The Songs of the Kings: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

  In accordance with his usual tactics, Agamemnon was waiting for movement among the chiefs to cease before he spoke. The constant billowing and collapsing of the canvas, like laboring lungs, was beyond his control, as were the flat, smacking sounds of the wind in it. He had put on the skullcap, black silk stitched with gold thread, which he used for audiences of state. Below this his eyes looked huge, dark-ringed and slow, eyes of the sleepless or the drugged. It was hot inside the tent, but he wore the same heavy blue gown, the same thick belt with its buckle of bronze and hanging dagger. When the people gathered there were still, he spoke, not loudly. “Let them be brought before us.”

  They filed in almost at once, four men, unarmed, accompanied by Chasimenos, still in his tunic of a palace official. They made their reverences, crouching with heads lowered and hands on knees. Then they straightened and stood together, side by side before the King. One of them Calchas recognized, a man named Phylakos, a captain in Agamemnon’s guard. He was naked to the waist, dressed only in cotton kilt and leather wristbands and sandals, a powerful, deep-chested man, nearly bald, with pale scars on his body and a papyrus flower tattooed on his right thigh.

  In the pause before the King spoke again, all heard, twining through the voices of the wind but distinct from them, the flailing of the bull-roarers down near the shore like the sound of many wings beating together. Every day the shamans of the Pelasgians, a people with their own gods and their own language, fronted the sea and whirled their long ropes, with flat pieces of wood attached, in great circles overhead, striving to outdo the wind with the whirling they made and so drive it back to its caves in the north. Perhaps stirred in his twilight by this mighty wingbeat, old Nestor began some querulous complaint, hushed immediately by his two sons, who were in constant attendance upon him, one on either side. It was never possible to tell whether these two were speaking separately or together. In the years of trying to quieten their father, their voices had become identical, like the cooing of doves. Calchas felt again that shudder of warning within him. These things too were exact, unrepeatable, as was the way they had chosen to stand together, even though it might seem as random as the stones in a streambed.

  Agamemnon began to speak. His voice was slow, like the voice of one who relates a dream immediately on waking and strives to remember the order of things as they happened. He spoke about the omen of the eagles, the two male eagles, one black as night, one with a blaze of silver, seen about the palace of Mycenae in the time before the expedition set out, seen several days in succession, haunting the walls, always on the right hand, the spear side, auguring good fortune. Two full-grown male eagles in company together, a thing never seen before. “Those of Mycenae will remember this omen and the interpretation made at the time by our diviner Calchas?”

  Nobody spoke but Menelaus nodded and after him several others, as if they had needed the example. None of the four who had been brought in made any sign. Agamemnon turned his head slightly towards the diviner. “Calchas will remind us of his words at that time.”

  Thus prompted, the priest began to speak in his careful, slightly hesitant Greek, moving his body slowly and rhythmically forward and back in the way the priests of Caria did when uttering prophecies—it was in Caria, as a youth, that he had been admitted to the cult of the god whom he must always now remember to call Apollo. A coldness gathered in his breast as he spoke, because his words at Mycenae had been uttered to please Agamemnon and establish his own position, he had not been properly mindful of the nature of his god, who was male and female in equal parts and so gave divided counsels, which then had to be reconciled. There was no choice now but to repeat the simple message.

  “As the eagle is the king of birds, so Agamemnon and Menelaus are kings of men, the eagle brothers, sons of Atreus. The eagle is the bird of Zeus, and this has been so from the beginning of his rule, even before his rule was established. It was an eagle that flew towards him on the eve of his great battle with the Titans for supremacy in heaven, thus ensuring his victory. The eagles that came to haunt the battlements of Mycenae, and whose presence was remarked by many, were sent by Zeus in token that the quarrel with Troy is a just one.”

  He stopped here, the coldness still gathered around his heart. Croton was already raising his staff. He had known that the priest would intervene, would want, as he had wanted from the beginning, to make the augury his own, establish himself as sole interpreter of the god’s will. But he had expected more ceremony. Now Croton broke into speech, scarcely waiting for the King’s nod—mark of the power he had gained in these few days.

  “The justice of Zeus demands that the outrage to hospitality committed by Paris in his abduction of Helen while a guest in the house of her husband Menelaus should be avenged. The justice of Zeus—”

  He was interrupted by Menelaus, who said loudly, “Absolutely right, you’ve hit the nail on the head, Croton. A piece of shit like that, a beastly Asian who started life as a ragged-arsed goatherd, how could my Helen, who was always repelled by anything coarse, have allowed herself to be forcibly abducted like that if he had not used the wiles of the bitch goddess Hecate and all the demons of his filthy country against her?” He was fair-skinned and inclined to freckles and his nose had peeled, making it look strangely paler than the rest of his face, which had flushed with the force of his feelings. “Asians stink,” he said, more mildly. “Their houses are like pigsties.”

  Croton’s staff was still raised. He seemed not to have registered the interruption. “The justice of Zeus gives redress to the wronged, the justice of Zeus is vested in the eagle brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus.”

  His eyes were alight and his voice vibrated with passion. This was the new thing, this cry of justice, Calchas thought. It simply didn’t make sense. Thoroughly unreasonable. It derived from the same error, that of regarding a god as a father. Naturally, the children will want a father to be just, especially since they can’t achieve justice themselves. Zeus was cloudgatherer, rain-giver, thunderer. Where did the justice come in? He glanced across at Menelaus’s patched face. That reference to the uncleanness and evil habits of Asians, had it been a dig at him? On the whole, he thought not. The representative Asian was still Paris, who had seduced his wife while he was away at a funeral and then run off to Troy with her. All the same, these outbursts were getting more frequent all the time and more wide-ranging. Calchas thought of the houses of Tarsus, with their scrubbed steps and entranceways, the smell of wet dust in the courtyards of Hattusas when they scattered water to clean the paving stones. In Kadesh they employed street sweepers, a thing unheard of in the Greek lands. Menelaus had seen nothing of Asia, of course—except perhaps the slave markets of Miletus . . .

  Croton seemed about to continue, but Agamemnon raised a hand to stay him. No one had yet mentioned the wind and it seemed unlikely to Calchas that anyone would, not here, not unbidden. It was too dangerous a subject. But the question must be there in all minds, as it was in his: If Zeus had sent the eagles as a blessing on the expedition, why was the army being held there in Aulis, why were they being prevented from sailing?

  Agamemnon looked round at the faces as if he might see treason on the wing among them. “It was to Mycenae that the eagles were sent, not elsewhere,” he said. “They were sent to me. By consent of my brother first, and then by consent of you all, the conduct of the war is given to me.”

  No one had questioned this, at least not otherwise than in private with those he could trust, or in the thoughts of his solitude. For Agamemnon to assert it publicly now was a mistake, a sign of weakness. Calchas sensed the knowledge of this twisting through the minds of all those in the tent. He saw Odysseus glance aside, but could not tell where his eyes were directed. Chasimenos, standing beside him, appeared lost in thoughts of his own. Achilles was turning his perfect profile upward, towards the roof of the tent, with his usual air of bored indifference. No particular expression showed on any face; but Calchas could sense the twisting course of the knowledge of weakness
as it went from mind to mind, a serpent of thought, moving like the snakes of light that coiled and loosened on the walls of the tent as the wind ruffled the flaps of canvas at the entrance. The snake, sign of the Mother . . .

  “There is something we did not know before,” Agamemnon said. “My captain, Phylakos, has words for us.”

  Phylakos took a step forward from the other three and stood in a position of attention, arms at his sides. “These men saw something more. They were at the lookout post on the northern side of the citadel on the third day of the eagles, early in the morning, soon after dawn.” He paused to look briefly round at the others in the tent. “The light is good at this time,” he said. “That I can vouch for. I sometimes inspected the guard posts then. It is the time you find men sleeping, before sunrise, before the guard is changed.”

  His face was impassive but it was immediately apparent to Calchas that he was trying to secure belief beforehand for what they were going to hear; or at least to anticipate objections. But this, after all, was no more than anyone would do when there was a story to tell, a story he believed and wanted others to believe.

  “This man will tell you what they saw,” he said now, indicating one of the three. “He is called Leucides.”

  Leucides stepped forward in his turn and braced his shoulders preparatory to speech. He was a bony man with a conspicuous rib cage and a long, sad face. “There was a hare,” he said. “We saw the eagles stoop at this hare. They killed it and tore it to pieces.”

  In the startled silence that followed on this, the plaintive muttering of Nestor became audible, rising above the shushing of his sons. His concentration span was short, and he had lost interest in the proceedings at an early stage, embarking yet again on the interminable narrative of his own past deeds. He was talking now, Calchas realized after some moments, about a cattle raid into Elis that he had made in his distant youth.

  “. . . show these Trojan dogs a thing or two, I’d be over there in two shakes of a duck’s tail if I was young again, in those days I could outdistance the wind, I would race ahead of it, as I did when we went rustling cattle in Elis, they couldn’t stop us, they tried to stop us but they couldn’t stop us, nobody could stop us, Achilles is a runner but he isn’t a patch on what I was, I tell you I could outrun the wind, bounding and bounding over the land and the wind falling short behind me, I heard the wind behind me, wailing because it couldn’t keep up . . .”

  “That is a striking image, father, but running is no good now, there is water before us.”

  “Father, that wind was behind you, whereas this one . . .”

  “They couldn’t stop me, they tried to stop me, nobody could stop me, we got away with fifty cows, Itymoneus tried to stop me, or was his name Iphitomenos, he was the son of Hypeirochus or Hypernochus, I’m sure of that, they were his father’s cattle, he came against me, he fancied his chances, but I took my sword, it wasn’t a javelin, the singers have said it was a javelin but it was a sword, who would carry javelins on a cattle raid, you need to make a quick getaway on a cattle raid, it was a sword, I went down on one knee and quick as a flash I gave him an upward thrust with it, straight up the crotch, ha, ha, he wasn’t expecting that, the blades were longer in those days . . .”

  The old man raised his head and a brief light blazed in his eyes. “I split him open,” he said in a stronger voice, “the point went in at the crotch and I pushed up with it, I got both hands to it, got it in up to the hilt, they knew how to make swords in those days, he couldn’t fall, he wanted to fall but he couldn’t fall, I was holding him up on the sword, he was skewered from his balls to his belly like a stuck pig, then I twisted the blade and his guts came spilling out, there, you bastard, I said to him, now you know the stuff Nestor is made of and he said, what did he say, no, he didn’t say anything, he just—”

  “Those were happy days, father, you were young then, but now we must listen.”

  “Now we must be quiet, now we must listen.”

  Their voices were like the notes of doves, yes, Calchas thought, but contented doves, doves in the sun, clucking together, the sounds overlapping. Blotted in these cooing remonstrances, the old man’s voice faltered away into its habitual muttering, half querulous, half plaintive, and then trailed off into silence.

  “I think Nestor needs to take a good long rest,” Odysseus said. “I propose that he be escorted back to his own quarters.”

  There was a quality of anger in his voice, something that seemed to Calchas more than mere impatience at the delay. Was it because Nestor’s reminiscences had lowered the level of attention, reduced the impact of this strangely belated news about the hare? If so, there must have been some prior knowledge on Odysseus’s part, on that of others too. He felt a gathering of suspicion.

  “No, no,” Agamemnon said. “Absolutely out of the question. Nestor must stay. No council is complete without Nestor. He has attended more councils than any man alive.” He looked again at Leucides. “We are listening.”

  “We were on the wall, on the side that looks towards the sea. We saw the eagles rise together into the sky and wheel in a wide circle. Just below us a hare was feeding. There are hares, they come in the first light, anyone who has been on guard duty on that side can tell you. We shoot at them sometimes, the ground is open there, you can recover the arrows.”

  He paused and swallowed, still in the same rigid posture. Calchas studied him with quickened attention. Constraint was to be expected, even awe: he was in the tent of the Commander-in-Chief, among the heroes of the army, men who featured often in the verses of the Singer. Awe yes, but Leucides looked frightened. He spoke in the manner of someone who had rehearsed his words—or been rehearsed in them. But this was natural enough, he was without practice. His speech was rough, half bitten back in the way of the country people of Argos. In some remote village, herding his goats, tending his strip of vines, turning over the stony ground, he had been fired by thoughts of Trojan gold, a life of ease.

  “The eagles swooped down on the hare both together and killed it and devoured it, sharing together.”

  As these words were uttered Calchas’s gaze fell on the face of the man standing next to the speaker, on his right. A febrile face, the yolk of the eye too much visible, something too excitable and tremulous in the mouth. Prone himself to the tremors and fevers of strained nerves, the priest recognized the signs. This did not look like a reliable witness. But of course they had not been able to choose, it had to be these three, the three on guard on the northern wall in the hour before sunrise, when few people were about . . .

  The silence was broken by Chasimenos, who raised his narrow, pale-eyed face and spoke directly to the King: “This is news indeed.”

  “Why do we know it only now?” The question came from Achilles, who looked at nobody as he spoke and moved his smoothly tanned and perfectly proportioned shoulders in the usual narcissistic shrug. “Why was it not reported at the time?”

  “They did not think it important,” Phylakos said.

  “Not important?” Calchas looked directly at the captain, raising his eyebrows in an attitude of surprise he was conscious of assuming. Commander of a hundred, a professional soldier from the mountainous country around Larisa, in middle age though strong still. Not many campaigns left, not many chances, this perhaps the last one, the big one, an occasion for plunder he could retire on. Yes, it was easy to see that Phylakos would want to strengthen belief in victory at a time of trial like this when the army’s resolve was wavering in the wind. “I find it strange that they should not think it important,” the diviner said.

  Phylakos looked at him without expression. “They are simple men.”

  “Those simple men should be hanged for not thinking it important,” Achilles said. “I’ve a good mind to string them up myself.” He moved his beautiful shoulders again in the same shrug, lithe, luxuriant, deeply self-loving. “Or drown them in Ajax’s latrine,” he said.

  “It’s not my latrine.” The booming voice of
Ajax filled the tent. He was staring at Achilles with furious hostility. “Good grief,” he said. “Do you think I use it myself? It’s for the men, not the officers.”

  Achilles showed no sign of having heard this. “By Zeus,” he said, “it’s hot in here. I fancy a dip. Not in Ajax’s latrine, though.”

  Calchas watched his movements and listened to his words with the usual mingling of dislike and fear. Achilles was a natural killer. These Mycenaeans were all warlike and brutal, but Achilles was a special case, he enjoyed homicide as a leisure activity. These last words of his had been a deliberate provocation. Nothing ever led anywhere, with Achilles, except back to his own pride and perfection, to the gestures with which he endlessly celebrated his own marvelous existence. He was dressed this morning in one of the outfits he had had made for him at home before leaving, a short-skirted, sleeveless linen tunic with gold-tasseled epaulettes and a matching cap. His splendid legs were enhanced by shin guards of polished bronze. Conscious of the eyes upon him, he took out an ivory and papyrus fan from a tuck at his waist, flicked it open and began to fan himself, very slowly.

  “There’s a man there with faulty hearing,” Ajax shouted. His huge face had flushed to a shade of dark crimson.

  Achilles continued with his fanning. “Better deaf than daft.”

  The wind at Aulis, continuing so long, had sensitized men’s hearing in some ways, as if it was necessary, to avoid going crazy, to distinguish sounds not caused by it, or even to invent such sounds, there were those who swore afterwards that they had heard Ajax’s teeth grinding in the massive jaws. But his mind worked slowly, even when not clouded by rage, and Croton took the opportunity to intervene.

  “The justice of Zeus—” he began loudly, but Agamemnon silenced him with a slight movement of the arm.

  “Calchas will give us the meaning.”

  “My lord, fountain of benefits, I will do my poor best.” The meaning was obvious of course—suspiciously so to Calchas’s mind: the hare was Troy, by its death and devouring victory was established in advance for the Greek alliance. Not only was the cause approved and the favor of Zeus confirmed, but the total destruction of the enemy was guaranteed. However, no diviner worth his salt would blurt out the obvious, there had always to be the ceremony of interrogation, the spending of words.