The Song of Troy Read online

  We ground the soil of Sigios to powder under the trample of our boots, it drifted far above our heads and rose to the vault of the sky. Though in later battles I behaved with more logic and had a thought for my men, in that one their welfare never entered what passed for my mind. I didn’t care who was winning or losing as long as I was winning. If Agamemnon himself had fought next to me, I wouldn’t have known. Not even Patrokles penetrated my furore, though he was the sole reason why I survived that first fight, for he kept the Trojans off my back.

  Suddenly someone swung a shield across my path. I struck with all my might to come at the face behind it, but like a bolt from a bow he stepped aside and his sword came within a hair of my right arm. I gasped as if flung into a pool of icy water, then shook in exultation when he lowered his shield to see me better. A prince at last! Clad all in gold. The axe he had used to cut Iolaos down had vanished, replaced by a longsword. Snarling my pleasure, I faced him eagerly. A very big man, he had the look of one used to excelling in battle, and he was the first man who dared to challenge me. We circled warily, my axe dragging on the ground by its thong until he gave me an opening. When I leaped and swung he flicked aside, but I was fast too; I dodged the sweep of his sword as easily as he had evaded my axe. Understanding that we had each found a worthy foe, we settled down to the duel steadily and patiently. Bronze rang on bronze-backed gold, always a parry, neither of us able to wound the other, each of us conscious that the soldiers, Trojan and Greek, had moved back to give us room.

  Whenever I missed my mark he laughed, though in four places his golden shield gaped to show the bronze, the innermost layers of tin. I had to fight my rising rage as hard as I fought him – how dared he laugh! Duels were sacred work, not to be desecrated by ridicule, and it infuriated me that he couldn’t seem to feel that sanctity. I made two mighty lunges one after the other and missed him. Then he spoke.

  ‘What’s your name, Clumsy?’ he asked, laughing.

  ‘Achilles,’ I said between my teeth.

  That made him laugh harder. ‘Never heard of you, Clumsy! I’m Kyknos, son of Poseidon of the Deeps.’

  ‘All dead men stink alike, son of Poseidon, be they fathered by Gods or men!’ I cried.

  Which only made him laugh.

  The same kind of rage swelled up in me that I had endured when I saw Iphigenia lying dead on the altar, and I forgot all the rules of combat Chiron and my father had taught me. With a shriek I sprang on him, in under the point of his blade, my axe raised. He leaped backwards, stumbling; his sword fell, and I broke it into a hundred fragments. Round came his wasp-waisted, man-sized shield to cover his back as he turned and ran, pushing through the Trojan troops in savage desperation, calling for a spear. Someone thrust the weapon into his hand, but I was too close on his tail for him to use it. He went on retreating.

  I plunged into the closing ranks of Trojans after him. Not one man among them aimed a blow at me, whether because they were too frightened or because they respected the time-honoured tenets of duel, I never discovered. The throng dwindled until the battle lay behind us, until a looming cliff brought Kyknos the son of Poseidon to a halt. The spear describing lazy circles, he turned to face me. I stopped too, waiting for him to cast, but he preferred to use the spear as a lance than as a javelin. Wise, since I had both axe and sword. When he flicked the head forward, I jumped to one side. Time and time again it darted at my chest, but I was young and as easy on my feet as a much lighter man. I saw my chance, went in and broke the spear in two. All he had now was his dagger. Not finished yet, he groped for it.

  Never had I wanted anyone dead as much as I wanted this buffoon dead – yet not cleanly dead, felled by axe or sword. I dropped the axe and pulled the heavy baldric holding my sword over my head. My dagger followed. The amusement left his face at last. He finally gave me the respect I had vowed to wrest from him. But he could still speak words!

  ‘What was your name, Clumsy? Achilles?’

  The pain consumed me; I was unable to answer. He was not close enough to the God to understand that a duel between those of the Royal Kindred was as silent as it was holy.

  I jumped at him and sent him sprawling before he had his dagger out; he scrambled to his feet and backed away until his heels collided with the buttresses of the cliff. Over he went, flung out against the sloping rock behind him. Perfect. I took his chin in one hand and used the other as a hammer, smashed his face to pulp and broke every bone beneath it without caring what damage I did to myself. His helmet had come undone; I grasped its long, dangling straps and drew them tight under his jaw, twined them about his neck and put my knee in his belly, dragging on them until his maimed face was black and his eyes bulged to glaring balls of red-streaked horror.

  Not until he must have been dead for some time did I let the straps go; I looked at something more an object than a man. For a moment I felt sick at the realisation that I had a lust for the kill as deep as that, but I crushed the weakness and lifted Kyknos athwart my shoulders, slinging his shield across my own back to protect it as I made the return journey through the Trojan ranks. I wanted my Myrmidons and the rest of the Greeks to see that I had lost neither him nor the fight.

  A small detachment led by Patrokles met me on the edge of the battle; we got back to our own lines unscathed. But I paused to drop Kyknos at the feet of his own men, his swollen tongue puffed between his ribboned lips, his eyes still goggling.

  ‘My name,’ I howled, ‘is Achilles!’

  The Trojans fled; the man they had deemed an Immortal was proven just another man like them.

  There followed the ritual at the end of a duel to the death between members of the Royal Kindred; I stripped him of his armour as my prize and sent his carcass to the Sigios refuse pit, where it would be eaten by the town dogs. But not before I cut off his head and stuck it on a spear, an odd apparition with its ghastly face and beautiful, unmarked golden braids of hair. I gave it to Patrokles, who embedded it in the shingle like a banner.

  The whole Trojan force suddenly broke. Since they knew where to flee, they outdistanced us easily, their retreat fairly well disciplined. The field and Sigios were ours.

  Agamemnon called a halt to the pursuit, an order I was loath to obey until Odysseus caught my arm as I loped past him and swung me roughly around. He was strong! Much stronger than he looked.

  ‘Leave it be, Achilles,’ he said. ‘The gates will be shut – save your strength and your men in case the Trojans try again tomorrow. We have a mess to sort out before darkness.’

  Seeing the good sense in his words, I turned with him to trudge back to the beach, Patrokles by my side as always, the Myrmidons falling in behind us singing the victory paean. We ignored the houses: if there were women inside them we wanted none of them. At the edge of the pebbles we stood aghast. Men were sprawled everywhere. Screams, cries, groans, babbling pleas for help came from all sides. Some of the bodies moved, others lay still, their shades fled into the dreary wastes of the Dark Kingdom, the realm of Hades.

  Odysseus and Agamemnon stood apart as men swarmed over the ships, prying them loose where beaks had stove into sides or sterns, while the beach was tidied up, our men were transferred onto the ships, and the outer ranks of vessels moved into the stream. When I glanced up at the sun I found it sinking, about a third of the day remaining. My bones felt leaden with weariness, my arm felt too heavy to lift, and the axe dragged on the ground from its thong. I could think of nothing else to do than join Agamemnon, who stared at me with jaw dropped. Obviously he had not avoided battle, for his cuirass was buckled, his face grimed with gore and filth. And now I saw him with the leisure to look, Odysseus presented an odd sight. His breastplate was split open to display his chest, yet his skin was unmarked.

  ‘Did you sit down and bathe in blood, Achilles?’ the High King asked. ‘Are you hurt?’

  I shook my head dumbly; the reaction against the storm of emotions I had experienced was beginning, and what I had learned about myself threatened to summo
n the Daughters of Kore permanently into my mind. Could I live with such a burden and not go mad? Then I thought of Iphigenia, and understood that to live on as a sane man was a part of my punishment.

  ‘So it was you with the axe!’ Agamemnon was saying. ‘I thought it must be Ajax. But you’ve earned our thanks. When you brought back the body of the man who killed Iolaos, the Trojans lost heart.’

  ‘I doubt I was responsible, sire,’ I managed to say. ‘The Trojans had had enough, and we kept spewing men ashore without end. The man Kyknos was a personal thing. He mocked my honour.’

  Odysseus took my arm again, but this time gently. ‘Your ship lies yonder, Achilles. Get aboard before it sails.’

  ‘Where to?’ I asked blankly.

  ‘I don’t know, except that we can’t stay here. Let Troy cope with the dead bodies. Telephos says there’s a good beach inside a lagoon around the corner on the Hellespont shore. We intend to have a look.’

  In the end most of the Kings sailed aboard Agamemnon’s ship, north along the coast until we reached the mouth of the Hellespont; the first Greek ships to enter those waters in a generation surged serenely on. Only a league or two further the hills dabbling their flanks in the sea gave way to a beach longer and wider by far than the one at Sigios, more than a league in length. At either end of it a river flowed into the water, their sandbars forming an almost landlocked lagoon. The sole entrance to the salt lake was a narrow passage in the middle; within, the sea was dead calm. The farther bank of each river was crowned by a headland, and on top of the one beside the bigger, dirtier river was a fortress, deserted now, its garrison undoubtedly fled to Troy. No one emerged from it to see Agamemnon’s flagship sail in, and every neat little toll-collecting warship was still beached.

  As we lined up along the rail, Agamemnon turned to Nestor. ‘Will this do?’ he asked.

  ‘It looks quite splendid to my untrained eye, but ask Phoinix.’

  ‘It is a good place, sire,’ I offered diffidently. ‘If they try to raid us here they’ll find their task a hard one. The rivers make it impossible for them to outflank us, though whoever lies against each river will be most vulerable.’

  ‘Then who will volunteer to draw his ships up on the rivers?’ the High King asked, then added, a trifle shamefaced, ‘Mine will have to be in the centre of the beach – ease of access, you know.’

  ‘I’ll take the bigger river,’ I said quickly, ‘and fence my camp off with a stockade in case we’re attacked. A defence within a defence.’

  The High King’s brow darkened. ‘That sounds as if you think we’re going to be here for a long time, son of Peleus.’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘We are, sire. Accept it.’

  But he wouldn’t. He started giving orders as to who would beach whose ships where, emphasising impermanence.

  The flagship remained in the middle of the lagoon as one by one the ships were slowly rowed in, though not a third of them had been beached before night fell. My own vessels were still riding the open Hellespont, as were those belonging to Ajax, Little Ajax, Odysseus and Diomedes. We would be last of all. Luckily the weather was holding well, the Hellespont was unruffled.

  As the sun died into the sea at my back I took my first cool look at the place, and was satisfied. With a good stout defence wall behind the rows of beached ships, our camp would be almost as invulnerable as Troy. Which rose in the east like a mountain, closer here than at Sigios. We were going to need that good stout defence wall; Agamemnon was wrong. Troy wouldn’t fall in a day, any more than it had been built in a day.

  Once all the ships were in and properly beached, the chocks hammered under their hulls and their masts stepped down – there were four rows of them – we buried King Iolaos of Phylake. His body was fetched from his flagship and set on a high bier atop a grassy knoll while one by one the men of Greece’s nations marched past as the priests chanted and the Kings poured the libations. As slayer of his slayer it was my duty to give his funeral oration; I told the silent host how calmly he had accepted his fate, how gallantly he had fought before he died, and the identity of his slayer, a son of Poseidon. Then I suggested that his courage be marked by something more enduring than a eulogy, and asked Agamemnon if he might be renamed Protesilaos, which meant ‘the first of the people’.

  Solemn consent was accorded; from that moment on his people of Phylake called him Protesilaos. The priests fitted the death mask of hammered gold over his sleeping face and twitched his shroud away to reveal him clad in all the fire of a robe woven from gold. Then we laid him on a barge and rowed him across the biggest river, to where the masons had worked day and night, hollowing his tomb out of the headland. The death car was rolled inside, the tomb was closed and the masons began to tip earth across the stone-filled doorway; in a season or two no eye, even the most discerning, would be able to see whereabouts King Protesilaos was interred.

  He had fulfilled the prophecy and made his people proud.

  14

  NARRATED BY

  Odysseus

  Beaching over eleven hundred ships took all my time and energy in the few days after that first battle on Trojan soil. The tally had diminished a little, for some of the poorest among Helen’s suitors had not been able to afford ships as well built as, for instance, Agamemnon’s. Several dozen vessels had gone down, holed during the frantic rush to get sufficient men onto Sigios beach, but we had not lost any of the supply ships or those holding horses for our chariots.

  To my surprise, the Trojans didn’t venture anywhere near our mushrooming camp, a fact which Agamemnon interpreted as a sure sign resistance was finished. Thus, with the entire fleet safe ashore so the hulls wouldn’t swell and crack by sucking up too much water, our High King held a council. Flushed by his success at Sigios, there was no stopping him as he made much of what I thought would soon prove to be very little. I let him run on, wondering who else would question his confident opinions. As was his due, he had his say amid silence, but no sooner had he handed the Staff to Nestor (Kalchas was not in attendance, why I didn’t know) than Achilles was on his feet demanding it.

  Yes, of course it would be Achilles. I didn’t trouble to conceal my smile. The Lion King had bitten off a large mouthful in the lad from Iolkos, and from the frown gathering on his brow I fancied he was suffering acute pangs of indigestion. Did any enterprise so brave and bold ever get off to a worse start than ours? Tempests and human sacrifice, jealousy and greed, no love lost between some who might end in needing each other. And what had possessed Agamemnon to send his cousin Aigisthos to Mykenai to mount guard over Klytemnestra? An action I judged as foolhardy as Menelaos’s wandering off to Crete with Paris in his house. Aigisthos had a legitimate claim to the throne! Perhaps the problem was that the sons of Atreus had forgotten what Atreus had done to the sons of Thyestes. Stewed them and dished them up to their father at a banquet. The much younger Aigisthos had escaped the fate of his elder brothers. Well, it wasn’t my problem. Whereas the widening rift between Agamemnon and Achilles most definitely was.

  Had Achilles been a simple fighting machine like his cousin Ajax the rift would not have opened. But Achilles was a thinker who also excelled in battle. The smile slipped from my mouth when I realised that if I had been born with this young man’s size and circumstances, yet retained my own mind, I might have conquered the world. Mine was the stronger life strand; it seemed likely that I would be there watching when they covered the lipless face of Achilles with a lipless mask of gold, but there was a glory about him that was never mine. I felt a sensation akin to loss, understanding that Achilles owned some key to the meaning of life always dangling just out of my reach. Was it a good thing to be so detached, so cool? Oh, just once to burn, as Diomedes yearned just once to freeze!

  ‘I doubt, sire,’ said the son of Peleus levelly, ‘that if the Trojans don’t venture outside to fight, we can take Troy. My long sight is better than most men’s, and I’ve been studying those walls you seem to think overrated. I can’t agree.
I feel we underrate them. The only way we can crush Troy is to lure the Trojans out onto the plain and defeat them in open battle. And that’s not easy. We’d have to outflank them as well, prevent their retiring back inside the city to fight another day. Don’t you think it’s wise to talk bearing that in mind? Can’t we devise some sort of trick to lure the Trojans out?’

  I laughed. ‘Achilles, if you sat within walls as thick and high as Troy’s, would you march outside to do battle? Their best chance was the beach of Sigios while we were landing. They couldn’t defeat us even then. If I were Priam, I’d keep the army on top of the walls and let it thumb its noses at us.’

  He was not at all dashed. ‘It was no more than a faint hope, Odysseus. But I can’t see how we can storm those walls or batter down those gates. Can you?’

  I pulled a face. ‘Oh, I’m silent! I’ve already spoken on the subject. When there are ears prepared to listen, I’ll do so again. Not before.’

  ‘My ears are prepared to listen,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Your ears aren’t prominent enough, Achilles.’

  Not even this little joke pleased Agamemnon’s ears. He leaned forward. ‘Troy cannot withstand us!’ he cried.

  ‘Then, sire,’ Achilles persisted, ‘if there’s no sign of a Trojan army on the plain tomorrow, may we drive to the foot of the walls to inspect them at close quarters?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the High King stiffly.