Sacred Bride

by Sacred Bride (retail) (epub)

  ‘I’m sure you did your best, Korakis,’ Kyshanda says, and her voice sends a shiver through me, because I know it well enough to detect relief. ‘Will you try once more?’

  ‘Even if I could,’ and here there’s a pause, presumably to show them his broken arm, ‘it is not wise for me to make another attempt immediately. I have been seen and my purpose is known. Security will be increased and the quarry wary. One seldom gets a clear second chance.’

  ‘Try again anyway,’ Skaya-Mandu snarls. ‘Your right arm is whole and you can still use a blade. I want him dead.’

  Kyshanda sent the warning note. She still cares. But my heart has no idea what to do with that information any more, and nor does my head. Because everything tells me that what she and I shared was something we stole, against all odds, and that anything lasting is impossible. Our nations, our causes, have already torn us from each other’s arms, and though war might be averted, I doubt we’ll ever find union. She’s already a phantasm, an illusion that’s fraying in the cold blast of reality.

  But Penelope is here, and real. Possibly just as unattainable, but unequivocally on my side.

  ‘If the Ithacan still lives, then we must move with greater urgency,’ Carnus growls. ‘Don’t wait until midday – go to the king at dawn, and convene the seeing as early as possible. I will send my chosen theioi and their men to hunt down Odysseus on some pretext. He has to die.’

  They bustle into action, footsteps departing with varying urgency, until the space below us is empty. I can hear Carnus talking with someone out in the vestibule – the local Dionysus priest, who has otherwise been silent. But there’s no time to waste. Any moment, the two priests will finish their conversation and one or both will come inside, presumably to sleep. Which means, they’ll come upstairs…

  We climb onto the balcony rail and I lift Penelope up so that she can grasp the edge of the light well. With her safely on the roof, I leap, catch the lip and hoist myself out into the fresh air just as footsteps start up the staircase from the ground floor room. Even then we can’t relax. When we’re sure the other conspirators are all gone and there are no guards in sight, we repeat the acrobatics of our rope-walk above the alley, though this time Penelope seems a lot more at ease, physically. Once she’s across, I dismantle the lower rope, repeat my tightrope exercise in reverse, free the final stretch of rope and slowly reel it in. In less than a minute, the entire coil is in my hands.

  I turn to face Penelope. ‘Holding you so close was wrong,’ I mumble, trying to confront the problem head-on. ‘Heat of the moment. I apologise.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Penelope replies tersely, her composure still clearly frayed. Head warring with heart? Or perhaps it’s just confusion at having been forced into intimacy with a man – any man – when she’s pledged celibacy. But her expression is of self-recrimination, and when she speaks again her voice is gentler. ‘Odysseus, I have to think, and pray. I’ve never questioned my vocation, but the Artemis cult is changing into something I no longer understand. And Delos is killing me. I can feel my brain atrophying with every blank day… I don’t think I can endure the place much longer.’

  ‘Then don’t. Leave.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I’m like a trained puppy to them now. They don’t care about my needs, they just record my words and gather my weaving every night, and I never see or hear of either again. I’m going to die having never lived.’

  Instinctively I go to hug her, but she stops me.

  ‘No,’ she says softly. ‘You’ve grown into an extraordinary man, Odysseus of Ithaca. In another life…’ Abruptly she turns to make her way back across the roof top and I have no alternative but to follow her meekly, as we clamber down and into the alley.

  Once we’re back at the town springs, with the earlier crowds dispersed, we exchange urgent words, planning our next moves. She needs to return to her quarters as soon as possible, before she’s missed. But we must somehow find a way to disrupt Zeus and Hera’s plans, before Helen is given to Parassi, and the Trojan invasion, with all its bloodshed and rapine, becomes a forgone conclusion.

  ‘Will you be included in Sophronia’s delegation tomorrow morning?’ I ask her. ‘It’d be good to have someone on the inside.’

  ‘I’ll do all I can to be there,’ she tells me. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m going to try and rouse resistance to this,’ I tell her. ‘I think I have a plan…’

  18 – In the Eyes of the Gods

  ‘Seeing such a great crowd of [suitors] Tyndareus was frightened that, by deciding in favour of one, the rest would erupt into violent disagreement.’

  —Apollodorus, The Library

  Sparta

  There’ll be no sleep for me tonight…

  I’m unable to return my room, not with Carnus’s theioi hunting for me. With so many enemies here, he’ll have no shortage of volunteers. But I have a plan and I know these streets and palace grounds like a local – if that local happens to have spent half his youth out on midnight jaunts, as I have.

  I slip right past all the hunters, and seek out the people who can really help me now: Bria and Eurybates – and Teliope – we’re going to need her even more than we thought. Diomedes is probably too much of a mess to assist us, but I ask Eury to see if he can talk some sense into him. My main focus is to smuggle my way undetected into the palace, and seek out the person who has the rank and reputation to be the public mouthpiece for my idea, now I can no longer act freely and openly: Menelaus.

  He’s up for it, of course. Together we creep back down into town, evading groups of men who are quite clearly hunting for me.

  By now, it’s after midnight, but we’re both wide awake, stimulated by the danger. It’s a cold, clear night, with a waning half-moon giving us enough light to find our way into the sea of tents outside Sparta town. There are two temporary villages which have grown up during the wedding games; the one we’re heading into houses those suitors and their entourages who live in the Peloponnese and the southern mainland – the pure Achaeans, in other words. There’s another one on the other side of the ridge that houses mostly Thessalians and other northerners – the men of Zeus and Ares and their cabals. It’s been raucous in both camps every night, and even now there are still men lined up outside the whoring tents, or sitting round drinking and dicing. It reminds me of an army on campaign.

  I take Menelaus to the pavilion of Menestheus first. We rouse and brief him before moving on to Idomeneus and then Euryalus of the Epigoni, and so on and so on. We tell them that Tyndareus is planning to betray and rob them all – that’s not altogether fair on Tyndareus, but we need to keep the message simple – and ask them to gather at the edge of the town half an hour before dawn, and to pass the word.

  I use the remaining time to prime Menelaus as to what to say. He’s a good speaker, so long as he’s well-rehearsed; and everyone knows him as someone who wears his heart on his sleeve.

  What he says and does next could change Achaea’s fate, or seal it.

  * * *

  ‘They’re not going to give back the gifts! They’re not going to recognise the victor of the games! And they’re going to marry Helen to a Trojan!’

  Menelaus punches the air, his voice hoarse with outrage. His words catch fire among the hungover, dog-tired and hugely disgruntled suitors. We’re perched on a rock outcrop, a natural speaking platform, just outside the edge of the town and my Ithacans have massed behind us, to ensure no one tries to bar the gate into the main street. There’s also a crowd gathering of disgruntled locals, roused from their houses and workplaces by the hubbub. As they listen, they’re beginning to get as worked up as the suitors.

  ‘They only invited us here to fleece us!’ he goes on. ‘There was never any real competition! It’s a farce! Are you going to let them get away with it?’

  As one, the men begin to shout, ‘No! No!’

  Menelaus flashes me an anxious look. ‘How am I doing?’ he mutters, his handsome face flushed with excitemen
t and worry, and the exertion of shouting.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ I reassure him, from my concealed position at his feet. ‘Now talk about the Trojans again. Show them the arrow.’

  ‘There was an arrow fired inside the palace compound last night!’ he shouts. ‘A Trojan assassin with an inscribed arrow, bearing the name of my friend, Odysseus of Ithaca. That assassin is still out there, lurking around waiting to murder good Achaeans, right under our noses – and make off with Princess Helen!’

  ‘Death to the Trojans!’ shouts Itanus and my Ithacans, and the call is readily taken up. The suitors are all warrior-born, all armed and armoured, a menace to anyone; and, with every word, they’re growing angrier and angrier. It won’t take much now to push them into action.

  I love a good rabble­rousing.

  ‘Tell them about Carnus being here,’ I remind Menelaus. There is no one more hated and feared in Achaea than Hyllus, son of Heracles, and anyone associated with him attracts the same opprobrium.

  ‘I have it on good authority,’ Menelaus shouts – Damn, he’s doing this well – ‘that the seer Carnus, who serves Hyllus, the man who ravaged the Peloponnese and lusts to do so again, is here, right now! He’s up there, at the palace shrine, plotting to kidnap our princess, the daughter of Zeus, and hand her over to our enemies! Are we going to let him?’

  ‘Fuck, no!’ roars an Arcadian champion. ‘Let’s go get that piece of shit and tear him apart!’

  The whole crowd starts bellowing, a sea of heads and open mouths, lit by blazing torches held aloft, sparks flying up into the night sky as they’re shaken about. The men are fully primed now, ready to surge through the town and up to the palace. Just like that, our work here is done.

  I rise and clap Menelaus on the shoulder, keeping a fold of my cloak over my head ‘Go on, take the lead,’ I urge him. ‘Keep them focused, and angry. I’ll stay hidden in the crowd for now – there are still men hunting me.’

  He gives me an anxious grin. Menelaus is a decent and conservative young man and this kind of wild near-riot is anathema to him. He also loves Tyndareus. But he believes in me and what I’ve told him. He really does fear for Helen and for Achaea, and rightly so – leaving aside the fact that Helen is complicit in all this plotting with Troy – a small detail I haven’t yet shared with him.

  Our mass of angry Achaean warriors goes bullocking through the town, joined by scores of excitable Spartan men equally inflamed by Menelaus’s words. I scamper along in their midst, huddled close to Eurybates as we exchange information.

  Bria has gone ahead – she has a vital mission right now, a move that might just turn the tide our way. Eury reports that the small band of Ithacans he sent off earlier have been partially successful, and returned with one of their targets to join our rearguard.

  It’s not all good news: Diomedes has ruled himself out – he’s too humiliated to show his face, and perhaps that’s for the best, given his moment of weakness could be used against him – and us.

  Worse, word comes from a runner that the other suitors’ camp – the one made of mostly Thessalians and other wild northerners – has been warned, and they’re also on the move, surging into town through another gate. Those local people not already joined with us are barricading themselves into their homes. If this goes badly, the bloodbath Tyndareus and I have feared could easily come to pass. It’s a huge gamble with people’s lives, which I will be responsible for. I’m desperate to prevent such a bloodletting, despite the hornets’ nest Menelaus and I have kicked here – our plan has to succeed.

  ‘We must get to the palace gates before the other lot,’ I tell Eurybates, and he hurries off to urge Menelaus – now at the head of the mass of men – to redouble his pace. We are striding out now, and I disperse my Ithacans to flank the column and provide early warnings. There’s danger in the air, and the taste of blood.

  But we started first, and we reach the palace before the Northerners. Tyndareus has barred the gates – not at all surprising in the circumstances, but he’s nowhere to be seen on the battlements above us. Over beyond the Parnon mountains in the east, there’s just the faintest hint of dawn light. The ceremony in the palace shrine must be about to begin, if it hasn’t done so already.

  There’s a guard commander fretting above the gates, and I imagine it looks terrifying from his perspective: a sea of angry warriors breaking against the rock he’s perched upon.

  But the citadel has walls twelve feet high, lined with guardsmen, bows and spears at the ready. If this really turns bad, he’s got all the advantages. Already some of the men behind Menelaus are aware of this, and the energy of this march is starting to dissipate. And the mainland camp – all those damned Northerners – are starting to arrive behind us. We’re about to be caught between a rock and a very hard place indeed.

  That’s where sending Bria ahead pays off, because she appears atop of the gatehouse – with Agamemnon.

  I’m too far away and there’s too much of a din for me to hear anything, but the gestures and body language are quite clear. Agamemnon, resplendent in purple and gold, is ordering the guard captain to stand down and open his gates, and the captain is maintaining that he’s answerable only to Tyndareus.

  Agamemnon raises his voice at this point, so that even I can hear him, down in the baying crowd. His message is basic: he’s the High King and Tyndareus’s overlord, so every-fucking-body is answerable to him, and does the captain wish to be hurled from the gatehouse right now?

  That threat – and Agamemnon’s hallowed status, a reverence for lineage and blue blood, all the stuff that gets ingrained into every Achaean from birth – cause the captain to back down… indeed, crawl down… pretty damned fast. Just as the chanting that Menelaus is leading is beginning to falter, the gates are thrown open, and Agamemnon joins Menelaus at the head of the column that spews into the palace grounds, and pours upward to the royal shrine, at the centre of the citadel compound.

  And the gates get slammed shut again, in the faces of the Northerners.

  Nice touch, that.

  At this stage, I decide that the safest place in the world is right behind Agamemnon, so I elbow through the crowd as best I can, and so I’m virtually treading on the heels of the High King and his brother – who look more pleased with each other than I’ve ever seen – as they burst into the sacred gardens and interrupt my grandmother’s little gathering.

  The shrine is a colonnaded garden with a statuary icon of every Olympian god, one beneath each column, and an altar in the middle piled high with offerings and votive candles and oil braziers that never go out. The greatest statues are of Zeus and Hera, at the head of the rectangular space, flanked by Ares, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Apollo and Artemis on one side; and Poseidon, Hades, Hephaestus, Hermes and Athena on the other.

  No Leto, of course. This is the heartland of Lacedaemon and the Peloponnese, where old tales die hard. The Apollo statue is especially new, and the least garlanded.

  Before some of these statues of the divinities are poised their primary servants. Carnus – a balding man with a thick, bushy grey beard and the build of a warrior – has placed himself before the Zeus icon; my grandmother Amphithea is positioned before that of Hera. Sophronia, High Priestess of Delos, stands before the Artemis icon, beside an easterner I don’t know, languid in coloured silks beside the Apollo figurine. A burly man in furs is stationed before the Ares statue, next to a shapely young woman representing the Aphrodite priestesses. A rather handsome grey fox of a man is before the Dionysus statue, presumably Melampus. No others: no Athena, Poseidon, Hades, Hephaestus or Hermes servants – just seven of the twelve Olympian gods. Zeus’s new inner circle.

  They all have extra attendees – I see Manto among those people gathered behind my grandmother, and right now they’re all seething with indignation at being interrupted – but it’s more than indignation. I read fear and frustration, shock and bravado on their faces in equal measure.

  Tyndareus and his family are also here –
not just Helen, Castor and Polydeuces, but also his once-beautiful, once-vibrant wife Leda, whose life has been destroyed by a longing that turned to drunken despair, in the aftermath of her one night of divine love with Zeus. Even Tyndareus’s younger children are present, three prepubescent daughters, Timandra, Phoebe and Philonoe, who are clutching their mother in bewilderment and fear. They’re in the middle of the garden near the altar, a place of honour. But, huddled together, they look more like hostages.

  Agamemnon and Menelaus pause at the edge of the shrine, and the mob behind us pipe down, straining to hear. The High King draws himself erect and opens his mouth…

  …and for once Menelaus speaks ahead of his brother. ‘Tyndareus!’ he shouts, in a stricken voice – he’s doing this just the way I told him – ‘How can this be, that you harbour the counsellor of Hyllus, the ravager of this kingdom, in your sacred shrine?’ He thrusts an accusing finger toward Carnus, while turning his head to address Agamemnon, ‘There he is, brother; the man whose invective unleashed Tartarus-on-earth upon our people!’

  Carnus is visibly shaken, and begins to cast his eyes about, seeking escape routes. But with our crowd of armoured suitors beginning to spill out around the shrine, those options are fast disappearing.

  Make a run for it, I silently beg him. You too, Amphithea – back down now, and make this easy for us…

  I must say this for my grandmother, though: she’s not one to allow being caught in the act of betraying her people to shut her up, or even cause visible embarrassment. She’s impressively brazen, as she steps forward. ‘High King Agamemnon,’ she cries in a high-pitched, imperious voice, ‘I am here at your invitation, to make clear the will not only of Hera, but of all the gods!’

  ‘You’re here by your own bidding,’ Agamemnon retorts crisply. ‘King Tyndareus called the greatest men of Achaea to contend for the hand of his daughter, many of whom are gathered behind me. They wish to see a just settlement of his obligation to them.’