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Odysseus narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you saying, Guneus?’
The Thessalian lifted the palms of his hands. ‘I’m not saying anything … not for certain. But times change and the world changes with them. As I said a minute ago, ten years is a long time … Boys turn into men. Women can get restless … And no one knows what’s happened to you, remember. By the time I left Argos everybody had pretty much given you up for dead.’
In a voice low with menace, Odysseus declared, ‘Not Penelope.’
Guneus shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps she’s different from the rest.’
‘You don’t know her. There’s no perhaps about it.’
Sensing the heat in the man, Guneus made to withdraw. ‘I’m sure you’re in the right of it. Like I said, it’s only hearsay.’
‘Then you shouldn’t go spreading it about.’
But the voice was so malignant now that Guneus got to his feet, reflexively checking the dagger at his belt.
‘This is unjust,’ he said. ‘I spoke only because you forced me to speak. Left to myself I would have said nothing.’
Odysseus glared at him through hot eyes. ‘You would have done better to keep silent sooner.’
Guneus grunted as a man will who feels himself badly done by. ‘If my words have troubled you, Lord Odysseus, I’m sorry for it.’ Adjusting the strap of the leather corselet he wore, he looked up, expecting some acknowledgment of his apology. When none came he grunted again, stared out to sea a moment, and then looked back to where Odysseus sat glowering with one fist tightly clenched. A fine trickle of sand was falling from it, down onto the fringes of his mat, as though he had ground a stone to dust in his bare hand.
‘Well, I don’t care to leave a man gnawing on his own vitals,’ Guneus said, ‘but I think it best if I withdraw.’
‘Do as you like,’ Odysseus snapped back, ‘it makes no difference to me.’
Guneus looked down at him for a moment with an uneasy mixture of pity and contempt in his scarred face. Deciding to call his crew together and drag his ship back into the surf, he turned away, but he had taken no more than a dozen strides when Odysseus shouted after him, ‘If you value your life, Guneus, you’ll keep this slander to yourself.’
Guneus stopped in his tracks. When he turned to face Odysseus again there was something closer to mockery in his eyes. ‘I’ll defend my own honour before any man,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’ll keep silent as and when I choose. But for the sake of the respect I once had for you, I’ll say this much: take a look around you, Odysseus. I don’t know what’s been going on here and I don’t want to know; but this camp’s a pigsty and there isn’t one of your crew who’s in a fit condition to stand up against mine. Take a good look at yourself while you’re at it. You’ve got a belly on you like an Aulis tavern-keeper. If I wanted to, I could knock you down as soon as spit at you. You’d better start shaping up and get out of this squalid hole if you’re to stand any chance of winning your wife and island back again.’
He had turned on his heel and started walking back towards his men when he heard Odysseus running across the sand towards him. With no difficulty at all he dodged the first blow that came at him and merely leaned the other way to avoid the loosely swinging second. Then, being a taller man than Odysseus, with a longer reach, he pushed the palm of his hand into the Ithacan’s chest and stiffened his arm to hold him at bay.
‘That’s enough,’ he hissed so that the men watching in dismay down the beach should not hear him. ‘Stop it now or I’ll humiliate you.’ His fierce, imperative stare was fixed on Odysseus’s bewildered grey eyes. A moment later, to his immense consternation and surprise, he saw tears starting there.
The Young Lions (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)
In my later travels across Argos I encountered a chronicler who insisted that more than eight hundred thousand people had died in the war for Troy. Though his estimate strikes me as more bloodthirsty than accurate, many thousands of men and women must have lost their lives in what proved, in the end, to be a wholly destructive enterprise. Countless more came back with injuries that disfigured them for the rest of their days. But what of its effects on those other, unsung casualties of the war – those who were too young to fight?
Having grown up without a father’s guidance, they were forced either to endure the wretched silence of those who could not bring themselves to talk about the war at all, or to listen again and again to stories which left them feeling that real life had passed them by. This is what Odysseus came to recognize as the dreadful patrimony of war. Even as he identified its corrosive power, he was aware of the shadow that his own glorious reputation cast across the life of his son; but I know that he was also thinking about Neoptolemus and Agamemnon’s tragic son, Orestes.
The fierce young son of Achilles – his true name was Pyrrhus – was of a different order than other boys who had been left behind at home. Though he was only twelve years old in the final year of the war, he had been summoned to the fight by an oracle. It was prophesied that Troy would not fall until he came to the city, and so, against the will of his mother Deidameia and his grandmother Thetis, who were both devastated by the news of Achilles’ death, he was fetched out of Skyros. No one expected him to take an active part in the fighting. He was seen merely as a kind of mascot, a talismanic presence required by the gods; one who might rouse the flagging morale of the host by reviving the memory of his father. Yet he was given the name Neoptolemus – the new warrior – and quickly astounded them all. It seemed that he put on his father’s intrepid spirit with his gilded suit of armour, and the Myrmidons guarded his young life with a loyalty that encouraged him to such fearless acts that some said his soul was possessed by his father’s ghost.
Odysseus believed the boy to be possessed rather by the idea of what his father’s ghost demanded of him, for Neoptolemus was a child whose sense of manhood was shaped by the desire both to avenge the death of Achilles and to equal him in glory. It was a consuming appetite, unqualified by such tenderness as Achilles had known in his love for Patroclus and Briseis, and perhaps also for Polyxena. And so, long before he left Troy without a wound on his young body, Neoptolemus was a casualty of the war.
What could Andromache have made of him as she was forced to submit to his embraces on board his father’s black ship? Here was a woman who had lain in Hector’s arms. She had known the devotion of a man for whom warfare was not the chief goal and glory of a man’s existence but a violent fate forced on him by other men. She in turn was forced to watch as Hector fell under Achilles’ spear. She had seen her husband’s body dragged around the walls of Troy. The son of Achilles had hurled her child from a balcony onto the stones below; and now she must endure the thrust of his callow hips as Neoptolemus strove to plant his seed in her loins.
Yet if her body was captive, her spirit was not, and the boy can have found little pleasure in her bed. After a time, he began to leave her alone; and though his Myrmidons may have guessed that she emerged the victor from those loveless encounters, those grim men were too loyal to reveal their amusement and contempt. But Neoptolemus knew what had happened, and the knowledge made him all that more furious a fighter. Returning from Troy to recover his father’s lost lands, he was unable to land in Iolcus, which remained in Dorian hands; so he navigated the straits between Euboea and southern Thessaly and then marched inland in search of glory. The march brought him to the Orthris Mountains, where his grandfather Peleus – an old man aged further by the death of his son – had withdrawn his forces to make his stand against the alien invasion.
Before the day when his grandson marched the advance-guard of Myrmidons up into the mountains, Peleus and Neoptolemus had never met. The boy had been raised on the island of Skyros, in thrall to his formidable grandmother Thetis, from whom Peleus had been estranged for many years. Through her influence, Neoptolemus had developed a profound attachment to his heritage among the Dolopian people, some of whom had long since migrated from Epirus in the far west, through Thessaly, and on to Skyros. In these circumstances, Neoptolemus might have felt little attachment to Peleus, who was, for him, a remote and dubious figure, one who had long outlived the noble achievements of his youth. But the Myrmidons belonged to Peleus, and he had given them to Achilles; and since Neoptolemus had acquired an appetite for blood at Troy he had begun to think of himself as a Myrmidon first above all things. So now he was eager to make a stand beside his grandfather, and swear on his father’s shade that the soldierants of Thessaly would not rest until they saw King Peleus seated again on his rightful throne in Iolcus.
The old man gazed at the armoured youth with tears in his eyes. He recognized more of his wife’s features in the humourless yet unexpectedly soft young face than he did his own. The hair blowing about the boy’s head had the same reddish tinge to it as hers; the eyes were the same grey-green: and Peleus wondered whether something of her rage still ran through his veins. But there was a colder edge about him too – the coldness of a blade in winter – as if the things he had done at Troy had cancelled all feeling from his heart and left only ambition there.
Standing on the windy mountainside Peleus knew that when this boy fought on his behalf, it would not be for love of him, but merely out of a voracious appetite for battle. He shook his head, remembering the disastrous quarrel among the goddesses at his wedding feast at Mount Pelion all those years ago. There were those who claimed that the seeds of the war at Troy had been sown that day. Well, here was its harvest now – an unsmiling boy who had lopped off King Priam’s head and led a murderous assault on his beautiful city. And the dreadful truth was that Peleus had need of such warriors now.
‘Did you come here directly from Troy?’ he asked. ‘You must be weary.’
‘I am rested well enough,’ Neoptolemus answered stiffly.
Peleus nodded. ‘Did you not put in at Skyros?’
The youth glanced away. ‘For one night only. Iolcus had already fallen, so one night could make no difference.’ He hesitated a moment before adding, ‘Also I wished to speak with my mother.’
Peleus nodded. ‘And with your grandmother no doubt?’
‘Yes, with my grandmother also.’
So he had guessed right. Thetis had dropped some of her old poison in the boy’s ears. Yet she had not been able to prevent him from coming at his call. Loyalty to his father’s Myrmidon heritage had brought Neoptolemus to the fight for Thessaly. Peleus could build on that. Somehow he must find a way to win his love and respect as well as his cold service.
Smiling into those calculating eyes, he said, ‘May I see the spear you carry?’
Neoptolemus considered a moment before relinquishing his weapon. ‘This was my father’s spear,’ he said.
‘I know it was,’ Peleus answered, feeling the familiar weight in his hand, and balancing it there as if for the throw. ‘And it was his father’s before him. This spear was given to me by the gods as a wedding gift. The head was forged in the smithy of Hephaistus. This ash-wood shaft was carved by Divine Athena.’
Unable quite to conceal his boyish awe, Neoptolemus said, ‘You truly stood in the presence of the gods?’
‘As we all do, all the time,’ answered Peleus, ‘though not all of us are privileged to see them. Your father once took down this spear from the hooks where it hung beside my hearth. He was no more than a restless boy at the time, younger than you are now. I found him hurling it at a tree for target-practice and was angry with him because he had taken my spear without seeking my consent. But it was on that day that Achilles declared his desire to become a Myrmidon.’ Peleus smiled at the memory. ‘I told him that he should have his wish but that I would keep my spear until I could be sure that I had a son who was fit to wield it.’
As stiffly as if some insult had been intended, Neoptolemus declared, ‘No man was ever worthier than my father.’
‘I know that,’ Peleus answered him, unsmiling, ‘and no father was ever prouder than myself. And now this spear is yours.’
The youth narrowed his eyes against the wind. The beardless jut of his chin was held high as he said, ‘My hand shall never dishonour it.’
‘I trust not, Son of Achilles.’ Gravely, Peleus handed back the ash-wood spear. ‘I am proud to have you at my side,’ he said. ‘I hope to be made prouder still. Now come, let us make our offerings to the gods and to your father’s shade.’
Many weeks later, some fifty miles to the south, at the city of Crisa in Phocis, another son of the war – a sandy-haired youth with truculent eyes, some two or three years older than Neoptolemus – was practising sword-play with his friend. They wielded only wooden swords and carried light duelling shields, but both of them sweated from the length of the bout even though a cold wind was gusting off the rugged slopes of Mount Parnassus.
Growing suddenly impatient of his failure to break through his opponent’s guard, the sandy-haired youth came at him with a swift series of swingeing blows that drove him back on the defensive; but the vigour of his assault left his shield-arm swinging almost as widely as his sword. Just as he was about to deliver what must be the winning stroke, he felt the blunt point of his opponent’s weapon nudging at his ribs.
‘Ha, you’re dead, Orestes!’ cried the darker youth. He gave a gay, slightly mocking laugh that was picked up by the four girls wrapped in brightly coloured shawls who had been watching them from the balcony above. Their clapping set the doves whirring their wings across the court.
Orestes glowered briefly up at them and flushed.
‘Take no notice of them,’ said Pylades, who was the king’s son in Phocis and the most intimate friend to the youth he had just stabbed with his wooden sword. ‘Their applause is as empty as their heads. In any case, it’s you they fancy!’
‘It was a lucky stroke,’ Orestes scowled.
Smiling still, Pylades arched his brow. ‘Even if that were so, you would still be dead. But I was waiting for you to lose control and that’s just what you did.’ Putting down his sword and shield, he wiped the back of his arm across his brow. ‘You’re still far too hot-headed. It’s part of your passionate nature, and I love you for it. But if you want to live long enough to take your vengeance, you’re going to have to rein in that temper of yours.’
‘That’s easy enough for you to say.’ Doing his best to ignore the tittering of the girls, Orestes threw down his sword. ‘The gods have always been kind to you. What complaint can you possibly have against this life?’
‘None,’ Pylades answered, ‘except that it has treated my friend very ill.’ He took a towel from the heap on the bench beside him and tossed it across to Orestes. ‘Come, let’s take a bath together. Then I’ll give you a game of knucklebones before we eat.’
The two youths were cousins and had been friends since they were children, though it was not a friendship of which Clytaemnestra had recently approved. Even before the death of his sister Iphigenaia at Aulis, Orestes had become a major source of concern to his mother. His temperament was pugnacious and impatient, his manner verging on the insolent. In a court where everyone else went in fear of her power, Orestes had begun to take liberties, trying her patience in ways that he would not have dared to risk with his father. Yet Clytaemnestra found it hard to be firm with her son, even though she often devastated others with her cruel reproofs.
From the first, she had always entertained such hopes of him. One day he would marry his cousin Hermione and unite the thrones of Mycenae and Sparta, thus confirming the hegemony of their royal house across all Argos. And he would become the kind of king that her first husband might have been had Agamemnon not murdered him. A king who ruled supreme over a world of artistic beauty and intellectual excellence, a world such as she would have chosen for herself if a strong fate had not willed otherwise.
Yet with her mind preoccupied with the cares of state, Clytaemnestra had found it impossible to give her son the quality of attention that such ambitions required. She had recruited the best mentors she could find to teach him eloquence and music, to cultivate his aesthetic sensibility and encourage him in philosophical enquiry as well as instructing him in the elements of politics and statecraft. But the plain fact was that Orestes wanted to be at the war. More than that, he wanted to be fighting alongside Achilles – to serve as his cup-bearer or humble armour-polisher if no more glorious role was available. Anything to be close to the man whom he idolized above all others. While Troy still stood and there were deeds of glory waiting to be done, what interest could he have in poring over old clay tablets and the finer points of sophistry?
And then when Clytaemnestra returned to Mycenae with the bitter news that his father had put Iphigenaia to death on the altar of Artemis at Aulis, the mind of Orestes had taken a darker turn. What was he to make of this – that his sister, whose beautiful face and exquisite singing voice had always been sources of wonder and delight to him, should have been murdered by his father? How could such a thing make sense unless the gods themselves were mad? In his confusion, he raged against his mother. How could she have permitted this to happen? Why had he not been informed of what his father intended so that he could have offered himself up in Iphigenaia’s place? But Clytaemnestra seemed remote and frozen inside her grief, and where Orestes looked to find maternal understanding, he met only silence or the impatient snarl of an injured lioness.
Eventually he found consolation in the company of his friend Pylades, who had been brought from Phocis to Mycenae in the hope that his companionship might make Orestes’ hours of study less solitary. The two boys had always been fond of one another, but now their imaginations were ignited by the same hopes and dreams. At last Orestes had found someone willing to play Patroclus to his own Achilles; and the cheerful modesty of his friend elicited a greater generosity of spirit from the spoiled prince. The two boys became inseparable. They swore the same oaths of undying love for one another as their heroes had sworn. Secretly they began to sleep in each other’s arms.
Then the news reached Mycenae that both Achilles and Patroclus were dead.
For a time Orestes was inconsolable. Not only did victory seem inconceivable now, but life itself seemed a vain and empty thing. How was it that everything he loved was taken from him? How was it that Achilles could have been slain by treachery while his father – a man he barely knew, who had callously put his own daughter to death – lived on and did nothing with all the power at his command?
Cooler-headed, more pragmatic in temperament, Pylades consoled his friend as best he could. Surely, he said, the best way to honour the shades of their heroes was to become greater heroes still. Together they would make good the loss. Let the war drag on, for soon the two of them must be called to the front. They were the young lions who would carry on the fight. Agamemnon would look on with pride as his son Orestes did what even Achilles had failed to do and led his forces through the Scaean Gate into the very heart of Troy.
Yet before any of that could happen, changes began to take place in Mycenae itself. Pelagon, the court bard who had sung for years of the deeds at Troy, mysteriously died. Familiar figures about the palace were relieved of their posts. Less approachable young men replaced them. Then Aegisthus appeared.
When his father first left for the war, Orestes had been too young to hear a full account of his family’s history, so the name of Aegisthus meant nothing to him. Nor did he take against the man at first. Handsome and charming, the newcomer appeared to be no more than a further addition to his mother’s ever-growing staff of ministers and officials, though one with whom she spent an unusual amount of time closeted in private. Only on the day when he remarked on the man’s lively wit to Pylades, and he saw his friend glance uneasily away, did Orestes become conscious that something might be amiss.
‘What is it?’ Orestes demanded. ‘Don’t you like him?’
Pylades merely shrugged and carried on oiling his bow.
‘I agree he seems a bit full of himself,’ Orestes said, ‘and I resent the way he tries to speak to me sometimes as if he thought he was my father. But he’s better company than those other drones that hang about my mother. I mean, which of them ever stops to pass the time of day with us?’
‘I don’t trust him,’ Pylades muttered almost below his breath.
Orestes blinked in surprise. ‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know.’ And then, two seconds later. ‘I’d rather not say.’
‘What do you mean?’
Pylades flushed. ‘You must have noticed,’ he murmured, ‘how much time he spends alone with your mother.’
‘They work together,’ Orestes countered, but the back of his neck was suddenly hot. He wanted to demand what his friend meant by that mumbled remark but he couldn’t do it without losing his temper. His mind started to lurch as he watched Pylades put more oil onto the kidskin. Could it be that the friend he loved was imputing his mother’s honour? And why would he choose to do that unless he had good reason?
‘I think,’ he said quietly, ‘you had better explain yourself.’
Pylades turned his honest face towards him, ‘Do you trust me?’ he asked.
‘Are we not sworn to one another?’
‘Whatever might happen? Whatever I might say?’
Orestes saw that they were both trembling a little.
‘Now you’re alarming me,’ he gasped.
‘Then perhaps silence is better.’
‘It’s too late for that. Tell me what you know.’
Pylades looked down at his feet. His knuckles were gripped tight about his bow. ‘Do you remember some time ago when you were ill with a fever and you asked me to bring your mother to you? It was quite late one night.’
‘I remember.’
Pylades swallowed before continuing. ‘I went to the Queen’s private apartment and saw her serving-woman Marpessa admitting Aegisthus to her bed-chamber.’
He watched the colours changing in Orestes’ face. He saw the anger rising in his eyes, but he pressed on, forestalling interruption. ‘I withdrew at once, of course, and came back wondering what reason I could give for not bringing your mother with me. Fortunately you’d already fallen asleep so I didn’t have to explain.’
‘Is that all?’ Orestes demanded hotly. ‘What’s so terrible about that? Doesn’t it occur to you that he might have needed to speak to her urgently? Some matter of state business must have come up. Anyway, if Marpessa was there, they weren’t alone. There need have been no wrong in it.’
But his boyish heart was floundering.
‘That’s what I told myself,’ Pylades answered. ‘I would have put it out of my mind but Marpessa must have spotted me leaving the apartment because the next day Aegisthus came up to me and …’ Pylades faltered there. He glanced away from his friend’s fierce regard, uncertain but not abashed.
‘What?’ Orestes demanded.
‘He threatened me.’
‘How? How did he threaten you?’
Still not looking at his friend, Pylades drew in his breath a little shakily before answering. ‘He said that he knew very well what the Queen did not yet know – that you and I have taken to sleeping in each other’s arms. He said that if the Queen got to learn of it I would certainly be sent away from Mycenae.’
‘How?’ Orestes protested. ‘How could he have known that?’
‘He must have spied on us while we slept. He or some minion in his pay. I don’t know, but he said that he would say nothing to the Queen about it so long as I too agreed to say nothing to anyone of what I thought I might have seen. He said that if we failed to reach such an agreement, he and I, then the consequences would be very unpleasant for you.’
‘I’ll kill him,’ Orestes said.
‘I don’t think so,’ his friend answered quietly.
‘I’ll go to the armoury and take a sword and plunge it in his traitor’s heart.’
‘Think about it, Orestes, Even if you got close to him – which I very much doubt – what would your mother do? How would you explain yourself without disgracing her? And who would believe you anyway? Pylades put a hand to his friend’s trembling shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t have said anything, but you asked me and … I don’t know, but there’s something going on in this city that I don’t understand.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why have so many of the old ministers gone from the palace? And haven’t you noticed how hard it’s become for ordinary people to petition the Queen? The whole feel of the place is different. Nobody seems to speak their mind any more. I may be quite wrong about it, but,’ Pylades glanced around to make sure they were still unobserved, ‘the only person I trust right now is you.’
Orestes listened to his friend with growing trepidation, for everything he said corresponded to vague feelings that had crossed his mind without ever becoming clear. Yet the implications were so worrying that his heart jumped about his chest and his mind refused to keep still long enough to think.
Pylades looked up and saw the agitation in Orestes’ face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. But it seems to me that the only thing for us to do is keep our eyes and ears open and our mouths shut till things come clearer.’