by Ben Blake
Caesura
I was not there that day in Thessaly, when the boar fell to Peleus’ spear. I heard the tale later, when I had grown to an age when my elders thought me worth talking to. When some thought so, at least. There are always men who cannot bring themselves to regard a hollow-chested youth with a club foot as a proper man at all, who turn away rather than speak as though feebleness might be catching if they open their mouths.
I became a storyteller, and then people talked to me.
Every king wants his name remembered. They build palaces for their sons and burn the houses of enemies, all to make a mark on the world. They etch their names in silver and have them carved into stone, and still it’s not enough. Still they want more. When the sky shudders to the echo of their name, chanted by multitudes, then they might be content. But I doubt it.
As a teller of tales, I was sometimes given a place in the megaron of a king. A long way down the table, or across the hearth, far enough away that the lord and his cronies could pretend not to see me – but close enough to hear. That was how I learned what had happened on that hunt. I heard it in Atreus’ hall, and in Nestor’s in the west, and Peleus’ own poorer palace to the north. Later I heard it told in Mycenae again, seated on the same bench as when Atreus spoke, but this time it was his sullen son Agamemnon who told, short days after his father had been laid into his tomb.
It was there, too, that I heard of the death of Theseus, leaping from the cliffs of Attica into the sea three days after Atalanta passed in her sleep. She was several years past fifty by then: a good age for any woman, but remarkable for one who slept in the open from choice. Atalanta was not a woman who took easily to imprisonment. Perhaps that was why Theseus loved her so. He longed for the one bird he could never catch. Happiness is elusive for such men.
I’ve long thought I should write a play about their story. A hero king, home from slaying the dreadful Minotaur; and the free-spirited maiden who takes his great heart and ties it on a thong about her neck. Perhaps I will, one day, if the Fates spare me and the seasons are kind.
But this is a greater tale, the story of the age. There has been none greater since Zeus threw down his father and the time of the Twelve Olympians began. It is the story of what flowed from that day in the Thessalian meadow, the events which came down through time to fall upon mortal men. Is it bad luck or good, to be fated to live in such times? I have heard the tale told in a hundred halls by a thousand tongues, and I do not know. Perhaps Zeus himself does, the Lord of the Black Cloud on his throne atop Olympus. Or perhaps not, for even the gods are subject to Fate, not masters of it.
This is a tale of the fall of kings, the ruin of empires and of pride. A tale too of love and honour. And for much of its length it is my tale, the story of how a crippled boy went from the lakes of Magnesia to the walls of Troy, to the halls of kings from Greece to Phoenicia, and who knew the men who walked with gods on their shoulders. Achilles, Hector with his voice of thunder, Diomedes shining like silver in mud. Agamemnon, king of kings, and great Ajax hefting his oblong shield, and Paris staring down from the wall at the chaos his recklessness had brought. I remember Helen, first demure in Sparta and later standing forth in Troy, proud as Aphrodite with the golden apple in her hand.
And I remember Odysseus, an ordinary man standing usually in a corner or half in shadow, speaking little but always watching, watching, and smiling his wry smile.
I knew them. I spoke with them, and they with me, and I heard the thrum of the gods in their words and saw divinity glimmer in their eyes.
I am Thersites. I will tell you of Troy.
