The Songs of the Kings: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

  His breathing had grown calmer as he spoke. He had reached the moment of the gift, the moment that would redeem him, restore him to trust. For the first time he met the King’s eyes. “No crimes are yet committed,” he said. “The goddess gives us time to reconsider. And this is the message brought to the King by his diviner, which I said once before and was not heard. But now I see further. If the King will accept the goddess as sender, he will be free from necessity. The justice of Zeus and the compassion of Artemis will make a single path for him if he can find it. Since there is no offense, there can be no punishment. With the fear of punishment lifted, there can be no constraint. This is the gift of the goddess to Agamemnon, through the words of his diviner. She offers him the greatest gift that mortals know, the power of choice.”

  He fell silent and bowed his head and waited. Then Chasimenos spoke and there was a note of genuine incredulity in his voice. “A seer from Asia who denies that Artemis is bound in obedience to Zeus, who believes the snake and the eagle to be equal in power, this upstart tells the King to reconsider.”

  Agamemnon said nothing for some moments, his head lowered on his chest. Then he looked up and Calchas felt his heart contract at the hatred on the King’s face and knew in that moment that he had been led again into error, that in offering freedom he had snatched away the comfort of necessity from the King’s heart.

  Chasimenos said, “We have it on good authority that it was this man who encouraged Iphigeneia to put Artemis above Zeus. Now he is seeking to undermine the King’s authority and his dedication to the heavy burden of command. Further proof, if any were needed, that he is a Trojan spy. Let me call the guard and have him shackled.”

  “No.” Agamemnon’s mouth seemed to smile a little. “No, I have other plans for Calchas the diviner. Not one hair on his head must be harmed. Do you hear me, Chasimenos? I make you responsible for his safety.”

  “I will obey you in this, as in—”

  While he was still speaking a guard entered hastily and sank to his knees before Agamemnon. “Lord King,” he said, “the word has come, the ship has been sighted.”

  In the moments following upon this announcement, all those in the tent felt a strange deafness descend on them, like the humming aftermath of some crash or collision. This they thought at first was due to the momentous nature of the news; but then, in a collective moment of realization, the true reason came: the wind had ceased. The guard remained kneeling; no one moved or spoke; the first sounds that came creeping back were still, at first, like symptoms of deafness.

  Afterwards, everyone in the camp asked himself the same question: Where was I, what was I doing, when the wind ceased? People stopped in their tracks and stood stock-still, listening to the silence. Those sleeping woke abruptly, with a sense of insecurity and alarm. After the first deafness there was the illusion that one could hear the very slightest of sounds, sounds never heard before. Those on the hillside thought they could hear the straightening of grasses or the clicking sounds made by the movements of insects’ antennae; others swore that they could hear the breathing of the horses, even though they were far away on the other side of the shore; others claimed that they could hear the winking and bubbling as the suds of the last waves burst and webbed the pebbles.

  Odysseus, as a person of authority and unrelated by family to either of the Ajaxes, was trying to arbitrate in the dispute between them, which had grown more embittered with time. All three were sitting in the shelter of some dunes, well away from the camp, so as to avoid any spreading of the quarrel among the rank and file.

  “Do you not think,” Odysseus said to Ajax the Larger, who had just threatened once again to leave the expedition and return home, “that it will be very bad for your image if, having introduced these Games as a means of peaceful and healthy competition, in order to avoid quarreling and disunity, having had yourself widely publicized through the Singer as Ajax the Unifier, the man who held the allies together, you now abandon those same allies because of a dispute with your closest friend? See what I mean? Does it not seem contradictory to you?”

  Ajax the Larger’s huge face bore no detectable expression. His greenish eyes under their sun-bleached brows looked more than usually blank. “Share and share alike,” he said. “Through thick and thin. That’s what friends are for.”

  “Thick and thin my arse,” Ajax the Lesser said. “How come I always get the thin end? I wasn’t even there when you threw that fucking javelin, why the fuck should I pay anything?”

  Odysseus sighed and cast around in his mind for further arguments. Both men were stingy and obstinate, but the basic trouble was that Big Ajax was not intelligent enough to keep incongruous elements present together in his mind. Far from thinking his attitudes contradictory, he appeared to believe that quarreling with his friend over the blood price was quite consistent with his role as peacemaker. Arbitrating between them was a thankless task; however, some further effort would have to be made. “Look at it this way,” he was beginning when suddenly the wind ceased, leaving all three of them staring at the sea as if in expectation of a storm.

  Odysseus was the first to gather his wits. This calm came to him as a serious threat. “I must get back,” he said, and he got to his feet and moved away, leaving the other two sitting there. When he reached the first lines he learned that Iphigeneia’s ship had been sighted and would soon be entering the strait. Heralds were already crying through the camp, summoning the chiefs to an immediate assembly.

  10.

  Croton and his assistants were included in the summons and so was Calchas. The same obscure wish, or need, to mark himself out, assert his foreignness, had made him want to appear looking his best, in full priestly regalia; but he had grown accustomed to the ministrations of Poimenos, especially in the dressing of his hair and the applying of his makeup. These things he now had to do for himself and hastily, with the aid of a hand mirror. He felt conscious as he arrived that he was in disarray, the fringes of his skirt hanging too low, his hair not properly pinned up, the kohl on his eyelids smudged.

  Agamemnon opened the proceedings, briefly thanking the assembled chiefs, remarking on the strange coincidence of the calm falling just as the ship was sighted. What could this portend?

  By common consent, the first among the chiefs to speak was Idomeneus, commander of the Cretan contingent, which was second in numbers only to the Mycenaean. His support was essential, whatever the ultimate decision. He was known as a pragmatist, with both feet firmly on the ground, and his words now bore this out.

  “I think we should make immediate preparations to leave,” he said. “The wind has dropped, that’s the salient fact, there’s no need to look beyond it. For whatever reason, it has pleased Zeus to release us from this misery. We’ve waited long for this moment. For heaven’s sake, let’s take the opportunity that is presented to us, let’s welcome Agamemnon’s daughter as befits a princess of Mycenae, and embark her for home again as soon as possible. Meanwhile let’s start work breaking camp and loading the ships. If there’s a calm in the narrows we can use our oars to get out into the open sea. Once there, we’ll be all right. The breezes will be southerly, as accords with the season. We’ve lost time enough already, are we going to lose more days while she is got ready for the sacrifice? I am for setting out immediately.”

  “Send Iphigeneia home again?” Achilles said. “I’m surprised to hear you suggest that, Idomeneus. I thought you were my friend. Don’t you see, it will be thought she changed her mind about marrying me. As you all know, and as the Singer has given out, for patriotic reasons I allowed my name to be made use of as a means of persuading Iphigeneia to come here. No name but mine could have brought her on such a journey. What sort of figure will I make now if she turns round and goes straight back home again? Think what future generations will say. Think of my image. A girl arrives, looks Achilles over, decides he doesn’t come up to scratch and promptly leaves again. No, I can’t allow that to happen. I’ll kill her myself first. Then
at least it will be supposed that she didn’t come up to my expectations. With all due respect, Agamemnon.” On this he bowed slightly to the King, who made no answering sign.

  “We must rise above personal issues and think of the needs of the alliance,” Chasimenos said. “As it happens, I agree with Achilles, though not of course for personal reasons. Let me state my credentials. Let me speak as what I am, what I am proud to be, a top civil servant in Agamemnon’s service. In fact, not to be needlessly modest, I am the head of the whole palace bureaucracy. Mine has been the overall responsibility for arranging this sacrifice. Sending Iphigeneia back again would be both illogical and sinfully wasteful. In fact it would be an absurd thing to do. The knife has been fashioned at considerable cost, in accordance with daily instructions from the King. The sacrificial altar has been built at enormous labor under the personal supervision of Croton, priest of Zeus, who has done a marvelous job. I am sure that all here share my sentiments of gratitude to him for the time he has put in and for his dedication to this project.”

  Shouts of “Hear hear, well done, Croton” came from various quarters and the priest raised his staff in acknowledgment. “Not only that,” Chasimenos continued, “but a processional way has been laid up the slope to the altar by levies of men working day and night, without remission. In the course of these works five men have been injured, two of them seriously. Think of the planning and organization involved, the sheer human cost in blood and sweat. The knife, the altar, the road, these things have been brought into being for one purpose only. They must be used for that purpose. To divorce the product from the purpose for which it was produced undermines the logic on which our civilization and all its values are based. It makes nonsense of everything. It is unnatural, it is perverse, I might even say it is inhuman.” Chasimenos looked earnestly from face to face. Beads of sweat had appeared on his high and narrow forehead. It was plain to all that he was deeply moved. “It would leave us with a deficit on the books,” he said. “There is no way it could be justified in terms of cost-effectiveness.”

  Chasimenos was not very well liked among the chiefs, being a known intriguer; but one or two bravos were heard at the end of this speech and Achilles went so far as to send Patroclus over to say a word of thanks. In the brief silence that followed all heard the querulous voice of Nestor suddenly raised: “I remember a similar case many years ago now. It was in the land of the Lapiths. I was young then, I could hold my own with anyone, as a wrestler and spearman my equal was hard to find. My companions were men like Caeneus and Exardius, men such as we don’t see nowadays, more like gods than men, or was it Caenichus? I’m sure of his name when he was a girl, he was called Caenis when he was a girl, he was raped by Poseidon, or she, I should say, she was still a girl then, afterwards she asked Poseidon to change her into a boy so it couldn’t happen again, but of course that doesn’t follow, he didn’t know much about life, she, I should say, she was still a girl then, Poseidon liked the look of him as a boy and did it again. I was one of the guests at Peirithous’s wedding when the fight broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, we were all drunk, I killed three Centaurs single-handed, this was after that famous cattle raid in Elis when we got away with fifty—”

  “Father, where is this leading?”

  “Don’t interrupt me. My sentence is for death.”

  “Death for Iphigeneia?”

  “Fool, how does she come into it? The penalty for stealing from a comrade is death. I demand the death penalty.”

  “Father, the man whose death you are justly demanding was decapitated the day before yesterday.”

  While the old man was still being shushed into silence by his dutiful sons, Calchas raised his hand and waited for Agamemnon’s nod. Like Croton, he had no authority deriving from command and therefore no automatic right of speech. He had not been sure whether he would speak or not—it was unlikely he would be invited to do so. But after all he had been sent for; and he felt some of the recklessness that visits fearful souls when their fears are realized. No immediate harm could come to him, he knew that: he was protected by the King’s hate. Listening to Idomeneus, a practical man and not god-vexed like himself, it had occurred to him that others might see it in the same way and be inclined, after so much waiting, to go at once. It was futile now to argue against the war. But at least the folly of the sacrifice, the offense to Artemis, might be avoided.

  “Surely,” he said when the nod came, “we do not think of sacrificing a king’s daughter only because arrangements have been made to do it? If we go so far along a road and find it is the wrong one, do we continue along the road and make the error worse and weary ourselves to no purpose, or do we stop and look about us and try to find the right way? O Kings, the wind has ceased, is it not signal enough? The meaning is plain to see. There was contention between Zeus and Artemis; but there is contention no more and that is why the wind has ceased. What could better show reconciliation than a calm? Idomeneus is right. The way to Troy lies open to us. Why should we wait here a single day longer?”

  Now Croton raised his staff, shouting as he did so, barely waiting for the nod of permission. “Lies! How dare you speak to this assembly in such a manner, as if Zeus and Artemis were on an equal footing, as if they could quarrel as equals, be reconciled as equals? False diviner, where are your friends here? Zeus sent the wind and Zeus has lifted it. There is only Zeus. Now that the witch is approaching and he sees us ready to fulfill our vows and perform the sacrifice, he shows his trust in us by ending the wind. If we betray that trust, he will send the terror of his bolts against us, he will destroy us utterly.”

  At the sight of Croton’s contorted face, Calchas felt his body stiffen with a passion of rage stronger than any he could remember, stronger far than caution. “Madman,” he said loudly, “we live in a world of movement and you try to understand it by casting dead things on the ground, bones and stones and entrails, and so you see only death. Your Zeus stands for death. Who truly sent the wind, who stopped it, what do you care? You call the woman a witch and kill her in the name of Zeus and so you gain power for the priests of Zeus.” He ceased and hung his head to hide the trembling of his lower lip—he had never, even as a young man, been robust enough to contain anger.

  “I say we wait a day or two and see what happens,” Ajax the Larger said in his loud, clotted voice. “You know, sort of test it out. If the wind doesn’t come back we’re in the clear. That way we could get to the finals of the javelin-throwing and weight-lifting events, and in the meantime I could hope to bring my small friend here to see reason over this blood-price business.”

  “See reason? I see the reason well enough, you want me to pay for your fucking blunders.”

  Odysseus smiled very slightly and raised a hand. He had been waiting for the right moment to intervene. It was always a good thing to follow upon fools, they gave one a chance to drive things home. “Croton has a point,” he said. “What if Zeus has ended the wind because he takes it on trust that the sacrifice will be performed? How can we be sure? There is no sense in trying to test it out, as Ajax suggests. It’s Zeus who would be playing the waiting game, not us. The gods are immortal, they have all the time in the world. If Zeus is holding the wind over us, as seems very likely to me, he will obviously wait till we are at sea before bringing it back, because embarking without performing the sacrifice will be taken as the final proof that we don’t intend to perform it. If that happens we’ll be worse off than ever, there’ll be nowhere to run to, the fleet will be wrecked, we’ll all be drowned. The only way to be sure is to hedge our bets and carry out the sacrifice as planned. Then we are safe either way.”

  The saliva of pleasure had gathered in his mouth as he spoke, slightly thickening his words. Here they were, discussing the sacrifice of a man’s daughter. And there was the man himself, the one most vitally affected, wordless, helpless, all trussed up—precisely because he was the father. It was neat. Agamemnon could not speak against the sacrifice now, he would ris
k being overruled and thus losing what shreds of authority he had left. His voice had been needed once and once only. He had given it and could not take it back. He was superfluous now and he knew it; but the fiction had to be maintained, there had to be a figurehead, a vehicle for the general will. Agamemnon knew that too. Agamemnon, the Commander-in-Chief . . .

  Odysseus swallowed, clearing his mouth of excess saliva. “There is one circumstance that nobody has remarked on. Only one man received news of the ship and felt the wind cease at precisely the same moment. We can’t count those with him, the message was not delivered to them. The men on lookout knew of the ship but only felt the wind drop later, and this applies to any they told on the way. The man I refer to is Agamemnon. It was granted to our Commander-in-Chief to understand the intimate connection between the two events, making clear the necessity for the sacrifice and at the same time confirming his place as the supreme leader of this great expedition.”

  “There’s the moral aspect too,” Menelaus said. “I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. I’ve been doing some soul-searching. I think I may have been too hard on the Trojans because of Paris carrying off my Helen, who is a very valuable woman, in fact she is unique, being the only woman currently alive today who can claim to have been born from a swan’s egg. Now it is true that the Trojans are Asians, but they can’t help that, can they? Most of them have never had a chance to be anything else. I mean, there they are, they are stuck with it. They are kept in ignorance and superstition, they live in the midst of squalor and bad smells, they are unhygienic, they have the wrong gods. Now we could save them from that, we could bring light into their darkness. I mean, we are streets ahead of them, especially in metalwork and catapults. We have a duty towards these people. Once the territory has been occupied and the troublemakers rounded up—I don’t believe in leniency towards those responsible for the war, I have every intention of personally hanging Paris up by his balls—we could set about civilizing the population and changing their ways. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of this. I see it as a mission. I am with Odysseus, we should take no chances.”