The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

by Iliffe, Glyn

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eperitus said. ‘Sometimes my principles make me a harsh judge.’

  Odysseus shook his head dismissively. ‘Not as severe as you used to be. I think the war has taught you a few things about the true meaning of honour, Eperitus; it’s mellowed you. One day you might even reconsider your hatred towards your father.’

  ‘That’s twice you’ve questioned my desire to avenge his crimes, my lord.’

  ‘Hate eats a man from within, my friend, and vengeance does not cure it.’

  ‘Neither will mercy.’

  ‘And his servant, Astynome?’ Odysseus persisted. ‘What about her?’

  Eperitus did not reply, but turned his burning gaze on the flanks of Tenedos and kept them there while the island grew steadily nearer.

  They did not beach the galley among the other Ithacan ships in the sprawling Greek camp, but sailed further up the coast and tossed out the anchor stones in a small cove. It was Odysseus’s intention they should try to clean Philoctetes up and heal his wound before they presented him to the Council of Kings, though he did not say how he hoped to cure such a vile and persistent injury. Nevertheless, he ordered the crew ashore and by the time the sun had set, leaving a blood-red smear across the western horizon, they were already busy making fires and preparing their evening meal. In earlier years they would have been taking a reckless risk, exposing themselves to death or capture by a Trojan night patrol, but these days their enemies had had enough of war and were resigned to staying within the safety of the city walls, abandoning the plains to the Greeks.

  Philoctetes was the last ashore, where they laid him still sleeping on a litter. Shortly afterwards, two Greek horsemen arrived at the top of the beach and trotted down towards the Ithacans. Odysseus, who by his constant glances in the direction of the camp appeared to have been expecting their arrival, went to meet them. They spoke briefly, then the riders pulled their horses about and galloped off.

  ‘Agamemnon sent them,’ he explained, returning to the others. ‘They spotted our sail, of course, and wanted to know what we were up to. I told them to send Podaleirius; Asclepius’s son will know how to treat Philoctetes’s wound.’

  ‘Neither he nor his brother could cure him ten years ago,’ Diomedes said. ‘Why should he succeed now?’

  ‘Because it’s the will of the gods, my friend,’ Odysseus replied with a confident smile.

  The smell of the wound grew in its offensiveness without the sea air to carry some of it away, but they were at least relieved of the archer’s intermittent fits of pain as he remained in a deep sleep until Podaleirius arrived on horseback, his leather satchel bouncing against his hip. The healer dismounted and, after a curt nod to the others, knelt beside the sleeping form. Repeatedly sweeping his long hair from his eyes, he undressed the wound and bent low to inspect it.

  ‘Bring me a torch,’ he ordered.

  Eperitus fetched a brand from one of the campfires and stood over Podaleirius, wincing in disgust as he prodded and picked at the black sludge of rotting flesh on the top of Philoctetes’s foot. Podaleirius took a wooden bowl from his satchel and set it down on the sand.

  ‘You have water?’ he asked.

  Antiphus knelt and filled the bowl from the skin at his hip, while the healer pulled out a cloth and unwrapped two sharp knives. He dropped the cloth into the bowl, then held up one of the knives so that it glinted in the torchlight.

  ‘Lord Apollo, grant me the skill to heal this wound,’ he whispered, then lowered the blade to the liquefied flesh.

  Chapter Five

  THE EYE OF APOLLO

  Cassandra pulled the cloak tighter about her shoulders in an attempt to keep out the cold west wind that haunted the plains of Ilium. Looking up, she could see a circle of tall plane trees at the top of the slope, their branches silhouetted by the waxing moon. She tipped back her hood to reveal a beautiful but melancholy face, her skin pale in the thin half-light. Her dark eyes contemplated the temple of Thymbrean Apollo with unease. As a girl she had encountered a young man there who offered to teach her the art of prophecy. In her naivety – partly enticed by his noble looks and partly thrilled at the thought of reading the future – she accepted and for months he had shown her the mysterious secrets of divination. Inside the shadowy temple, where the pillars were the boles of the trees and the ceiling the interlaced fingers of their branches, he showed her how to peel back the dark layers of her mind and use her inner eye to see far and wide, into things past and things yet to come. The knowledge was fearful for one as young as she was, but it quickly enslaved her, and when the man had taught her everything she needed to know he told her his price. Her virginity. She was at once horrified and excited by his impudent demand, but in spite of the way he made her heart race and her skin flush with desire she reminded herself that she was a princess of Troy, the daughter of King Priam, and she refused him. His handsome face became dark and terrible and in that moment he revealed his divine nature to her, transforming into a being of light and glory before her eyes. But Apollo did not rape her, as she had expected, or threaten to take back the gift of prophecy; instead he cursed her, announcing that her visions would continue but her words of doom would never be believed. And so it had been ever since.

  She shuddered at the memory – and at the knowledge she would soon be calling on the god again. Inside the temple she would ask him to open the future to her. Though she had refused her body to Apollo, to have his divine spirit inside her was an experience much more intense and intimate than she imagined physical intercourse could ever be. And like sex, prophecy had its dangers. When a woman allowed a man to enter her body, she risked pregnancy and death in childbirth, but when she allowed a god to enter her mind she risked insanity. Yet it was a risk she had always been ready to take, and all the more so now as she sensed the end of the war approaching. Looking back over her shoulder she saw the River Scamander in the vale below – gleaming like a line of mercury as it fed into the great bay – and the high walls and towers of Troy rising up beyond it. She loved the city with all her heart, though few within it loved her; and if, by sending her inner eye farther than she had ever dared to go before, she would discover how to keep Troy safe, then the loss of her sanity was a peril she was prepared to face.

  She climbed to the top of the ridge and entered a dark gap in the circle of trees. The floor inside was laid with heavy flagstones that had been polished smooth by the feet of countless worshippers and gleamed in the filtered moonlight. Cassandra did not wait for her eyes to adjust to the deeper gloom – she could have found her way around the temple blindfolded if she needed to – but walked up to the pale monolith at the far end of the temple. She dropped to her knees before the marble altar, letting her gaze hover briefly on the carved effigy of Apollo in the shadows behind it, then lowered her forehead to the hard floor. As she bent her body, the leather satchel at her hip slipped to the flagstones and she heard the contents twisting and thrashing inside, hissing in protest before becoming still again.

  ‘Lord Apollo,’ she whispered, feeling the blood rush to her head and the coldness of the stone against her skin. ‘Bringer of dreams. Receive my sacrifice.’

  She pushed herself up with the palms of her hands and, still kneeling, fumbled with the tie of the satchel. It came free and she thrust her hand inside, grasping for the smooth, cord-like body of the snake. She caught it close to the neck and lifted it free, holding it at arm’s length so that it danced in anguish before the rough image of the god. A small woollen bag had been tied around its head to keep it from biting or attempting to escape. Cassandra unslipped the knot and pulled the bag away to expose the thin, triangular head with its dark eyes and flickering tongue.

  She had been given the creature by Apheidas in exchange for her prayers. He had been a follower of Apollo all his life, and though he bred snakes for the priests to sacrifice to the god, he was no priest himself. The Fates had made Apheidas a soldier, a powerful commander in the Trojan army, and with the deaths of He
ctor, Achilles and most recently – so rumour from the Greek camp had it – Great Ajax, he knew the zenith of the war had been reached. The conflict had endured for ten years because of the valour of these three men, and without them the end would come quickly for one side or the other. And so he had approached Cassandra with his gift, out of respect for her devotion to Apollo, and asked her to pray on his behalf so that the god would help him with what he had to do.

  Cassandra pulled the satchel over her shoulder and let it drop to the floor. Her cloak followed, revealing white priestess’s robes. The icy wind that penetrated the ring of trees took away the heat that the cloak had retained and she felt her flesh stiffen beneath the gauzy material. Gripping the snake, she held it down against the altar and drew a dagger from her belt. The blade gleamed and Cassandra’s gaze hung on it for a moment before moving to the crude idol in the shadows. This had been carved from the trunk of a living tree long ago, when the temple had first been established, and the ravages of time and the weather had left it so featureless that only the horn bow and the bronze arrow that it clutched in its lumpish fists identified it as Apollo.

  ‘Protect your follower, Apheidas, son of Polypemon,’ she said. ‘Watch over him in battle. And aid him in this task he has taken upon himself, about which he keeps his own counsel but which he says is for the glory and preservation of Troy.’

  She lowered the blade to the neck of the snake.

  ‘And I call on you to speak to me, lord. Enter me. Fill me with your presence and guide my inner eye. Show me the things I seek, show me how I, too, can protect Troy from the wolves at her gates. Lord of the bow and the lyre, show me and don’t spare me, even if I have to cross into the realms of madness to witness these things. Let me know what must be done to save my city.’

  She pressed the knife against the snake’s skin, feeling the momentary tension as the scales resisted and then gave. The blade slid quickly through the flesh to the unyielding stone. Dark blood poured over the pale altar and, stopping her thumb over as much of the wound as it would cover, Cassandra hastily lifted the severed body to her raised lips. The warm liquid filled her mouth and spilled over her chin and neck to spatter her white robes. She squinted against the coppery taste and stumbled backwards, releasing the dead snake and the knife as she fell to one knee. She slumped forward onto her knuckles and her black hair fell over her face like a curtain, hiding the mixture of revulsion and fear on her features. Her heart was beating faster now, knowing from long experience that she had but moments left in the waking world, moments in which her mind remained connected to her body and could feel, smell, hear, taste and see the temple around her.

  And then it came.

  She was thrown onto her back. Her wide eyes stared up at the ceiling of dark leaves traced with silver. Then there was a rush of light as if the moon had expanded to a hundred times its own size, filling the temple and swamping her retinas with whiteness. At the same time, the gentle rustling of the wind grew to a roar like the sound of a monstrous wave rolling towards her. The cold night air bit into her flesh with the intensity of fire, burning her nerve endings and arching her back until, with a scream, she felt her conscious mind ripped from her body and pulled upward through the branches of the temple into the cloudless, moon-dominated sky. She continued to ascend, glimpsing the Scamander and the dark mass of Troy to her right, while away to her left was the semicircular wall of the Greek camp with the beetle-like hulls of their thousand ships blackening the shoreline. Then she was plunging forward, not by her own will but drawn inexorably on towards the great, glittering blanket of the ocean, until she was leaving Ilium behind and soaring over the waves at a height that made the islands below appear like stepping stones. Formless in her flight, as if she were a ghost rushing on its way to the eternal halls of Hades, she could neither feel the wind that herded skeins of cloud across the face of the moon, nor hear its roar filling her ears; neither could she taste the dampness in the air, nor smell the cold clarity of the night. But she could see. Like a great eye she could see far and wide, all the way back to Ilium – already in the dim distance behind her – and beyond. To the north she saw the mountainous lands of Troy’s former rivals, before the Greeks had come and Priam had bought their allegiance. South, she could see the country of Egypt, even though it was many days journey by ship and several weeks on foot. Yet it was towards the west, to the never-before-seen land of her enemies, that her mind was focussed.

  The gods had shrouded Greece in cloud, but beneath its tattered edges she glimpsed mountains and valleys, rugged and beautiful, dotted throughout with white-walled cities and towns that slumbered peacefully in the darkness. This was the cradle of the fleet that had brought so much destruction to her homeland, and she felt nothing but revulsion as it came rapidly closer. Then the sea was gone and she fell through the clouds to skim bird-like across the land below. Now she could see orchards and vineyards; ramshackle villages and hillside enclosures half-filled with sheep; roads left unguarded by abandoned watchtowers, from which the soldiers had long since been called to war. She passed a city nestled beneath two mountain peaks and felt a surge of black fear at the sight of it, but before it could overwhelm her she had moved on, over more mountains and plains until she saw a river below, its surface shining like glass as the moon broke momentarily free of the clouds. She followed its course and saw a high mound that she instinctively knew was the barrow of a long-dead warrior, and without any lessening of speed plunged towards it. If she had possessed hands to throw before her face, or a mouth with which she could have screamed, she would have; but there was no sense of impact as she passed into the barrow, or of having come to a stop as she found herself inside the high-ceilinged chamber beneath. Though there was no light in the tomb, she could see a sarcophagus before her with the carved figure of a horse above it. Inside was a bone, one of many that made up the giant skeleton of a man, but this single shoulder blade was starkly white – made of ivory, the work of the gods. Briefly she wondered why she had been brought here, and immediately she knew that this was one of the answers that she had sought. A voice spoke the name of the man whose tomb this was, and she understood at once that unless the Greeks took the ivory shoulder blade from the sarcophagus the walls of Troy would never fall.

  Then she was free of the chamber and returning east, moving through the air at great speed until the clouds opened to reveal a large island far below her. She saw a palace on top of a hill overlooking the main harbour, and as her mind’s eye descended to enter its empty halls she wondered what the significance of the island was and why Apollo had brought her here. Then a vision of a great warrior appeared, dressed in magnificent armour that she had seen once before from the walls of Troy. The helmet was gold with a red plume, the breastplate shaped in the perfect likeness of a man’s torso, and the shield had seven concentric circles filled with figures that moved as if alive. The armour had been made by Hephaistos, the smith-god, for Achilles. But Achilles was dead, his ashes buried beneath a barrow on the plains of Ilium. And then she understood the meaning of the revelation. The warrior in the armour was to take Achilles’s place on the battlefield; without him, the Greeks would return home defeated.

  She turned from the terrible vision and found herself crossing the Aegean once more, hurtling back to Ilium and the temple of Thymbrean Apollo. But the oracles of Troy’s doom were not yet over. As she hung over the circle of plane trees, expecting at any moment to be reunited with her physical self, she looked across the Scamander to the great city with its high walls and towers and its gates that had withstood the might of Agamemnon’s army for ten years. And then the sloped battlements began to shake and crumble. The towers fell and the gates were torn from their mountings, while in the city behind the buildings caved in on themselves in clouds of dust. People were running everywhere, their screams unheard by her sealed ears as they were crushed by falling stones or disappeared into the chasms that were opening beneath their feet. Cassandra wanted to cry out in terror but was u
nable to make a sound, as the mound that Troy was built on started to rise up, like a monstrous subterranean creature waking from centuries of slumber, destroying the city on its back as it came to life. And as Troy disintegrated and was gone, all that remained was the mound – higher and blacker and smoother than Cassandra had ever known it before, and yet strangely familiar. It was then that she recognised it. The Palladium, the wooden effigy that stood in the temple of Athena in the citadel of Pergamos. Legend said that it was an image of Athena’s friend, Pallas, whom the goddess had accidentally killed. It had fallen from heaven when the city was being built and had landed in the unfinished temple, a sign of the goddess’s divine protection. Without it, Troy was doomed to fall.

  As the meaning of the third oracle became clear to her the vision faded and the night grew suddenly dark, consuming the light of the moon and the stars until nothing was left but stifling blackness. Panic threatened for a moment, then Cassandra saw tall grey pillars emerge from the darkness on every side of her. Briefly she thought she had returned to her body in the temple of Thymbrean Apollo, but the absence of any of her other senses quickly told her she was still dreaming.

  Something was different, though.

  She could not feel the quickness in her breathing or the rapid beat of her heart, but she knew she was afraid. Something terrible had happened. She looked up and saw the figure of a woman above her, seated on a stone plinth with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other. The crude, stern features of her helmeted head were fixed in a cold gaze as Cassandra knelt at her feet with her hands raised imploringly to the statue of the goddess. She recognised the inside of the temple of Athena, but Apollo was no longer showing her the tasks the Greeks would need to perform to conquer Troy. This was the future, her future. Outside, though she could neither hear the flames nor smell the burning, she knew there was fire on the streets of Pergamos. People were fleeing in terror and soldiers were running among them, though whether they were Trojan or Greek she could not tell. Time blurred and she sensed herself curled up in fear at the feet of the statue, when the temple doors were flung open and the sounds of battle burst in. The once-peaceful chamber now echoed with the clash of bronze, followed by the screams of women and children in pain. Rough hands pulled at Cassandra, turning her over to stare into the eyes of a small man with a snarling, angry face. Coiled about his shoulders was a brown snake that hissed in defiance at the unfamiliar temple. The soldier’s eyes fell upon Cassandra and his malicious look transformed to one of sneering lust. She looked away and he slapped her hard, before seizing her clothes and tearing them from her. She was conscious of her naked breasts and the terrifying strength of the man as she tried to fight him. Then he hit her and her resistance ceased. She fell back to the floor beneath his heavy body, his leather armour doubtless cold and hard against her soft skin. He entered her roughly and forcefully, without any reverence for the purity she had preserved for so long. Suddenly her nostrils were filled with the smell of blood and, arching her back on the rough flagstones, she screamed.