Vengeance at Aulis (The Trojan Murders Book 2)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Still, if she is,’ said Diomedes, ‘there might still be a pattern to discover.’

  ‘I’m not certain I see the logic in that approach,’ said Odysseus. ‘Even if we do find an apparent pattern in these events, it’s still no proof that the Goddess…’

  As Odysseus said this, we passed Oikonomos’ tent. I knew it was the right tent because my frog-faced friend was hopping from foot to foot outside it. ‘Perhaps this would be an opportune moment to have an initial look in Oikonomos’ accommodation,’ I suggested. ‘The body won’t be going anywhere. Not with Elpenor guarding it.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Odysseus. ‘It is an efficient use of our time if nothing else. And the less time I waste on this, the more chance I will have to discover how it all started, whether Agamemnon and Palamedes want me to or not.’

  As Odysseus said this, he stooped to enter the cramped accommodation of the High King’s Chief Steward. Diomedes followed and I followed him. There wasn’t really room for the three of us but at least it was clear immediately that Oikonomos occupied the tent alone. I suspected that his underlings bunked in two, three or even four to a tent. There was a makeshift bed, much like the beds Machaon had in the hospital. Travelling panniers no doubt full of clothes and other necessaries, something amongst which seemed to be giving off a strongly unpleasant smell. A makeshift table with clay tablets on it. The tablets were covered in the sort of marks I had tried to learn while working in one of my father’s storehouses with a record keeper from Pylos. The marks were used to keep basic accounts of supplies whose details were impossible to remember accurately. He said they were called ‘writing’.

  But the thing of most interest lay in the corner of the tent just beyond the bed-foot. It looked at first glance as though Oikonomos had chosen to cover a small bush with a couple of his cloaks and I immediately wondered whether this was some way of drying the garments out. But then I remembered that there had been no rain since the storms were replaced by this sweltering calm.

  These thoughts were fleeting at best, however, for Odysseus reached over and pulled the coverings loose. To reveal the gilded antlers that had once adorned the head of Artemis’ sacred stag.

  7 - The Princess and the Priestess

  i

  Oikonomos lay face-up on Machaon’s table. He was naked, lacking even the usual covering to protect his modesty. His eyes stared sightlessly at the tent-roof, wide with shock and horror. Some philosophers believed that the last thing he had seen was drawn forever there. But we had no need of that final vision, I thought: we knew exactly what the last thing he had seen was. The expression frozen on his face told us all we needed to know about its size and fearsomeness. His mouth gaped as though he was screaming but of course no sound was coming out of it. The fact there had been nothing coming out of it on an earlier occasion was starting to exercise our minds as we discussed how the poor man met his brutal end.

  The flesh of both thighs sagged open from groin to knee, revealing the white sticks of his thigh bones, though the pale columns were smeared with dark blood. The gaping flesh was clotted with it – a mixture of blood and dust from the brick-dry ground. There was a larger smear of the stuff on his right side than there was on his left, which had been repeated more thickly on the tunic Machaon had just finished removing. At least his current position allowed the snakes’ nest of his intestines to remain inside him, contained in the cup formed by the bones of his hips and pubis, even though the muscular wall that normally stood in front of them had been ripped as wide as his thighs. The flesh had been folded down over his genitals like the skirts of a tunic.

  ‘It must have been a fearsome beast to have done this,’ said Machaon. ‘Almost as large as the boar Artemis sent to Calydon. And yet there were no tracks you say?’

  ‘None,’ answered Odysseus. He turned to Ikaros who had been summoned from the High Priestess’ side to add his expertise as a hunter and tracker. But, on Odysseus’ specific order, we had not mentioned the gilded antlers in the dead Chief Stewards’ tent to him, suspecting that the High Priestess might demand their return before we had finished examining them.

  ‘The ground’s too hard,’ said Ikaros now. ‘This weather has set it solid. It’s like rock.’

  ‘And nobody heard anything,’ the physician persisted.

  ‘We heard a pig rooting around in the rubbish mounds,’ I confirmed, glancing across at Diomedes. ‘But I don’t think anyone else heard anything. Or saw anything.’

  Machaon shook his head. ‘If something was doing this to me, I’d be yelling my head off…’

  Without a word, Odysseus gestured to Ikaros and me so the pair of us lifted the dead shoulders. The head rolled back like a surprisingly weighty ball. ‘If you feel the back of his skull,’ said the Captain, reaching over and cupping the thick-haired curve in his hand to show what he meant. Then he nodded to Machaon, stepping back so the other man could feel what he was talking about. When the physician did so he said, ‘That’s quite a bump. You think he was unconscious? Lying down?’

  ‘I’d gone down after putting my spear in my boar’s shoulder. Then it did this to me.’ Odysseus moved his leg so that the long scar running up his thigh came into view. ‘You don’t have to be standing up to get gored.’

  ‘So,’ said Machaon pensively. ‘It surprised him.’

  ‘Charged him down,’ added Diomedes grimly. ‘Winded him and knocked him unconscious when the back of his head hit the rock-hard ground. Then it went to work.’

  It must have been guided by the Goddess, I thought, in revenge for taking the antlers. The boar that had gored Odysseus had been fighting its hunters. But why a boar should just attack a passing stranger without divine prompting was something that exercised my mind. I remained silent, though, as the conversation continued around me.

  ‘But you found him face down,’ said Machaon. ‘He must have come to and turned over.’

  ‘The thicker blood on his right side certainly suggests it,’ said Odysseus and Ikaros nodded his agreement.

  ‘He could only have done that, I assume, after the boar had gone back to the Groves of the Goddess because there are no wounds on his back. Why not call for help then?’

  ‘Maybe it was just too late,’ said Ikaros. ‘Maybe he couldn’t get enough breath. Only the gods know what having your belly torn open like that would do to your ability to breathe, let alone shout. And if the length of the bloodstain is anything to go by, he had almost no time at all. One convulsive heave moved him the length of his legs downhill and that was that.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Odysseus. ‘That must be what happened. One death explained at least. But I’m not going to report back to Agamemnon until I’ve had a chance to think this whole thing through.’ He looked around at us all. ‘We’ll just have to hope that Agamemnon is so caught up in the wedding preparations that he doesn’t bother to keep too close an eye on us and what we’re doing.’

  ‘Because,’ said Diomedes, ‘there’s something going on here that we still haven’t fathomed. Something apart from everything the High King doesn’t want us looking too closely into. Something Palamedes and that murderous little scum Aias with his extra private army of murderers have been told to keep us well away from.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Odysseus. ‘But I’m not quite certain yet who’s giving Aias his orders.’

  ‘Well,’ said Diomedes bracingly. ‘There’s only one way to find that out as far as I can see.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Odysseus, straightening and purposely misunderstanding his friend’s warlike suggestion. ‘We have to go right back to basics and think the whole thing through once more.’

  ***

  ‘So, said Odysseus a little later as full day gathered around Thalassa and Elpenor brought a simple breakfast to us as we talked, allowing the food to share table space with the contents of my bag-full of clues. ‘Let’s look at it right from the beginning – as far as we understand the sequence of events.’ Having said that, he fell silent, pushing the skull
one way, the foreleg another; holding up the two very different arrow-heads and the two equally different knives.

  In the absence of anything immediate from the Captain or Diomedes, I leaped into the breach. The ship’s forecastle had been chosen for our secret deliberations because – unlike Agamemnon’s tent for example - it was almost impossible to spy on. Not even the sharpest ear could hear anything through that sold hull, especially with the rumble of the lazy foam running to and fro along its seaward sides. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Agamemnon and Menelaus arrive here with their armies and are joined by all the greatest kings in Achaea.’

  ‘Or their most trusted offspring,’ added Diomedes. ‘That’s the most powerful gathering of royalty since the suitors for Helen’s hand all got together at Sparta the best part of ten years ago. I was there myself, though I was hardly more than a boy.’

  ‘One of them, we don’t know which,’ I persisted, ‘seems to have asked for Princess Iphigeneia’s hand in marriage. He did so in secret and for some reason that secret has been kept by the widening circle of people who know the truth.’ I looked pointedly at Odysseus, but he appeared to be so deep in thought that he didn’t hear me.

  ‘The weather was bad,’ mused Diomedes, warming to this game of fitting what facts we knew into a story we thought convincing. ‘The army was not yet fully formed or ready. Agamemnon thought that a royal wedding would pass the time in a positive manner. As soon as the proposal of marriage was made, he sent a message to summon Clytemnestra and Iphigenia.’

  ‘In the mean-time,’ I chimed in once more, ‘someone killed both the sacred deer and the young priestess Nephele. Suddenly Artemis was demanding the sacrifice of a child in recompense or she would hold the entire Achaean force here indefinitely. The weather closed down immediately in such a manner that all sorts of people from royalty to soldiery began to give some credence to the messages passed on from the Oracle by the High Priestess.’

  I paused for breath and looked at my pensive audience before I continued. ‘That changed everything. Given those new circumstances, the camp was the last place under Olympus that Agamemnon wanted any child of his to be. So he made plans to send a second message, via Sophos his rhapsode, while the High Priestess asked you, Captain, to find the man who killed the deer and started the curse. The second message he sent to Queen Clytemnestra was inevitably quite long and complicated. There was a lot of explaining to be done in it – which is why he got his rhapsode to learn it off by heart as though it was one of the poet’s songs. When he was satisfied that the rhapsode had the message off exactly as he wanted, he sent him hurrying to Mycenae, believing he had acted in good time to stop his wife and daughter from arriving.’

  ‘Then Agamemnon realised…’ began Diomedes, picking up the thread of the narrative.

  ‘… prompted by Menelaus, I believe,’ I added.

  ‘…that if the man who was unmasked as having killed the stag, and who therefore must sacrifice one of his children, was one of the more powerful kings, it was entirely likely that the guilty king, whoever it was, would at the least take his army home and might even start a civil war here before he gave in to Artemis’ demands. Especially if Agamemnon tried to enforce the Goddess’ ruling. A complete disaster either way.’

  ‘So the High King sent you home, Captain,’ I continued, ‘and used that as an excuse to give the enquiry over to Palamedes who would guarantee the outcome that Agamemnon wanted and keep the High Priestess happy for the moment at least, while the High King in the meantime agreed to get rid of the evidence by holding a feast and eating it.’

  ‘But,’ said Diomedes to Odysseus, ‘your absence also cleared the ground for the Rat and his friends to make sure that our young rhapsode here had not learned too much while he was assisting you. And it had also already given someone the opportunity to stop Agamemnon’s second message getting to Clytemnestra by shooting poor old Sophos the messenger and cutting his throat for good measure.’

  ‘That must have happened some time before the feast,’ I reasoned. ‘Because that was the feast at which I sang my first song and was given the deer’s broken leg to eat. Which prompted me to look further into the matter…’

  ‘… and put him at the top of the Rat’s murder list,’ concluded Diomedes. ‘Someone, probably not the High King but probably whoever was in ultimate charge of the Rat, sent him an easily-identifiable dagger as a gift for singing such a good song. The dagger allowed the Rat and his friends to identify him all too easily. I had no idea that being a rhapsode was such a dangerous calling. Please don’t ask me to look after any more rhapsodes, Odysseus. Never. Not ever.’

  Odysseus stirred. He gave a brief smile. ‘It seems the lad was under the protection of the Goddess in any case,’ he observed. ‘The first would-be murderer crushed by a bear sacred to Artemis, the Rat finally killed by a viper sacred to Artemis. If Oikonomos had presented the boy with any kind of a threat, the boar would have made it three animals watching out for him, all of them sacred to Artemis.’

  ii

  ‘I don’t know if Ikaros counts as one of the Goddess’ creatures,’ I added, ‘but it was his slingshot that saved me when the Rat was just about to kill me with the dagger that cut poor Sophos’ throat – and nearly took his head into the bargain.’

  ‘It is certain that Sophos was the man carrying the second message to Queen Clytemnestra and that message contradicted the first, commanding her to stay in Mycenae and keep the Princess safe,’ said Diomedes. ‘Surely we can judge this from Agamemnon’s surprise when she appeared. Everything he has done since her arrival has been unplanned reaction to one crisis after another. Which is why, despite his bitter words about your fleet’s non-arrival, the High King is actually relieved you have returned, Odysseus. He is still, clearly, chary about unmasking the man who killed the stag but he very much does want to know who killed his rhapsode and his chief steward.’

  Odysseus grunted. ‘You see what you’ve done there?’ He asked. ‘You’ve linked a death which was obviously a murder with one that is an apparently random animal attack.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘If Oikonomos’ death is linked to any other deaths it must be linked to the Rat’s and his friend who was killed by the bear.’

  ‘By the hand of the Goddess,’ said Odysseus. ‘As suggested by the fact that he was in possession of her sacred stag’s gilded antlers when he died. Yes, you’re right.’ He stirred himself and demanded abruptly, apparently a propos of nothing, ‘I wonder have all the bodies been burned or buried yet.’

  ‘Well, if you’re thinking of starting with the first one, you’d better hurry,’ said Diomedes. ‘And if you’re planning to go up to the Temple, this is where our ways part.’

  Diomedes had his duties as senior of the three commanders in charge of the four-thousand-man Argive army, and these pulled him away for the rest of the morning while Odysseus and I went to Aulis with Elpenor who put the Ithacan stallions to Odysseus’ chariot and drove us up to the Temple. At first the temple precinct seemed deserted. ‘Good,’ said Odysseus. ‘I want to poke around a little.’ We left Elpenor holding the horses’ heads and walked towards the rear of the temple building. We had never had the opportunity to explore this far before and I was surprised at how abruptly the hillsides stepped up back here. There was a steep slope leading up to a plateau level with the temple’s roof where a pyre was being busily erected – which explained the lack of acolytes and priestesses down here. But behind and above this there was another, higher level. On this, an impressive-looking altar was under construction with a familiar figure in charge of the work. ‘Is that Kalkhas?’ I asked the Captain, squinting to get a clearer view.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is.’

  ‘It is good to see you have returned from Ithaka,’ said a familiar voice immediately behind us, ‘though of course Ikaros informed me you were back. And you fell in with Queen Clytemnestra on the way. A lucky coincidence…’

  ‘Unless it was once again the hand of the Goddess,’ said
Odysseus, turning back to face the High Priestess.

  ‘Quite,’ said Karpathia. ‘You never know. Now, what can the servants of Artemis do for you?’

  ‘I would like to see poor Nephele if such a thing is possible such a long time after her death.’

  ‘It is possible. She is in the cold room beneath the temple, undergoing the final rituals before holy fire transports her anima to the arms of the Goddess herself.’ She gestured up towards the funeral pyre. ‘A ceremony that is conducted on the first night that the new moon appears in the sky, when just the faintest bow of light can be seen as proof that Artemis the Huntress is at her closest to the earth.’

  Odysseus was courteously careful not to point out that Artemis appeared to have a habit of wandering around Aulis and its environs no matter what phase the moon was at. Then Karpathia herself led us off the hill slopes, through the temple and down into an icy vault beneath it, her determined footsteps ringing on the marble floor as we approached the place. There we found the dead priestess lit by a range of lamps, surrounded by increasingly impenetrable shadows. The golden brightness revealed her to be in a surprising state of preservation – though to be fair all we could see of her was the vague shape of her body beneath a sheet of fine white cloth and her face, which was only visible when an equally fine veil was lifted aside. The poor girl’s final expression was one of restful peace. Ointments and potions far beyond my reckoning had been used to bring a faint blush to her cheeks and a lifelike colour to her lips. Her hair was neatly bound in braids secured with ribbons as though she was being prepared for a festival rather than her funeral. Her eyes were closed. I had expected the room to smell of death. It smelt of lavender and rosemary. And of something else – a powerful and quite disgusting smell that was the faintest trace in the background. I knew it but could not identify it. Then Odysseus said quietly, ‘Come out into the light, Ikaros. There is no need to be shy - standing guard over the priestess must be a task which honours you as well as her.’