The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Then Palamedes said, ‘So when can we expect to see them?’ Again Dromeus smiled. ‘This is, as you acknowledge, a generous commitment. You will not be surprised, therefore, that it comes attended by a condition.’

  Lifted by a breeze gusting from a courtyard down the hill, the distant shout of an officer haranguing his men entered the room. With an irritable flick of his hand Agamemnon shooed a fly that was buzzing about his ear. ‘What condition?’

  ‘That as leader of so large a force King Idomeneus should share supreme command of all the allied forces.’

  Telamon’s son, Ajax, an open-faced, broad-chested fellow with a frank manner, was the first to break the silence. He gave a derisive snort, slapped a hand across a sturdy thigh and said, ‘The crown has gone to your new king’s head! Go home and tell him that we already have the only leader we need.’

  Still smiling, Dromeus fingered the curls of his beard and turned his gaze back to Agamemnon. ‘I might point out,’ he said, ‘that Crete’s hundred vessels are equalled in number only by the large squadron that the High King himself has brought out of Mycenae. Our ships are ready to sail. They await only your word.’

  The stern young face of Achilles was also waiting for that word. Agamemnon did not miss the quick sideways glance directed by Patroclus at his friend, but the cool, intimidating scrutiny of Achilles’ gaze remained fixed directly on the king’s frown, waiting to see how he would react.

  Feeling the immediate need for decision, yet flustered by this unforeseen development, Agamemnon was, in those tense moments, listening for the advice of a god. When no voice entered the silence of his mind, he decided that though a hundred ships meant a great deal to him, his honour and authority meant a great deal more.

  He was about to declare as much when Nestor straightened from where he had leaned to hear Odysseus whisper in his ear. ‘Perhaps’ -- the old man cleared his throat -- ‘perhaps it might be wise for the council to deliberate upon this matter?’

  Taken aback, Agamemnon observed Nestor’s insistent nod. ‘My own thought precisely,’ he said. ‘If the Cretan legate will excuse us . . .’

  Bowing courteously to each of the counsellors, Dromeus backed out of the room, leaving a musky trace of perfume on the air.

  As soon as the door had closed behind him, Ajax said, ‘What is this whispering about? The High King is our commander. He has all the fighting force he needs.’

  ‘Bear with me, friend,’ Odysseus smiled, and would have said more but Palamedes intervened. ‘This matter requires careful thought. Crete promises more than eight times the number of ships that Salamis could muster.’

  ‘But at what price?’ demanded Ajax. ‘Any fool knows that a divided leadership can only spell trouble in the end.’

  ‘I stand with Ajax,’ declared Diomedes. ‘It seems to me there’s nothing to discuss. Like most of us here, Idomeneus was sworn to our cause at Sparta. A man doesn’t make conditions when he swears before a god.’

  Fortified to find his own instincts strengthened by such unqualified support, Agamemnon said, ‘There’s already too much scope for division in our forces. A hundred ships more or less will make no great difference to our strength. I’d rather do without them than lose control of the rest. If Idomeneus won’t bow to our authority then let him stay at home.’

  ‘Good,’ said Odysseus. ‘The only hard part being that’s not what he will do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ajax frowned.

  ‘You heard what Dromeus said. His ships are ready to sail. If Idomeneus has scoured his island to mount such a considerable fleet, he’s not about to let it rot in port at Knossos.’ Odysseus turned his ironical smile on Agamemnon ‘A hundred more warships may not count for much in your reckoning, King of Men, but I’ve no doubt that Priam will welcome them with open arms.’

  Ajax uttered an outraged gasp of dismay. Menelaus began to shake his head. ‘Idomeneus was among the first to swear. I don’t believe he would betray us.’

  Odysseus shrugged. ‘Is it unknown for Cretans to break their word?’

  ‘But the man’s my friend,’ Menelaus protested. Then he saw that every man in the room was thinking the same bleak thought: that the open-hearted, younger son of Atreus had not proved to be the wisest judge of friends.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Nestor dispelled the fraught silence, ‘it seems that Deucalion’s son has ambitions for his kingdom. Evidently he hasn’t forgotten that there was a time when Crete ruled the seas and took tribute from many of our cities. With Troy’s help it’s possible that she might do so again.’

  Diomedes said, ‘Then what would he have to gain from joining us?’

  ‘A large share of the spoils of Troy,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Unrestricted access to her trade routes through the Hellespont and around the Asian coast -- gold, silver, grain, cinnabar, timber, amber, jade. All of this, along with recognition of his independent authority by every kingdom in Argos.’

  ‘My friend Menestheus won’t care for that,’ said Palamedes. Odysseus made a dismissive gesture. ‘Then the Lord of Athens should have kept as tight a rein on his vassal as his predecessor did.’

  Agamemnon grunted and sat back in his chair. ‘Crete was on the rise again even before Theseus leapt from the cliff on Skyros. Idomeneus merely has more ambition than his father.’

  ‘And more courage,’ Menelaus put in.

  Diomedes frowned. ‘The more shame that his courage is not matched by his honour. I took him for a true man at Sparta, and a worthy contender for Helen.’

  ‘But the question remains,’ Odysseus insisted. ‘Do we want his ten thousand Cretan spearmen inside our tents pissing out or outside them pissing in?’

  A hint of a smile briefly crossed the face of Achilles. Agamemnon caught it from the corner of his eye, and decided that the time had come to confront this arrogant young blood directly. ‘The son of Peleus seems amused. What are his thoughts on this question, I wonder?’

  ‘That it is a matter of indifference to me,’ Achilles said. Agamemnon frowned. ‘How so?’

  ‘With all due reverence to the gods, my trust is in my own strength and that of my friend.’ Achilles smiled at Patroclus. ‘Whether the Cretans are for us or against us, we will fight.’

  ‘So will we all,’ said Ajax. ‘But who will lead? My obedience is to Agamemnon.’

  ‘And mine,’ Diomedes concurred.

  Nestor rubbed a hand through the silvery-white curls of hair at the back of his head. ‘Yet Idomeneus awaits an answer. I for one am wondering whether it may not be prudent to have his forces at our side.’ He turned his grave eyes to Odysseus, who nodded and said, ‘This war will have to be won at sea before it can be won on land. A hundred ships either way could make all the difference.’

  Agamemnon stared at Palamedes, who said quietly, ‘I agree with that judgement,’ and glanced away across the table, where Menelaus fidgeted with the heavy gold signet ring that Helen had given him on their wedding day. He was frowning gloomily down at the rampant pair of leopards on its bezel when Palamedes asked, ‘What does the King of Sparta say?’

  The younger son of Atreus glanced uncertainly at the elder before answering. ‘As I said before,’ he murmured hoarsely, ‘I consider Idomeneus to be my friend. I believe he will prove a valuable ally.’ He fingered the ring which slipped loosely around his knuckle. Then he said, ‘This thing is for my brother to decide.’

  Again Agamemnon shifted in his chair, trying to gauge the feeling in the room. His face had reddened and his eyes were on the move, avoiding the silent faces round him, yet finding nowhere sure to settle. This was the first occasion since he had committed himself to this war when he knew he was faced with a decision on which the whole dangerous enterprise might turn. Yet which way to lean? Every muscle of his body insisted that he retain absolute control. Control over the forces he had gathered, control over this council, control over himself. And the two men in the room with whom he felt most at ease fully expected him to do so. But Ajax and Diomedes were men o
f action, not of thought. And the same was true of Achilles and Patroclus, young men both, driven by an invincible confidence in their own strength and prowess. Neither of them, he suspected, would hesitate for a moment. They would go down fighting sooner than yield an inch in pride. That was the warrior’s way, the way of men, and he was Agamemnon, King of Men. But there was more to waging war than blood and fear and mindless valour amid the clash of chariots, and if shrewd old Nestor and that cunning thinker out of Euboea agreed with Odysseus on this, then more might be at stake than pride.

  Agamemnon sat with his hand across his mouth, regretting that he had exposed his own position too soon. Were he to change his mind now, lie might appear weak before those who most respected him. Yet if they were wrong ... A hundred more ships . . . ten thousand more men ... on one side or the other. He saw his whole proud fleet in flames around him and a Cretan pentakonter bearing down on his flagship with a gryphon at its prow and the double axe painted on its sail. An error made now might prove costly indeed when his ships were at sea.

  But he could not vacillate for long under the impatient gaze of Achilles.

  He was summoning the will to speak when Odysseus leaned back with a mildly incredulous air and said, ‘Do I speak only for myself when I say that if there was disagreement between Idomeneus and Agamemnon, I would know where my own loyalty belonged?’

  And before either of them had fully taken in the implications of the question, both Ajax and Diomedes, at whom his challenge was directed, had declared that he was certainly not speaking for himself alone.

  Odysseus arched his brows at Agamemnon and opened his hands. ‘It seems that we’re in agreement then.’

  Agamemnon narrowed his eyes and saw that a door had opened on his dilemma. ‘Very well. On that clear understanding, let the Cretans come.’

  But the Lion of Mycenae was feeling the full weight of the burden of command, even in the very moment when he was about to relinquish half of it.

  Nor was he to know that Odysseus had no particular reason to mistrust the intentions of Idomeneus. But as the Ithacan said to his cousin Sinon afterwards when telling him how the meeting had gone, ‘We need those Cretan ships and how else was I to persuade Agamemnon to give up half his command?’

  As to whether or not divine assistance might be required, Agamemnon was more inclined to agree with Odysseus than Ajax, so he had set aside the day before the fleet was due to sail for prayer and acts of sacrifice to the gods.

  All the principal commanders and their men assembled outside the town in a hollow where a thick-girthed plane tree, sacred to Hera, had stood for centuries. An altar had been raised in the shade of the tree beside a nearby spring. The priests invoked the almighty power of Sky-Father Zeus, and Calchas prayed for the wisdom and guidance of Apollo. Then Agamemnon offered the sacrifice.

  He had just raised the knife from the kill when all the men standing in the hollow were amazed to see a huge snake slither out from under the altar. Agamemnon stepped back in shock, gazing down at the scarlet markings streaked along the mottled black scales of the creature’s back. With astonishing speed, the snake writhed its long body towards the trunk of the plane tree and began to climb.

  Calchas moved quickly from where he had been standing a little behind Agamemnon to observe the behaviour of the snake. He watched it make its way along a high bough to where a sparrow had made its nest. Though the mother-bird rose, fluttering her wings in alarm, she was quite powerless against the muscular strike of the great snake. Eight times it dipped its jaws into the nest, snatching out a fledgling sparrow at each strike. Then it raised its head upright, swayed for a time, watching the flight of the panic-stricken mother-bird. A last swift strike caught the sparrow by the wing and swallowed it whole. A moment later the snake stretched itself out along the bough and lay there so stiff and rigid that men later swore that it had been turned to stone.

  A murmur of wonder and alarm ran through the assembled men.

  Agamemnon stood with the sacrificial knife still dripping in his hand, looking to Calchas who threw the flat of his right hand to his forehead, cried out, ‘We accept the oracle,’ and stood with his eyes closed.

  Silence settled across the glade. Not a man moved. Only the plane tree stirred a little in the breeze off the sea. Then Calchas lowered his hand, opened his eyes and smiled at the hundreds of men gazing at him with rapt attention. ‘Argives,’ he cried, ‘the mighty intelligence of Zeus himself sends you this portent. We have waited long for it, and will have to wait long for its fulfilment, but the glory promised here will never die.’

  Still dismayed by the shock, Agamemnon took encouragement from his words. ‘Tell us, Calchas,’ he said, ‘how do you read the omen?’

  ‘Does a serpent not renew its skin each year?’ said Calchas. ‘And are the leaves of the plane tree not reborn with every year that passes? Eight was the number of the fledglings in the nest. Their mother sparrow made the ninth, and the death of each bird speaks of the passing of a year. The sparrow is one of Aphrodite’s creatures and Aphrodite fights for Troy. So for nine years you must fight to take Troy, but in the tenth year her broad streets will be yours.’

  The priest’s voice was exultant. He threw open his arms, gazed skywards, and then stood with his eyes closed as though in silent prayer. Around him the assembled men waited in silence, each locked in his own thoughts.

  Agamemnon saw at once that more was needed. ‘It is the will of Zeus,’ he shouted. ‘The god has spoken. Victory will be ours.’ Then Menelaus and Ajax were quickly at his side taking up the shout, urging others on. Soon the hollow was loud with the cry of ‘Victory will be ours’. It rose from the throng again and again, but as he joined the shouting, Palamedes, the prince of Euboea, became uncomfortably aware that only a few yards away across the glade, Odysseus of Ithaca was studying him with a cold, ironical regard.

  The next day, to the accompaniment of a peal of thunder which was generally interpreted as a sign of encouragement from Zeus, the fleet set sail for Troy.

  Two generations have passed since that day and many men have told the stories of the war many times. But memories grow confused with the passing of the years, so not all of the stories are reliable, and some chroniclers, for reasons that serve their own doubtful ends, have been known to tell downright lies. My own authority is the word of Odysseus, which I have found to be trustworthy in almost all respects, and he was quick to dismiss as nonsense the story put about by some that the fleet got lost almost immediately and made landfall in Mysia, where they launched a major assault, thinking that they had reached the coast of Troy.

  Those who believe this fable offer divine intervention in explanation of the error. They claim that Aphrodite confused the navigators in order to stave off the attack on the city. But as Odysseus pointed out, Agamemnon was well-furnished with charts, Menelaus himself had already made a voyage to Troy without difficulty, and some of the most experienced rovers of the Ionian, Cretan and Aegean seas were among the captains of the Argive fleet. Odysseus was not the only prince who supplemented his wealth by piracy, and among his many other pursuits, Palamedes took a particular interest in the problems of navigation. So the story is most charitably understood as a muddled memory of a war that lasted for many years and involved many different campaigns not all of which took place beneath the walls of Troy.

  It is true that when Agamemnon first conceived of attacking Troy, he had hoped to emulate the swift, devastating raid by which Telamon and Heracles had once breached the weakest stretch of the city’s walls. But King Priam had strengthened his defences since then. He had also commissioned a new fleet of warships and had been engaged in serious, and successful, diplomatic activity to ready his many allies for the coming conflict around the western coast of Asia. The High King of Troy might have fewer ships at his command than the High King of Argos but he was not faced with the problem of transporting a hundred thousand men across the Aegean, and his fleet was quite large enough to guard the mouth of the Hellespon
t and offer support to his allies.

  And his allies were many. As intelligence reports came into Mycenae from Agamemnon’s spies, they proved ever more daunting. Of all Troy’s friends, only the Dardanians had decided to stay out of the war. Having tried and failed to persuade Priam that Helen should be returned immediately to Sparta, King Anchises had declared that he would not embroil his people in a military conflict that had begun with Paris’ perfidy and might end with the ravaging of all the lands around the Idaean Mountains. But neither would he lend support to the invaders, and all the other coastal kingdoms, from Paeonia and the Thracian Chersonese in the north to the Lycians in the south had swiftly rallied to King Priam’s aid. The Phrygians, the Mysians, the Carians and the Pelasgians out of Larissa were raising armies, and Priam was also given promises of support from countries further east should the need arise. The Amazons, the Paphlagonians and even the distant Halizonians all stood ready to send forces to the defence of Troy.

  In the face of such concerted opposition, Odysseus advised that a cautious war of attrition would be the wisest course of action. Troy might be more easily taken if they first wore down her allies through a campaign of naval blockades and raids on the weaker fronts. Until that ominous day at Aulis, no one except Odysseus had reckoned that the campaign might drag on for as long as ten years. But if such was the will of Zeus, he argued, then the princes of Argos must resign themselves to it, fortified by the knowledge that they would win in the end.

  Agamemnon listened to this argument but his was not a patient temperament. He still nursed a hope that the sheer size of the force he had mustered would shock the Trojans into surrender and prove the reading of the omen wrong. When he expressed this view the council divided round him along the usual lines, with the thinkers among them -- Nestor and Palamedes -- supporting Odysseus. The rest argued for an immediate attack on Troy.