This scathing portrayal scarred my illusions badly. I groped for palliation. 'I think you're unjust, sire. War - and farming - is the Hero's way of life. Gentlemen spend moons in practising skill at arms and exercising their bodies.'
'Of course. You can't grab an enemy's armour unless you kill him first. You've got to be good or you don't win loot.'
I reflected dismally on the bitter cynicism clouding Atreus' outlook, so unlike his satirical good-humour before he went to Pylos. He had indeed changed. 'At Megara,' I admitted, 'booty seemed everyone's main object. The Scavengers had different aims.'
'Theban bugger-boys!' the king snorted. 'Uncontrollable fanatics! Tactics based on theirs will lose nine battles out of ten!'
The Scavengers' aggression, control and discipline had won the Battle of Megara. I kept the thought to myself: the king's demeanour discouraged dissent.
'The affair was a shambles,' Atreus continued, 'because spearmen crowded on chariots as they did in Perseus' day. Fatal. Always, when I led the Host, I ordered spears and chariots to manoeuvre as separate bodies. When I saw the enemy I advanced my mobile armour, spearmen in rank a bowshot behind, a reserve of both in the rear. If our chariots broke the enemy line spears followed and exploited. Were the armour repulsed it rallied behind a spearmen screen.1
'Which,' I murmured, 'is the sort of sensible tactic I had in mind. You have never lost a war, so it must have worked.'
'Not once. Directly the chariots began to move the spearmen broke into separate squads which followed their personal lords. Exactly like Megara. They share in the plunder, you see - and nobody in Achaea fights for anything else. It's hard to break a tradition dating from Zeus' time.'
Except the Scavengers. From this depressing discussion was born a resolve to form, whenever the means arrived, a body of disciplined charioteers bent on winning battles before they scrambled for booty.
* * *
I had buried the bits of Clymene's body Thyestes' murderers left. He had sent Stymphalian axemen, men notorious for their pitiless ferocity. (Fifteen years later I burned Stymphalos, slaughtered the men and enslaved the women and children.) I shifted from my ruined house to quarters in the palace, but seldom set eyes on Atreus. He immersed himself in work and travelled extensively, visited Corinth where Heraclid raids had ceased and husbandmen rebuilt burned-out manors; and inspected demesnes he had granted to newly made Heroes. Because he had not appointed a Marshal he personally supervised training on the Field of War, and led a warband to Arcadia to chastise cattle thieves. Curator at heel he scrutinized store rooms, tallied enormous jars of olive oil and corn, checked fleeces, hides and bales, counted sacks of gold and brazen ingots stored in musty basement chambers that contained Mycenae's power, the wealth that she imported and the goods she traded abroad, all centralized in the citadel, directed by the king and inventoried by Scribes.
The bribe delivered to Pylos, Atreus once grumbled on return from probing the treasury, had made somewhat of a hole in the realm's resources. None the less, he conceded, Eurystheus had judged rightly: the gifts and the Marshal's diplomacy persuaded King Neleus to abandon his intention of raiding Mycenaean shores.
'Neleus is failing,' Atreus told me. 'Sixty if he's a day, and the Hercules raid quite broke him up. Nestor, his only surviving son, is running Pylos. He's no chicken, either - twice your age.
Dogmatic and full of bounce, but an intelligent man with unusual ideas. He is rebuilding the palace and citadel on a different site inland on a hill overlooking the bay - and is leaving the place unwalled. Nestor declares that fortifications didn't, save old Pylos from Hercules' destruction; and in future his navy replaces walls.'
'Like Cretans in olden days,' I ventured.
"You know that much history? I suppose you're picking Gelon's brains. Nestor may be right, but Achaeans conquered Crete despite King Minos' ships. A long time ago: Acrisius, I believe, commanded that invasion.
'Pylos,' the king continued, 'can never be allowed to blackmail us again. Far too expensive. So our navy must be more than a match for theirs. I visited Nauplia's yards a fortnight ago and sacked the harbour master - an idle layabout. Now nobody is properly in charge, and I'm sending you to supervise the shipwrights.'
Atreus surveyed the sculpted bulls' horns cresting the palace building - we were sauntering in the Great Court - and added, 'There's another question. Since .. . Thyestes went, Tiryns lacks a Warden. I considered Copreus, my most experienced nobleman, an outstanding warrior, holds a lot of land - and is bent as a bowstave. I need a strong administrator: he'll be responsible both for Tiryns and the whole shipbuilding programme.' (That hesitant reference to Thyestes was the nearest he ever came, until Aerope's end, to mentioning the disgrace that burned him like searing brands.)
Atreus entered the portico and sank on a marble seat. His escort - a Hero guarded the King of Mycenae wherever he went and sentried his chamber at night - leaned against a pillar discreetly beyond earshot. I said, 'You need a Hero who can think - rare enough, I allow - and a Scribe to keep his records.'
'Quite so. You and Gelon. I'm proposing your name to the Council tomorrow. A formality, of course.'
'Your older Heroes will make me a target of jealousy. Is it wise to arouse enmity?'
'Do you care? You're unscrupulous, ruthless and tough, Agamemnon, and one day you'll be king. You'll have enemies in plenty before you've finished: better start learning to cope with them now. You'll take over Tiryns and Nauplia before the old moon sets, so make your preparations.'
(I disagreed, then and afterwards, with Atreus' brisk assessment of my character. All Heroes in these hard times have to be tough to survive, and some are perfidious crooks. I do not believe I am worse than most. A forbearance afflicting my nature - as, for example, tolerating Achilles' tantrums during the Trojan siege - has often proved pernicious. In politics and statecraft - the dirtiest of games - I played the hands as I found them, and who can blame me for that? In war I obeyed the prevailing rule: no mercy for those who resisted - why should I be condemned for behaving as everyone does ? I have come to the conclusion that a frightening reputation rests largely on my appearance: from Atreus I inherited an impressive stature, eagle features, blazing blue eyes and a cruel mouth. And for one who became the most powerful king in all Mycenae's history it was fortunate indeed that very few men - perhaps Menelaus alone - have ever discerned the kindliness a forbidding exterior hides.)
I duly informed Gelon, who was gravely enthusiastic. We strolled the ramparts by the north-west postern and discussed the problems arising from assessing and accounting the revenues of Tiryns: a much more complicated matter than auditing Rhipe's receipts. As for the shipyards, he confessed his inexperience in maritime accounting, hazarded a guess that affairs were in a muddle and asserted a belief we could sort the business out. I confided my scheme of raising a chariot squadron, and asked him whether systematic payments were a feasible alternative to dependence on battle-plunder.
Gelon rested elbows on parapet and gazed across the sun- soaked valley. 'You mean a force of paid professional soldiers ? It has never been done in Achaea, my lord, although his forefathers' - he pointed his chin at Zeus' tomb in the foreground - 'kept a standing army in Egypt.'
I stared, astonished, at the ancient oak tree shading the mound. The usual offerings that peasants deposited - dead doves, small pottery figurines, wheat-cakes - littered the ring of standing slabs. 'Zeus, the first of the Heroes? An Egyptian?'
Gelon looked equally surprised. 'Didn't you know, my lord? Zeus' family certainly came from Egypt, though not of Egyptian breeding.'Leaning on the wall while a sentry paced behind us he related a history I suppose I should have known; but nobody bothered to tell me and, a man of the moment, I seldom delve in antiquity. Moreover I doubt whether many Achaeans outside the Scribal sect learn more of the past than their pedigrees. Four hundred winters ago - for me an unimaginable aeon, to Gelon as but yesterday - a dynasty of foreign kings, sprung from
nomadic shepherds, governed the lands of the Nile until the Egyptians rose and expelled them. Some of them crossed to Crete: the Cretans, a peaceable race, unwisely allowed the refugees to land. They promptly fortified a place called Gortys, which to this day remains the island's only fortified city.
'These exiled kings,' Gelon explained, 'had ruled Egypt from fortresses guarded by monstrous walls and therefore felt uncomfortable without ramparts. The limestone walls which girdle Avaris, their capital in Egypt, soar higher than the tallest in Achaea.'
From Gortys the aliens, within fifty years, captured neighbouring Phaestos, then Malia and Knossos, overran Crete and established rulers in all the cities.
'Impossible!' I protested. 'Cretans can fight if they have to - remember their record at sea.'
'The men from Egypt,' Gelon said, 'brought chariots and horses, both unknown to Cretans. Chariots, my lord, were decisive then, and later in Achaea.'
Towards the end of this period Zeus, grandson of a deposed shepherd king, first saw the light on Mount Dikte where his parents found temporary refuge from a palace uprising in Knossos. ('In fact his name was User,' Gelon interpolated, 'taken from a king in ancient Egypt. Cretan tongues soon twisted the word to Zeus.') He grew to manhood, peerless in war and cunning in counsel, valiant and wise, a paladin and paragon who held all Crete in fee.
Then fire fell from heaven.
An insignificant island called Thera lay a day's sailing northward from Crete. A volcano humped from the island's centre; intermittent earthquakes tumbled houses. (Manifestations of dread Ouranos, who lives in the bowels of the earth, whose name nobody speaks. Indeed to think of him invites disaster. I will hurry on.) On a summer's day three centuries ago an appalling eruption buried Thera under twenty spears' lengths depth of ashes. Successive shocks carved clefts in the crater's sides. Sea gushed into the blazing hollow.
The entire island exploded.
The sound stunned people in distant Colchis, desert dwellers in far Sumeria trembled at the thunder. Masses of molten rock, burning ash and debris whirled to the roof of heaven. Ash and vapour blackened the sky and plunged the world in darkness from Thracia to Egypt - one of many plagues afflicting the country around that time. A poisonous blanket fell on Crete and smouldered three feet deep.
Worst of all were the waves.
The speediest horse ever foaled can gallop just so fast: the waves came four times faster. Walls of water from sunken Thera battered the Cretan coast. They were fifty feet high, so Gelon averred, and utterly engulfed the towns on the northern shores. Blackened, cracked and cloaked in ash, inland Knossos alone survived.
I listened enthralled. A memorial of catastrophe in days beyond man's memory lingered faintly in bardic lays; Gelon told the story as though his eyes had seen it. I said, 'How can you know of happenings which are so remote in time?'
'My ancestors were there, and wrote it down. We have the records still.'
'Ancestors? Are you then of Egyptian or Cretan blood?'
Gelon sniffed. 'Certainly not. Long ago my people, defeated in war and enslaved, were taken into Egypt by the victors. We brought the art of writing, and found employment in the palaces. When the shepherd kings were evicted they carried away their Scribes. Part of my tribe - called Dan in our tongue - arrived in Crete.'
I glanced at his crow-black hair, nutbrown hook-nosed features, the long grey robe all Scribes affect. Undoubtedly he and his fellows, both in character and appearance, seemed different as Phoenicians from the fair-skinned men of Achaea.
'Go on. What happened next?'
King Zeus and his surviving kindred surveyed the ravaged island. A crust of virulent ash blighted the earth. Nothing would grow, the people starved. Zeus decided to cut the ties and begin again in a different country. He salvaged broken ships from the fields where the waves had flung them, scoured the southern harbours which had suffered lesser damage. Embarking all the descendants of those who came from Egypt seventy years before, the Scribes and chariots and horses, he sailed northwards to Achaea.
Simple rustic husbandmen inhabited the land, peaceable and unwarlike, dwelling in open villages. Zeus and his warriors destroyed them like a holocaust. Thousands died, more became slaves; many fled from the fury and sought shelter in the mountains.
'Where their children's children are present-day Goatmen,' I remarked.
'Even so. Implacable enemies, my lord, ever seeking vengeance for the wrongs their forbears suffered. As you well know.'
Before Zeus died, Gelon continued, his followers ruled in Pylos, Elis, Argos, Sparta, Mycenae. Arcadia became a no-man's-land where the old race fought the new. (It remains so in part till now.) They fortified the towns, bred multitudinously over the centuries - 'Achaean families are always large,' Gelon commented wryly - and extended their sway to the realms we know today.
'Zeus died peacefully in bed, and there he lies: Mycenae's earliest king, the founder of your line.' Gelon pointed to the oak-surmounted mound. 'He and Hera his queen, his sons and other relations. All wear masks of beaten gold, their bodies encased in gold and silver. And nowadays' - a tinge of contempt - 'the common people believe him a god.'
'Much to the Daughters' annoyance.' I dredged my memory. 'Haven't I heard of a brother Poseidon, a famous mariner who founded the House of Perseus?'
'He led Achaea's navy three hundred years ago. Pylos claims his grave and the royal line his blood. I think they err in both: our records show him lost at sea while fighting Sicilian pirates. None the less the lower orders worship him in Pylos.'
An ox-cart squealed up the road from the town, laden with jars and hides and cloth - some outlying manor's tribute. Children played 'catch-if-you-can' among the burial ground's stone mounds, their voices muted by distance like mosquitoes whining at dusk. A peasant trickled a handful of corn in the dust of Zeus' Tomb, folded his arms in prayer, seated himself with his back to a slab and drowsed in the oak tree's shade. I said wonderingly, 'So I'm descended from Egypt's kings. You've certainly opened my eyes to the past! The bards sing none of this.'
'The bards!' Derision was plain in Gelon's tone. 'They come to us for history, then embroider and distort. They sing to flatter their patrons; and only in chanting pedigrees which Heroes know by heart do they tell the approximate truth. Even then they often invent to hide unsavoury gaps. If you'll forgive me, my lord ...' Gelon finished in some confusion.
'What do you mean ?'
The Scribe hurriedly disclaimed any reflection on my ancestry which, he swore, the documents traced generation by generation through Pelops back to Zeus. But, he added uncomfortably, the Perseid line was not so well attested. Perseus' mother Danae certainly had no husband: in Argos when her pregnancy grew obvious her angry father, Acrisius, immured her in a watch-tower. Perseus later founded Tiryns and rebuilt Mycenae's crumbling walls. His descendants asserted their distinguished progenitor could not have been misbegotten; so the bards concocted a story that Zeus' ghost raped Danae - when it comes to protecting the blood line the bigger the lie the better.
Gelon quoted similar tales to cover lacunae in noble descents. 'You see, my lord,' he ended apologetically, 'nobody likes bastards dangling like rotten fruit on the family tree.'
'No one does,' I agreed. 'In my own genealogy I've occasionally doubted the line from Zeus to Tantalus. Some odd names....'
'I promise you, my lord,' Gelon said earnestly, 'your line is quite unsullied, each ancestor truly attested. You can see them in our records, if only you could read.'
(Years afterwards, when Gelon became my trusted Curator and friend, he confessed that my lineage from Tantalus back was almost entirely bogus. I laughed and smacked his back; I'd suspected it all along.)
'Which you refuse to teach me,' I smiled, 'because Scribes won't share their skills.'
'We are forbidden. A short-sighted policy. When we and our writings are gone, what will remain to tell Mycenae's splendour, the prowess of her warriors, the mightiness of kings?
I laughed. 'As a man who lives in the present, Gelon, you can't expect me to worry a thousand years ahead. We have idled too long by this sun-warmed wall, and I'd like you to check the stores I am taking to Tiryns.'
Side by side, grey-robed Scribe and kilted, bare-bodied Hero,
we climbed the rubbled path to the palace gate.
* * *
The citadel of Tiryns stands on a jagged mound in the plain within sight of the sea. Walls of tremendous hewn stone blocks rise from natural rock, the mightiest rampart on earth, fifty feet thick and thirty high. The resonant galleries piercing the walls - where Atreus prisoned the Heraclids - lead to magazines and store rooms which are second in the wealth they hold only to Mycenae. On top of the mount the palace buildings stand three storeys tall, plastered and painted white, a beacon for mariners entering Nauplia's harbour. Twisting streets and steep stone steps weave between houses and workshops; and a walled enclosure juts from the northern ramparts: a shelter for refugees in times of danger. Around the hillock's foot homesteads, hovels, shops and byres spread like a mottled apron.
Warriors in Bronze Page 13
