The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  As with all mysteries, the true nature of the shore women’s rites can be comprehended only by those who undergo them, so I can tell only what Odysseus told me of the account Peleus gave him of his first encounter with Thetis. It took place on a small island off the coast of Thessaly. Cheiron had advised him that his daughter was often carried across the strait on a dolphin s back. If Peleus concealed himself among the rocks, Thetis might be caught sleeping at mid-day in a sea-cave on the strand.

  Following his mentor’s instructions, Peleus crossed to the island, took cover behind a myrtle bush, and waited till the sun rose to its zenith. Then all his senses were ravished as he watched Thetis gliding towards the shore in the rainbow spume of spindrift blowing off the back of the dolphin she rode. Naked and glistening in the salt-light, she dismounted in the surf and waded ashore. He followed her at a distance, keeping out of sight, till she entered the narrow mouth of a sea-cave to shelter from the noonday sun.

  Once sure she was asleep, he made his prayer to Zeus, lay down over her and clasped her body in a firm embrace. Thetis started awake at his touch, alarmed to find her limbs pinioned in the grip of a man. Immediately her body burst into flame. A torrent of fire licked round Peleus’s arms, scorching his flesh and threatening to set his hair alight, but Cheiron had warned him that the nymph had acquired her sea-father’s power of shape-shifting, and that he must not loosen his hold for a moment whatever dangerous form she took. So he grasped the figure of flame more tightly as Thetis writhed beneath him and took him on a fierce dance that wrestled him through all the elements.

  When she saw that fire had failed to throw him, the nymph again changed shape. Peleus found himself floundering breathlessly as he clutched at the weight of water in a falling wave. His ears and lungs felt as though they were about to burst, but still he held on until the waters vanished and the hot maw of a ferocious lion was snarling up at him, only to be displaced in turn by a fanged serpent that hissed and twisted round him, viciously resisting his embrace. Then, under his exhausted gaze, the serpent took the shape of a giant cuttlefish, which sprayed a sticky gush of sepia ink over his face and body. Already burnt, half-drowned, mauled by fangs and talons, and almost blinded by the ink, Peleus was on the point of releasing his prize, when Thetis suddenly yielded to this resolute mortal who had withstood all her powers.

  Gasping and breathless, Peleus looked down, saw the nymph resume her own beautiful form, and felt her body soften in his embrace. The embrace became more urgent and tender, and in the hour of passion that followed, the seed of their first son was sown.

  The wedding-feast of Peleus and Thetis was celebrated at the full moon outside King Cheiron’s cave in the high crags of Mount Pelion. It was the last occasion in the history of the world when all twelve immortal gods came down from Mount Olympus together to mingle happily with mortal men. A dozen golden thrones were set up for them on either side of the bride and groom. Sky-Father Zeus himself gave away the bride, and it was his wife Hera who lifted the bridal torch. The Three Fates attended the ceremony, and the Muses came to chant the nuptial hymns, while the fifty daughters of the sea-god Nereus twisted their line about the gorge in a spiral dance of celebration.

  As their gift to Peleus, the Olympian gods presented him with a suit of armour made of shining gold, together with two immortal horses sired by the West Wind. King Cheiron gave the groom a matchless hunting spear, the head of which had been wrought by the lame god Hephaestus in his forge, while its ash-wood shaft had been cut and polished by the hands of Divine Athena. With the whole remaining tribe of Centaurs gathered in garlands for the occasion, and all the other revellers carousing on nectar served by Zeus’s cup-bearer Ganymede, everyone agreed that there had been no more joyful marriage-feast since the Olympians had honoured the wedding of Cadmus and Harmony with their presence many years before.

  Yet alone among the immortal gods, Eris had not been invited. Her name means Strife or Discord, and she is twin-sister to the war god Ares. Like him she delights in the fury and tumult of human conflict. It is Eris who stirs up trouble in the world by spreading rumours. She takes particular pleasure in the use of malicious gossip to create envy and jealousy, and for that reason none of the gods and goddesses other than her brother cares to have too much to do with her. For that same reason her name had been omitted from the list of guests at the wedding-feast of Peleus and Thetis. Yet all of the immortals have their place in the world and we ignore any of them at our peril.

  Furious and slighted that she alone among the immortals had not been invited, Eris looked on at the festivities from the shadows of a nearby grove, waiting for the right moment to take her revenge. That moment came as Hera, Athene and Aphrodite were congratulating Peleus. The groom’s eye was caught by a flash of light as something rolled towards him across the ground. All three of the goddesses exclaimed in wonder when he picked up a golden apple that lay glistening at his feet. With their curiosity excited by the goddesses’ cries of delight, other guests quickly gathered round. Only Cheiron, to his dismay, saw the figure of Eris in her chequered robe slip away into the trees.

  ‘Look’, Peleus exclaimed, ‘there’s an inscription here.’ Holding the apple to catch the light, he read aloud, ‘To the Fairest.’ He turned to appraise the three goddesses standing beside him, and his smile instantly faded with the realization that he could not give the apple to any one of them without immediately offending the others.

  ‘But I’m surrounded by beauty,’ he prevaricated. ‘This riddle is too hard.’

  Aphrodite smiled at him. ‘To the Fairest, you say? Then there’s no difficulty. The apple must be meant for me.’ The goddess was holding out her hand to take it when Hera said that as wife to Zeus, Lord of Olympus, there could hardly be any doubt that the apple should be hers.

  ‘There is every possibility of doubt,’ Athena put in. ‘Any discriminating judge would agree that my claim to the apple is as strong as either of yours -- if not a good deal stronger.’

  Aphrodite laughed, dismissing Athena’s claim as ridiculous. Who would look twice, she asked, at a goddess who insisted on wearing a helmet even to a wedding? Smiling in reparation, she conceded that Athena might be wiser than she was, and there was no doubting Hera’s matronly virtue, but if beauty was the issue, then she had the advantage over both of them. Again, sidling closer to Peleus who stood in a consternation, wondering how he had got into this quandary and how to get out of it again, she held out her hand.

  ‘Can’t you see you’re embarrassing our host, flaunting yourself like that with his bride looking on?’ Athena protested. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll learn that true beauty is also modest.’

  Sensing the imminence of an unseemly quarrel, Hera intervened, warning her divine sisters to restrain themselves. Then she smiled at Peleus and suggested that it would be best to settle the matter quickly by giving the apple to her. At which both the other goddesses turned on her, each clamouring to be heard over the other until all three were tangled in a rancorous exchange. The Muses faltered in their song, the Nereids ceased their dance, a nervous silence fell across the Centaurs, and the bride and groom looked on in dismay as the dispute became ever more acrimonious.

  Hera spoke sharply above the others. ‘If you two won’t see reason, there’s only one way to resolve the matter -- Zeus must decide.’ But neither of the others was about to accept that solution, nor did Almighty Zeus show any enthusiasm for it. Though he’d been drinking nectar all afternoon, he remained too astute to put himself in a position where his life would be made miserable by his wife if he was honest, or by two resentful goddesses if he was not. Hoping the row would peter out, he turned away. Only moments later, netted in a trance of rage, all three contenders began hurling insults at each other.

  ‘Enough!’ bellowed Zeus in a voice that briefly silenced everyone. ‘If it’s golden apples you want, all three of you can have a whole orchard of them any time you like.’

  ‘It’s not the apple!’ Hera answered hotly. ‘None
of us cares about the apple!’

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ Athena agreed.

  ‘Then why are you embarrassing us all like this?’ Zeus demanded. When no immediate answer came, he said it was time the goddesses remembered who they were and where they were. They should stop this bickering and sit down and enjoy themselves, so that everyone else could do the same. Again he tried to turn away but Aphrodite widened her eyes, protesting that the dispute was a matter of simple justice. She wasn’t about to let some pretender lay claim to a title that everyone knew was rightly hers.

  Sensing that her husband might be wavering, Hera hissed, ‘Don’t you dare take any notice of that mindless bitch.’

  ‘And you shouldn’t let your wife push you around,’ Athena put in, ‘not if you expect anyone ever to respect your judgement again.’

  At which point Zeus shouted that he was damned if he would choose between them. Looking around in embarrassment, he turned back to the goddesses and said more quietly that, in his opinion, they were all beautiful. All three of them. Each in her own inimitable way. They should forget the apple and let that be an end to it.

  ‘Things have gone too far for that,’ said Hera. ‘We demand a decision.’

  Zeus met his wife’s eyes with gloomy displeasure. For all his might, he could see no way of resolving this argument without causing endless resentment on Olympus. Yet when he shifted his gaze, it was only to see the assembled mortals staring at him, aghast and bewildered. Part of him already begrudged having ceded a nymph as beautiful as Thetis to a mere human. Now he was thinking that this trouble had come from mixing up the affairs of mortals and immortals, and when he caught himself thinking that way, he realized that Eris must be at the back of this quarrel and, if that was the case, there could be no reasonable solution. But the harm was done and he couldn’t yet see how to undo it. Neither could he allow this disgraceful performance to carry on in front of mortal eyes.

  ‘My decision,’ he said at last, ‘is that we shall return to Olympus immediately, and leave these good people to their feast.’

  Moments later the immortals were back among the clouds on high Olympus. But when it quickly became clear that Zeus was still not prepared to make a judgement, the goddesses resumed their argument with uninhibited vehemence and no sign of a solution.

  Meanwhile, having begun so joyfully, the wedding feast faltered to a dismal end. Thunderheads had been building over Pelion for some time and the gods had vanished in a livid flap of lightning. Now came the rain, and people ran for shelter, slipping among the rocks and stumbling about as though the storm had wrecked all expectations of peace and order in the world. As soon as the downpour eased, they made their apologies and dispersed back down the mountainside to their comfortable lives in the cities of the plain.

  Dismayed that Sky Father Zeus had not been able to contain the fractious energy of the goddesses, Cheiron withdrew gloomily to his cave. The last time his Centaurs had attended a wedding-feast they had been depraved by wine and then hunted down like wolves. That had been the fault of men; but now it seemed even the gods had lost their senses. With the world so out of joint he decided that his people would keep to themselves from now on. If Peleus and his friends wanted to send their sons to be educated in the mountains, he would care for them, instruct them in music and the healing arts, and do what he could to set them on the path of wisdom. But with the gods at loggerheads, and most men’s hearts no longer content with a simple, wilderness life such as he and his people led, he saw only dark omens for the future.

  The years passed and things did not go well with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. However uneasily, the couple had tried to laugh off the dismal fiasco of their wedding day, but it wasn’t long before Peleus woke up to the fact that he knew almost nothing about his wife.

  For a time, out there on the mountain, he had come to believe he might be happy once again. Exhilarated by his passionate encounter with Thetis, he began to be sure of it. They would make a good life together, raising children in the clear air of the mountains, far away from the ambitions and duplicity of the courtly world. But Thetis was a creature of the shore. She loved the salt-wind off the sea, the surge of a dolphin’s back beneath her, the moonlit rush of surf, the smell of sea-wrack, the way the shingle tugged between her toes, and the marble world of rock pools. Up there in the mountains, she felt stranded. She pined for the long strands of sand and the sound of the sea, or raged with disgust and frustration at the horsy smell of the Centaur people and their stubborn, earth-bound ways. Having quarrelled with her father, and offended his chief tribesmen, she made it clear to Peleus that though they had been consigned to each other by Zeus himself, if he kept her in that gloomy mountain gorge against her will she would, quite simply, die.

  Peleus already had a dead brother and a dead bride on his conscience. The first had been named for a seal and had also loved the sea. The second had hanged herself because instead of staying at her side, he had gone chasing a wild boar in the Calydonian hills and killed her brother. The thought of another such death was more than he could bear. So he had already made up his mind that they would have to leave the mountain by the end of the summer, when a rider came looking for him out of Thessaly.

  He brought the news that King Actor, who had never recovered from the loss of his son and his daughter, was now dead. The Myrmidons -- those implacable soldier-ants of Thessaly -- were now leaderless, and the messenger had been sent to ask Peleus to return and take up his rightful heritage as Actor’s heir. He could be sure of a warm welcome, for some of the Myrmidons had been on the Calydonian boar-hunt and knew that Eurytion’s death was an accident. Moreover the wife of Acastus had gone mad and had been heard boasting crazily that she was responsible for Polymela s suicide. In these circumstances, Peleus’s right to rule would go unquestioned.

  Here was a god-given answer to his problems. Both duty to his people and concern for his wife required him to leave the mountain. He would move the royal court from Athena’s sanctuary in the inland city of Itonus down to one of the coastal strongholds. His wife would soon have the sound of the sea in her ears again. Thetis would be happy there.

  Immediately Peleus set about making preparations for his return. Solemnly he said his farewells to the friends he had made among the Centaur people, promising that he would not forget them and that they would be welcomed as guests in his house should they ever want to come. Then he spent a long time alone with Cheiron, up on a windy shelf of rock high above the gorge, from where they could look out across all the summits of Thessaly and Magnesia to the eastern sea beyond. An eagle scaled the blue spaces about their heads. Everything else felt still and ancient round them. They were almost outside time up there, and watching the wind blow among the white locks of the old king’s hair, Peleus knew that Cheiron was looking deeper into the heart of things than words could reach. And his own heart too was lost for speech -- not because there was nothing to say but because there was too much. Yet in the silence of the mountain it felt as though it went understood.

  After a time, Cheiron turned to look at him. ‘You will do what you can for my people when I am gone?’

  ‘It goes without saying. But you Centaurs live long. I think you have many years in you yet.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Cheiron turned his face back to the wind. ‘But my daughter,’ he sighed. ‘When I first spoke of her, I did not understand that she has immortal longings. A man will find it hard to live with that.’

  Peleus frowned at the thought, and then made light of it. ‘I’m not easy to live with myself. And Thetis will be content when we are by the sea.’

  Again the Centaur said, ‘Perhaps.’

  The eagle glided high above them now, its pinions bent like a bow against the wind. Cheiron stared up at the way that strong span gleamed in flawless sunlight. Quietly he said, ‘Remember that your son will be greater than you. Try not to resent him for it.’

  ‘I shan’t -- because it will be your blood that makes him so. When he is o
f age I will send him to you.’

  Cheiron nodded his old head. ‘Then I shall live for that.’

  Yet Thetis fell pregnant six times in the following years and each time she came to term, but not one of the infants lived for more than a week or two.

  At each small death, Peleus found the sadness harder to bear, and all the more so because it was his wife’s custom to withdraw to a sanctuary of the shore people between the start of her labour and the day when she hoped to present a living child to the world. When Peleus asked the reason for this practice, she told him it was a woman’s mystery and not to be questioned.

  Yet she returned each time, pallid and drawn, as if hollowed out by failure.

  But she would say nothing more, so Peleus harboured his grief and returned to giving judgement in the world of men, and they lived a life that became ever more fraught with the silence that was left between them.

  After the loss of the third child, he argued more strongly that it would be wise for them to consult her father who was more renowned for his medical knowledge than almost any man alive. But Thetis would not hear of it. She was a woman, she said, not a sick mare, and she wanted no truck with his mountain magic. Her trust was in her own understanding of these things as a sea-priestess to the moon-mother. In any case, had it not been prophesied that her son would be a stronger man than his father? Any child of hers that was not strong enough to survive the trials of birth had no place on the earth. He should not mourn them so.

  Her ferocity astounded him, but he put it down in part to an effort to mask her own sorrow, and in part to the influence of the Dolopian priestess who was his wife’s constant companion. A small, intense woman with deep-set eyes and a strawberry-birth mark shaped like a sea-horse on her neck, her name was Harpale. Thetis honoured her as a kinswoman, one of her mother’s people, and she had begged Harpale to stay with her at the court of Peleus rather than joining her clan’s recent migration to the island of Skyros.