The Song of Troy Read online

  She had not seen me, did not see me as she slid further out into the waves, dragging the dead calf with her until she was deep enough to sling his body around her neck and strike out. Some distance offshore she shrugged her shoulders to release the calf, which sank at once. A big, flat rock jutted out of the water; she made for it, climbed out of the sea onto its top and stood silhouetted against the pale sky. Then she lay down upon her back, pillowed her head on her arms folded behind her, and seemed to sleep.

  An outlandish ritual, not one condoned by the New Religion. Thetis had accepted my offering in the name of Poseidon, then had given it instead to Nereus. Sacrilege! And she the high priestess of Poseidon. Oh, Lykomedes, you were right! In her lie the seeds of destruction for Skyros. She is not giving the Lord of the Seas his due, nor does she respect him as Earth Shaker.

  The air was milky and calm, the water limpid, but as I walked down to the waves I trembled like a man with the ague. The water had no power to cool me as I swam; Aphrodite had fastened her glossy claws hard enough in me to lacerate my very bones. Thetis was mine, and I would have her. Save poor Lykomedes and his isle.

  When I reached the rock I fastened my hands in a ledge on its side and jerked myself upward with an effort that cracked my muscles; I was crouching above her on the stone before she realised I was any nearer than the palace above Skyros Town. But she was not sleeping. Her eyes, a soft, dreamy green, were open. Then she scrambled away and looked at me black-eyed.

  ‘Don’t you touch me!’ she said, panting. ‘No man dares touch me! I have given myself to the God!’

  My hand flashed out, stopped barely short of her ankle. ‘Your vows to the God are not permanent, Thetis. You’re free to marry. And you’ll marry me.’

  ‘I belong to the God!’

  ‘If so, which God? Do you pay lip service to one and sacrifice his victims to another? You belong to me, and I dare all. If the God – either God! – requires my death for this, I will accept his judgement.’

  Mewing a note of distress and panic, she tried to slide off the rock into the sea. But I was too quick for her, grasped her leg and dragged her back, her fingers clawing at the gritty surface, her nails tearing audibly. When I took hold of her wrist I let go of her ankle and hauled her to her feet.

  She fought me like ten wildcats, teeth and nails, kicking and biting silently as I clamped my arms around her. A dozen times she slipped through them, a dozen times I captured her again, both of us smothered in blood. My shoulder was sheared, her mouth split, hanks of our hair blew away in the rising wind. This was no rape, nor did I intend that it be; this was a simple contest of strength, man against woman, the New Religion against the Old. It ended as all such contests must: with man the victor.

  We fell to the rock with an impact that knocked the breath out of her. Her body pinned beneath me and her shoulders held down, I looked into her face.

  ‘You are done fighting. I have conquered you.’

  Her lips trembled, she turned her head to one side. ‘You are he. I knew it the moment you came into the sanctuary. When I was sworn to his service, the God told me that a man would come out of the sea, a man of the sky who would dispel the sea from my mind and make me his Queen.’ She sighed. ‘So be it.’

  I installed Thetis in Iolkos as my Queen with honour and pomp. Within our first year together she became pregnant, the final joy of our union. We were happy, never more so than during those long moons waiting for our son. Neither of us dreamed of a girl.

  My own nurse, Aresune, was appointed chief midwife, so when Thetis began her labour I found myself utterly powerless; the old crone exercised her authority and banished me to the other end of my palace. For one full circuit of Phoibos’s chariot I sat alone, ignoring the servants who begged me to eat or drink, waiting, waiting… Until in the night marches Aresune came to find me. She had not bothered to change out of her birthing robe, its front smeared with blood, just stood huddled within it all withered and bent, her seamed face webbed with pain. So sunken in her head that they were two black sockets, her eyes oozed tears.

  ‘It was a son, sire, but he never lived long enough to breathe air. The Queen is safe. She has lost blood and is very tired, but her life is not in danger.’ The skinny hands wrung together. ‘Sire, I swear I did nothing wrong! Such a big, fine boy! It is the will of the Goddess.’

  I could not bear her to see my face in the lamplight. Too stricken to weep, I turned and walked away.

  Several days passed before I could bring myself to see Thetis. When finally I did enter her room, I was amazed to find her sitting up in her big bed looking well and happy. She said all the correct things, toyed with words expressing sorrow, but none of it was meant. Thetis was pleased!

  ‘Our son is dead, wife!’ I burst out. ‘How can you bear it? He will never know the meaning of life! He will never take my place on the throne. For nine moons you carried him – for nothing!’

  Her hand came out, patted mine a little patronisingly. ‘Oh, dearest Peleus, do not grieve! Our son has no mortal life, but have you forgotten that I am a Goddess? Because he had not breathed earthly air, I asked my father to grant our son eternal life, and my father was delighted to do so. Our son lives on Olympos – he eats and drinks with the other Gods, Peleus! No, he will never rule in Iolkos, but he enjoys what no mortal man ever can. In dying, he will never die.’

  My astonishment changed to revulsion, I stared at her and wondered how this God thing had ever been allowed to take such hold of her. She was as mortal as I and her babe was as mortal as both of us. Then I saw how trustingly she gazed up at me, and could not say what I itched to say. If it took the pain out of her loss to believe such nonsense, well and good. Living with Thetis had taught me that she did not think or behave like other women. So I stroked her hair and left her.

  Six sons she gave me over the years, all born dead. When Aresune told me of the second boy’s death I went half mad, could not bear to see Thetis for many moons because I knew what she would tell me – that our dead son was a God. But in the end love and hunger always drove me back to her, and we would go through that ghastly cycle all over again.

  When the sixth child was stillborn – how could he be when he had gone to full term and looked, lying on his tiny funeral car, so strong despite his dark blue skin? – I vowed that I would dower Olympos with no more sons. I sent to the Pythoness at Delphi and the answer came back that it was Poseidon who was angry, that he resented my stealing his priestess. What hypocrisy! What lunacy! First he doesn’t want her, then he does. Truly no man can understand the minds or the doings of the Gods, New or Old.

  For two years I did not cohabit with Thetis, who kept begging to conceive more sons for Olympos. Then at the end of the second year I took Poseidon Horse Maker a white man foal and offered it to him before all the Myrmidons, my people.

  ‘Lift your curse, bless me with a living son!’ I cried.

  The earth rumbled deep in its bowels, the sacred snake shot from beneath the altar like a flash of brown lightning, the ground heaved, spasmed. A pillar toppled to earth beside me as I stood unmoving, a crack appeared between my feet and I choked on the reek of sulphur, but I held my position until the tremor died away and the fissure closed. The white man foal lay on the altar drained and pathetically still. Three moons later Thetis told me that she was pregnant with our seventh child.

  All through those weary times I had her watched more closely than a hawk watches the ground bird’s chicks; I made Aresune sleep in the same bed every night, I threatened the house women with unspeakable tortures if they left her alone for an instant unless Aresune was there. Thetis bore these ‘whims’, as she called them, with patience and good humour; she never argued or tried to defy my edicts. Once she made my hair stand on end and my flesh prickle when she began to sing a strange, tuneless chant out of the Old Religion. But when I ordered her to cease she obeyed, and never sang so again. Her time grew imminent. I began to hope. Surely I had always lived in proper fear of the Gods! Sure
ly they owed me one living son!

  I had a suit of armour belonged to Minos once; it was my most treasured possession. A wondrous thing, it was sheeted in gold atop four separate layers of bronze and three of tin, inlaid with lapis and amber, coral and crystal depicting a marvellous design. The shield, of similar construction, was as tall as the average man and looked like two round shields joined together one above the other, so that it had a waist. Cuirass and greaves, helmet and kilt and arm guards were made to fit a bigger man than me, so I respected the dead Minos who had worn it as he strode about his Cretan kingdom confident that he would never need it to protect himself, only to show his people how rich he was. And when he did fall it was no use to him, for Poseidon took him and his world and crushed them because they would not subscribe to the New Religion. Mother Kubaba, the Great Godesss of the Old Religion, Queen of Earth and All High, always ruled in Crete and Thera.

  With the armour of Minos I had placed a spear of ash from the slopes of Mount Pelion; it had a small head fashioned from a metal called iron, so rare and precious that most men thought it a legend, for few had seen it. Trial had proven that the spear flew unerringly to its target yet felt a feather in my hand, so after I ceased to need to employ it in war I put it with the armour. The spear had a name: Old Pelion.

  Before the birth of my first son I had unearthed these curios for cleaning and polishing, sure my son would grow to be a man big enough to wear them. But as my sons continued to be born dead I sent them back to the treasure vaults to live in a darkness no blacker than my despair.

  About five days before Thetis expected to be confined with our seventh child I took a lamp and trod the ragged stone steps leading into the palace’s bowels, threading my way through the passages until I came to the great wooden door which barred off the treasury. Why was I there? I asked myself, but could find no satisfactory answer. I opened the door to peer into the gloom and found instead a pool of golden light on the far side of the huge chamber. My own flame pinched out, I crept forward with my hand on my dagger. The way across was cluttered with urns and chests, coffers and stored sacred gear; I had to pick my path carefully.

  As I drew nearer I heard the unmistakable sound of a woman weeping. Aresune my nurse was sitting on the floor cradling the golden helm which had belonged to Minos within her arms, its fine golden plumes streaming over her crinkled hand. She wept softly but bitterly, moaning to herself and breaking into the mourning song of Aigina, the island from which she and I originally came, kingdom of Aiakos. O Kore! Aresune was already weeping for my seventh son.

  I could not leave her unconsoled, could not creep away and pretend I had never seen, never heard. When my mother had ordered her to give me her breast she had been a mature woman; she had reared me under my mother’s disinterested gaze; she had trailed through a dozen nations in my wake as faithful as my hound; and when I had conquered Thessalia I raised her high in my household. So I went closer, touched her very gently on the shoulder and begged her not to weep. Taking the helmet from her, I gathered her stiff old body close and held her, saying many silly things, trying to comfort her through my own suffering. At last she fell quiet, bony fingers plucking at my blouse.

  ‘Dear lord, why?’ she croaked. ‘Why do you let her do it?’

  ‘Why what? Her? Do it?’

  ‘The Queen,’ she said, hiccoughing.

  Afterwards I realised that her grief had sent her a little mad; otherwise I could not have prised it out of her. Though she was dearer to me by far than my mother had been, she was always conscious of the difference in our stations. I gripped her so hard between my fingers that she writhed and whimpered.

  ‘What about the Queen? What does she do?’

  ‘Murders your sons.’

  I rocked. ‘Thetis? My sons? What is this? Speak!’

  Her frenzy dwindling, she stared at me in dawning horror as she grasped the fact that I knew nothing.

  I shook her. ‘You had better go on, Aresune. How does my wife murder her sons? And why? Why?’

  But she folded her lips one over the other and said nothing, eyes in the flame terrified. My dagger came out; I pressed its tip against her loose, slippery old skin.

  ‘Speak, woman, or by Almighty Zeus I swear that I will have your sight put out, your nails ripped from their beds – anything I need to do to unstopper your tongue! Speak, Aresune, speak!’

  ‘Peleus, she would curse me, and that is far worse than any torture,’ she quavered.

  ‘The curse would be evil. Evil curses rebound on the head of the one who casts them. Tell me, please.’

  ‘I was sure you knew and consented, lord. Maybe she is right – maybe immortality is preferable to life on earth, if there is no growing old.’

  ‘Thetis is mad,’ I said.

  ‘No, lord. She is a Goddess.’

  ‘She is not, Aresune, I would stake my life on it! Thetis is an ordinary mortal woman.’

  Aresune looked unconvinced; I did not sway her much.

  ‘She has murdered all your sons, Peleus, that is all. With the best of intentions.’

  ‘How does she do it? Does she take some potion?’

  ‘No, dear lord. Simpler by far. When we put her on the childing stool she drives all the women from the room except me. Then she makes me put a pail of sea water under her. As soon as the head is born she guides it into the water and holds it there until there is no possibility that the child can draw breath.’

  My fists closed, opened. ‘So that’s why they’re blue!’ I stood up. ‘Go back to her, Aresune, or she will miss you. I give you my oath as your King that I will never divulge who told me this. I will see she has no opportunity to do you harm. Watch her. When the labour begins, tell me immediately. Is that clear?’

  She nodded, her tears gone and her terrible guilt drained away. Then she kissed my hands and pattered off.

  I sat there without moving, both lamps foundered. Thetis had murdered my sons – and for what? Some crazed and impossible dream. Superstition. Fancy. She had deprived them of their right to be men, she had committed crimes so foul I wanted to go to her and run her through on my sword. But she still carried my seventh child within her body. The sword would have to wait. And vengeance belonged to the Gods of the New Religion.

  On the fifth day after I had spoken to Aresune the old woman came running to find me, her hair streaming wild in the wind behind her. It was late afternoon and I had gone down to the horse paddocks to watch my stallions, for mating season was close and the horse masters wanted to give me the schedule of who would service whom.

  I loped back to the palace with Aresune perched upon my neck, something of a steed myself.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked as I lowered her outside Thetis’s door.

  ‘Come in with you,’ I said.

  She gasped, squealed. ‘Sire, sire! It is forbidden!’

  ‘So is murder,’ I said, and opened the door.

  Birth is a women’s mystery, not to be profaned by any masculine presence. It is a world of earth owning no sky. When the New Religion overcame the Old, some things did not change; Mother Kubaba, the Great Goddess, still rules the affairs of women. Especially everything having to do with the growing of new human fruit – and the plucking of it, whether immature, at perfect ripeness or withered with age.

  Thus when I entered no one saw me for a moment; I had the time to watch, to smell, to hear. The room stank of sweat and blood, other things foreign and appalling to a man. Labour had clearly progressed, for the house women were in the act of conducting Thetis from her bed to the childing stool while the midwives hovered, instructed, fussed. My wife was naked, her grotesquely swollen abdomen almost luminous with distension. Carefully they arranged her thighs on the hard wooden surface to either side of the wide gap in the stool’s seat designed to free the birth canal’s termination, the place where the baby’s head would appear and its body follow.

  A wooden bucket slopping water stood on the floor nearby, but none of the women s
pared it a glance because they had no idea what it was there for.

  They saw me and flew at me, faces outraged, thinking that the King had gone mad, determined to drive him out. I swung a blow at the closest which knocked her sprawling; the rest cowered back. Aresune was hunched over the bucket, muttering charms to ward off the Evil Eye, and did not move when I chased the women out and dropped the bar on the door.

  Thetis saw everything. Her face glistened with sweat and her eyes were black, but she controlled her fury.

  ‘Get out, Peleus,’ she said softly.

  For answer I shoved Aresune aside, walked to the pail of sea water, picked it up and tipped the water upon the floor. ‘No more murders, Thetis. This son is mine.’

  ‘Murder? Murder? Oh, you fool! I’ve killed no one! I am a Goddess! My sons are immortal!’

  I took her by the shoulders as she sat, bent over, atop the childing stool. ‘Your sons are dead, woman! They are doomed to be mindless shades because you offered them no chance to do deeds great enough to win the love and admiration of the Gods! No Elysian Fields, no heroic status, no place among the stars. You are not a Goddess! You are a mortal woman!’

  Her answer was a shrill scream of torment; her back arched and her hands gripped the stool’s wooden arms so strongly that their knuckles gleamed silver.

  Aresune came to life. ‘It is the moment!’ she cried. ‘He is about to be born!’

  ‘You will not have him, Peleus!’ growled Thetis.

  She began to force her legs together against all the instinct which drove her to open them wide. ‘I’ll crush his head to pulp!’ she snarled, then screamed, on and on and on. ‘Oh, Father! Father Nereus! He tears me apart!’

  The veins stood out on her brow in purple cords, tears rolled down her cheeks, and still she fought to close her legs. Though demented with pain, she strained every last fibre of will and brought her legs inexorably together, crossed them and twined them about each other to lock them in place.