off with it as chance allows. The great fire collapses in restless wind were it not for the palace women standing along its upon itself in a storm of burning sparks, and some will swear they edges in their best. saw the black shapes of the embracing heroes arc down from the A hundred yards below, Agamemnon’s chariot enters the city, summit into the white heat of the furnace. lost to sight for a moment as it passes into the shadow of the mon- Later, there are sacrifices and funeral games, after the fashion of umental gate. The crowds on either hand are strangely silent, for the times, and prizes are given, weapons, bronze tripods, cauldrons. this is Agamemnon, sacker of cities, beast of Argos, whose name is terror. Agamemnon, senseless child that he is, awards Achilles’ armour to Odysseus as a prize for his bravery in rescuing the dying hero. A second chariot follows, its driver struggling to control the Ajax stands blinking, as if he has lost his wits, when the hapless nervous horses. The woman standing next to the charioteer grips king makes this announcement. the rail, her black vestments flying in the wind, out and around her body like wraiths. Behind again, soldiers, captives, the spoils of war. If this war has a hero, it is surely mighty Ajax, the mirror image

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It is theatre, an acting out of the real, a ritual procession. The Agamemnon is fumbling for the words to say to this woman who women by the palace gate are watching the cortege as it winds has grown strange to him, searching in his mind for some response slowly up the paved way, hearing the gathering clatter of hooves, to this prepared speech. His voice sounds lame in his own ears. the noise of the wheel rims, coming and going in the blustery air. ‘Wife, wife, great hearted woman that you are…..your speech The king’s car comes to a stop in the space before the tall doors. is like my absence. Too long, too much.’ Agamemnon does not dismount, he waits, his driver speaking in a The crowd is waiting. She must say something. low voice to the horses to calm them as they sidle and pull, fearful of the billowing scarlet. ‘My lord, my conquering hero, lord of ships, place your foot upon these royal crimsons, walk this scarlet road home.’ The king is doing what kings do, standing, waiting, being seen to be what he is, the king. His lank red lion’s mane, batting around He frowns at what sounds to him like lines in a play. his face, is shot with grey and there is something ruinous in the ‘This is not for me. Greet me as a man. I am no god. If you greet slope of his bearlike shoulders. me as a god, the gods will punish us all.’ The nine years’ war has hollowed him out, written upon his face, ‘The gods have been good to you, given you the spoils of war, deepened his eye sockets. wealth, fame. You are here in your own home. The winter of your And then she appears, Clytemnestra his queen, walking out absence was long, seemed endless. You have returned like the Spring. of the shadow of the palace doors, a phantasm of the woman he The whole house is blessed.’ remembers, tall and straight backed still, though her face has been Agamemnon does not know what to say, for he cannot find a etched by the years; wearing the heavy, encrusted costume, the dia- purchase on these strange speeches. dem, necessary to such occasions. It is ten years since they spoke last. ‘This is not for me. My heart misgives me.’ ‘My Lord.’ ‘Take possession of your triumph. Act like the conqueror you She reaches across to hand him down from his chariot but he are. Are you afraid of the rabble’s disapproval?’ is oddly reticent, as if unnerved by the rippling scarlet road he ‘The rabble?’ he shakes his head. ‘Or the people?’ must take. ‘Surrender just a little to me.’ ‘My lord, you must, you are the king, the conqueror. Let the world know that I love my husband, that I have spent ten years ‘So this is a contest, which you need to win.’ praying for his return. ‘You have had your victories, my lord, let me have my small I have wept myself dry. My eyes are raw with staring night- triumph’ long at the lamp. He moves his shaggy head, catching an echo of the wife he The stories of your death were unending. Rumour spoke of your remembers. defeat, your destruction, with a hundred voices. ‘I am a superstitious man. When I tread this royal crimson, as Nothing is sweeter than a safe harbour after a storm, or a spring if the glory were mine, let no god resent it or be offended.’ of water to a desert traveller. He pauses, about to step down, nonplussed. Only this is sweeter, to welcome my husband home. ‘Do I make too much of it?’ Safe, victorious. He waves a hand toward the chariot behind. The witch woman Agamemnon, high king of Argos, sacker of cities, step down clutches the rail, her eyes closed. from your chariot. Welcome.’

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‘This is Cassandra, let her be cared for. Her house is ashes, her the crowded space before the palace and the light is dimmed, as family dead. She is a captive, a slave. Treat her as mine.’ if this were the onset of a storm. The lowing of the tethered bull- He steps down and follows Clytemnestra, shambling almost, ocks is borne on the same wind. across the rippling fabric toward the palace door, but she pauses on It is as if Cassandra is waking from a dream. the threshold as if struck by a sudden thought, and hands her hus- ‘What place is this? Where have they brought me?’ band on to her women who lead him through to the dark interior. She looks around at the crowd, at the massive stones of the Clytemnestra turns, walks back across to the second chariot. walls, built by giants, at the billowing scarlet. ‘Thou likewise, come within. I speak your name, Cassandra.’ ‘This is the fortress of the Atreides.’ The prophetess is gripping the rail of the car, staring ahead, ‘A great sin plots in this house today. Weep for me.’ trembling. The old woman is trying to prize her hands from the chariot rail. ‘Come down, come.’ ‘Why must I come with thee? To die? Only to die?’ These are public moments. The soldiers of Agamemnon’s guard are watching and the place is full of onlookers. The queen turns to ‘Come.’ these sightseers, jokingly. ‘Must I go down beneath the axe blow that will empty me like ‘Maybe this wanderer cannot fathom the language of her cap- a chicken on a block?’ tors, but see me, I offer my hand.’ The crowd are gathering closer to listen to this trembling for- The captive woman recoils, ague spasming through her body. She eigner in her black prophetess’ regalia and the soldiers of the guard grips the rail of the chariot as if this were a shipwreck. Sounds issue are at a loss. Cassandra, looking about in confusion at the sea of from her mouth, the cries of a bird maybe, or a creature in distress. faces, begins to speak from the platform of the chariot, like an actress on a stage. ‘Is she blind as well as deaf?’ ‘That house is full of demons. Under those painted ceilings they There is no laughter at her drollery from those round about. She flitter and squeal. They huddle on every stair. Do you see them, tries to catch Cassandra’s hand but it flies away again, refusing her Thyestes’ children, sitting in the darkness of the door, cradling the grasp and the queen’s patience is suddenly exhausted. bundles of their own butchered bodies?’ ‘Before god, she is mad. She is a slave. Her city is in ruins. How It is as if she is looking deep into the palace. long must I dally here at my own gate? If she is dead to persua- sion, then fetch her.’ ‘See. See Agamemnon stripped naked by his she-wolf.’ Clytemnestra turns and walks back into the palace, leaving a The prophetess is looking into the darkness of the door. Sud- sense of fault, of danger, hanging in the air outside. It is not clear denly she is borne backwards from the chariot as if by a blow. exactly who is supposed to coerce this strange woman and besides, ‘Oh. Oh, the cow has gored the bull. The horn goes in, again she is beginning to sing now, to intone, to make some sound that and again.’ is at least human. An old woman comes forward and places her She is kneeling on the ground, in the space that the fearful hand on the seer’s arm. crowd have created around her and little by little she comes to her- ‘You must bear the yoke my darling. We must all bear the yoke. self again and looks about. The trembling has passed away, leaving Come, come down.’ her calm for a moment. Somewhere in the city below, the sacrificial fires are being lit ‘Tis all one. The thing which must be, shall be. It has already and their fulminating smokes, driven flat by the wind, fly across happened. What needs a prophecy?’

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She stands unsteadily, pulling off her prophetess’ garlands and dancers emerge. When the sacred whores have performed the fig- pushes through the close packed bodies toward the black maw of ures of the dance and stand panting, men come forward and press the open door and they press back, panic stricken, unwilling to be money into the hands of the priest. touched by this shaking stranger. When she is fifteen, in a dark corner of the temple, the god She stumbles on the threshold of darkness and turns again to Apollo lifts the hems of her skirt so that she trembles violently. speak to them. The future is crowding close. ‘Give me your chastity and I will give you the gift of prophecy. ‘A minute, maybe two. She will kill me with her axe.’ You shall see into the future. Will you?’ Though she can barely stand, such are the gusts of trembling ‘Yes.’ that shake her frame, she speaks again. She is suddenly in the light, the radiance. The god’s gift comes ‘One comes after me, to lift the curse that lies on this house, to her in a blinding kaleidoscope as she stands in the darkness. She who will right wrong with wrong. is engulfed, annihilated. She flees the place, her girlish calves flick- One will come to avenge us. ering in the candlelight, her silhouette flashing black in the open door as she passes out into the declining day. An exile now, blowing in the wind. She runs home to the palace, worlds blooming behind her eyes, He will slaughter his mother, put her creature to the sword. runs to her room. She passes a night like no other, for to know the He will put the topmost stone on this family’s bloody monu- future is to know all of its possibilities. Futures gather and break ment. A shining wind out of this darkness shall blow’ apart at random, and there are darknesses gathering, fallings together of shattered shards, as if the future were made up of broken mir- She is gone through the dark door. rors. Clots of darkness begin to form. She sees her brother Hector’s body, ruined and bloody, being dragged inexplicably over stony ground, as if it were the memory Stories cling to the name of Kassandra. She is Hekabe’s daugh- of a dream. Smokes ascend above Troy’s walls, blackening the sky. ter, a child of the royal house of Troy, younger sister to Hector, to She glimpses her own head spinning through the air. Paris. She is Priam’s favourite child. It is said that Priam the king She returns to the temple at dawn, walking through the silent fathered fifty children, but who knows the truth of that? empty streets and passes into the black interior of the ancient place, Kassandra, from infancy is a wanderer, known to everybody, the feeling her way in the blackness. She stands where she stood yes- royal child who roams the steep streets of the city. Set apart, solitary, terday, and the god’s awful heat begins to rise and expand around oddly sacred, she spends her days in the town, in the souk, on the her. Her thighs grow slack, wet, and she is about to fall, but then steps of the temples, in an aura of solitude, and her agitated royal she speaks. nurses lose her at every turn, but the city bears her up and she is ‘No. You cannot have me. Last night I saw the fall of this city. guided home to the palace as night falls, by shopkeepers, beggars I saw my brother die. I saw multitudes dying on the plain. You are and whores. Untouched, untouchable. She is a kind of guardian of a god. You can change these things. You hold the future in your the city and the people take comfort from her strangeness, stroke hands. I will not be your creature unless you save the city. Change her blue black hair for luck. Troy will never fall. The easy days will what the first day wrote.’ never end. The city exists in a trance of wellbeing. The fey child is Angry stuttering turbulence gusts through the darkness and the emblem of peace, the touchstone. the god’s words form in her head like a black inscription, flicker- She sits on the steps of the temple of Apollo, playing fivestones ing and enraged. and watching. A crowd gathers each evening when the temple

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‘I cannot do these things. You are wrong to try to test me. I can- trench across the king’s neck and shoulder. Agamemnon seems not take back the gift I have given, but I shall add to it. The gift of to lose a part of himself, sinking to his knees for a moment in the prophecy is yours. You shall see what is to come, but when you speak water, but rising again, resisting his death. He gets a foot over the of these things no one will believe you. They will think you mad.’ side of the bath and the sword catches him again, deepening the She goes to her father, to Priam the king, and tells him what massive wound. He falls, half in and half out of the bath. has befallen, tells him that the city will be destroyed. He exchanges Clytemnestra runs for the axe, for the weapon she has kept glances with those around him. The girl was always strange. The through the years. She is unhandy, like a woman, and must chop word goes abroad, that the child Kassandra has gone mad. and chop at the inert corpse until the king’s head comes free and When she learns that Paris is to go to Sparta, she clings to Pri- drops to the floor next to the bath, as if it were a cabbage. There is am’s robe and cries pitifully. more blood than you might imagine could be contained within a single corpus. The bath is full of blood. She stands panting, curling her fingers in his hair but the head is almost too heavy for her to lift. See this. Clytemnestra runs after her husband through the dim In the dim, bestial obscurity, a shadow falls across her. interior of the megaron, past pale, fearful faces, to the bathhouse. The great copper bath steams, its sides swagged with heavy stuffs. The witch woman, Kassandra the prophetess is standing a yard Vapour fills the air and figures move in the mist . away, watching. She does not speak but begins to strip him of his armour, The axe blow, though fatal, is not clean, and Kassandra lies unbuckling the cracked leather corselet, unfastening the heavy unspeaking, listening to the small sounds of her life leaking away, sword belt, and laying these things on a distant chest. She pulls the the fluttering of her own breath, free now from her burden. sweat darkened shirt over his head and his prick is already rising Clytemnestra lifts the axe again and beheads the corpse of the out of the red thatch. She hands him into the bath and he flinches prophetess as she lies in the crimson mess. comically as he steps in to the hot water, like a foolish boy. He sits The queen is gone, staggering, half dragging the weight of the deep into the water and lies back as if he really were at his ease, and two heads. She emerges from the palace door into the daylight, a she, unthinking, divests herself of the jewel encrusted gown, so that terrible spectacle. The crowd recoil as one body. she stands naked but for the regal tiara. They are like ageing lovers. She kneels to pour water over his shoulders and neck but her hands shake visibly. She looks across the dim, steam filled bath house seeking out the form of Aigisthus in the fog. Agamemnon is standing now, struggling to his feet in the bath- water, suddenly apprehensive, avid to escape this place. I came back in Agamemnon‘s ship, from Troy. I travelled with She looks about, on the edge of panic. Where is Aigisthus? his people to Mycenae. I saw all this. ‘A clean shirt my lord.’ The weather turned heavy a few hours after we left the Trojan coast behind, a sudden wind that blew the sail to rags and raised a She offers him the prepared garment and her whole body is churning sea. We were lucky to make it back to Greece. We were shaking. He does not know what to make of these things, but tries with Menelaos’ ship when we left but we lost him in the night, him to drag the shirt over his head, over his wet skin. This is no ordinary and his tart. I heard later that they finished up in Egypt. garment. The neck and cuffs are sewn up tight. Agamemnon fails to understand. He grunts and curses within the trap, unable to see. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Menelaos, always did, a decent Aigisthus’ sword descends from nowhere, opening a scarlet

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bloke, for a king, no airs and graces. With her, it was different. What can you say about somebody who pulls the world down? I did the whole nine years, I did my time on the front line, but then I was hit by this big stone, and my leg was never right after that. Now Agamemnon is a bad tempered bastard, everybody knew that, but he took me on, after I was hit with that stone. Out on the plain, it was, when I was hit. We didn’t see them coming because just there, maybe five hundred yards out from the Skaean Gate, the ground is broken into little hills and hollows, so we didn’t see ‘em till they were on top of us. It was like they came up out of the ground, like killers sprung from dragons’ teeth, and all Hell broke loose. Stones, spears. I shat myself. Seemed to be hun- dreds of ‘em, plate faced fucking giants, and screaming like maniacs. My mate, well he took an eighteen inch spear point in his gut. He gave me a look, he did, when he was hit. He was my mate and all, but I was off, threw away my shield I did, ran like fuck. Not quick enough, though, was I? Bits of bone sticking through. I don’t know how I got back through the lines. This is it, I thought; when you got bits of bone sticking through, it’s not a good sign. But let me tell you something, some of them Asclepian priests, they know what they’re doing. Weeks it took and it smelled something rotten, my leg, but it came good. I mean, I’ve still got a bad limp and it gives me gip in the wet weather, but I’m here. Mostly you die when you got bones sticking through. I know, I’ve seen a lot of it in my time. I did nine years, don’t forget. Anyway, when I was up and about, well, on sticks anyway, you know, gimping about the camp, I tried to make myself useful. That was the way I was brought up. I spent a lot of time trying to keep the camp a bit tidy. I organised buckets of sand for the latrine pits, stupid stuff. My mother, she was a stickler for that kind of thing. Wipe your arse, don’t leave a mess. Keep yourself clean. Anyway, Agamemnon, he was watching me one day, and he said to me, when I was doing the shit pits. You, he said, stand up. You want another job? I need somebody to keep my tent in order. Changed my life, it did, just like that. Regular food, a proper bed. He could be a twat obviously, but that was it, I was his dog, until

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the day he died. Slept in his tent, cleaned up after him, washed his Priam when he came to ask for Hector’s body, maybe she stayed clothes. I got to know a lot of things. on. I don’t know. I liked her, that Kassandra. He liked her, you could see that, but I was supposed to be one of Agamemnon’s body guards, but she was a funny bugger. Most nights she had bad dreams, woke up I was just a cleaner up really, and that suited me fine. There was screaming. Frightened the shit out of me to start with. He used to maybe a dozen other blokes in his bodyguard proper, and they get hold of her, put his arms round her until she was quiet again. were an odd lot, not what you’d expect. Capaneus had lost his arm, She had twins by him. Not a lot of people know that. Two girls, a sword that did it, cut it clean off below the elbow. They say he and he liked them too. walked back into the camp carrying it. And he lived. I don’t know They was toddlers by the time we left. what he did with the arm. It’s a funny thing, Kassandra must have come to the camp You’d think Agamemnon would have had big strong blokes around the time that Achilles killed Hector. Maybe she came with for a bodyguard but it wasn’t like that. Telamon was another, he could sing, I mean really sing, not bullshit about battles, but women’s songs, funeral songs He would sit there at night, Agamemnon, listening to Telamon sing and breaking his heart. It was the same with the rest of his bodyguards. He seemed to choose blokes who weren’t quite right. We were all, what’s the word, damaged. But, he could be a serious twat. An evil temper he had, like a boy somehow, as if he’d never grown up. They tell a story that his dad killed his own brother’s kids and fed them to the brother in a pie. Some family feud. Agamemnon and his brother were only Peter Huby Children of Pelops

kids themselves but they were there when it happened, saw it all. Greeks? They’ve gone, at last, somebody says. It’s a sign. We’ve They say that when the brother had eaten his fill, then this Atreus, won. Let’s take it into the city.’ Agamemnon’s dad, sent in a big plate piled with the kids’ heads Ajax snorts again, and he says: ‘Maybe the Trojans will say, burn and hands and feet. Damaged, I should say. it, here on the beach. How can you know, o wise one, what the Tro- I don’t know as I can speak about the fall of the city. I knew jans will decide to do?’ a lot, obviously, in the days before. His generals were in and out I don’t know,’ Odysseus says reasonably, ‘but we can help them all the time, the two Ajaxes, Diomedes, but it was Odysseus’ plan. along a bit, help them to decide. I have this spy, Sinon, his name is, Little Ajax, well, not so little, but smaller than big Ajax, who and we’ll leave him behind and he’ll pretend to be a deserter from was a fucking giant…he had a pet snake. Not a lot of people know the Greek army, frightened witless because I threatened him. Me. that. He’d be sitting there and then this snake would come up out The Trojans will find him skulking in the reed beds, and he’ll sing of his shirt and he would look at it in the eye as if to say what you them a ballad of blue starch and poking sticks. He’ll say that the doing here. army has given up and gone home and that this wooden horse has Odysseus, he was a funny bloke, pot bellied, big feet, shaved been left as a gift to Athena. He’s a good liar is Sinon, almost as head, solid as a pig, but clever, really clever. I mean, I didn’t like good as me,’ says Odysseus, with a wink. him. I was just a piece of shit as far as he was concerned. I saw Agamemnon says: ‘who will go inside this horse?’ what he did to Thersites. ‘Me,’ says Odysseus, without a flicker, ‘and anybody with the Anyway, he comes into Agamemnon’s tent and there’s a meet- stomach to join me. But listen. I’m not done yet.’ ing going on, but he doesn’t let it stop him. He’s like that, Odysseus. ‘The Trojans find ropes, ships’ hawsers and timber rollers and ‘I had an idea,’ he says. ‘A wooden horse.. We build this fucking they drag the horse into the city. This is victory and this of the horse great wooden horse and leave it on the beach and then we sail away.’ is a symbolic thing. The whole city turns out to drag it. They are so ‘What?’ keen to get this monster into Troy that they pull down part of the city gate so that it can pass through. How would you feel, after nine ‘Well, the ships sail out to Tenedos island, not so far for the years? They feel released. There are ten year olds who have known boys to row and they anchor in the lee of the island, out of sight.’ nothing but war since they were born. The horse is festooned with ‘What?’ garlands of flowers and boys stand on its back as it inches into the city. The dancing goes on through the night, the drinking, the rev- ‘No, listen. We make this horse hollow, with a trap door. It can elry. We are a free people again, they think.’ take maybe ten men inside it. The fleet rows away in the night and this big horse is left standing on the beach.’ They’re starting to see, the generals, starting to get the picture. The generals can’t make any sense at all of what Odysseus is Menelaus asks; ‘And then?’ saying and they‘re looking at each other. ‘We wait inside the horse until it’s nearly dawn, till they’ve gone ‘So, think of this, the Trojans come down to the beach in the home or they’re sleeping it off, we hope, and then we let ourselves morning, the whole city walks down. The word has gone out: the down from the trapdoor in its belly We run down to the gate. We Greeks have gone, not a Greek in sight, just an abandoned camp… open the gate, the Skaean gate, and light a signal fire. The ships and this horse, this great big horse. With me so far?’ Big Ajax snorts, but he doesn’t say anything. ‘So the Trojans stand about around this big horse and they start to argue. What is it, they say to each other, this thing? A gift? From

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have already rowed back in the darkness and they’re waiting for And then, there we were, gone, all of us. Ten thousand, twenty the signal.’ thousand human beings, gone, a world of oars, rising and falling. Ajax again. ‘Madness. Did you dream this up, Odysseus? I’ll Well, I was in the last ship to leave, Agamemnon’s ship, and I give you a hundred to one it won’t work.’ got to watch as we pulled away from the beach, and it was a dis- ‘Done. So you’ll come with me into the horse?’ grace, that beach, great drifts of rubbish, as far as you could see some of it burning, bits of huts still standing, but towering above all the ‘Hearse, more like.’ mess was this fucking great horse, as if it had fallen out of the sky. That raised a guffaw. I thought of the poor buggers inside it. I thought of Odysseus ‘I’ll come,’ says Menelaos. in that black space. What kind of man is that? I knew though, I knew it was going to work. I knew that the world was going to end. We rowed for a few hours and the whole fleet dropped anchor I watched the carpenters, I watched them build it, not twenty behind Tenedos island, out of sight of Troy’s battlements. yards from our tent, mine and Agamemnon’s. Well, I wasn’t going to go, was I? I was going to stay on board. Clever, them carpenters, seriously clever. They knocked apart I didn’t want to see it, did I? I got enough bad memories. two complete ships and used the timber. Bloody colossal, it was. I never saw anything being made before, you know, like that, before We rowed back in the dark. I was sitting on the foredeck and I my eyes. I could hardly believe it, and the carpenters, just ordi- could hear the splash of the oar banks of the boats on either side nary blokes. of ours, and beyond them, like an echo, the sound of other boats. Nothing else, just the sound of the oars rising and falling, no moon, I talked to one of ‘em. He’d been a boat builder, before the war, just the oars and now and then the odd voice, cursing. and it didn’t seem like anything special to him, just another job, but me, I was gobsmacked. It was so big, and so quick, that’s what baf- We ran the boats shore, in a great line, just like nine years before, fled me, it only took them days, a week maybe, no more. Long days, but this time nobody moved. We just sat there in the dark, like we’d they worked, and into the night, by the light of torches and bonfires. been told, thousands of us, waiting, squinting into the black night. But the other thing was, that it didn’t seem to mean anything This is the space, the place, you might think, to reflect, to pause, to this carpenter I was talking to, it was just a job for him. But me, wait, think about why these things happen…… but there is no I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking of it standing out there, waiting reflection, no salvation, only action. We cannot be extricated, the to make the world end. carnage has rucked too thick for these mens’ extrication. Well, I didn’t see too much after that. I mean, it was all hush A spark, out there, beyond the darkness, that’s all it was, a tiny hush anyway, but we had the tents to take down, stuff to organ- flicker, the signal. ise, stuff to stow in the ships, and let me tell you, after nine years, Over the sides they go, across the beach, up the dunes and out the camp was a serious shithole. My mother would have hated it. into the darkness, column after column. No noise, that was the They were knocking away the props and running the ships back order, no talking, but it was like the roar of a big wind, just the into the sea, piling last minute stuff aboard and it was mayhem. same. I thought of all those houses in the sleeping city, all those Some of those ships hadn’t been in the water for years. I watched rooms, all those sleepers. one ship run out into the sea and sink straight off. Somebody had been ripping up planking to feed cookfires.

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Me, I wasn’t going to go, was I, I wasn’t going to watch the city of Troy go down, and besides, my leg was bad, and it’s a mile from the sea to the Skaean gate. I sat there for an hour after the army had gone, but what can you do? I climbed up the dunes and I started to gimp across the dark plain and there was this glow in the sky. The fires were rising above the walls in long slow tongues, a hundred feet high, they must have been, and even though I was a long way off, I could hear this noise. Screaming mostly. I don‘t ever want to hear that noise again. I couldn’t go there. I sat down on a stone and wept.

After the first fall of the city, forgotten days of pillage and atroc- ity follow. Many die: some survive. The members of the house of Priam suffer variously, suffering and dying, or suffering and surviv- ing. Priam himself is killed close to the altar of the temple of Zeus, where he had fled with Hekabe his wife, seeking sanctuary. Hek- abe, his ageing queen, is dragged away from her husband’s hacked corpse to join the captive women, among whom is Andromache and her tiny boy, Astyanax. It is not possible to speak adequately about this woman, Andromache, who has lost everything to the war: father, brothers, husband: who can yet stand erect with her child in her arms, and can find it in herself to offer comfort to the crazed widow, Hekabe. Somewhere else in the burning city, a grimy, bloodstained Odys- seus is arguing his case with Agamemnon and a group of butchers. ‘Hector’s boy must go. Think of it. Twenty years hence, the boy is a man, and an enemy of Greece.’ ‘Wait a minute.’ This is Neoptolemos, born too late to join that first mythic setting out for Troy, who came of age during the nine years of the war and who has arrived toward the end, at the head of fresh Thessalian battalions. Neoptolemos is the son of world class Achilles, breaker of men, newly dead. When the city falls, as Achilles’ heir, he is granted his father’s share of the loot. Among his allotted spoil is Andromache, Hec- tor’s widow, and her infant boy child, Astyanax.

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‘Wait a minute‘, he says. ‘Hector’s wife is mine, by lot, and the the war these women were rich and well groomed with husbands child.’ and families, royalty, some of them, and now look. Raped a dozen Odysseus does not waste his time in empty debate, the times times, hungry, unwashed. Behind us, cartloads of stuff, expensive have grown too bestial for niceties. He strides away, through the furniture, carpets. weeping crowds of captive women until he comes upon the women At the head of the column, Agamemnon in his chariot and of the royal house. behind him, in another chariot, Kassandra. A mistake, a big mis- Andromache is a woman rich in the gifts of the mind and she take, you might think, but she knows, she knows it’s all written knows exactly why this shave headed Greek is standing before her. down in that big book, so maybe it doesn’t matter at all. She knows that the child clinging around her neck is heir to this Think about it. Agamemnon is coming home to his wife after smoke blackened desolation and that the conquerors will decide ten years, and he’s bringing a new woman, and her children. that he cannot be allowed to live, but this knowledge is as nothing Worse. to what she feels as the child is ripped from her arms. Ten years ago he fooled this same wife into delivering their one We see Odysseus high up on the smoking battlements, whirl- and only child to be sacrificed on an altar so that the wind would ing the infant around his head by its ankle. We see the child‘s flight blow and he could sail away with his army of toy soldiers. above the burning city. You got to see it through, I said to myself. I could have walked The Greeks hunt down and kill all of the male members of Pri- off, walked away from what I knew was coming, but I didn’t. am’s house. Only Aeneas survived, according to the Roman poet Virgil, one of the king’s sons, who escaped the catastrophe and Those walls, that gate with the two lions, that would put the went on to found another city. frighteners on anybody. Must weigh fifty tons, that lintel with the lions carved in it. Who could have done that? Who could have lifted it? Giants, that’s what they say. Bollocks. Anyway, the column’s stopped. I saw Agamemnon’s chariot pass under the gate and I guess he’s arrived in front of the pal- We came up from the plain in a column. I was riding in a cart ace. I get down from the cart and go up past the slave women so it was no problem for me. Ahead of us were the slave women, and stop for a minute in the shadow of that gate. There are peo- two, three hundred maybe, walking, shuffling more like. Before ple standing along the wall top. I make the bad luck sign, put my head down, and go. The road inside is made of big stone slabs and it’s steep, so I’m limping badly by the time I arrive in front of the palace. There are people everywhere but nobody’s doing any talking. I get as close as I can to the main door. Somebody has put red cloth on the ground in front of the palace doors, great bolts of it, but it’s a windy day, so it’s rippling like the sea and it frightens the horses. Young women in their welcome home costumes are standing on the flapping fabric to keep it from blowing away altogether. I come up behind Kassandra’s chariot and the charioteer is having a hard time keeping his horses quiet while this red stuff flaps about. I see the boys of the bodyguard. I catch Telamon’s eye, but he’s not singing now. What did I say? You’ve got to see it through?

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Here she comes, Clytemnestra, out of the shadow of the big door, she falls the crowd recoil as if they don’t want her to touch them and it’s more than I can cope with. I’m on my knees now, watch- and she kneels there on all fours, like a dog. ing through the spokes of a chariot wheel, so I can’t see her face, Ένας θαρθεί εκδικητής. just the feet, the feet and the hems of the fancy robe. She’s stand- Της γης του απόξενος, φυγάς στον άνεμο είναι τώρα. ing there, and I picture her looking up at him in his chariot and it Φονιάς της μάνας του θα γίνει. seems like they’re having some sort of argument but I can’t hear Θα βάλει τον τελευταίο λίθο στο μνήμα αυτού του much, what with this fabric cracking in the wind and the horses αιματοβαμμένου οίκου. sidling and clattering about. Then I see him get down and they walk together toward the door, as if they were walking on water, except Someone will come, she’s saying, after me, someone who’ll put it’s red. She’s as tall as him and he looks so old, like an old mangy an end to all this, someone who will place the final stone on this lion. They get to the door and I think that’s it, but she turns as if bloody monument. But that’s it, she gets up, shaking, and she’s she’s thinking about something. I can see what’s going on, she’s gone, through that dark door. telling two of her women to take Agamemnon inside, but her, she A kind of nothing follows. Nobody moves. The crowds don’t turns back. She’s coming back across to Kassandra’s chariot. I can move. The sun moves, maybe, and the planets move. The red stuff see her feet inside her sandals. She’s not a yard from where I’m ripples across the flagstones. crouching and I can hear some things. The unspeakable. Κασσάνδρα, σε σένανε μιλώ. Μέσα να μπεις έλα κι εσύ. Στο βωμό με άλλους δούλους να σταθείς, αφού η μοίρα σου ήτανε, Time passes, but the crowd stays standing, like the chorus in a έτσι να σκλαβωθείς. play. The wind grows more blustery, you can feel the gusts getting stronger and then, as if this were the moment, the great red flags She’s trying to persuade Kassandra to come in with the rest of are plucked from the ground and spiral up into the air like dragons. the captives but she won’t, and the pitch of Clytemnestra’s voice is She comes out of the dark door, Clytemnestra, transfigured by rising. She must be mad, she’s saying. Maybe her mind is in ruins, blood, holding a human head in either hand. She raises Kassandra like her father’s city, full of smoke and stinking bodies. high for the crowd to see, but her husband’s head is too heavy for Τρελή θαρρώ πως είναι. Το μυαλό της σαν του πατέρα της την one hand so she lets the prophetess fall and raises the king high πόλη είναι, γεμάτο καπνούς. ερείπια και βρώμικα νεκρά κορμιά. in both her hands. She‘s telling the boys, Agamemnon’s boys, you know, Telamon, I picked his head up, you know, after she cut it off. I was the Apaneus and co. to fetch her in to the palace. first to pick it up. Heavy it was. There were two heads, his and hers, I see their legs as they close in on Kassandra’s car. The queen though I never saw hers. They killed the twins, but I never saw them. walks off across the blood with her head up, disappears into the dark. The crowd is closing in. I see Telamon’s legs inside his tin greaves and the legs of some of the other boys, but then her voice, Kassandra’s voice, rises up and I can hear it all. Απόλλωνα, οδηγητή μου, σε ποιό φριχτό μέρος με έφερες The plain of Argos again, seven years later: the palace at Myce- nae: August. The doors loom within the deep noonday shadow of Apollo, why have you brought me to this place, she’s shouting. the gate. The place seems not to remember its own history. The bil- She’s out of the chariot now, moving away toward the palace lowing bolts of scarlet are long gone. The unspeaking flagstones give door and I see her tear the black priestess’ wreath from her neck- back the heat of the sun in wavering columns. A pair of butterflies and stamp on it, but she keeps shaking and falling and each time dance in the rising heat, a tiny flicker in all that space, barely visible. They stand outside, the two young men, in the heat shimmer,

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travellers, dusty black, staffage merely, details, figures flicked in to ‘Enter.’ show the scale of the place. Pylades turns, looks down over the As they slip into the unknown interior, following the queen, somnolent town and out beyond the walls to the baking vistas of the old woman catches at Orestes’ cloak, looks into his face. Argos below. He catches Orestes’ eye. Orestes bangs on the bronze door with his fists and the sound echoes within. ‘You.’ They wait for what seems a long time, until, with a subter- The boy/man shakes his head, closes his eyes for a second as ranean rumble, the doors begin to move on their ratchet pawls, the strong hand grips his arm. inching ajar. An old woman emerges, black again, another flicker The gloomy high ceilinged megaron is empty save for a few against the white light, a tiny motif at the base of the cliff which unremarked servants sitting against the far wall; somewhere up is the palace wall. in the dim rafters the cooing of a pigeon. The fire pit is cold for ‘What? Speak up. Greek are you?’ this is summertime. She gestures them to a bench, and a pitcher of water appears, cups, and she waits for them as they sit drinking, Pylades affects the dialect of his childhood, his speech low, her heart beating high under her ribs. respectful. The woman tuts, raises her chin dismissively. Unbidden, Pylades begins to speak, in the Parnassian dialect ‘News? What news? For the queen? Bah.’ of his nonage. She looks them up and down as she disappears, only her voice ‘We are strangers, madam, Aeolians from Daulis. We met by coming to them, half heard from within, as the doors grumble to chance on the road a man, Strophius by name, from the town of a close once more. Krisa. He asked our destination and when we replied that we were ‘Wait.’ on our way to Mycenae, he begged us to bear this news to the palace. They wait. The sun is a gong and there is no shade. They turn Madam, your pardon, but I do not know you. You are Clytemnestra?’ again, looking out along the way they have come, the stepped road- The woman inclines her head in assent. way down to the fortress gate, the Lion Gate. The sword moves ‘Then I must tell you that your son Orestes is dead.’ awkwardly beneath Orestes’ mendicant cloak. It is as if she has not heard. Time passes. The sun’s shadow creeps across the sill. At last the doors grumble ajar once more and she is there, the queen. ‘The man Strophius said that your son’s ashes rest in an urn in the temple in Krisa, and he wishes to know what should be done Picture this: Clytemnestra, a woman in her middle years, tall, with them.’ plain enough, not set apart, you might think, from the common run, stands against the scarred bronze panelling. Behind her, the Clytemnestra turns to the old woman. old woman is half hidden by the door. The two youths stand at a ‘Geilissa, fetch Aigisthus.’ respectful distance, travellers, not beggars, but dusty, travel worn. The servant finds her master outside in the palace yard among Pylades she has never seen. He looks at her directly and she his henchmen. For seven years he has ruled the city of Mycenae returns his gaze. The other, hardly more than a boy with a boy’s and he is never to be seen except in the company of his guards, for straggle of facial hair, stands back, his head lowered. She makes fear of the shadow of the retribution to come. nothing of him. ‘My Lord, the queen says for you to return to the palace. There ‘Speak.’ The queen’s voice is low, matter-of-fact. is news of Orestes.’ ‘We have news, madam, news of Orestes.’ Aigisthus flinches. There is a flash of panic, exultation, a moment, nothing.

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‘There is no danger, my Lord. Orestes is dead. News of his death him as he kneels, throw clods of mud and empty wine cups, before has just come to the palace. The queen says to come alone. There turning back to their drinking. is no need to bring your people.’ At last, when night has fallen and Agamemnon is drunk, and Let us pause for a moment. The old woman, Geilissa, is lying his carls have wandered off to find sleep, and he himself might to Aigisthus, leading him to his death. She is a servant, a nonen- seem to have forgotten entirely about the matter of killing, he tity you may think, yet she is the hinge upon which the story turns. wades across to his vanquished foe, who is already as cold as death She knows the youth is Orestes, recognised the nervy, travel stained from his hours kneeling in the water, and simply pushes him over youth the moment she saw him in the sun. on to his face in the blood dyed pool. Tantalus, his hands chained behind him, cannot rise, chokes to death in a few inches of water. There are no onlookers, no witnesses. It is an event that would seem to have no meaning. Go back, years, before the war. In the false dawn, Agamemnon sleeps on the battlefield, wrapped Geilissa was a servant in Tantalus’ palace in the kingdom of in the banner of his enemy, who still lies face down in the water a Pisa, which lies to the west beyond Arcadia, a servant merely, but few yards away. Figures are moving here and there, lanterns bob- no slave. She had a house in the lower town, grown children of her bing in the werelight. Women are moving about in search of their own, and a man, men: a free woman. She walked to work each day. dead. Agamemnon climbs unsteadily to his knees, his feet, in need She was employed as Clytemnestra’s companion and got on well of a piss and sees this movement of torchlight, hears low voices and enough with her young mistress, as far as these things are possi- muffled weeping. Two women are standing a few yards from the ble. In those days Clytemnestra was the young wife of fat Tantalus, pool where the body of Tantalus lies. Agamemnon’s unseen piss King of Pisa. Tantalus had inherited the kingdom from his uncle clatters into the water nearby and the women clutch one another at Pelops, but he was not the strong man his uncle was. the sound. He watches from the darkness, and in a little while the The young king Agamemnon and his army marched through two women move to the edge of the pool, craning to see the half the mountains of Arcadia, bringing war down upon Tantalus the submerged body. They step down into the shallow water together. king and upon the land of Pisa. Agamemnon, the red slayer, laid They struggle to work the corpse over. There is no shock of recog- the country waste until at last he forced his victim to battle in front nition, no moment of revelation as it falls over like a log onto its of the city. He had no reason to do any of these things except that back, because they know, they know already, that this is the king, he was young and, as Pelops’ grandson, he had some claim to the Tantalus, Clytemnestra’s husband. His face is unmarked, expres- kingdom of Pisa, and he smelled weakness. sionless, eyes open. They pull the body until it lies half in and half out of the water, unable to do more, panting, defeated by the weight He went through Tantalus’ peacetime army of clerks and ageing of the corpse, for Tantalus was a big man. retainers like a cleaver. The battle, the massacre, was fought along the banks of the Alpheios river, which flows on down by Olym- When Agamemnon staggers over to seize hold of the women, pia, where Pelops had watered his horses a generation before, and they start away and it is only by chance that his hand catches the many died in that boggy littoral, among the pools and the gravel hem of Clytemnestra’s garment. He drags her back, while Geilissa banks and the trampled bulrushes, as if it were the banks of the Styx. scrambles away to watch from the distant darkness. After the battle, Tantalus was brought in chains to Agamem- Agamemnon took Tantalus’ widow back to Mycenae, and made non, as he sat drinking with his henchmen on the heaped debris of her his queen, and Geilissa follows her mistress to this new life. war, by the scarlet pools. The defeated king is forced to his knees The child that was conceived in the chill dawn of that battle- in the shallow water, his hands chained behind him. They mock field was born in the palace of Mycenae nine months later, a girl child, Iphigenia.

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Twelve years later, there was another child, a boy, Orestes, con- when, as in a vision, rising up above the sea of heads, she glimpses ceived in the royal bed at Mycenae only months before his sister the child Iphigenia, lashed hand and foot to a wicker frame in her will be sacrificed at Aulis, bound to a wicker frame, and his father nuptual garments, with flowers in her hair, being passed like a toy sailed for Troy. above a forest of raised hands. There is a look, an expression in the Clytemnestra is great with this second, unexpected child when girl’s face, joy, fulfilment, who can know?. Geilissa closes her eyes, she receives Agamemnon’s letter summoning her and her daughter a piece of nothing. urgently to Aulis. The ships bearing the Greek army have assem- This is what men do. bled in the bay of Aulis, but still wait to leave for Troy. A marriage In the tent, the women pass an endless night, as if they are a has been arranged. Iphigenia is to be married to great Achilles, lord city under siege. Geilissa rocks her queen in her arms. of Thessaly; a dynastic marriage, a marriage to make a bond, the letter says, between two great houses. The younger women, the handmaids, cling to one another, unable to sob, out of fear for what may happen next. When mother and daughter arrive in the royal mule carts among the beached ships and the squalor, the crowds of young warriors fall In a dream, at the end of the world, pebbles tumble down some silent. Iphigenia sits unspeaking among her handmaids, dressed in desert bank, sand trickles in rivulets, scabbed fingers spear upward her finest, flowers in her hair, a child, twelve years old; and Achil- under cold stars, out of the stony earth. It is the Erynnies, whose les is a giant, they say. Clytemnestra picks at the hem of her own name is vengeance, the beautiful ones, woken from long sleep. garment, as she watches the passing crowds, lost among anxieties In the darkness before the dawn, in the tent, Geilissa sits up, for her child. listening. The sound is unfamiliar: the chatter of ships’ rigging in There is no music, no cheering, nothing festive that might the rising wind. bespeak a royal marriage, as the covered carts pass through the In the empty palace of Mycenae, when the boy is born, his camp, past piled up chariot frames and tethered horses. She looks mother’s screaming echoes through the empty rooms. Greece has out at the impassive, unshaven faces, and they must know about sailed for Troy and the world is empty of men. the marriage, surely, these soldiers, these men standing in the hot Geilissa lifts the bloody boy child, trailing its cord, from sun, watching. Foreboding clutches at Clytemnestra’s heart. She between his mother’s legs and lays it on her belly. feels the child in her womb begin to kick. The carts come to a stop and priests hand the queen and her daughter down, and Iphigenia is hurried away. The girl flashes her mother a look of helplessness as she is borne away among these clerics. Clytemnestra and her women are shown to a tent. She grips Geilissa’s arm, and the servant is alive to the wrongness of everything. There is a story, though it lacks the ring of truth, which tells how Clytemnestra left the tent and wandered along the beach, where she met Achilles. The queen spoke to him about the forthcom- ing marriage. Achilles shook his head. Marriage? What marriage? Geilissa leaves the tent and makes her way toward the big crowd of men gathered by the water, and their glances are hostile as she begins to push into the crush. She burrows through to the densest part of the press, a mass of men, dark eyed, silent. Something is hap- pening and she is worming her way instinctively toward the centre

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The infant, Orestes, is brought up in the company of women and old men, because the young men are fighting and dying far away on the plains of Troy. Geilissa cares for the boy and contrives to keep him away from his mother and the madness of her hatred. Clytemnestra thinks of nothing but revenge in the long lidless nights. The queen is willing to fuck Nauplius when he appears at the palace, though it is a poor encounter, unmanned as he is by the wrongs done to him by Agamemnon’s army. When Aigisthus, Thyestes’ son arrives, she welcomes her fate, though the man himself is a greasy monster. The game is set. Geilissa sees it all and tries, as far as she may, to shield the growing boy from the curse which lies upon the house into which he has been born.

Who is Nauplius? Stories radiate, become webs of complex- ity. His tale, though interesting, connects only obliquely with the story of the house of Atreus. Skip it if you wish. Nauplius was a pirate, a wrecker of ships, a bad man in some ways, but he had many friends around the inland sea. Catreus the Cretan was his friend, and Atreus the king in Mycenae, whose house is cursed. Catreus and Atreus. Pay attention. Nauplius bought the daughters of Catreus as slaves, very cheap. Catreus’ girls were wayward creatures, and though very young, drawn to the things of the flesh, which some might think a great gift, but their father was consumed by a nameless, guilty rage and arranged to have them drowned in the sea. At the last moment, and quite by chance, Nauplius stepped up with a drawn sword and persuaded Catreus’ hounds to free the hysterical girls. He married the younger girl himself, who was only twelve at the time, and gave the elder girl as a wife to his friend Atreus. The tale which is most often told of Nauplius begins with his son, Palamedes. The boy grew to be that rare thing, a hero, with a hero’s gifts of courage, grace, modesty. Nauplius loved him. Palame- des sailed with Agamemnon’s army and fought nine years on the plains of Troy. He was clever as well as bold. They say he invented Children of Pelops

dice, and weighing scales and a written alphabet. But they did not love him, his fellow generals: too wise, too courageous to live long, and besides, he had the olive skin and the black hair of a Cretan. Fatally, in the tenth year of the war, he incurred the wrath of Odysseus, Agamemnon’s wily lieutenant. A plot was hatched and Palamedes was accused of betraying the Greek cause. He was found guilty and stoned to death by the whole army. Nauplius never recovered from the news of his son’s death, and he took a strange revenge. He paid visits to the wives of the absent warriors with lying tales of their lechery and their captive women. He cuckolded his enemies where he could, but he was haunted by the manner of Palamedes’ murder and took no satisfaction in these things. Geilissa, a servant, sees all. In the nine years of the war she becomes by little and little, a visible, deferred-to figure in the half empty palace of Mycenae, for though she has no ambition for herself, she is a strong woman and a capable one, and even Clytem- nestra, her mistress, who is quick to abuse and rail at her women, is more chary with her paid companion. There is a complicity too, between them, born of shared history. When Aigisthus, Thyestes son, arrives at the palace in the third year of the war with his gangrel retinue and becomes Clytemn- estra’s lover, her only half concealed paramour, the servant understands what it means, guesses at the gathering darkness. She grows anxious for the boy Orestes, who might, in less dangerous times, expect to inherit his father’s throne. She considers Aigisthus to be an oily mountebank, the very sound of whose voice repels her, and while she is less than certain that he has the stomach for naked evil, she is nevertheless, anxious on Orestes’ behalf.

I was never a brave man. I was a timid child and a devious. I learned to speak early, that is to say, I learned to lie, to keep a secret, to live that other secret life, and maybe it is the same with all children. It is the life I always lived, it seems to me, now that I am dead. The fortress of Mycenae was built by giants. I know this to be true.

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We came there once, my mother, my little brothers and sis- the city of Mycenae, sent there by their father Pelops, king of Pisa, ters, and my father Thyestes. We were in our best; I was made to who has made a deal with the aging Sthenelus, king of Mycenae. wear a purple cloak and ride next to my father on a horse, at the Atreus is the elder son and thus becomes king when the old man dies. head of the long procession of carts. I was afraid of horses, afraid Thyestes the younger son is a malcontent and plots to seize the of most things, come to that. I pissed myself repeatedly into the throne of the city from his brother for himself. saddle blanket because I was afraid to ask to get down at the road- side. In the covered cart behind, the little ones looked like dumpy There is something else. angels in white Egyptian linen. They sat under the awning of the Atreus is married to Aerope, a Cretan woman, and she bears covered cart in a jolting nest of cushions, sleeping and wailing by him two boys, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Thyestes, in his discon- turns, or demanding to be let down into the road for a pee, or a tent, fucks his brother’s wife secretly, as he thinks. Atreus knows, shit. I wanted to ride in the nest of cushions with the little ones but says nothing. but my father forbade it. My father ate his children, but that was a little later. When I lived through these things as a small boy, I knew nothing about what it all meant. I learned later.

When we arrived outside the fearsome walls of Mycenae, Atreus, Red hair he had, my first child, Agamemnon, plastered down in my uncle was standing with his people under the shadow of the wispy rats’ tails, when I first gave him suck, and me wanting only stone lions. There were banners hanging motionless above the great to sleep, or die. Long boned and restless, he was, even in those gate and crowds of people standing on top of the walls that the first minutes. giants had built. My father dismounted from his horse and I saw Atreus, my uncle and my father fall together in an embrace, like trolls. Under the slick of bloody fluids there was red hair down his back too, and on his arms. The red slayer they called him in after The sound of the crowd came and went, as if I were holding years, though whether this was because of his lion’s mane of red my hands over my ears and opening and closing them in turn. It hair or because of all the blood he spilt, I couldn’t say. was like the roaring waves of the sea, breaking inside my head, hot and heavy. It seems I fell off my horse, there at the gate of the city, Menelaus, his little brother, was different, perfect skin, he had, with my uncle Atreus and my father Thyestes locked together a and fine red gold hair that flew out in a great cloud when he was few yards away. a tiny boy, and I loved those golden locks of hair that grew year by year, down to his waist. I loved his smooth skin and the perfec- I had a fever, it seems, and I passed into that hot unsleeping tion of his body. No wonder that Peleus’ daughter Helen, when it world for many weeks and was thus spared what was to follow. I was time for her to marry, chose him out of all those burly young was taken down to the seaside town of Tiryns, overlooked by a princes who had come to court her. great fortress. Tiryns was held in those days to be a healthy place, and I was given into the hands of temple women there. He did not take after his mother, my child Menelaus. My ringlets were black, blue black in those days, and my skin had the olive Think of two brothers, Thyestes and Atreus, young princes in cast of the old Cretan families. I used to take off his little tunic and hold his body against my own naked flesh and watch our reflec- tions in the copper mirror, and it was a marvel to me that he was flesh of my flesh, so different did he seem. My name is Aerope and I have a sister, Clymene, and our father

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was Catreus the king of Crete. People used to say that my name and a boy whose name I did not know, when my father came into was Europa, but it never was: Europa was someone else. the place with two of his people. He took a sword from one of his servants and hacked the boy to death with a dozen blows. The blood I never knew our mother, who died giving birth to my little was outrageous, the boy’s head and shoulders chopped to formless sister when I was two years old. Sometimes I get a feeling, not a meat. My father was panting from his exertions. memory in my head, for I cannot picture her at all, my mother, as if it is my body remembering her touch, her skin, her smell. ‘These are my whores. Take them away, throw them to the fishes.’ Catreus is dead and I did not mourn him, nor did my sister. He We were taken down to the sea, where a boat was waiting to was a beast, that is to say, he was a man and he was no Cretan, but take us out to the deep water. They fastened weights of lead to our a foreign invader. My son Agamemnon is also a man. ankles and tied our hands together behind our backs. Catreus had no other children but my sister and me. He used We would have died, my sister and I, carried down into the to say, when he was drunk, ‘I have no children, only two daughters.’ blue green deeps by the weights tied to our ankles, except that our uncle Nauplius the wrecker was standing on the harbour wall, It was as if his girls had brought shame down upon him, because having just arrived from Thera in his galley, waiting for his bag- what he really wanted were sons, and even his daughters were of gage to be unloaded. Nauplius was a slaver, a pirate and a wrecker Cretan blood, with black curls and olive skin, and no trace of their of ships, which he would lure on to the rocks near his home port father’s coarse Greek looks. As I grew older I learned that, between by means of false beacons. Greeks and Cretans, there is a difference, not just in looks but in some deeper way. Cretans are more subtle, more given to lying, and He was also our uncle, at least that was what we called him, and paradox. Aerope the Cretan says that all Cretans are liars. the sight of his hysterical nieces struggling and screaming in the grip of Catreus my fathers’ guards, was not something he might What do I remember out of the years of my childhood? Cly- have expected to see. We shrieked and wet ourselves and cried out mene was two years younger than I, and when you are small, two and bit the hands that tried to stifle us. years is a long time. She was my slave, my body servant. When I was ten I started my monthly bleeding, but before that, in some Nauplius came down the wharf with his crewmen behind him, childish mist, I was alive to the pleasure of my body, to the spasm and spoke to the guards. He pulled a dagger from his belt and spoke between my thighs. I had a wooden doll. She was called Perse- to them again, shouted. His people crowded closer. phone. Persephone had a dress made from an old underskirt of my He took my sister and me back to my father’s house and my mother’s and I would take off the dress and press her wooden legs father burst into tears. between my other lips. Clymene was my handmaid. It is a mystery and no mystery at all. What happened in the end was that uncle Nauplius bought us as slaves from my father, for a small sum of money, with the con- There was a boy, a servant, who worked around my father’s hall, dition that we were never again to return to Crete. and I watched him carrying loaded trays, coming and going with pitchers and bowls. I watched the flicker of his thighs, the move- Nauplius was a bad man but he was practical. A pirate chief ment of muscle. He was stupid, that boy, and nothing came of it. has no need of two unmarried girls on his pirate ship, so he married Clymene himself and took her back to his home port. She I was fucked by a man, a nobody, raped you may say, when I bore him two children before she was fifteen. He gave me in mar- was twelve: no mystery, an event, something that happened. It was riage to his friend Atreus in Mycenae, whose wife Cleola had died what I wanted, though I did not know what I wanted. Later, there in childbirth. I was always afraid of Atreus, and I had two sons by were others, boys and men. People knew, my father knew. him, Agamemnon and Menelaus. It was a day in June, a hot day, my fifteenth birthday, and I was In those days, Pelops was still king in Pisa, though old and in my room with the drapes drawn to, in the company of my sister wasted. His left shoulder was made from ivory and I saw it once,

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when he and his queen, Hippodameia came to visit, and it made Years pass. me shiver to see it. He sends a message to his estranged brother. Come back to Atreus was king of Mycenae, and I became the queen. It pleased Mycenae. We must be reconciled. We shall rule together. me to be queen and I took to wearing heavy jewellery about the pal- And so Thyestes returns to the city with the wife and children ace and to painting my eyelids after the Egyptian fashion. Perfume of his exile, and a celebration is planned, a feast. too, made from cats they say, which I dabbed between my breasts. Years have passed. Time is a healer, they say. Atreus’ appetites were the appetites of an animal and when we came together it was as the rutting of beasts. There was no sub- False. tlety in him. But Atreus had a brother, Thyestes, a nice looking boy, We come to the dark heart of the story. Listen. with eyes that looked at me in my finery. One time in the mega- Atreus hates his younger brother still. Nothing has been for- ron he passed close by me, closer than was proper, his arm brush- given. Not the fact that Thyestes conspired to steal his throne, not ing against my body. Later, he came to my rooms in the afternoons the fact that he fucked his wife. Nothing. and it was not what I wanted, and I was afraid of Atreus, but sometimes it is hard to know what it is that you want. But why now, why unleash the darkness now, Atreus, after these long years? And then suddenly Thyestes was gone, banished from the city and sent into exile. He had been plotting, Atreus said, to over- Was it a line on a page in the book that the first day wrote? throw him, to seize the kingdom of Mycenae for himself, and I Are you the puppet of that text, the slave of your fate? Your boys, can believe that, for Thyestes was close and devious in his ways. He Agamemnon and Menelaus, must they be called upon to witness spoke against his brother in the market place and that was a mis- these things, to be infected by your darkness? take because Atreus had eyes and ears other than his own. Atreus greets his brother warmly at the citadel gate. They There was never a word of what Atreus knew about his brother embrace like bears and the people watching from the city walls weep. and me, that he had been cuckolded. I was not certain that he knew The thing has been long in the planning, and in the confusion at all, but I was afraid. I am afraid still. If he knows what passed of that first reception, Atreus’ people, his henchmen, lead Thyes- between his brother and me, then he will certainly kill me, though tes’ children away to take care of them during the festivities: grimy who knows when that will be. hands clamped over childish mouths. I heard news of Thyestes from time to time, that he had married, As it happens, Aigisthus, Thyestes’ eldest child, a boy of nine, fathered children. My own two boys, Agamemnon and Menelaus, had fallen from his horse at the city gate, suffering from a fever. grew taller and were taught the ways of men and I grew distant from He was carried into the shade by Thyestes’ servants and thence to them. These were years of failed harvests and sickness in Mycenae. Tiryns, where he was cared for at the temple. I remember a baking August when the mountain forests burned end to end and black ash rained down on the city below. The remaining children are killed, cut into pieces and cooked. In a pie, some say, but that sounds stupid. What is the best way to And then Atreus did what he did. cook children? When he announced that he had forgiven his brother, I did not believe it and when he sent a letter to Thyestes inviting him and his wife and children back to the city, I could not bring myself to think that this was real because I knew Atreus for what he was. Let us be clear. Atreus banishes his turbulent brother from the city.

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At the feast, Thyestes, all unknowing, half drunk, eats the flesh of his own children. His brother watches him eat, watches him strip the meat from the bone with his teeth.

Atreus says nothing. Another platter is brought in, piled with childish hands and feet, and heads. And so, at last, when the beacon fires relay the news of Troy’s He sends his brother back into exile, inert with horror, crushed, fall and Clytemnestra herself is alight with unnameable excite- violated. ment, Geilissa goes to speak to her mistress. She knows, half knows, what is afoot. She knows in her gut that Agamemnon’s days are Thyestes’ wife hangs herself.Thyestes puts a curse on Atreus and almost done. She believes he will meet his death here in Mycenae, all his descendants, as Myrtilus had cursed Pelops, his father. The and soon, for the people of the city are daily expecting his return. house is doubly cursed. She speaks to her mistress, though the words themselves are nothing. They both understand all. Geilissa looks her mistress in the eye. ‘Let me send him away, the boy. Orestes will grow up straight if he is spared what is to come. Let me send him to Strophius, his godfather.’ So, there was a survivor of the cannibal feast. Thyestes’ eldest boy, was not present. I had a fever, you see. Some of my father’s Clytemnestra knows that the boy is heir to the city of Mycenae women took me to Tiryns. I survived. and to the kingdom of Argos, and should Agamemnon die, then Orestes would expect to inherit the throne, which is not what she Yes. I grew to crooked manhood. It is a strange thing to learn wants. Aigisthus want him dead, and Clytemnestra can see the that your brothers and sisters have been cooked in a pot or a pie sense in this, but she is the boy’s mother and cannot bring herself and eaten, strange to know that your mother hanged herself and to connive at it. that your father died mad. Stranger still to know that you were chosen to survive, to bear witness, to endure these mysteries, to She exchanges a glance with Geilissa. That same night, the boy add another stone to the monstrous monument that is the house Orestes is gone. of Atreus. When the princes sailed for Troy those years ago and Greece was emptied of its heroes, pickings were easy. Only weaklings Seven years later. were left, the old, the cripples, the mad. The abandoned wives were avid for depravity. At the head of my poor retinue, I sought When Aigisthos steps in to the megaron from a side door he out Clytemnestra in her echoing palace at Mycenae in Argos. We cannot see for a moment as he leaves the blinding sunlight out- came together, she and I, because it was the only thing to do. She side for the dim interior. hated Agamemnon for the murder of her daughter and I hated Orestes is suddenly only a few paces from his enemy, but fro- Agamemnon because he had watched my father eat my brothers zen, unable to move, the sword handle clenched beneath his cloak. and sisters, because he was Atreus’ child. I am not a beautiful man Unexpectedly, Pylades pushes him savagely in the back and Orestes and some find my tastes unsavoury but Clytemnestra sucked on all my horrors.

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stumbles at his enemy who cannot yet see. The boy fumbles the in the flesh of his body but still he scrabbles away from his attacker. weapon clear of his clothing and swipes inex- Orestes wounds him again as he scuttles across the fire pit. Aigisthos’ pertly but the man has moved away instinc- voice is pitiable, a kind of weeping, as he enters his last moments. tively and the blade opens a wound in his The boy tries again but slips in the blood which has been spilled. retreating calf. Orestes pursues him as he On his knees he raises the sword and brings it down obliquely hobbles away and slashes across the man’s head, opening up a kind of blue white flap in his again. The sword’s tip face. And again, but still his enemy continues to move, helplessly, opens a rent in like a crushed insect, so that the boy must hack and hack until his Aigisthos’ victim grows still and his own breath comes in heaving sobs. It is garment a butcher’s yard. and His mother looks down at the boy as he kneels over the dead man, listening to the sound of her son’s breathing as it grows qui- eter and the sobbing grows less. She looks down at him as he kneels in the crimson mess. Her voice is unsteady. ‘You will murder your own mother? I nursed thee, those years ago, those lifetimes.’ Θα σκοτώσεις την ίδια σου τη μάνα; Αυτά τα στήθη σ ‘έθρεψαν ανήμπορος σαν ήσουνα ακόμα

She begins to unlace her bodice, pulling the lacing through without haste until her heavy breasts come free, teats stiff. She cups her breasts in either hand and offers them to the scarlet boy. ‘Last night I had a dream. I dreamed I gave birth to a snake and when I tried to give it suck, it bit my breast and made me bleed. I cried out in my dream.’ ‘I gave you your life Orestes, let me have mine. These breasts fed you when you were helpless.’ Orestes is kneeling on all fours, and his words come out between sobs: ‘Here in this house you stole my father’s life.’ ‘I was in the hands of fate.’ ‘And now I, the same.’ ‘This is my dream. You are the snake that crept out of my womb and bit my breasts.’ ‘No dream, mother, a prophecy’ He stands shakily, the bloody sword in his hand, his legs atrem- ble. He looks across to Pylades. Pylades says: ‘You swore an oath to Apollo, at Delphi. Do it.’

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Orestes looks away, turns his body away from his mother, as if Yeah for thy mother slain. in thought, and then spins back with his sword arm outstretched. What can be said? He has learned much about killing in these last minutes and he Madness is hard to gauge. Orestes falls to his knees, grasps his decapitates the woman almost cleanly. Only a rag of sinew holds sodden cloak and rolls away from the still convulsing corpse of his head and body together as she falls upon the mangled cadaver of mother and her lover, across the floor, holding the blood heavy stuff her paramour, the blood pumping from her severed neck. against his face so that as he rolls, the cloak wraps itself around his Now here is a thing. There is crying and wailing in the mega- head until he cannot see and all is darkness within. He lies still, as ron and the servants have run screaming from the hall. Aigisthus’ if he too were dead, listening to the rivulets of sand, the pattering people come running in, shouting and unsheathing their weap- of pebbles, the hiss of writhing hair, the rattling moan. ons, fearsome and noisily resolute, and you might think the lives Yeah, we will waste thee living, nerve and vein. of Orestes and Pylades were imminently forfeit, but it is not so. Yeah for thy mother slain. They jostle in through the door, blinking and squinting in the Pylades leads his friend out of the palace and none try to hin- half dark until the gruesome tableau reveals itself. There is blood der them. They pass out through the lion gate and are lost to view. everywhere and horror hangs above Orestes’ head. They come to a stop, Aigisthus’ dogs, stricken by this vision, which will never leave Picture Orestes on some rocky outcrop, blind because he will them. The boy has taken off his blood sodden cloak and stands not see, the blood black cloak wrapped about his face and head. naked with his sword still in his hand above the ruin he has cre- Pylades waits, sitting a little way off, his back against some sun ated. He looks across to these impotent sightseers. warmed slab, looking out over an empty plain. In his way, he too ‘Hark ye and learn, my friends, I have done what should never, has surely been marked by what has passed, but he does what is never have been done. My madness burns to chant its song. needed for his friend without thought and makes no complaint. He leads his companion through the time, the months, like a trav- I slew my mother.’ elling showman with his performing bear. They are tabooed and A dream of retribution begins to act itself out elsewhere in the pass through suddenly emptied villages as if they were dead, but world, who knows where. Think of a desert place, a stony bank they do not starve. Figs and scraps of dried goat flesh or little piles with no memory of the rat’s foot, a place unfrequented. Think of of olives lie in the path. bleached bones. The dry earth falls away in little runnels and tum- Orestes sees the furies, the Errinyes, sees them always. He blings as the blackened claws scrabble for the blank daylight. cannot sleep nor cannot wake but for their scabbed, leprous faces Skeletal arms and faces emerge, sand encrusted hair begins to pressed up against his eyeballs. The stale smell of piss is murder- writhe. Eyes blink redly. They have been called forth, these guard- ous, and vermin run in the folds of their rags. ians of the old law, the ancient dispensation, by this act, this matri- Pylades glimpses them sometimes, the ladies, black scuttlings, cide, this unthinkable breach. In slicing through his mother’s neck shadows against the sun. He hears them too, in absent moments, Orestes has opened a rent in the world. They are already commenc- thinks he hears them, sibilant echoes, the patter of dry stones. Once ing to mutter as they climb out of their crumbling tomb, tune- he saw them entire, the three ladies, the Errinyes. lessly intoning: It was in a temple, somewhere in the dry mountains, an ancient Follow, follow, follow, seek him, round and round, place, lost among giant boulders and forests of prickly pear, built Scent and snuff and scan the ground, above a village of mud hovels, against caves, a temple to Apollo, he Lest unharmed he slip away, saw them. Orestes would seek out such places, remote temples to He who did his mother slay. the sun god, the lord of light and mice, where he might sleep and Yeah, we will waste thee living, nerve and vein. hope to be free of his daemons for a few hours. The stone vault

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is cloven by a forgotten earthquake and bright stars wink beyond sat with his knees drawn up and waited for his friend to wake, until the fissure in the roof. the day was hot and the cicadas were loud in the stunted olive trees. The sanctuary of Delphi hangs on the mountain side over wide When he stepped inside the darkened temple, the smell caught olive groves that stretch away to the sea, a high sulphurous cleft in in his throat: stale piss, and old, unwashed flesh. With his back the rock face, overhung with trees. On the steep slopes roundabout pressed in fear against the wall, he waited, until, little by little he there are temples and shrines to many gods, though the sanctuary could make out the shape of Orestes’ sleeping body, clinging to itself properly belongs to Apollo, and a sort of town has grown up, the great stone like an infant to its dam. Around him, heaped on where soothsayers and charlatans of all stripes ply their trades. Along the earth floor lay bundles of black rags. the road that threads the lower slopes there are inns and lodging houses where pilgrims may find a bed and a meal, and whatever It was them. else a pilgrim may need. Whores and thieves abound. They could not touch him, here in this place, but they lay as It was above the steep and noisy town of Delphi, at Apollo’s close as they dare, like bats, twitching and muttering, called by his shrine, that Orestes, as a boy of seventeen, had sworn his oath to blood, the hiss of blood in his arteries, the wet pulse of his crime. avenge Agamemnon, his murdered father. It is a heavy, binding Another time, lost on an arid and endless plain, Pylades knew oath. He swears to kill his own mother, Clytemnestra, who has they were there, the ladies, though he could not see them. ruled the kingdom of Mycenae for seven years, since she and her The smell came on the dry wind and Orestes in his madness, paramour Aigisthus, Thyestes son, hacked his father to death in was restless, agitated. Silhouetted against the white sky, he stag- the palace bathhouse. gered and flinched, tearing the cloak from his head. He is seventeen when he swears to uphold the vendetta. The He could see them now, in the daylight, their claws fumbling God, lord of light, muttering through the drooling mouth of the sibyl, gives him to understand that if he fulfils his oath, he will find shelter from the Erinyes, the sisters of night, who come in pursuit of the killers of women, if he seeks refuge in the temples of Apollo. In the sulphurous cavern of the oracle at Delphi, the dribbling crone, as mischievous as she is mad, reading his uncertainty, his boyish dread, also promises him leprosy if he fails to honour his oath, the corruption of his own smooth flesh. Outside, in the daylight, on Delphi’s steep stepped causeway that climbs between ranks of altars and treasuries, other suppli- cants wait their turn, while the mountebanks and vendors of votive trinkets cry their wares the length of the queues. Set in the centre of the sunken earth floor of this remote, forgotten temple was the omphalos, the navel stone, ancient when the place was built around it, and it was here, his body wrapped around the boulder’s base that Orestes slept a whole night until the sun was high in the sky. Pylades had slept outside among the rocks and woken, stiff and hungry, to the smell of the sun on the sage that grew hereabouts. He

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closer, their red veined eyes like malevolent worlds. Helpless, he Translations from Euripides: was shaking his head to be rid, to be free of torment. The Trojan Women. 1954 Pylades watched him press the knuckles of his hand against Hecuba. 1963 his mouth and he was begging, pleading for release. He began to Iphigenia in Aulis. 1972 chew a knuckle of his hand until the blood ran. Trans. Phillip Vellacott. Now it is no easy thing, nor no quick thing to bite off a finger, but Orestes sawed at the bone with his teeth, roaring and crying Translations from Sophocles: out in his pain, until it came free of his hand. Ajax. 1953 He sank to his knees with his two arms outstretched, his head Trans. E.F.Watling bowed in penitence, the bloody ravaged digit cupped in his two palms, an offering, a sacrifice to his invisible teachers of the heart. Translations from Homer: Postscript. The Iliad. 2015. Trans. Peter Green. The literature that has gathered around the two Homeric poems, War Music. An account of Homer’s Iliad. 2015. Christopher the Iliad and the Odyssey, is vast, and in some ways they can be Logue. thought of as founding texts. Homer’s Iliad. C.1611. Trans. George Chapman. They have been a focus for scholarly enquiry and exegesis for The Odyssey. 1962. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald more than two thousand years. Already, in the ancient world these poems were used as divinatory writing and the list of uses to which these texts have been put, is almost endless. The first translations Other texts from Homer into English were published around 1611 and 1616. The Greek Myths. 1955. Robert Graves. What I have written draws heavily on Homer, though the Greek and Roman Mythology. 1978. Michael Stapleton. story of the house of Atreus forms part of a larger epic cycle, only The East pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia. some parts of which can be found in the Homeric texts. The plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus furnish much of the rest of the story. I have felt free to include in what I have written, without acknowledgement, a number of fragments from this literature: words, phrases, lines. Listed below are some of the texts I have looked at, and on occasion, borrowed from:

Translations from Aeschylus: The Oresteia Trilogy. 1907. Trans. E. Arnold. The Oresteia. 1999. Trans. Ted Hughes. Oresteia. 2002. Trans. Christopher Collard.