The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

‘My choice remains the same, my lord. I already have a husband, one who was chosen for me by my foster-father twenty years ago from among the best men of Greece. He is Menelaus, king of Sparta, and if you love your people you will send me back to him tonight.’

Priam slammed his palm down on the arm of his throne.

‘Menelaus may have been your husband in that barbaric land, but he is not here! And we have not fought for ten years just to give you back now. If you will not choose, Daughter, then I will choose for you. Deiphobus will be your husband. What’s more, you will be married this very night here in the great hall.’

‘No!’ Helen shouted. ‘I refuse!’

‘You’ll do as I command,’ Priam replied, sternly. ‘And as for you, Helenus, you will appear before the assembly tomorrow evening and you will tell us the oracle that was revealed to you.’

Helen turned and looked at the tall wooden doors at the back of the great hall. As the walls and ceiling of the vast chamber seemed to close in on her from the shadows, the doors presented her last hope of escape. But before she could think to run, Deiphobus seized her by the arm and shouted for Idaeus to fetch a priest. Helen struggled against her future husband’s grip, and though Deiphobus refused to meet her beautiful, accusing eyes, he held her firm.

Helenus shot his father an angry look, then turned and left with Apheidas at his shoulder.

Chapter Twelve

IN APHEIDAS’S HOUSE

Eperitus looked over his shoulder at the five horsemen riding in file behind him. They were cloaked and hooded against the cold night air, and with only starlight to guide their mounts over the unpredictable terrain their progress was slow. Odysseus was nearest. He caught Eperitus’s glance and nodded.

‘Still here,’ he muttered, without enthusiasm.

Eperitus smiled in reply and turned his eyes back to the ground before his own horse’s hooves. The grass was thin and parched, dotted here and there with broken weapons and armour from the years of fighting that had taken place across it. Looking ahead, he could see the ridge line that marked the edge of the plateau – a deeper darkness rising up against the blue-black of the night sky. His supernatural eyesight could already pick out the tall ring of trees that formed the temple of Thymbrean Apollo, silhouetted against the stars as it stood on top of the ridge. The sight of it filled him with a sudden, heavy sorrow as he remembered his former squire, Arceisius, murdered in the temple by Apheidas – and all because Eperitus had been foolish enough to agree a meeting with his father. If he had trusted his long-standing hatred of Apheidas then Arceisius’s death would not be on his conscience. But he had believed the woman his father had sent to draw him into his trap, and if anything her betrayal had hurt him even more than the loss of his friend. He had shed bitter tears at the passing of Arceisius, tears of grief and regret, but after a decade of war he could understand death and had learned how to accept it. What he had not learned was how to accept treachery of the heart. He wanted to be angry with Astynome, but all he felt was sadness that she was gone. It would have been much easier to hate her for making him love her, when all along she had been living a lie, sent by Apheidas to trick him into betraying the Greeks. To hate was a familiar emotion, easy to live with. And yet, when he recalled her beautiful face framed by the dark mess of her hair, or the soft fragrance of her skin in his nostrils – so wonderful to his heightened senses – he knew he could never truly hate her. Naturally, he felt surges of bitterness and anger, as much at what he had lost as at what she had done; but then he would remember the feel of her long fingers running through his hair and the warmth of her lips against his, and he could not convince himself that she did not love him back.

‘Not far now,’ Odysseus said, catching Eperitus unawares as he rode up beside him.

The king had tipped back his hood and was squinting in the direction of the temple, doubtless nothing more than a black smudge atop the line of the ridge to his eyes.

‘I wonder whether we’ll find anything when we get there,’ Eperitus replied. ‘How are the others?’

‘Grumbling. Just as you’d expect.’

‘But why? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend the night tramping halfway across Ilium on the whim of a crazy priest?’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ Odysseus agreed. ‘However, if Calchas says the secret to Troy’s downfall will be found in the temple of Thymbrean Apollo tonight, then I don’t mind a short horse ride to see if it’s true. Besides, Agamemnon believes him and we do whatever Agamemnon commands, right?’

‘Right,’ Eperitus echoed indifferently. ‘Though I still say this is just another wild rabbit hunt. The problem is this whole war’s been like chasing rabbits – we stop up one hole and the Trojans escape out of another. And if you ask me Calchas doesn’t have the gift of prophecy, and if he ever did he doused the fire with too much wine years ago.’

‘He predicted the day of Achilles’s death, didn’t he?’ Odysseus replied. ‘Anyway, the rabbit holes can’t go on forever. One day – maybe this day – the gods will show us how to defeat Troy. And then we can go home.’

‘Did Troy fall the day Paris died, as Calchas predicted?’

‘That was another rabbit hole. And even if there are a hundred more holes to block, what choice do we have but to stop them up, stop them all up? This isn’t a little matter of personal fate that you and I can try to change. It’s a war, the biggest war the world has ever seen, and only the gods know how it will end. So if they tell Calchas that a new oracle, maybe the last oracle, will be given in the temple of Thymbrean Apollo tonight, then I’m going to be there. I’ll do whatever they tell us, Eperitus, if it means I’ll be able to hold Penelope in my arms again and see my little Telemachus.’

‘Not so little now,’ Eperitus said, slapping Odysseus on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s get to the temple and see what the gods have in mind.’

Odysseus turned and called to the others, then spurred his horse into a trot. Eperitus followed, hoping that Calchas’s latest vision would prove right and that they would soon find the final key to unlocking the gates of Troy.

Helenus stormed from the palace in a fit of rage, so incensed at Deiphobus’s victory that he did not know where to go or what to do with himself. He stomped across the courtyard, cursing his brother, Priam, Helen and all the gods in turn, before bawling at the guards to move aside as he almost ran down the slope to the lower tiers of the citadel. He yelled obscenities at the few soldiers patrolling the streets of Pergamos, then threw himself down a side alley and began beating his fists against a solid wooden door until his fury was exhausted and he slid down the cold stone doorpost to sit huddled in the dirt.

After a while a shadow fell across him. He looked up and saw Apheidas towering above him, a halo of stars crowning his dark head.

‘Come with me,’ he ordered.

He pulled Helenus to his feet and led him through the shadowy streets to a two-storeyed house adjacent to a small temple of Apollo beneath the outer walls. They crossed the modest courtyard to a low portico at the front of the house, which was supported by two simple columns. Apheidas pushed open the double doors and stepped directly into the main hall. The large chamber was in darkness but for the circular hearth that glowed at its centre. The four columns that surrounded the fire seemed to dance as the flickering light of its flames licked across them, warping in and out of the shadows as if moving to an unheard music. The walls of the main hall were almost lost in the dense shadows, but where the blush of the firelight reached them Helenus could see scenes of fierce battles painted on the white, smoke-stained plaster, in which lines of red-skinned warriors fought furiously for mastery over each other while the dead and dying lay piled beneath them.

‘They take on a life of their own in the gloom, don’t you think?’ Apheidas commented. ‘The firelight makes them move as if they were actually fighting.’

Helenus looked at them wide-eyed and nodded, enthralled by the depictions of battle – something he had only ever witnessed at a distance from the city walls.

‘It looks terrifying.’

‘War is,’ Apheidas agreed, ‘even after all these years. But fear is the lowest price a man has to pay for immortality – most have to die, like Hector and Achilles. And Paris, of course. Have you thought any more what you will do – about Helen, I mean?’

The commander looked straight into Helenus’s eyes, reinforcing the seriousness of his question. Helenus frowned in confusion, before blinking and looking away to the murals on the walls.

‘What do you mean, do about Helen? Didn’t you hear what Priam said? He gave her to Deiphobus. They’re being married at this very moment, while I stand here listening to your nonsense.’ A flicker of anger tightened his lips and concentrated his brow. ‘And tomorrow I’ll be forced to tell the oracles to Priam, despite everything. Your stupid plan didn’t work, Apheidas! All you’ve done is made my father angry at me.’

‘So it didn’t work,’ Apheidas said with a shrug, his tone flat and unapologetic. ‘When things go wrong in battle, a good commander adapts and changes his plans. You’ll have to do the same, that’s all.’

‘That’s all? What are you talking about?’

Apheidas did not reply, but turned and shouted so that his voice boomed around the hall.

‘Astynome? Astynome! Where are you, girl?’

A door opened to the right of the main entrance and a servant entered. Though her face was hidden in shadow, she was wiping her hands on the front of the old dress she wore and her long legs and naked feet were visible beneath the raised hem. Helenus’s tongue flicked across his lips at the sight of her bare flesh.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Astynome said, dropping the hem from her hands as she emerged from the shadows.

The servant’s face took Helenus by surprise and made him momentarily forget his anger. She had fierce, dark eyes that hid deep passions Helenus would never understand, and her black hair and suntanned face gave her a wild beauty that was both alluring and yet far beyond his reach, challenging the young prince’s sense of pride and arrogance.

‘Bring us wine and something to soak it up with,’ Apheidas commanded, falling into one of the dozen chairs that surrounded the hearth.

He waved Helenus into its neighbour, unaware of the dark, hateful look Astynome shot him before disappearing back through the same door she had come in by.

‘Now, Helenus, do you want to marry your sister-in-law or don’t you?’

‘You know I do.’

‘Then what are you prepared to do to win her?’

He stared hard at the prince, who, despite his sense of royal superiority, struggled to hold the commander’s challenging gaze. He was rescued by the reappearance of Astynome, who carried a small table by a leg in one hand and a basket of bread in the other. Helenus’s eyes broke away from Apheidas’s and turned to the servant girl, admiring the curves visible beneath her dress as she set the table down between the two men and laid the basket on it. His licentious stare followed her out of the hall and then back in again as she returned with plates of cold meat and a bowl of fruit. Finally, she fetched a skin of wine and two kraters, which she filled and passed to the men while they looked on in silence. A moment later she had retreated into the shadows, there to wait on their needs.

Apheidas stretched across and poured a slop of wine into the flames, whispering a perfunctory prayer of thanks to the gods before drinking greedily. Helenus followed with his own libation and the two men started on the food, rolling slices of meat into the flat bread and cramming them into their mouths. After their immediate hunger and thirst were satisfied, Apheidas leaned back, belched and looked at Helenus.

‘So, my prince, I’ll ask you again: what are you prepared to do to win Helen?’

‘I fail to see what I can do. By now the ceremony will be over and Deiphobus and Helen will be man and wife. Unless you’re suggesting I kidnap her, as Paris did –’

‘Of course not,’ Apheidas said with an impatient frown. ‘But there is a more effective way to end a marriage. Indeed, it has ended many thousands of marriages in the past decade.’

Helenus shifted uncomfortably in his chair, watching Apheidas as he lifted his empty krater for Astynome to refill.

‘You mean death,’ the prince said. ‘With Hector and Paris killed and so many other losses already this year, my father isn’t likely to send the army out to face the Greeks in open battle again. The chances of Deiphobus being slain by an enemy spear or arrow –’

‘Don’t be so naïve,’ Apheidas snapped. ‘I’m saying you need to kill Deiphobus. And don’t look so shocked. You’re an ambitious lad, Helenus; with your brother out of the way not only will you be able to marry Helen, you’ll be next in line for the throne! And Priam is ageing quickly. Since the death of Hector his will to live has faded; it won’t be long before his mighty spirit is led away to the Underworld. And what then? Would you have Deiphobus become king, with Helen as his queen? Or would you rather see yourself ruling Troy, with the most beautiful woman in Ilium at your side?’

Apheidas leaned forward as he spoke, his handsome face bathed in the orange glow of the hearth. His tone was forceful and persuasive, not in the least bit afraid as he talked of fratricide and treason. And his barbed words had snagged in Helenus’s mind, feeding on his anger and exciting his pervasive lust for power. He imagined himself seated on Priam’s magnificent throne with Helen beside him, while all the elders and commanders of the army prostrated themselves in obedience at his feet. Then a cough and a small movement broke the chain of his thoughts. Looking up, he saw Astynome refilling Apheidas’s krater for a second time, though her gaze was fixed on Helenus. Her penetrating stare seemed accusative, pouring cold water on his fantasies. Was his resentment so strong that he was prepared to kill his brother? And if it was, would his ambition then have the patience for his father to die naturally, or would he be tempted to hasten the process himself? Indeed, once awoken, the lion of ambition was not an easy creature to put to sleep again.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘You can,’ Apheidas countered. ‘I will be at your side to help you. Don’t you desire Helen?’

‘Of course I do, but by now she’s married to Deiphobus. And I’m no warrior; what chance would I stand against him?’

Apheidas reached out and snatched his wrist, pulling him to his feet.

‘Come with me.’

He led the prince to a side entrance, thrusting the panelled door open with the heel of his free hand. At once, Helenus could feel the cool night air on his skin and smell the mingled aromas of wet foliage and damp soil. They stepped out into a square courtyard, filled with fruit trees and shrubs and surrounded by a pillared cloister. It was dark, the only light coming from the few stars that winked between the tattered edges of a thin screen of cloud. At first the garden seemed silent and still, slumbering in its own gloom. Then Helenus became aware of a low hissing that hovered at the edge of his hearing, enticing his senses and focussing them as they searched for the source.

‘What’s that noise?’ he asked.

‘That way.’

Apheidas pointed to a path that led between high bushes to the centre of the garden. Helenus hesitated a moment, then followed the line of flagstones to a border of low shrubs surrounding a large, black square in the ground. From the edge of the garden he had thought it to be a pond, but as he got nearer he noticed there was no hint of reflection in its dark waters and that a flight of stone steps descended into its depths on one side. Realising he was looking at a pit, and that the strange hissing sound was emanating from its heart, he stepped closer.

‘Careful,’ Apheidas warned. ‘Fall in there and Priam will have lost another son.’

Helenus nevertheless edged forward and looked down. The darkness was deep and all-consuming at first, as if a hole had been torn from the living world to reveal the black chasm of Tartarus below. As he stared he became aware that something at the base of the Stygian pit was catching the starlight, causing it to glisten weakly in a hundred different places. Then he saw the points of reflected light were moving – faint, slithering signs of life that seemed to intensify and spread as he watched, until the whole of the void was filled with a hideous writhing. He stepped back and shuddered.

‘Snakes! So this is where you keep the sacrifices for Apollo.’

Apheidas nodded. ‘My ancestors have always been devotees of the archer god. We were warriors, not priests, but one of our duties before my father was exiled from Troy was to breed snakes for the temple. He carried it on in Alybas, after he fled to Greece, and I revived the tradition when I returned to Troy. Apollo’s priests place a high value on serpents as sacrifices, but they have other uses too. Their venom, for instance.’

He placed an arm around Helenus’s shoulders and steered him back towards the main hall.

‘You don’t need to kill Deiphobus with your own hands. The right kind of snake left somewhere that only your brother will find it; a quick bite on the hand; then Helen will soon be your wife and you’ll be next in line to rule Troy.’

Helenus shook off Apheidas’s heavy arm as they reached the cloister.

‘I don’t know what you hope to gain from this, Apheidas,’ he said, turning to face him, ‘but you’ve overestimated my abilities. I’m not sure I can do what you’re suggesting.’

‘Have you already forgotten your anger after you were humiliated in the palace?’ Apheidas said, forcefully. ‘Don’t you care that Priam chose Deiphobus over you, or that he just expects you to give him the oracles tomorrow evening? He and your brother treated you like a child, but it’s up to you to prove you’re a man.’

‘But I’m not a man!’ Helenus protested. ‘At least, I’m not the man you think me to be; nor am I the sort of man Deiphobus and my father are. I hate them for humiliating me tonight, but I couldn’t easily take their places. Even if I was to do all you say, murdering my brother and taking the throne when Priam dies, who am I to rule over such a great city as Troy? In peacetime it would be difficult enough, but with an army of Greeks laying siege to Ilium it’d be almost impossible. Besides, the walls aren’t as impenetrable as we thought. The oracles my … the oracles that were revealed to me predict Troy will fall if the Greeks can do three things – I told you that! If Agamemnon finds out what they are –’

‘He won’t,’ Apheidas said through clenched teeth, his impatience becoming evident. ‘And you aren’t as weak as you think. With my help Helen will be yours and you will be the one to inherit your father’s throne.’

‘Stop pressuring me!’ Helenus shouted. ‘Don’t you realise your words are treasonous, that I could have you killed for the things you’ve said tonight?’

Apheidas stared at him through narrowed eyes.

‘That would depend on whom Priam believed – a defiant, ambitious son with everything to gain from his father’s death, or a loyal captain claiming he was coerced into joining a plot against the throne. But let’s not succumb to our tempers, Helenus. Take some time alone, here in the garden, to think on what I’ve said. If you want Helen, I’ll be waiting by the hearth to discuss what we can do. If your anger and ambition aren’t matched by your courage, then you can return to the palace and neither of us will mention this incident again – to one another or to anybody else. Do you agree?’

Helenus gave a surly nod and turned to look at the dark garden, waiting until he heard the door shut behind him before releasing a long breath and letting his shoulders slump in despair. He quickly tensed again when he saw a figure emerge from the shadows beneath one of the cloisters.

‘Don’t be afraid, my lord.’ It was the servant girl, Astynome. ‘I followed you into the garden to see if you would agree to kill Deiphobus.’

‘The testament of a maid won’t help Apheidas if he intends to accuse me of plotting against my father.’

‘I’m not here on his orders.’

‘Then why?’ Helenus asked, moving further away from the door to the main hall and nearer to the girl. ‘To see if I really am a traitor? And how would you feel if I’d have agreed to your master’s plot?’

Astynome moved closer so that her features were clearly visible in the gloom.

‘A few months ago I would have considered you vile, lower than the creatures that infest that pit over there. Now –’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Now I don’t see things in such simplistic terms. After all, I’m a traitor myself. My heart betrayed Troy for the sake of a Greek, and now he thinks I’ve betrayed him. But I’d gladly see Troy burn if it meant I could be with him again. So, you see, I’m in no place to judge you.’

Helenus considered her for a moment and realised there was more to the servant girl than her beauty. He also felt her words were spoken in honesty and that he could entrust his problems to her.

‘The truth is, I’m so angry I could do almost anything,’ he began. ‘When Priam awarded Helen to Deiphobus it was a deliberate humiliation, and as the gods are my witnesses I’d rather reveal the oracles to the Greeks than be forced to give them to my father and brother! I want to teach them a lesson they’ll remember, Astynome, but how can a lowly priest gain revenge against a warrior prince and a king? And yet, after tonight I don’t know whether I want Apheidas’s help.’

‘You’re right not to trust him. He wants Priam’s throne for himself and he’s only using you to remove the obstacles in his path. With Deiphobus dead, he would ensure the demise of your younger brothers before encouraging you to take the throne from your father. And then he would kill you and claim it for himself. That’s how his mind works, Helenus. What’s more, if you don’t agree to his proposal he’ll kill you and hide your body so it looks like you’ve run away in a fit of jealous anger.’

Helenus felt for the slender dagger tucked away beneath his robes and immediately knew it would be no use against a seasoned fighter like Apheidas. And yet the servant girl’s words rang true. He knew he would not walk out of the captain’s house alive unless he agreed on his oath to kill Deiphobus, thus starting a chain of events that would ultimately lead to his own death. Even if he told Deiphobus and his father of Apheidas’s plans, what proof would he have? How would he defend himself if Apheidas turned the accusation back against him? He looked again at the servant girl, and as her eyes met his he knew she understood his dilemma and had an answer in mind.

‘Then what should I do?’

‘Is your anger against Deiphobus and Priam genuine?’

‘Yes, but not enough to become Apheidas’s puppet.’

‘Then you must flee the city and go to the Greeks.’

‘The Greeks,’ he scoffed. ‘The Greeks will kill me, or just ransom me back to my father.’

Astynome shook her head.

‘Not if you do as I tell you. Over there is another door. It opens on to an alley that will take you out to the neighbouring temple. Find a horse, leave Pergamos and make your way out of the city. Ride to the Greek camp and demand to see Odysseus.’

‘The Ithacan? But what if he refuses to see me?’

‘He won’t. Not if you offer to tell him about the oracles I heard you speak of, the ones that hold the key to the destruction of Troy. Didn’t you say you’d rather give them to the Greeks than be forced to reveal them to Priam and Deiphobus? And won’t this give you the vengeance you were craving? Besides, Odysseus is an intelligent man, the cleverest of all the Greeks; he’ll see the importance of what you have to offer and give you whatever you want in exchange.’

Helenus pondered her words, sucking in his bottom lip as he eyed the girl’s dark beauty. He thought of Helen and his humiliation in the great hall, and then of the menacing figure of Apheidas, who would reappear at any moment and demand the answer to his question.

‘I should go at once,’ he said with a nod. ‘Your master won’t wait much longer.’

He moved towards the door Astynome had indicated, but she stepped in front of him and placed a hand on his chest.

‘I’ve helped you, Helenus, and now I want you to do something for me in return.’

‘What is it?’

‘When you see Odysseus, ask to speak to the captain of his guard – a man named Eperitus. Make sure Eperitus knows that it was me that sent you to the Greek camp, and that I encouraged you to entrust the oracles to them. That’s all.’

Helenus nodded and with a nervous glance over his shoulder ran to the door that led out to the temple of Apollo. As he reached it, he turned to look at Astynome.

‘This Eperitus,’ he asked. ‘Is he the Greek you fell in love with?’

Astynome nodded.

‘Then I will tell him you were prepared to give up Troy’s secrets for his sake. May the gods protect you, Astynome.’

Chapter Thirteen

THE ORACLES OF TROY

Eperitus rode his mount up to the top of the ridge where the temple of Thymbrean Apollo stood tall and black against the stars. Odysseus joined him and together they sat staring in silence at the familiar sight of Troy below them, before dismounting and tying the reins of their horses to the trees that formed the walls of the temple. The others followed their example and Eperitus, sword drawn, led the way into the shadowy circle of laurels. Their curved trunks bent inwards like the ribcage of a rotted carcass, looming over him as he entered, while the thickly interlaced branches formed a ceiling that only the faintest trace of starlight could penetrate. The floor within had been laid over with large, even flagstones and at the far end was an altar of white marble. It was a dim grey in the gloom, its surface scattered not with the sacrifices of reverent worshippers but the curled husks of fallen leaves. In the murk behind it was a wooden effigy, carved from the stump of a dead tree into the likeness of the god Apollo. Dense fronds of ivy bound its legs and torso and from its clenched fists protruded a horn bow and a bronze arrow, the latter gleaming dully in the shadows.

‘So what are we looking for?’ Antiphus asked, sweeping the leaves from the altar with his forearm and leaning across it to stare at the effigy of Apollo.

‘I don’t see anything different,’ said Eurybates, Odysseus’s squire, as he stared around at the deserted temple. Having been left in charge of the Ithacan camp while the others had sailed to Lemnos, he had insisted on riding with them that evening to relieve his boredom. The expression on his face, however, was one of disappointment. ‘What did Calchas say we would find?’

Eperitus stood over the place where his father had stabbed Arceisius in the back only two weeks before, looking down at the floor as if expecting to see his squire’s blood still staining the flagstones.

‘Perhaps we won’t find anything,’ he said. ‘Who’s to say we’ve not been sent here on one of Calchas’s drunken whims.’

‘You’re too cynical, Eperitus,’ Odysseus remarked, standing with his hands on his hips and looking up at the ceiling. ‘If the gods want us to know how to defeat Troy, they’ll find a way to tell us. Apollo may even appear to us in person.’

With the exception of Eperitus – who had encountered immortals before – the others turned to him with looks of mixed alarm and curiosity. Antiphus slipped back from the altar and stared uncertainly at the effigy of the god, while Eurybates and Omeros followed the king’s gaze up to the ceiling of branches, as if expecting Apollo to appear in the air above them at that very moment. Then Eperitus cocked his head to one side and narrowed his eyes, listening intently.

‘I can hear hooves,’ he announced. ‘A single horse, approaching from the direction of Troy. And its rider’s in a hurry.’

Polites, who had remained by the entrance, threw back his cloak and made to draw his sword. Odysseus raised a cautionary hand.

‘Let him come. The temple is neutral ground, respected by both sides.’

‘Not by my father,’ Eperitus growled.

‘It won’t be Apheidas,’ Odysseus replied, able to hear the distant sound of hooves himself now. ‘But whoever it is, he might just be the reason we were sent here. Pull up your hoods all of you and come back into the shadows.’

The others did as they were ordered, waiting in silence as they heard the hooves top the ridge not far from the temple and then come to a sharp halt. There was a pause as the rider doubtless saw the tethered horses of the Greeks and debated whether to carry on to the temple or turn back. Then they heard him dismount and lead his animal to the circle of laurel trees. The layered boles of the trees were so densely packed that only dark glimpses of the man and his horse were visible as he came closer, but Eperitus’s keen ears had already noted that the telltale sounds of leather or bronze that would have indicated a fully armed warrior were absent. Whoever the rider was, he was travelling light.

He tethered his horse and entered the temple: the slight figure of a youth, dressed in a dark cloak that was thrown back over both shoulders to reveal a simple, knee-length tunic of typical Trojan style. His beardless face was indistinguishable in the gloom, but the hesitation in his approach betrayed his unease as he walked slowly into the circle of trees. The whites of his eyes gleamed slightly as they fell on the six hooded figures.

‘This temple is neutral ground,’ he declared in Greek. His voice was high and tense. ‘All I want is to make an offering to the god and seek his blessing. Then I’ll be on my way.’

‘Go ahead and make your offering, son,’ Odysseus replied in the Trojan tongue. ‘We won’t stop you.’

Helenus’s eyes lingered on the Greeks a moment longer, then he reached into a leather satchel at his hip and pulled out four or five flat, round cakes. He approached the altar and laid them on the cold marble, before falling to his knees and bowing his head. After a sidelong, self-conscious glance at the Greeks, he closed his eyes, raised his hands before the crude effigy and began to pray.

‘Lord Apollo, if I’ve served you with any loyalty, if my past sacrifices have brought you pleasure, then I beg you to hear my prayer. Guide me safely to … to my destination, and let me find the man I was told to seek. My offerings are small and hurried tonight, but if you give me the vengeance my anger – no, my fury – demands, then I promise to thank you with the thigh bones and fat of a young calf.’

‘Vengeance?’ Odysseus said with a tone of mock interest.

Helenus turned to see two of the hooded men standing behind him.

‘You should have gone to a temple of Artemis,’ Eperitus added. ‘If it’s revenge you want, few gods can match her.’

‘I am a follower of Apollo, not his sister,’ Helenus replied. ‘And now I’ve made my prayer I will leave the temple to you.’

He made to step around the Greeks, but Odysseus raised a hand to stop him. It was then that Helenus noticed the other four men were standing by the single egress from the temple.

‘You said you would let me make my offering,’ he protested.

‘And so we have,’ Odysseus replied. ‘But don’t fear. We intend you no harm. Answer us a few questions and you can be on your way.’

‘What sort of questions?’

‘Your name, to start with.’

‘Helenus, son of Priam,’ Helenus confessed, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘But if you’re thinking I’ll fetch a good ransom because I’m a prince then you’ll be disappointed. I’m a priest, not a warrior, and my father values me less than the dogs that feed on the scraps from his table.’

‘We’re not after hostages,’ Eperitus countered. ‘We were sent here for information. We were told we would find the secret to the downfall of Troy in this temple tonight –’

Eperitus felt Odysseus’s hand on his arm and turned to see an admonishing look in the king’s eye. Clearly, he had said too much. Then he saw Odysseus’s gaze turn to Helenus; Eperitus followed and saw that the prince’s eyes were staring at him, wide with surprise.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

‘Calchas, the seer,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Do you know of him?’

Helenus nodded.

‘Yes. His reputation as a traitor is well known in Troy, though I also have vague memories of him from when I was a very young boy – his shuffling walk, and those piercing eyes.’

‘And are you the one he sent us to look for?’ Odysseus continued.

There was a tautness to the king’s tone, like a hunter who has sighted his prey and yet is afraid to launch his spear too soon for fear of startling the animal and sending it fleeing for cover. Helenus looked at the hooded men, their features indistinguishable in the gloom, and for a moment it looked as if he would tell them everything. Then he checked himself and stepped back towards the altar, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. It seemed the prey had flown.

‘Let me go. If you dishonour the neutrality of this temple you dishonour the gods themselves.’

‘The temple’s neutrality has nothing to do with the gods,’ Odysseus corrected. ‘The Greeks and Trojans came to a mutual understanding early in the war that it should be left open to both sides. And in the dead of the night there’ll be nobody to witness one small violation. Take him.’

At his signal Polites and Eurybates rushed forward and seized the prince by his arms.

‘And I’m curious,’ Odysseus continued, watching the captive struggle uselessly against their hold. ‘Why would anybody want to visit the temple so late, unless they were up to something they didn’t want anyone else to know about? Who’s this man you’re so desperate for Apollo to lead you to, and what’s made you furious enough to seek vengeance? What, exactly, are you up to, Helenus?’

‘I’ll speak to no man but Odysseus, or Eperitus his captain!’

‘Then Apollo has heard your prayer,’ Odysseus said, tipping back his hood. ‘I am King Odysseus of Ithaca, son of Laertes, and this is Eperitus, the captain of my guard.’

Eperitus lowered his hood and stepped forward to look at the prince, who had given up his struggles and now hung between his Ithacan captors, staring at Odysseus and Eperitus in disbelief.

‘Who told you to find us?’

‘A servant girl called Astynome,’ Helenus answered. Eperitus’s eyes widened momentarily, but he said nothing. ‘After Paris was slain, Deiphobus and I laid claim to Helen. Deiphobus is the elder and has fought valiantly against the Greeks, but I am a seer and offered to tell my father the oracles that were given to me to ensure the safety of Troy – or guarantee its destruction – if he gave me Helen for my wife.’

Odysseus and Eperitus exchanged glances.

‘Go on,’ the king said.

Helenus looked at the ground in anger and shame.

‘Priam chose Deiphobus. My brother forced Helen to marry him there and then, against her will, while I was ordered to give up the oracles to the council of elders tomorrow night. They humiliated me, and I want revenge.’

He looked up and there was a fierce rage burning in his eyes at the memory of what had happened in the great hall.

‘Menelaus won’t be happy,’ said Eurybates, still holding the prince’s arm. ‘He was hoping the Trojans would give Helen back to him after Paris was killed.’

‘I’d hoped the same,’ Odysseus confessed, ‘but it looks like we’ll have to do things the hard way, as usual. And yet it seems Calchas was correct: the gods have disclosed the means to conquer Troy, and the one man they’ve given this knowledge to is right here before us. Is your unhappiness so great, Helenus, that you’re prepared to betray these oracles to the enemies of your people?’

Helenus nodded and Odysseus signalled to Polites and Eurybates to release him.

‘Then tell me what they are.’

‘What, now? Here?’

‘I’m a hasty man,’ Odysseus answered, with a shrug. ‘The sooner you tell me, the sooner we can carry out the gods’ commands.’

Helenus seemed hesitant, as if wondering whether the Ithacan king and his men could be trusted.

‘First you must guarantee my safety, and once I’ve told you the oracles I want to be given safe passage away from Ilium. This country is no longer my home and the gods have already foretold its doom.’

‘You have my word,’ Odysseus said.

Antiphus and Omeros had left the entrance to the temple and were now standing either side of Odysseus and Eperitus. With Eurybates and Polites, they formed a circle with Helenus at their apex.

‘Then listen to what the gods have declared,’ he began. ‘Troy will fall this year if three conditions are met. First, the shoulder bone of Pelops must be fetched from his tomb in Greece and brought to Ilium. Second, Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son, must join the Greek army, for it’s his destiny to extinguish Troy’s royal line. And third, you must take the Palladium from the temple of Athena in Pergamos. Do all these things and victory will be yours.’

‘Rob a grave, kidnap a boy and steal a lump of burned wood,’ Eperitus mused. ‘Not impossible, even if I don’t see the point.’

‘Oh, there’s a point,’ Odysseus said. ‘If this is the path laid out by the gods then you can be sure there’s a reason behind it. And it won’t be easy, either. But at least now I know what I have to do to bring an end to this war.’

He touched the small dried flower in his belt, which all the Ithacans wore to remind them of their home.

Chapter Fourteen

THE LEGEND OF PELOPS

Agamemnon’s tent was bright and airy, filled with the early morning light that filtered in through its cotton and flax walls. It was essentially the same tent he had used when the fleet had gathered at Aulis so long ago, although it was enlarged in places and the canvas panels were replaced from time to time to keep it looking clean and white. From their first arrival on the shores of Ilium, Agamemnon had refused to follow the other leaders and build himself a hut, seeing it as defeatist and a signal to the army that he did not believe in a swift victory. And as the years of war had passed, his resolve had grown stronger, though the rich furnishings, the thick furs over the floor, the wide, oblong hearth at its centre and the many guards and slaves made the tent more a palace than a temporary military headquarters.

Eperitus barely noticed the familiar surroundings as he stood with his hands behind his back, lost in his own thoughts. Helenus was beside him, noticeably nervous as he waited in the quarters of Troy’s chief enemy, while opposite him Odysseus was standing with his arms crossed, his green eyes keenly watching the three men seated on the other side of the hearth. Agamemnon, Menelaus and Nestor were bent in towards each other, their heads almost touching as they spoke together in hushed voices. Eperitus’s gaze fell on Agamemnon, whom he hated, and moved away again. If he had wanted to, Eperitus could have heard everything they said, but he preferred to think on the words Helenus had shared with him on the slow journey back from the temple of Thymbrean Apollo. Words he should have dismissed with all his heart and mind, but which even his usually resolute spirit could not.

It began when Helenus had mentioned Astynome in the temple. Eperitus’s heartbeat had quickened at the sound of her name and his thoughts slid in an avalanche back to the girl whose beauty had opened up his guard, and whose treachery had then wounded him deeper than any Trojan spear could ever have done. Since he had watched her ride away from the temple that night with Apheidas, her master, he had resolved to drive her out of his mind and heart; to disregard her false promises of marriage and children and return to the warrior’s creed of immortality through glory. But the passion of his younger years – when he had not known love and his only desire was to win honour and renown on the battlefield – seemed cold and lonely compared to her, a poor comforter when he wanted nothing more than to forget the woman who had conquered him. So when Helenus had ridden up beside him and repeated the words Astynome had spoken in Apheidas’s garden, that she was the one who had encouraged the prince to betray Troy and reveal the oracles to the Greeks, Eperitus felt his resolve against her weaken. She was letting him know she was prepared to see her beloved Troy defeated by the hated Greeks for his sake; that her loyalty was not to her homeland or to Apheidas, but to him. It was a message that his anger wanted to reject, and he might have found the determination to rid her from his thoughts again if Helenus had not placed a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye.

‘Whatever it was she did to betray your trust,’ he had said, ‘she’s changed. I don’t understand women and I know nothing about love, but that servant girl loves you. She confessed as much to me, and I believe her.’

As Eperitus turned the words over and over again in his mind, the three kings ended their discussion and sat up. Agamemnon leaned to one side of his heavy fur-draped chair and rested his chin on his fist.

‘You say these visions were given to you in a dream,’ he said, eyeing Helenus coldly.

‘Yes, my lord. In the temple of Thymbrean Apollo.’

‘And you haven’t told them to your father.’

‘To no-one at all. Odysseus was the first to hear them.’

‘And we’re supposed to believe this is because you wanted to marry my wife, but she was given to Deiphobus instead,’ Menelaus said.

There was a dark look in his eyes, still furious from the news that Helen had already been married off to another of Priam’s sons. Helenus was about to reply, but Odysseus spoke first.

‘He was angry at Helen’s treatment – being forced to marry against her will. Didn’t you hear what he said, Menelaus? That she begged to be sent back to you?’

‘A lie,’ the Spartan snarled. ‘If she wanted me, she’d have found a way back years ago. The truth is your little prince wanted her for himself, or – what’s more likely – he’s been sent here by his father to trick us. These oracles are nothing more than a distraction, to send us chasing after our own tails rather than attacking the walls of Troy in earnest!’

‘A trick?’ Helenus snorted, his princely arrogance getting the better of him. He stepped forward and pointed a finger at Menelaus. ‘And what would such a trick achieve? At the most, one or two galleys sent to find a dead man’s shoulder bone and fetch a boy from his mother’s arms. If I’d been sent to fool you, wouldn’t I have been better directing half your army to besiege some distant city, or leading you into a well-planned trap?’

‘The lad’s right, Menelaus,’ Nestor added. ‘Besides, some of it, at least, makes sense. The Palladium, for instance. We’ve long known the value the Trojans place on that.’

Menelaus gave a derisive laugh.

‘And how do you propose we steal Troy’s favourite ornament? Knock on the gates and ask them to let us in? It’s just a lump of old wood, Nestor.’

‘The Palladium is sacred,’ Helenus protested. ‘Athena made it in honour of her friend, Pallas, whom she killed in an accident.’

‘We have enough divine trinkets of our own,’ Menelaus said. He pointed at the ornate golden sceptre that lay on a table nearby. ‘That rod was made by Hephaistos for Zeus himself, who in turn gave it to Hermes before he gave it to Pelops, my grandfather. The man whose tomb you want us to desecrate! Philoctetes has a bow that once belonged to immortalised Heracles, and Odysseus standing beside you owns a complete set of armour that Hephaistos made for Achilles at the request of his mother, Thetis. And that’s just to name a few of the god-made heirlooms that we possess.’

‘That isn’t the point of the Palladium,’ Odysseus said. ‘The Trojans hold that it fell from heaven into the temple of Athena when it was still being built. The first king of Troy, Ilus, was told in a dream that the city would never be conquered as long as the image remained in the temple. If we could find a way to take it from them, the blow to their morale alone would be significant.’

‘And Neoptolemus?’ Agamemnon asked. ‘Why would the gods have us fetch Achilles’s son here to Ilium? He can’t be much more than fifteen years old.’

‘His father was only a little older when he joined the army,’ Eperitus said. ‘And if Neoptolemus is even half the man Achilles was, then wouldn’t he be worth the voyage to Scyros?’

‘Achilles had many qualities, but not all of them were good,’ Agamemnon replied. ‘Do you forget the Trojans broke into this camp while he sat idle and nearly torched the fleet, all because Achilles’s wounded pride would not permit him to fight?’

‘Achilles made the mistake of believing his whims were more important than the war itself,’ Odysseus said. ‘But the gods knew better, and when Achilles’s pride led to the death of Patroclus, his friend and lover, he knew it too. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking these oracles can be ignored. As Helenus says, it’ll require nothing more than a galley or two to fetch Neoptolemus from Scyros and Pelops’s bone from –’

‘The strangest oracle of them all, don’t you think?’ Agamemnon interrupted, narrowing his icy blue eyes as he focussed on Odysseus. ‘I understand the Palladium, and even Neoptolemus; but my grandfather’s shoulder bone?’

‘Who are we to understand the commands of the gods?’ said Nestor. ‘This much I can say, though: Pelops’s shoulder bone was no ordinary bone; it was made of ivory and –’

‘Put there by the gods!’ Odysseus added, his eyes alight with realisation.

‘What do you mean?’ Eperitus asked, confused.

‘I’ll explain another time,’ Odysseus answered in a low voice. He returned his gaze to the Atreides brothers. ‘Whatever the significance, someone has to be sent to Pisa to fetch the bone, and then to Scyros on the return journey to persuade Neoptolemus to come to Troy. We can decide what to do about the Palladium when they get back.’

‘It’s a waste of effort, dreamed up by this Trojan prince to buy Priam more time,’ Menelaus said.

Agamemnon held up a hand to silence his brother’s protests. A moment later, he stood and signalled to one of the attendant slaves, who brought him a krater of wine.

‘If I’ve questioned the significance of these oracles, it isn’t because I was ever in any doubt that we should attempt to fulfil them. After all, didn’t Calchas say we would find the key to the gates of Troy in the temple of Thymbrean Apollo last night? And now, suddenly, three new oracles are revealed to us. No, we must send a ship without further delay.’

‘And who will go?’ Nestor asked.

Menelaus slapped the arm of his chair.

‘Damn it, if we must send someone then let me go. I haven’t seen Greece in ten years, and now the opportunity has arisen I’ll take it.’

‘Would you desecrate our grandfather’s tomb?’ Agamemnon said, angrily. ‘No, you must remain here.’

‘Let me go.’

Agamemnon looked at Odysseus for a moment, then shook his head.

‘Pelops’s tomb is at Pisa in the north-western Peloponnese, just a day’s voyage from Ithaca. Do you think I don’t know where your heart has been through all the years of this war, Odysseus? If I were to send you, the temptation to return home would be too much. You’d never come back.’

Odysseus moved around the hearth to stand opposite Agamemnon.

‘You don’t know that,’ he implored the Mycenaean king. ‘I’m here under oath until Helen is rescued from her captors, and I won’t dishonour myself, my family or the gods by breaking it. Besides, if you want Neoptolemus to come to Troy then you need to send me. Lycomedes, his mother’s father, won’t give him up easily, and I’ve a feeling Neoptolemus himself won’t be simple to persuade. However, if I succeeded with Achilles, I can succeed with his son.’

‘That may be true,’ Nestor said. ‘But I agree with Agamemnon: the lure of seeing Penelope and Telemachus will be too much for you. We can send Diomedes instead.’

Eperitus saw the look of muted exasperation, giving way to disappointment, on Odysseus’s face. Agamemnon and Nestor were right – a voyage to the north-western Peloponnese would take a galley within easy reach of Ithaca, and the temptation of his home and family could prove too great a test for Odysseus. But Odysseus was also right – to bring Neoptolemus to Troy would involve facing his grandfather, the perfidious King Lycomedes, and there was no-one among the Greek kings better equipped for such a task than Odysseus. And then an answer to both dilemmas suddenly occurred to Eperitus. He stepped forward and coughed.

‘There is an alternative.’

The four kings looked at him in quiet surprise. Odysseus, who was not used to being out-thought by Eperitus, raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘Send Odysseus and Diomedes – and me with them – but they should go in one of Diomedes’s ships, with a crew of Argives. That way, Diomedes will captain the galley and can prevent Odysseus succumbing to the temptation to return home.’

There was a moment of silence as the kings pondered his suggestion. Then Agamemnon and Nestor nodded, followed by Menelaus. Odysseus just smiled.

‘And if I protest,’ he said, ‘you can tie me to the mast until Ithaca is far behind us.’

Helenus left on a merchant ship bound for Epirus the next morning, but it was three days before the mission to fetch Pelops’s shoulder bone could begin. Despite Odysseus’s enthusiasm to set sail, the eighty galleys of the Argive fleet had spent too long hauled up on the shores of Ilium to be considered immediately seaworthy. A few had returned to Argos for replacements two years before, but even the best of these needed extensive work before she could be risked on the arduous voyage back to Greece. Every piece of worm-eaten or rotted wood had to be replaced; the hull wanted waterproofing with a fresh coat of tar; the ropes of leather or loosely woven fibre were old and dry and required changing; the cotton and flax sails would not hold a strong wind without repairs; the pine oars needed polishing back to a smooth finish; and the leather loops in which they were slung had to be freshly lubricated with olive oil. It would have been quicker and easier to have used one of the Ithacan galleys that had made the journey home earlier that year, but as Odysseus had been given the choice of making the voyage in an Argive ship or not making the voyage at all, he bit back his frustration and threw himself into helping Diomedes with the preparations.

After the work had been completed, the props were removed and the galley was pushed down into the waiting sea. Now the job of victualling her began. Under the watchful eye of Sthenelaus – Diomedes’s trusted comrade-in-arms – gangplanks were laid against the side and the hand-picked crew of sixty men started loading the hull with sealed jars of wine, sacks of grain for making bread and a few goats for fresh meat. They were assisted by Polites, Eurybates and Omeros, whom Odysseus had chosen to accompany him on the mission to Pelops’s tomb, having left command of the Ithacan army to Antiphus and Eurylochus. Meanwhile, Diomedes and Odysseus, with the help of Eperitus, made sacrifices at the altar of Poseidon, asking him to give them calm seas and a good wind for the Peloponnese.

When the crew finally settled down to their oars and began pulling for the open sea, thousands of soldiers crowded the beach to cheer them on their way. Odysseus watched them from the stern – with Eperitus and Diomedes standing either side of him – wondering how much the army knew of their mission. Naturally, the Ithacans who had heard the oracles spoken by Helenus in the temple of Thymbrean Apollo would have told others, and those others would have sent a wave of rumours racing through the camp. How much those rumours had become distorted and exaggerated with each retelling Odysseus could not guess, and did not much care; the army would know the truth soon enough if they were successful.

It was not long before Odysseus sensed a change in the current beneath the ship and felt a wind coming down from the north. Sthenelaus, standing with a hand on each of the twin rudders, shouted an order that sent groups of sailors scurrying to the ropes. They raised the cross spar and let go the sail, which tumbled downwards and flapped a little before suddenly filling up and bellying out. As they angled the canvas into the strong breeze, a second order saw the oars drawn back into the ship and stowed. Released from the laborious pulling motion of the rowers, the galley quickly took on a life of its own, skimming southward as it adapted to the movement of wave and wind.

With little now to do, Odysseus leaned back against the bow rail and relaxed, enjoying the natural motion of the ship and looking about at the sights of land and sea revealed in glorious detail by the bright sunshine of late morning. Rarely did he feel as much at ease as when he was on the deck of a galley with a good wind in its sail. The huge weight of his kingly responsibilities was lifted from his shoulders and he could fall back into a meditative silence filled by idle thoughts. Soon the camp was behind them, marked only by the thin towers of smoke from its fires. They had slipped past the bulk of Tenedos before Diomedes spoke.

‘It feels good to be on a ship again, with the freedom of the open sea before us. And to know we’re heading back to Greece for the first time in ten years!’

‘Better if we were heading back home for good and didn’t have to return to this accursed part of the world,’ Sthenelaus growled. He had stern features and hard eyes that glared out from a face overrun by curly black hair. ‘I hope this mission of yours is going to bring an end to the war like you promised, Odysseus, and not turn out to be another false hope.’

Eperitus caught Odysseus’s eye and raised a sympathetic eyebrow.

‘I didn’t make any promises, Sthenelaus,’ Odysseus replied, ‘and this isn’t my mission. We’re following the will of the gods, not to mention the command of Agamemnon.’

Sthenelaus’s snort showed what he thought of that.

‘You can’t blame him,’ Diomedes said with an apologetic shrug. ‘The men are keen to return to Greece and do something other than sitting around in camp or fighting Trojans, but they’re wondering what the point of all this is. And they’re not alone. I mean, why are the gods sending us after an old bone?’

‘I know nothing more than you do,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Although it’s possible the clue to the oracle lies in the legend of Pelops himself.’

‘There are plenty of stories about Agamemnon’s grandfather,’ Diomedes said. ‘But I don’t see how any of them can show us how to beat the Trojans.’

‘Well, I know nothing about Pelops,’ Eperitus said. ‘Although you promised in Agamemnon’s tent you’d tell me the significance of this bone.’

‘That’s something we’d all like to know,’ Sthenelaus agreed as he watched the wave caps ahead of the galley.

‘The story’s familiar enough,’ Odysseus answered with a sigh, ‘but if you’ve never had the patience or inclination to listen to it then I’ll recount it for you. Many have called Agamemnon ambitious and evil, and with good reason, but he is the natural product of his ancestors, a line of men cursed with wickedness. His great-grandfather was Tantalus, about whom there are numerous tales, but none so depraved as the trick he played on the Olympians. He lived in the time when the gods walked freely among men, and some men walked with the gods. Tantalus was one such man, being regularly invited to banquet with them on Mount Olympus. Unfortunately their favour didn’t inspire him to worship them more, only to regard them with contempt. He saw their frivolity as a sign of childish stupidity, rather than the result of a nature free from the shadow of pain, suffering and death. And so he decided to test their power, stealing ambrosia and nectar from their feasts and sharing it with his fellow mortals, just to see if the Olympians noticed. They said nothing because they loved him, but this only made Tantalus despise them more. As a further test, he invited them to a banquet of his own, where, in his wickedness, he served the immortals a stew from an iron pot in which he had cut up and boiled the flesh of his own son.’

‘He fed them his own child?’ Sthenelaus exclaimed in disbelief.

‘Didn’t Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter at Aulis, just to appease the anger of Artemis?’ Eperitus reminded him, a hint of bitterness in his voice. ‘The man’s a monster.’

‘It was the undoing of Tantalus,’ Odysseus continued. ‘The gods were not as foolish as he took them to be, all but one of them realising the meat before them was human. Only Demeter, distracted by grief at the recent loss of her daughter, ate the stew. As revenge, Zeus contrived a special torment for Tantalus, condemning him to an eternity of hunger and thirst in Hades. There he stands, up to his neck in a pool of cool water and with the heavily laden boughs of a fruit tree bending over him; but whenever he lowers his lips to the water it recedes before they can touch it; and whenever he reaches for the fruit of the tree, a gust of wind blows it just beyond his grasping fingers.

‘As for his son, Zeus ordered his dismembered body to be placed back in the pot in which Tantalus had boiled them. The only missing part was the shoulder blade that Demeter had eaten whole, but the goddess replaced this with one of ivory. Once inside the pot, the parts of the body reformed and took on new life, the boy emerging even more handsome than he had been before his father had murdered him. The boy’s name,’ Odysseus added, leaning in towards the others, ‘was Pelops.’

‘By all the gods,’ Sthenelaus said. ‘Then this bone we’ve been sent to find is the ivory replacement made by Demeter.’

Eperitus frowned. ‘But how is the bone significant? It was made by the gods, just like Agamemnon’s sceptre, Achilles’s armour and dozens of other artefacts already in our possession, but I don’t see how it will help us defeat the Trojans.’

‘Nor I,’ Odysseus said, with a melancholy nod of his head. ‘And that’s half the problem. The story doesn’t end there, though. Legend says that Pelops was blessed by the gods and grew to a height and stature much greater than other men, with a strength and fierceness that made him invincible in combat. But like so many great warriors, it was a woman who conquered him. He fell in love with Hippodameia, the daughter of King Oenomaus, ruler of Pisa. Now, Oenomaus was a jealous father who loved his daughter more than anything else. When Pelops asked to marry Hippodameia, the old king set him the same challenge he had put before all her previous suitors: a chariot race from Pisa all the way to Corinth. Pelops would be given a head start, but he would have to drive the chariot with the beautiful Hippodameia beside him – a distraction that could only play to Oenomaus’s advantage. If he won, then the girl would be his; but if Oenomaus caught up with him, he would kill him, just as he had the dozen or so other suitors who had been foolish enough to fall in love with his daughter. To emphasise the point, the king indicated the city walls where their shrivelled heads leered down from spikes.

‘Undeterred, Pelops agreed to the challenge without a second thought: he was a renowned horseman and charioteer, and being almost twice the size of most men he did not fear a fight with Oenomaus. What he did not know, though, was that Oenomaus’s horses were the fastest in Greece and his spear was a gift from Ares, which, if thrown by a skilled warrior, would fly straighter and truer than any mortal weapon. Pelops only learned of these things the night before the race, in a message sent by none other than Hippodameia. She had fallen deeply in love with him and told him her father’s secret in the hope he would not throw away his life for her sake.

‘Pelops knew then he could not win the race. But neither would his love for Hippodameia allow him to back down. So, being a resourceful man, he approached Oenomaus’s charioteer, a man called Myrtilus, and offered him half the kingdom of Pisa if he would betray his master and ensure Pelops won the race. Myrtilus agreed to help, but not in exchange for wealth or power. Ever since Hippodameia had been a young girl, he had lusted after her, dreaming of nothing more than to share her bed and take her virginity: if Pelops wanted victory, he would first have to swear an oath allowing Myrtilus to be the first to sleep with her on their marriage night. Reluctantly, knowing he had little choice, Pelops took the oath.

‘The following morning, the two chariots lined up at the starting point. Hippodameia stepped aboard Pelops’s chariot, her face lined with tears for the man whom she believed she was accompanying to his death. But a furtive nod from Myrtilus gave Pelops all the reassurance he needed, and with a crack of his whip and a loud shout he sent his chariot shooting forward. Oenomaus waited until the dust from his opponent’s wheels had died away, then sacrificed a black ram to Zeus before seizing his spear and stepping into his own chariot. Myrtilus took up the reins and began the pursuit.

‘The king’s horses had not won their reputation for nothing. Despite the long head start, by the time the sun was at its hottest Oenomaus could see the dust from Pelops’s chariot ahead of him. He ordered Myrtilus to go faster and had soon come within range of the young suitor. Taking Ares’s spear in his hand, he drew it back and took aim, not knowing that Myrtilus had removed the linchpins from the axle of his chariot and replaced them with thinner ones coated in wax. At that moment, the heat of the sun finally melted the wax and the pins came free. Myrtilus, who felt the telltale juddering beneath his feet, leapt clear into a large bush, but Oenomaus was still aiming his spear when both wheels came off, and was caught up in the wreckage of the chariot and dragged to a horrible death.’

‘Nothing more than he deserved,’ Sthenelaus commented.

Omeros, who had turned from the benches and come to hear the tale, shushed him, forgetting Sthenelaus’s seniority in his annoyance at the interruption.

‘What about Myrtilus?’ he asked.

Odysseus smiled.

‘Myrtilus was saved by the bush and returned to Pisa with the victorious Pelops and Hippodameia, his prize. In the preparations for the wedding Pelops forgot all about the oath he had taken, but Myrtilus, of course, had not. At the wedding feast, he whispered in Pelops’s ear, reminding him of his promise that he would be the first to sleep with Hippodameia. Pelops looked across at his wife, beautiful in her wedding dress, and nodded, putting on a show of reluctance as he told Myrtilus to wait for Hippodameia by the bridge over the River Alpheius. It was there, after night had fallen, that Pelops found him and threw him into the deep, ice-cold waters. Myrtilus, as he knew, was no swimmer, but with his dying breath he laid a curse on Pelops – a curse he never divulged, but took with him to his grave. After he had married Hippodameia and became king in the place of her father, he began a campaign of conquest that saw him take possession of many of the cities and lands around Pisa. He was so successful the whole of southern Greece – the Peloponnese – was named after him. But he was also a tyrant, displaying time and again the ruthlessness he had inherited from his father and shown against Myrtilus. Those he could not defeat by arms alone, he tricked and betrayed. One such was the king of Arcadia, whom he invited to a feast then killed and cut into pieces – an echo of how his own father had treated him when he tried to trick the gods.

‘And so there you have it,’ Odysseus finished, with a sigh, ‘the legend of Pelops. Whether it has any bearing on our mission, I can’t yet say, but there is something else I should tell you. Before we sailed, Agamemnon came to warn me about his grandfather’s tomb. He says the casket containing his bones lies at the centre of a maze, which Pelops had built to deter not only robbers, but also the ghost of Myrtilus. He said Pelops lived the remainder of his life in fear of the man he had betrayed and murdered, and that fear pursued him into the afterlife. What is more, Agamemnon says the tomb itself is cursed, though he doesn’t know the nature of the curse.’

‘I’m not afraid of curses,’ Eperitus said.

‘You may not be,’ Odysseus replied, ‘but Agamemnon is. I could see it in his face, and that’s the actual reason he wouldn’t allow Menelaus to carry out the mission. He knows the curse is real, and he fears it.’

Chapter Fifteen

THE GOLDEN VINE

Aren’t you concerned, my lord?’ Aeneas asked.

The Dardanian prince leaned over the large table, his hands flat on the smooth wood, and stared at Priam seated in his golden throne. The king held his gaze for a moment, then stood and approached the table.

‘Concerned that I’ve lost another son?’ he said. ‘Or that he might have betrayed his father and run off to the Greeks with the oracle?’

Priam’s vanity and arrogance had all but gone since the deaths of Hector and Paris, and as he faced Aeneas he looked the ghost of his former self. His hair was grey and lank now, and his skin pale and lined; his once tall figure had become sloped and bent, while his eyes were dull and stricken with the pain of his loss. But Aeneas could still see the old disdain in them that Priam had never been able to hide, a contempt that was born out of rivalry with his cousin Anchises, Aeneas’s father. The king of Dardanus had once slept with the incomparable Aphrodite, whereas Priam, who had numerous wives and had always slept with whomever he pleased, had not. But instead of taking his jealousy out on Anchises – whom Zeus had already crippled for boasting about sleeping with Aphrodite – he directed his resentment instead towards Aeneas, the result of Anchises’s union with the goddess. And even though Aeneas was married to one of Priam’s many daughters, as a mere prince he was forced to bear it in silence.

‘I refer to the prophecy that Helenus said would ensure the safety of Troy,’ Aeneas replied. ‘He was furious about losing Helen to Deiphobus, and one of our spies saw him enter the Greek camp under escort three nights ago. If he’s revealed the oracle to them out of spite, then they may know a way to undermine our defences.’

‘You’re speculating,’ said Deiphobus, who was standing next to Aeneas with a silver goblet of wine in his hand. ‘We don’t even know what this prophecy was.’

‘I do,’ Priam said.

He looked at Deiphobus and Aeneas before passing his watery gaze over the others around the table: Apheidas, Antenor and Idaeus, his herald.

‘How do you know?’ Apheidas asked, only belatedly adding, ‘my lord.’

‘One of my daughters, Cassandra, came to me this evening. It was she who had given Helenus these oracles – there were three of them – which he was intending to pass off as his own. And if the Greeks want to believe them, then that’s their foolishness, not ours.’

‘Nevertheless, shouldn’t we take some precautions?’ Deiphobus asked. ‘Just in case there’s a weakness we’ve overlooked.’

‘Cassandra is deluded – half-mad, even,’ Priam answered. ‘Her tortured mind imagines the most fantastic things that she believes are visions from the gods. They aren’t. And perhaps you’re forgetting something, Son.’

He looked over at the wall to his left. The daylight that was normally channelled into the great hall through conduits from the high ceiling had long since disappeared, but the flames that flickered in the oblong hearth and the torches that hung about the walls spread an orange glow throughout the vast chamber. It pushed back the shadows to reveal the murals that decorated the smoke-stained plaster, though they had been drained of the colour and energy that inhabited them during the day. Sweeping his long purple cloak behind him, Priam walked up to one of the larger-than-life depictions and reached up to touch it with the palm of his hand. It showed two golden-skinned men: one dressed in a shepherd’s fleece and playing a lyre as he sat on a hillside; the other stripped to the waist as he fitted enormous blocks of stone together to make a strong wall.

‘You forget, Deiphobus, that our city has no weakness,’ the king said. ‘Its walls were made by the gods themselves, by Poseidon and Apollo. They cannot be broken down and they cannot be scaled. Let Cassandra try to draw attention to herself, and let the Greeks chase after her fantasies. We are safe.’

‘Then why have you called us here, my lord, if not to discuss Helenus’s treachery?’ Antenor asked.

Priam left the mural and moved slowly back across the hall, the flames of the hearth casting a tall shadow over the wall behind him. As he rejoined the others, he laid his hands palm-down on the table and leaned his weight upon them. He let out a long breath and his whole body seemed to deflate with it, leaving him a thin, elderly man heavily burdened by the responsibilities of his rank. Deiphobus and Antenor, standing on either side of him, instinctively moved closer, fearing the king might suddenly collapse. Then he drew himself up again and nodded towards a large shape in the middle of the table, draped in purple cloth. It had sat there all through the meal they had shared, arousing the curiosity of the others but so pointedly ignored by Priam that they dared not mention it themselves. Now, at last, it seemed the mystery would be revealed.

‘That is the reason I’ve asked you here. Deiphobus?’

The king looked at his son, who after a moment’s hesitation reached across and slowly pulled away the purple cloth. Aeneas and Idaeus gasped, while Apheidas called on the gods in an awed whisper. With the sole exception of Priam the men around the table leaned closer, their eyes wide with wonder and their faces shining with the glittering light reflected from the object before them.

‘The Golden Vine,’ Priam declared. ‘Zeus gave it to Tros, my great-grandfather, as compensation for abducting Ganymede, his son, and making him his cupbearer on Olympus. It was on the promise of this Vine that Poseidon and Apollo built the walls of Troy for my grandfather, Ilus, who then cheated them of their payment.’

‘But I thought this was just a legend,’ Deiphobus said without taking his eyes from the Vine.

‘All legends are based in truth of one kind or another, Son.’

Priam reached across and gently scooped up the Vine in the palms of his hands, lifting the cluster of golden spheres before the faces of the others. As they looked at it they were able to see that each grape had been individually crafted and was linked to a stem of gold that was supple and moved with the weight of the fruit. Three golden leaves were attached to the Vine and as Priam’s fingers closed lightly about them they bent to his touch as if they were real.

‘The Vine has lain hidden in the deepest vault of the palace since I was a boy, jealously guarded by each of my forefathers and never brought out into the light of day. It is the last great treasure of Troy. And now it must be given up.’

There were exclamations of disbelief and denial at the announcement, but Priam shook his head.

‘Hector and Paris are dead, and the faith I placed in the Amazons and Aethiopes proved unfounded. Our armies have been decimated time and again, until the rump that remains is barely capable of manning the city walls, let alone driving the Greeks from our shores. And yet there is one final hope, a last resort that my pride has always refused to acknowledge. Until now.’

Apheidas’s brow furrowed.

‘What is this hope, my lord?’

‘Not what, but who,’ Priam replied. He lay the Vine carefully back down on the purple cloth and looked about at the others. ‘I mean King Eurypylus of Mysia.’

‘Your grandson?’ Antenor queried. ‘He’ll never go against his mother’s wishes, and Astyoche refuses to even recognise you as her father.’

‘Our parting was bitter,’ Priam agreed, nodding. ‘Astyoche was a female Hector – headstrong and resolute. When I forbade her to marry Telephus, Heracles’s son, she slipped away at night and rode to his palace, where she married him. We haven’t spoken since. And yet there was one thing she coveted above all else, but was never able to make her own. The Golden Vine.’

Apheidas snorted his disgust.

‘Do you mean you’re going to exchange the Vine for the help of a king who can’t do anything without his mother’s permission? What possible use could a man like that be on a battlefield?’

Priam stared at him, piqued that a mere captain should dare to question the judgement of a king.

‘Only a fool would dismiss Eurypylus,’ he said. ‘His grandfather is Heracles, from whom he has inherited terrifying strength, or so it’s said. What’s more, he leads an army many thousands strong, all of whom would be fresh to the fight – not tired of war like we who’ve been battling for the past ten years. If the Mysians can be persuaded to help us while the Greeks are still recovering from their recent losses, we might be able to throw them back into the sea once and for all.’

‘But would Eurypylus come to our aid, just because you placate Astyoche with the last great treasure of our city?’ Deiphobus asked. ‘Wouldn’t he want something for himself? He’s a king, after all.’

‘Rumour has it Astyoche is her son’s lover,’ Priam said, ‘and knowing how manipulative she used to be, I can fully believe it. If I offer her the Vine, she will make sure he comes. Though you’re right, Eurypylus should have something too. I will offer him Cassandra in marriage.’

Priam called for wine, while the others exchanged questioning looks. As servants appeared and refilled their cups, the king leaned across the table and replaced the cloth over the Golden Vine. At his signal, four guards moved out from the shadows and placed the priceless treasure into a wooden casket, before turning and carrying it from the great hall.

‘It’s late,’ Priam said, draining the last of his cup. He turned to his herald.

‘Idaeus, tomorrow you will begin preparations to go to Mysia. Antenor will go with you. Deiphobus, tell your sister she’s going to be married. That’s if she doesn’t already know,’ he added with a small laugh. ‘And as for the king, I need my bed. Good night.’

Eperitus sat on one of the benches, wet, windswept and dejected as he huddled between Eurybates on his right and the bulk of Polites on his left. Polites acted like a wall that protected him from the worst of the storm, but the rain and the waves that broke over the low sides of the ship had already soaked him to the skin, while the howling wind that burrowed through the gaps in his clothing ensured his discomfort was complete. And, unlike the Argive sailors who were busy battling the squall under the shouted directions of Sthenelaus and Diomedes, Eperitus had nothing to take his mind off the misery of his situation. All he could do was stare at Zacynthos to the north-west, a dark lump that was almost lost between the jagged seas below, the grey, oppressive clouds above and the thick veil of rain in-between. As he stared at the sparsely populated, southernmost extremity of Odysseus’s kingdom, he thought back longingly to the days they had spent on the voyage from Troy, sailing on sun-blessed oceans from one headland to the next as they tracked the Asian seaboard south to Icaria, and then hopping from island to island across the Cyclades. The weather had been kind to them, too, as they crossed the Cretan Sea from Melos to Malia – the south-eastern corner of the Peloponnese – and followed the coast round, past the mouth of the River Eurotas to the tip of the Taygetus Mountains at the cape of Taenarus. By then his legs had gotten quite used to the pleasant movements of the waves beneath the hull of the galley, and the only thing that had unsettled him as they made their way up the south-west coast of the Peloponnese – a route he vaguely remembered from ten years earlier when the Ithacan fleet had sailed to war, and from ten years before that when he and Odysseus had journeyed back from Sparta after the marriage of Helen and Menelaus – had been the ramshackle and almost deserted appearance of the harbours and fishing villages they had passed. There had been no women or children to wave at them as they went by, or groups of old sailors discussing the trim of the galley or the way she was handled. Only the cluster of small fishing boats in each harbour, and the sense they were being watched by unseen eyes, suggested the villages were inhabited at all.

Then, as they pulled up the stone anchors that morning, the weather had changed. With a speed that surprised Eperitus, the wind picked up and the skies grew dark with clouds that rolled down from the heavens to press upon the rising turmoil of the sea. The easy motion of the waves that Eperitus’s legs had learned to accommodate in the earlier part of the voyage now turned violent, pitching him about the deck and turning his stomach so that he was sick over Omeros’s sandals. Omeros, green-faced and almost too ill to notice, returned the compliment. Sthenelaus’s voice fought against the wind, ordering the crew to angle the sail so that the ship was driven diagonally across the waves. A moment later the spar was lowered halfway down the mast to reduce the pressure and steady the roll of the galley. That was as much as they could do in the face of the gale, but as the ship drifted in relative safety a new cry went up. Land had been spotted to the north.

Eperitus, who had remained astern with Omeros, was now joined by Polites and Eurybates.

‘It’s Zacynthos,’ Polites announced, a hint of excitement in his normally deep, slow voice. ‘Come on.’

He hoisted Eperitus up by his arm and dragged him to the prow, followed by Eurybates and Omeros. Odysseus was already there, not even noticing his countrymen as he grasped the bow rail and squinted hard against the squall. They joined him in silence, staring through the sheet-rain at the almost imperceptible horizon rolling from left to right before them. Eperitus saw the line of the Peloponnesian coast on the starboard side of the galley, which Sthenelaus kept them in sight of at all times, but despite his sharp vision he was unable to see the new land that had been spotted. Eventually he caught a brief glimpse of something black and indistinct, but the act of focussing on a static point in a world of constant motion forced his stomach to contract in protest. He vomited again, this time managing to reach the side of the ship before the liquid spilled from his lips, then staggered back to suffer in solitude on the benches. One by one the others sat down until only Odysseus remained, lost in his own thoughts and memories as he stared at the southernmost point of the kingdom he had not seen for ten years.

Slowly, Zacynthos grew from a small blot to something that was visibly a large, if still distant, island. The gale was already dying away and the galley would soon head towards the mainland, to seek the mouth of the River Alpheius. There they would make their final landfall of the voyage and head inland to find Pisa, and hopefully the tomb of Pelops. Knowing this, Eperitus reluctantly extracted himself from the shelter afforded by Polites and Eurybates, and staggered up the middle of the ship to join the lone figure of Odysseus at the prow. Despite his nausea, which was exaggerated by his supernaturally enhanced senses, Eperitus fought down the desire to vomit again.

‘Thinking of home?’ he asked, raising his voice over the roaring wind.

Odysseus nodded.

‘They’re so close,’ he said, just loud enough for Eperitus to hear. ‘It’s strange, but the nearer I am to Penelope, the clearer I can recall her face. Back in Ilium I could barely picture her, but here –’ He reached out with his fingertips. ‘Here it’s as if I can see her before me in the rain. But it’s only a memory, an image of how she used to be, and what makes it worse is the real Penelope is just over there, beyond the storm. If only I could see her as she is now.’

‘I’m sure she’s as beautiful as the day you left her.’

‘Yes,’ Odysseus said. ‘Ten years would barely have added a line to her face. Unlike me. I feel like the past decade has been spent in Hades, surrounded by horrors and forgetful of the beauty of the real world. It’s as if the Odysseus who sailed away from Ithaca has died a thousand times since then, and all that’s left is this.’ He plucked dismissively at his tunic. ‘I doubt she would even recognise me any more. And what would Telemachus make of me? Could he ever come to love a father he’s never known? Why, Mentor and Halitherses will be more like fathers to him than I can ever be.’

‘Uncles, maybe, but you’re his real father, Odysseus. Nothing can replace that. And the sooner we find this bone – ’

‘Agamemnon and Nestor were right, you know. If this had been my own ship I’d be on my way to Ithaca now. Oh, I’d probably tell myself it was just a short visit, a day or two to see my family. But days would become weeks and weeks months, until I’d no longer care about Agamemnon’s war or my oath to Menelaus. The fact Diomedes is in command prevents that, but it hasn’t stopped me thinking the strangest, most desperate things, Eperitus. Before you joined me, I was even considering whether I could leap overboard and swim to Zacynthos –’

‘That’d be madness,’ Eperitus exclaimed.

‘Madness indeed,’ said another voice.

The two men turned to see an Argive sailor standing beside them. He was tall and pale, with large grey eyes and a straight nose that did not dip at the bridge. His chin was clean-shaven, unlike the rest of the crew, and he had long, fair hair that was tied back behind his neck. Even more notable than this rare feature was the fact that his stone-coloured cloak and tunic were dry, as if impervious to the lashing rain.

Eperitus frowned in confusion, sensing something was wrong. Surely he would have remembered such a man on the long voyage from Troy? Moreover, why weren’t any of the other crew members looking at the striking figure standing in the prow? It was then he saw that many were leaning against each other, their heads lolling on their chests. Others had slumped forward over their knees with their arms hanging limply at their sides. Diomedes and Sthenelaus at the helm were both reclining against the bow rail, propped up by their armpits as their heads rolled back to stare with unseeing eyes at the stormy skies above. Even more strangely, the twin rudders were not swinging freely now that the unconscious Sthenelaus had released them, but were held fast by an unseen force that kept the galley on a straight course. As his mind struggled to comprehend what his eyes were telling him, his other senses were registering that the rain was no longer driving against his skin and the sickness in his stomach had gone entirely.

As ever, Odysseus was the first to recognise her. With one hand still gripping the bow rail, he dropped to his knees and bowed his head. Eperitus followed his example, finally realising the man before them was no sailor, but the goddess Athena, Odysseus’s immortal patron who had appeared to them several times during their many adventures together.

Athena leaned down and took both men by the hand, sending a wave of warmth through their chilled bodies as she pulled them to their feet.

‘Even a swimmer of your skill and stamina would not reach Zacynthos through these seas, Odysseus,’ she said. ‘You would have thrown your life away for nothing and never seen your family again.’

‘If my mortal body is frail, Mistress,’ he replied, ‘then my mortal heart is even weaker. Why shouldn’t I risk the one when the other is already dying without Penelope and Telemachus?’

Athena looked at him and there was pity in her eyes, softening the cold, hard beauty of her ageless face. There was something else, too, Eperitus thought: a sadness beneath the compassion, as if she knew of an even more terrible fate in Odysseus’s future.

‘You are stronger than you think,’ she said. ‘How else have you managed to stay true to Penelope through all these years, when every other man has taken Trojan concubines or satisfied himself with whores? No, Odysseus, you are unique among the kings of Greece and only you can deliver Troy into their hands.

‘As for you,’ she added, turning to Eperitus, ‘I’m pleased, if surprised, that your brain has finally managed to emerge from its long slumber.’

‘Mistress?’

‘I mean your suggestion of making the voyage in an Argive ship, of course. Agamemnon was right not to have allowed Odysseus to sail in one of his own galleys – the temptation of returning to Ithaca would have been too great. But without Odysseus the mission was doomed to failure and the will of the gods would never have been fulfilled. We are grateful to you, Eperitus.’

Eperitus nodded uncertainly. ‘Thank you, Mistress.’

‘And what is the will of the gods?’ Odysseus asked.

‘To see Troy defeated. The war has almost fulfilled its purpose; Zeus does not want to see it prolonged unnecessarily.’

Eperitus could see Odysseus biting back whatever words had sprung to his quick mind. Instead, the king looked questioningly into the goddess’s clear eyes.

‘And how will an ivory shoulder blade help us defeat Priam and conquer his city, Mistress?’

‘Think of what your qualities are, Odysseus. Ask yourself why this mission will fail without you.’

Odysseus frowned and looked away into the storm. Eperitus followed his gaze and saw for the first time how the raindrops seemed to hit an invisible shield around the ship and disappear in small puffs of steam, leaving the vessel surrounded by a thin layer of fog.

‘It’s a riddle!’ Odysseus answered, turning sharply back to the goddess. ‘There’s something about the shoulder bone, or maybe the tomb itself, that will tell us how to defeat Troy. And you think I’m the one who will decipher it.’

Athena answered with a smile. ‘Whatever the reason for sending you, Odysseus, don’t think the tomb will give up its secrets freely. You already know about the maze.’

‘To keep out the ghost of Myrtilus,’ Eperitus said.

‘Or so Agamemnon believes,’ Athena replied, enigmatically. ‘And maybe that was the story its builders put about. Yet the truth is the maze was not built to keep something out, but to keep something in.’

‘Agamemnon said the tomb was cursed –’ Odysseus began.

‘In that he was not wrong,’ Athena said, ‘as some have found out for themselves – robbers, mostly: desperate men who were either ignorant of the curse or too greedy to care. Their bones now litter the dark corridors of the maze. But though you are neither ignorant nor greedy, your need is more desperate than theirs and by the will of the gods you must enter the tomb and face the curse that haunts it. For that reason I am permitted to help you, if only with advice. In a moment I will be gone and the crew will awaken, each of them thinking they were alone in a moment’s lapse of consciousness. The storm will abate and you will be able to anchor your ship by the mouth of the Alpheius. Make camp tonight and in the morning take a small force of warriors with you, while leaving enough men behind to protect the galley in your absence. Follow the banks of the river until you reach a temple of Artemis, within sight of the walls of Pisa. On the opposite side of the water is a low hill. You will know it because it is overgrown with long grass and weeds: no animal would graze on it, even if their herders allowed them to. This is the tomb of Pelops.

‘The entrance is not obvious. It’s on the northern flank, below the trunk of a dead olive tree, and is covered by brambles and a layer of earth. You will have to dig your way into it and knock down the wall you find beneath. Once you’ve done this you will find yourselves in the antechamber to the maze.’

‘And how will we find the tomb?’ Odysseus asked.

‘That I cannot tell you. All mazes are designed to confuse, but this one will dull your senses and have you losing all track of time and place. If you succeed, it’ll most likely be by chance, although you might be able to deduce a way through if you apply your intelligence, Odysseus.’

‘What do you know about the curse, Mistress?’ Eperitus questioned. ‘How can we protect ourselves from it?’

‘Protect yourselves?’ she queried. ‘There’s no protection from what lies within the tomb – not for mortal flesh, at least. But this much I can say, and I say it to you in particular, Eperitus. The only way to overcome the curse of Pelops’s tomb is for Ares’s gift to complete its purpose.’

‘I don’t understand!’

‘You will, when the time comes,’ she answered.

And then she was gone, dissolving into the air as a dense spray of seawater dashed over the side of the galley, dousing Odysseus and Eperitus and waking the crew from their induced slumber.

Chapter Sixteen

PELOP’S TOMB

Eupeithes looked up at the stars glinting and glittering above the broad roof of his house. They were a fierce white, like particles of daylight burning holes in the night, and as he traced the outlines of the constellations he wondered what a man would have to do to have his own image set among them. Then he smiled and shook his head gently: a ridiculous ambition, he mocked himself, for an overweight merchant who was neither king nor warrior.

Antinous, his son, returned from the bushes at the edge of the expansive garden, where he had emptied his bladder. He dropped heavily onto the seat between Polyctor and Oenops and stared across at his father. Eupeithes had ordered chairs to be carried out to the lawn where it was less likely that eavesdropping slaves could overhear their treasonous talk and report it back to Penelope or her supporters.

‘What’s the point in having control of the Kerosia if you’re not going to do anything with it?’ Antinous asked, picking up the argument he had walked away from in anger only a few moments before. ‘Once Odysseus returns he’ll reappoint a new council and leave us back where we started – if he doesn’t execute us all first. I didn’t throw old Phronius to his death for that to happen. We have to act while we still can: appoint a new king then form an army, ready for Odysseus’s return –’

‘The Kerosia can’t just appoint a king,’ Oenops protested, shaking his white head firmly. ‘We haven’t the right or the power, not while the true king still lives.’

Polyctor, a black-haired man with soft grey eyes and a scanty beard, leaned across and patted Antinous on the back.

‘You’ve grown up in a kingdom without a king, used to the idea the Kerosia makes all the decisions. It doesn’t, Antinous. We’re only a council, subordinate in everything to the power of the throne. The only time we get to make any decisions is when the king is absent.’

‘Well, he’s absent now –’

Eupeithes raised his long, feminine hands for silence. There was no light in the garden and his mole-speckled skin looked grey and waxy as he smiled at the others.

‘You’re all correct, of course. Though we control the Kerosia, we remain but a council of advisers with limited authority – and certainly not enough to elect a new king. As Oenops implies, we can only do that if the king dies and leaves no successor. What power we do have will only last until the return of Odysseus. We therefore have to be realistic: if he comes back within the next few weeks or months, accompanied by a veteran army of loyal Ithacans, there is nothing we can do.’

Antinous threw his hands up to the heavens in a despairing gesture.

‘Then why go to such lengths to take control of the Kerosia? Why did we try to have Telemachus murdered? We’ve risked all we have for nothing.’

‘Maybe,’ his father replied, ‘but I don’t think so. I made my wealth as a merchant, not a gambler, by relying on shrewdness rather than luck. This is no different. But before I outline the solutions, let me first delineate the problems. There are three: Odysseus’s return; Telemachus, his heir; and the loyalty of the Ithacan people.’

‘I’d like to hear your solution to Odysseus,’ Oenops sniffed. ‘Didn’t you just say there’s nothing we can do if he comes back now?’

‘I was simply putting the case, my dear Oenops. The fact is he won’t be coming back. I’ve made certain of that.’

‘How?’ Antinous asked, sitting up.

‘I placed two men among the replacements that were sent to Troy in the spring, with instructions to murder Odysseus if the war ends and he survives. Both are more than capable of carrying out the task, and they know they’ll be generously rewarded if they succeed. What’s more, neither knows about the other. That way, they’ll act alone and if one fails the other won’t be implicated. I had to make doubly certain Odysseus doesn’t make it back to his beloved Ithaca. To our beloved Ithaca.’

There was a self-satisfied grin on Eupeithes’s face as he revealed his cleverness and forethought to the others, a grin that was justified by their stunned reactions.

‘However, that still leaves us with the people and Telemachus,’ he continued. ‘When Odysseus fails to return from Troy, his son will inherit the throne at the age of twenty-one. That still gives us eleven years to dispose of him, but first we must lure him back from Sparta.’

‘Penelope won’t allow him to come back home,’ Polyctor said. ‘She won’t risk it.’

‘Neither can she bear to be apart from him for that long,’ Eupeithes countered. ‘You’ve seen how much she loves him. No, she knows she is in an impossible position: she has to remain in Ithaca, guarding her husband’s kingdom, and yet she can’t live without Telemachus at her side. Believe me, she will look for any opportunity to bring him back, any arrangement that will ensure his safety. I intend to offer her such an arrangement, even if it is unpalatable. And if she takes it, perhaps we won’t need to kill the boy anyway.’

‘You’re talking in riddles, father, and avoiding the central question,’ Antinous said. ‘Who will become king?’

‘Maybe you will, Son,’ Eupeithes answered, rising to his feet. ‘But not until we’ve dealt with the third problem – the consent of the people. They’re fiercely loyal to Laertes’s line and have a deeply rooted aversion to illegitimate rulers.’

‘They’ll obey whoever’s put over them,’ Antinous insisted.

‘They will not,’ his father snapped, his control failing momentarily. ‘They will not, Son, as I have found out to my own expense in the past. No, one can’t merely foist a king upon the simple-minded; their masters must have authenticity – a royal connection.’

Polyctor’s brow knotted with confusion.

‘Then who? Odysseus’s cousin, Eurylochus, might have served our purpose, but he’s away with the army in Ilium. There’s no-one else we could set up as king.’

Eupeithes locked his hands behind his back and looked up at the stars, as if seeking guidance from the gods. Then he turned his gaze on the others.

‘If Odysseus does not return after a set time – which we know he will not – we will insist he is presumed dead and that a new king takes his place to restore stability and leadership to Ithaca. I intend for that new king to be you, Antinous – a projection of myself upon the throne – but not by appointment. You must be chosen, and you must have legitimacy in the eyes of the people.’

Oenops shook his head.

‘Impossible. The throne will be held for Telemachus until he’s of age. He has the right of succession.’

‘The ancient laws of Ithaca allow one exception,’ Eupeithes corrected him. ‘It’s an echo of the old days when kings were chosen through the female line, as they still are in some cities. If the king dies before his sons are old enough to assume the crown and the queen marries again, then her new husband will become king ahead of all other claimants.’

‘You want me to marry Penelope?’ Antinous exclaimed.

Oenops shook his beard dismissively. ‘She’s Odysseus’s through and through. She’ll never marry another, not even if you were to bring her Odysseus’s bones in a box.’

‘Don’t be so sure, my old friend. Women are fickle things; given the right incentives they can be bent to anyone’s will. Now, here’s what I intend to do –’

The storm had passed with unnatural quickness after the departure of the goddess, allowing the galley to reach the coast of the Peloponnese in safety. Seeing a huddle of stone huts overlooking a small, natural harbour a little below the mouth of the River Alpheius, Sthenelaus had guided the ship into the pocket of calm water and ordered the anchor stones to be thrown overboard. But when Diomedes and a handful of Argives had rowed ashore, they found their joy at being back on the soil of their homeland dampened. The old fishing hamlet had been deserted long ago.

‘Doesn’t bode well,’ he said later that evening, speaking to Odysseus and Eperitus as they sat by a fire overlooking the harbour, while the rest of the crew and the other Ithacans were busy bedding down in the abandoned houses. ‘This village should have at least fifty people in it, but by the looks of it no-one’s lived here for years. And yet the sea’s teeming with fish, there’s plenty of fresh water just a short walk to the river, and they’d have had a good crop of fruit and olives from all the trees around here. There’s only one reason can explain why they left. They were afraid of something.’

Odysseus, who had been drawing strange patterns in the dust for most of the evening and studiously following them with a stick, raised his head.

‘Bandits,’ he said. ‘With the kings and their armies away in Troy there are barely enough men left to protect the cities, let alone these small villages. I fear for what we’ll find in the morning.’

They rose again at the first light of dawn, though this was nothing more than a pale suffusion among the dark clouds that covered the skies. After they had breakfasted on barley broth, flatbread and fresh olives picked from the trees that surrounded the village, Odysseus called his Ithacan comrades to him and ordered them to put on their armour. Their greaves, leather cuirasses and helmets felt heavy and awkward after so many days aboard ship, where they had only needed their tunics and cloaks, and the feel of the shields on their arms and the spears in their hands gave them all a sense of impending danger, though none knew in what form it might come. Diomedes chose twelve of his best warriors for the expedition, leaving the remainder to guard the galley under the charge of Sthenelaus. Then, with small bags of provisions and skins of fresh water hanging over their shoulders, they sloped their spears and tramped off in double-file under the silent gaze of those left behind.

The River Alpheius was but a short distance north from the harbour. It was broad and fast-flowing as it poured out into the sea, and in the distance they could see the mountains from which it harvested its waters. The low, fumbling peaks seemed to prop up the hanging canvas of cloud that brooded with dark intent in the east, but as they walked with the river on their left Eperitus’s thoughts were not on the threat of rain but on the dilapidated state of the country around them. The land on both sides of the Alpheius was choked with weeds and long grass, where once it must have been filled with crops irrigated from the river. The pastureland on the hills that rose up behind was also overgrown. Though there were occasional sheepfolds, the tumbledown walls were empty and there was no sign of the flocks that had once occupied them. Even the road they were walking along was almost lost beneath a sea of knee-high grass and was only recognisable by the wheel ruts left by the farmers’ carts that had trundled along it in happier times. Most notable to Eperitus’s mind, though, was the lack of people. He and his companions were the only travellers on the road and there were no boats passing up or down the river. Like the fishing hamlet they had first encountered, all but one of the villages they passed through had been deserted for some time. The exception was a huddle of pitiable cottages, surrounded by narrow strips of farmed land where the heads of the barley bowed beneath a gentle west wind. The doors of all the other dwellings they passed had been thrown from their hinges to reveal lifeless and empty interiors, but here they were firmly shut against the strange soldiers who had wandered up from the direction of the coast. A doll made from wood and rags lay abandoned in the middle of the road, kept company by a single sandal that Eperitus guessed had slipped from a woman’s foot as she hurriedly scooped up her child and swept it back into the house. It was a poor village – too poor, perhaps, for the bandits who had forced the other villagers to flee – and the Argives and Ithacans passed through without pausing.

At no point during the rest of the journey did Eperitus’s sharp senses tell him they were being watched, even from a distance. It was eerie and unsettling and hardly a word was spoken as the band of warriors trudged through the unhappy country. For the first time they were witnessing the hidden cost of the war against Troy, and it seemed Odysseus’s guess of the evening before was right. Without the protection of their kings, the people had withdrawn to the walled towns and cities for safety from the groups of armed thieves that roamed the countryside. The land had been abandoned and trade would have all but died out, to be replaced by poverty, hunger and disease. And if the war lasted for much longer, there would be no Greece to return to.

After a while they passed through a knot of trees and came to a place that Eperitus felt was vaguely familiar. The river was broken by a series of rocks and the soft sound of the water now became a roar as it crashed against them. In the centre, where the river was deepest and the current quickest, three boulders stood up like black knuckles, while a shelf of rock jutted out from the nearest bank to make the passage by boat perilous indeed.

‘Recognise the place?’ Odysseus asked.

Eperitus gave a laugh and nodded. ‘Of course, this is where we crossed the river on our way to Sparta twenty years ago. Didn’t we build a raft further upstream from here, where the waters are calmer?’

‘We repaired an abandoned ferry so we could get those mules across, do you remember? Then one of them panicked and knocked old Halitherses into the river. You dived in after him, before he could be battered to death against these rocks.’

‘That’s right,’ Eperitus said, more solemnly.

He vaguely recalled the cold, fast water and the sight of Halitherses, the former captain of the guard, being taken along by the current ahead of him.

‘We pulled you both out of the water by that shelf of rock,’ Odysseus added. ‘We were so young then, and old Halitherses seemed like such a relic to us. Now we’re not far off the same age that he was.’

They gave the rapids a final glance and then followed in the wake of the others. They passed a small, rotten jetty where boats could be moored rather than risking the peril of the rocks, and shortly after entered the shade of a wood that skirted the banks of the river. Its cool, green gloom was a pleasant relief after the growing heat of the morning, but they were soon out in the open again, trudging along the rutted, overgrown track that would eventually take them to Pisa. Their footsteps grew heavy and they felt the sweat running in rivulets beneath their close-fitting armour, but for men who could fight all day long under a Trojan sun there was no need for rest. And both Odysseus and Diomedes were determined to reach the tomb as quickly as possible.

Shortly after midday, they came upon a bend in the river where the fast-flowing water curved around the spur of a low hill. As they climbed the ridge, Eperitus spotted a flash of whitewashed walls gleaming in the distance. Shielding his eyes against the bright sunshine, he could make out a large town nestled within the fold between two hills, not far from the river. It was surrounded by modest battlements and had a single gateway that he could see, guarded by a tall tower. Two men in armour – the first signs of human life he had seen since leaving the deserted fishing village at dawn – stood watch as an ox-drawn cart struggled along the tree-lined road towards the gate. The town was still a long way off, but in-between was a small wood from which a thin trail of smoke was drifting up into the clear sky. On the opposite bank of the river a domed mound rose like a dark mole on the face of the land.

‘I can see a town,’ he announced. ‘It’s still a good way off, but it has walls and guards and there are signs of more life inside.’

‘That must be Pisa,’ said Diomedes, squinting in the direction Eperitus was pointing.

‘Can you see a temple?’ Odysseus asked.

‘No, but you see the trail of smoke coming from that wood? There’s a small hill on the opposite bank of the river. That could be the tomb.’

A murmur of interest spread through the group of warriors as they strained to see, but a snapped order from Diomedes silenced them again. He led them back down to the level of the river, where the hill was lost to Eperitus’s sight behind the line of trees. They followed the overgrown track to the eaves of the wood. Here the air was heavy with the pungent odour of damp earth and thick foliage, through which Eperitus could faintly discern the mingled scent of woodsmoke and roasted flesh. Before long they reached a small clearing where the glimmer of the river could be seen through the trees a short distance on the other side. In the centre of the clearing was a pile of blackened, smouldering wood, upon which the burnt thighbones of a sheep or goat were gently smoking. To the left of the pyre was a rough table of stone supported by two boulders. This crude altar was covered in a dark circle of fresh blood that was still dripping onto the trampled grass below.

‘Looks like we’ve disturbed someone in the middle of a sacrifice,’ Diomedes said, entering the clearing and poking at the fire with the point of his spear. ‘The gods won’t be pleased.’

‘This must be the temple of Artemis that Athena mentioned,’ Odysseus said in a low voice to Eperitus, as they looked around at the circular clearing in the wood. ‘And if that’s the case then your guess was right – Pelops’s tomb is just through those trees, on the other side of the river. Come on.’

Without waiting for the others, he crossed the clearing and plunged into the undergrowth. Eperitus strode after him and together they were the first to reach the edge of the wood and see the sombre-looking hill on the opposite bank of the Alpheius. It was unnaturally perfect in shape, as if a giant bowl had been upended in the middle of the level plain, and at this range Eperitus could see it was much larger than he had estimated when he had first seen it from the ridge. Its curved flanks were featureless, covered with long grass and thorn bushes, and though the sun was bright overhead the mound seemed to absorb its light and maintain a dreary dullness.

‘Even a hill as big as that can’t hold too large a maze,’ Eperitus said, trying to quell the despair that had crept into his heart at the sight of the mound.

‘The maze will be below ground,’ Odysseus replied, knowingly. ‘That hill is just the earth they dug out to make it. And that should give you an idea of the size of what lies beneath.’

The river was fordable between the wood and the mound and they crossed it in single file with the water rising no higher than their waists. The olive tree that marked the opening was on the other side of the hill, just as Athena had said it would be. Not wanting to let on to the others that the goddess had spoken to him, Odysseus suggested they look for something that might indicate where the entrance to the maze was. Diomedes obliged almost immediately by pointing to the dead tree. After hacking away the brambles with their swords, they scraped at the earth beneath with a combination of flat rocks and their bare hands until they exposed the top of what appeared to be a wall. The rest was soon uncovered, but before they attempted to knock it in and open the ingress to the labyrinth beyond, Odysseus ordered the men to make torches from the materials they had brought – dowels and rags that had been soaked in animal fat – while he made a small fire to light them with. Finally, after the torches were ready and two Argives had been chosen to remain guard on the outside, Polites slid down into the shallow pit they had dug and splayed his massive hands against the stone blocks of the wall. It gave way easily under his great strength, collapsing in a cloud of dust that swept over him and forced him to turn away, choking loudly as he covered his face with the crook of his arm.

The others crowded round the edge of the pit, Odysseus, Diomedes and Eperitus foremost, trying to see through the swirling brown haze into the void that had been created. But even Eperitus’s eyes were unable to penetrate the thick blackness beyond the remains of the wall, and after a moment’s hesitation Diomedes ordered one of his men to light a torch and hand it to him. An instant later he was shouldering past Polites and stooping beneath the low entrance to the tomb, holding the flaming brand before him.

‘What do you see?’ Odysseus called after him.

‘It’s a chamber,’ Diomedes replied from the darkness, his voice flat and stifled. ‘Come and see for yourselves.’

One by one, the others lit their torches and joined Diomedes in the low antechamber, where the stale air was cold and smelled of damp earth. By the light of his struggling torch, Eperitus could see that the floor and walls were of mud and had not been dressed with wood or stone. The ceiling, too, was bare and had been broken in several places by the roots of the dead olive tree on the hillside above. At the back of the chamber, directly opposite the entrance, was a deeper darkness that he knew led down into the depths of the maze. He sensed a faint current of air coming from it, like the breath of something ancient and evil, and shuddered as it touched his skin.

Odysseus approached the passageway with his torch, revealing a roughly hewn arch and a steeply sloping tunnel beyond it. He peered down into the darkness, sniffed at it, then turned to the others.

‘This has to be the way to the maze. It’s too narrow for spears, so bring your swords only. And that old shield of yours will never fit down there, Eperitus.’

Though the half-moon shields of the others could easily be slung across their backs, the heirloom Eperitus had inherited from his grandfather was tall and bulky and would only prove an encumbrance in such a tight space. Reluctantly, he slipped it from his shoulder and laid it with his spear against a wall of the chamber.

‘Why do we need our weapons, anyway?’ said one of the Argives, leaning his spear next to Eperitus’s. ‘It’s just a tomb, after all.’

‘A warrior should never be without a weapon, Trechos,’ Eperitus answered. ‘Even in the houses of the dead.’

‘It’s the curse Odysseus is worried about,’ added another Argive, a veteran warrior called Epaltes who had lost an ear and two fingers during the long years of the war. ‘My wife was from Pisa, and she always said how the tomb was filled with riches befitting a great king like Pelops, but that they were protected by a terrible guardian. There’s someone, or something, down there and Odysseus knows it. Ain’t that right, Eperitus?’

Eperitus adjusted his sword in its scabbard and said nothing. Then Odysseus signalled to him from the archway, where he was waiting with Diomedes.

‘We want you to listen, Eperitus,’ Odysseus said. ‘See if you can hear anything.’

‘Silence!’ Diomedes ordered, instantly stilling the chatter among the men.

Eperitus took Odysseus’s torch and entered the mouth of the passageway, taking a few steps down into the consuming darkness that neither the flaming brand nor the thin daylight from the entrance could penetrate. It reminded him of the Stygian caves of Mount Parnassus, where long ago he and Odysseus had been guided into the presence of the Pythoness, the priestess of Gaia who had prophesied to them in riddles. He shut his eyes and concentrated.

At first, all he could hear was the fizz and sputter of the torches behind him, mingled with the suppressed breathing of fifteen other men crowded into a confined space. Then the sounds faded, pocketed away in another part of his consciousness as he pushed out with his senses. He could feel the gentle breath of chilly air rising from deep below the hillside, drawn naturally towards the comparative warmth that had spilled in from outside. Then, as he reached further and further down into the darkness, he felt the soft, absorbent earth of the tunnel suddenly give way to walls of hard stone. These branched out into narrow corridors that twisted and turned and left him quickly confused. He had found the maze and his senses could penetrate no further, except to register the faint echo of scuffling and scratching coming out of the stillness.

‘Do you hear anything?’ Diomedes asked.

Eperitus nodded. ‘I can hear rats.’

‘That’s all? Then there’s nothing else?’

‘That I can’t say, Diomedes. The tunnel leads down to more tunnels, which my senses cannot follow. The only way we’re going to discover what’s down there is to look for ourselves.’

‘Then let’s not waste any more time,’ Odysseus said, taking his torch from Eperitus’s hand and pushing past him into the tunnel.

Chapter Seventeen

THE MAZE

Not for the first time, Odysseus wondered why the gods had led the Greeks to this half-forgotten tomb, many days sail away from Troy and with no obvious relevance to the war there. As he thrust his torch into the unyielding blackness, he tried to guess at the significance of Pelops’s shoulder bone, and what other things they might find in the subterranean crypt. Eperitus, Diomedes and the others followed him in single file and soon the ground was falling away at a steep incline beneath them, forcing them to advance slowly if they were to keep their footing. As they left the daylight of the antechamber behind and plunged deeper into the earth, they were consumed by an oily darkness that their torches struggled to throw back more than an arm’s length before them. Dense cobwebs caught in the flames and were incinerated, but many more – crawling with long-legged spiders – snagged on their hair, clothing and armour to hang from them like rags. The walls of the tunnel were irregular and confusing to the senses, sometimes widening beyond the reach of their groping hands and at other times suddenly narrowing so that they could barely squeeze their shoulders between them. The ceiling, too, would undulate, rising above the heads of the tallest and then plunging again so that even Omeros, the shortest among them, had to stoop. As their senses grew tired and bewildered, Eperitus shouted a warning and seized Odysseus’s shoulder, pulling him back sharply. Thrusting his torch close to the ground, he showed him a hole big enough to swallow an unsuspecting man. Odysseus shuddered at the doom his captain had saved him from. Picking up a stone, he dropped it into the hole and a few moments later the bunched warriors heard a small ‘plop’ as it fell into unseen waters far below.

After each man had leapt the gap safely to the other side they set off again with Eperitus in the lead, his torch held before him as he probed the darkness with his superior senses. They found no more traps, but when eventually Odysseus felt the ground level out beneath his feet and saw the passage branch into two before them he had lost all sense of time.

‘So this is the beginning of the labyrinth,’ he said, standing beside Eperitus. ‘The first challenge we must overcome if we are to discover Pelops’s sarcophagus.’

‘What’s your plan?’ Diomedes asked.

Odysseus held his torch down each branch of the fork in the tunnel, and to the surprise of all they saw the dull gleam of stone floors and walls reflecting back from the darkness.

‘I don’t have a plan, only an idea,’ he replied. ‘I spent last night drawing out different mazes and trying to see if there was a foolproof method of finding a way through. I drew circular mazes and square mazes, mazes with the object on the opposite side of the entrance, and mazes with the object at the centre of the pattern. And I think I’ve worked out a solution. Unless the architect of this labyrinth was more cunning than I’ve anticipated, then all we need to do is keep our hands on one wall – left or right – and follow every twist or turn until it leads us to our goal.’

The others looked sceptical, especially the Argives, who were less familiar with Odysseus’s sharp mind.

‘Theseus used a ball of twine in the Cretan Labyrinth,’ said Trechos.

‘That was to help him find his way out again,’ Omeros replied. ‘It was Ariadne who told him the correct way in, after she received instructions from Daedalus.’

‘I don’t see how keeping a hand on one wall is going to help,’ Diomedes said. ‘Not that I don’t trust your wits, Odysseus – not after all these years – but it seems to me our best hope is to split up and cover as much of the maze as we can.’

There were concerned murmurs from the others, including Diomedes’s own men. Their instincts had been unnerved by the dark, confining space of the tunnels and their imaginations had had too long already to contemplate the rumours that the tomb was cursed. Odysseus shook his head.

‘I think we should stay together. We don’t know how big this place is, and if we separate we could spend days trying to find each other again. If my suggestion proves wrong, then we can consider something else. Do you agree?’

Diomedes shrugged and drew his sword. ‘Lead the way.’

Odysseus felt a hand on his arm.

‘Be careful,’ Eperitus warned him.

Odysseus hesitated. ‘What do your senses tell you now?’

‘The air isn’t entirely stale. There must be other ways in and out, but only small enough for rats and bats. And there’s something else. A lingering sense of malice.’

‘I feel it, too,’ Odysseus agreed. ‘The evil things Pelops did in life still haunt his resting place. But that’s all it is – a phantom of the past. The sooner we find this bone, the sooner we can return to the daylight.’

He took a few steps down the left-hand passage and paused with his torch raised before him. After a moment’s contemplation, he placed his fingertips against the wall to his right and moved forward. A dozen paces further on he stopped again. There was a large, black opening ahead of him to the right, which his torch seemed barely able to penetrate. He shook his head, as if in denial of the instinctive fear he felt, and entered. At once he stepped back in alarm, covering his face with his arm as black shapes came darting out of the tunnel. A sound like wind tumbling through the leaves of a tree filled the tunnel and small bodies were caught momentarily by the light of the torches as they fled in panic, startled by the unexpected intrusion into their secluded world.

‘Bats,’ he said, his voice a little higher than normal. ‘Just bats.’

He continued his advance and the others followed. The air seemed colder as they turned the corner and the torches struggled momentarily to throw out any light, as if the darkness itself was suffocating them. Then the flames grew again, running in ripples up the fat-soaked cloth and throwing back the shadows to reveal a flagstoned floor and stone walls. The end of this new passageway was not yet visible, but as Odysseus stared into the blackness Eperitus touched him on the shoulder and pointed. Odysseus looked again and finally saw what his captain’s keen eyes had already picked out. Something was lying on the ground several paces ahead of them: a grey ball at the foot of the left-hand wall, a bundle of rags a little further back, and the glimmer of something metallic beside them. Eperitus moved past Odysseus and knelt down by the first object.

‘What is it?’ Odysseus asked, his voice hushed but urgent.

‘A skull,’ Eperitus replied, staring down at the empty eye sockets and the open jaws that were still set in a silent scream, long after life’s last breath had passed between them. ‘The body’s over there.’

Odysseus joined him and saw the humped shape of a ragged cloak in the shadows, torn in many places and heavy with dust. Grey rib bones were half visible through the holes in the wool, while two skeletal arms reached out into the circle of light cast by their torches. A short sword lay on top of the body.

Diomedes lifted the cloak away with the point of his blade. The material crumbled with the movement, revealing the grey skeleton beneath.

‘The shoulder bone’s the same colour as the rest. This isn’t Pelops.’

‘It’s the body of a grave robber,’ Odysseus said.

Eurybates picked up the sword. ‘These black stains are blood. But if the weapon was dropped on top of the man’s cloak after he was decapitated, then who killed him?’

‘One of his companions?’ Eperitus suggested. ‘They found something of value and argued over it. Typical of their kind. The victor then left the tomb with his treasure and closed the entrance behind him. Perhaps that’s all this curse is: human greed in the face of untold wealth.’

‘I pray to the gods you’re right,’ Odysseus said, though his instincts told him otherwise. ‘Now, let’s find the sarcophagus and hope these men didn’t have a taste for ivory.’

A little beyond the remains of the robber, the tunnel turned right. With Odysseus leading again, they advanced into the blackness for a few paces until another passage opened on their left, noticeable only by a deeper darkness and the faint, cold movement of air on their cheeks. The king ignored it and, with his fingers still tracing the right-hand wall, plunged on into the depths of the maze. Almost immediately the wall bent right and then another right, leading the huddled group of warriors shortly afterwards to a dead end. Without taking his hand from the wall, Odysseus followed it left and left again, back the way they had come until it turned right twice to lead them once more to the opening they had passed only a few moments earlier. He did not hesitate, but pressed on with his torch held before him in his free hand. The wall led him left to another choice of ways – an opening that went straight on or a passage that headed right. Knowing he must stick to the plan he had worked out the evening before, Odysseus turned right and traced the wall in a zigzag pattern until it bent sharply back to the right again. He turned the corner and stopped so suddenly that Eperitus and Diomedes almost walked into him.

‘Another body,’ he announced.

He raised his torch upwards so that it shed a pool of orange light over the curled up form of a second skeleton. This one wore no cloak and the remains of its short tunic were nothing more than a few lengths of rag clinging to the ribcage and the angular protuberances of the pelvic bone. Its head remained attached to the spinal column, but the handle of a knife stuck out from its back.

‘If these men died because of an argument,’ Diomedes began, ‘why were they both killed from behind? The first could have been fleeing, and I didn’t see that he was armed; but this one’s holding a dagger – look.’ He pointed to a dull blade lying beneath the rib cage, the bony fingers of the dead man still bent around its handle. ‘Why didn’t he turn and defend himself?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Odysseus responded. ‘Something tells me this man died long before the other – see how the clothes are more decayed – but if they weren’t killed by their fellow-robbers, then I don’t know how they died. I’ll say this much, though: they were thieves, lightly armed and with no training in how to fight. We are warriors, veterans of a long and bloody war. Whoever, or whatever, stalked these men through the black confusion of these tunnels won’t find it so easy against sixteen of us!’

He stepped over the body and forged on into the darkness. The others followed, many of them drawing their swords and throwing uncertain glances over their shoulders. The tunnel twisted again and again, leading them deeper into the maze as the cold blackness numbed their senses and left them feeling ever more disorientated. Time was drawn out so that moments that would have passed briefly in the daylight were stretched by confusion and growing fear into long periods that offered no hope of ending. They stumbled into each other constantly as they bunched ever closer, afraid of becoming separated in the dark. Despite the light of their brands they soon felt themselves entirely reliant upon Odysseus’s hand as it trailed along the stone walls to his right. Even Eperitus’s senses, Odysseus guessed, must have lost their edge, deprived of the sounds and smells of the outside world and confused by the deceptive shadows cast by the clustered flames of their torches. He realised that, but for his plan to follow the right-hand wall of the maze, they would be completely lost in a place without features and seemingly without end. He only hoped he had been correct in his deduction.

After a long time, twisting and turning and meeting at least two dead ends, he stopped and raised a cautioning hand. There, ahead of them in the shadows, was another body. Like the others, it lay front-down on the flagstones, nothing more than a skeleton beneath the rags of its former clothing. Then he saw the handle of a long knife protruding from its back.

‘It’s the same body we passed before,’ Eperitus said behind him.

‘It can’t be!’ Diomedes declared, pushing past him and staring down at the crumpled form. He kicked at the collection of bones and sent them rattling across the floor. ‘Damn it, Odysseus, your ridiculous scheme has been leading us in circles!’

His voice rose above the oppressive air that had previously dampened every sound they had made and rang out through the tunnels, echoing back on itself so that even Diomedes forgot his anger and glanced about in concern.

‘This sort of thing is to be expected,’ Odysseus replied firmly. ‘If you’d looked before kicking it to pieces, you’d have noticed we’ve approached it from the opposite direction. It’s the nature of a maze to lead back on itself in places and, if anything, coming here again shows my deductions were correct.’

He moved on before Diomedes could challenge him, knowing that if he was to concede his own doubts they might refuse to follow him altogether. Diomedes might even insist that they split up – something which Odysseus now felt certain would be disastrous for all of them. As it was, they followed him without question. Ever since Diomedes’s outburst, they had felt an increase in the malevolent atmosphere of the maze, as if the evil that had been slumbering there was now awake and conscious of their presence. They shrank against each other as they passed openings to other passages, or baulked as their heightened hearing detected the sounds of rodents or bats ahead of or behind them. Polites, whose great bulk brought up the rear of the file, was constantly glancing back over his shoulder and even Odysseus felt compelled to draw his sword and hold it loosely in his right hand as he traced the wall with the tip of his forefinger. Then, after many turns that had them feeling as if he had descended far beyond any hope of finding a way out again, they came upon the remains of another man. The skeleton had been dismembered and its bones spread across the tunnel, and for an awful moment Odysseus thought they had returned to the body Diomedes had kicked apart in his anger. Then he realised this was a third victim of whatever had killed the other two robbers, and that its arms and legs had been torn off by force while still alive and left littered around the torso. No-one spoke as they stepped over the bones, but Odysseus knew every man was thinking the same as himself. What terrible creature possessed the strength to tear a man limb from limb?

More than ever he wanted the nightmare journey to end, but the maze did not oblige his desperate desire to be free of its dark, confining walls. They wandered on interminably, past more openings and into more dead ends, not knowing whether the junctions they encountered were old or new. More than once Diomedes had to order his men to silence, and when the first torch spluttered and died out the sense of desperation among the warriors of Argos and Ithaca became palpable.

‘Keep your spare torch for the return journey,’ Odysseus said, as the man slid the dowel from his belt.

Eventually, just as he was wishing they would find another body to break up the monotony of the maze, he detected a change in the air. He did not need Eperitus’s supernatural senses to tell him they were nearing a larger space, and soon the whole party were lifting their heads and looking about as if their eyes could see what their deeper instincts had revealed to them. Then they found it. They followed the wall round to the right, then left again to face a large black void, much wider than any opening they had yet encountered. As they paused, the sounds of their feet in the dust and the knocking of their armour were no longer smothered by the close air but echoed back from the open space before them.

Odysseus let his fingers drop from the wall and, gripping his torch, forced himself forward through the opening. Eperitus followed. There was a short passage, like an antechamber, then the ceiling opened up above their heads and they found themselves in a wide, natural cavern, bigger than the great hall in the palace at Ithaca. The torches flared up to meet the richer air, and were soon joined by the flames of the others, who had forgotten the weariness of their long, subterranean journey in their eagerness to enter the heart of the maze.

Chapter Eighteen

THE GUARDIAN OF THE TOMB

The darkness was thrown back and the vastness of the chamber was revealed to them. Thick stone columns soared up into the shadows above their heads, and by the monochromatic light of their torches the warriors saw all the gathered wealth of a legendary king lying between them. To the left were two chariots: one magnificent in beaten gold that gleamed alluringly in the torchlight; the other a shattered wreck, its screen flattened, its yoke snapped and its broken wheels laid flat beside it. In an instant, Eperitus knew this was the chariot in which Oenomaus had pursued Pelops and Hippodameia, and beneath which he had been dragged to his death. His eyes moved on from this grim reminder of Pelops’s victory over his father-in-law to the heaped spoils of his victories over the other cities of the Peloponnese. Spears and swords lay in piles, while beside them were stacks of shields of the same, outdated design as the one Eperitus had inherited from his grandfather. Sets of body armour sat between them, like half-formed warriors rising up from the cavern floor. They were made of layered bands of bronze that gave the wearer full protection from his chin down to his groin, but due to their weight their like had not been seen on battlefields for many decades. Resting on top of them were helmets of bronze or leather, several of which were circled with layers of boars’ tusks.

More substantial wealth in the form of tripods, cauldrons, gold and copper ingots, silver goblets and other valuables lay scattered over the flagstones in no particular order. Whether they had been left like that by Pelops’s fearful but unloving subjects, or had been misplaced by the greedy hands of successive grave robbers, Eperitus was unable to tell, but they were a clear measure of how rich and important Pelops must have been in his lifetime. Some of the Argives were drawn irresistibly towards these precious items – forgetful of the dead men they had seen in the tunnels – but an order from Diomedes brought them back.

‘Touch nothing,’ he warned them. ‘We’ve come for one thing and one thing only!’

Odysseus hardly seemed to notice the piled treasures about him. He remained standing a few paces in from the entrance, his gaze fixed on the wooden figure of a horse at the far end of the chamber. It stood on top of an immense stone sarcophagus, which itself was set on a dais reached by three broad steps. Lying spread-eagled across the steps was another skeleton, this one on its back and staring blankly up at the high ceiling. Of all the rest of the party, only Eperitus, Diomedes and Omeros had noticed the tomb and the grim reminder of the curse that still haunted it. Odysseus turned and indicated for the others to put their torches in the empty iron brackets that were affixed to the columns. Then, with his own held high above his head, he approached the sarcophagus.

If the curse was to strike, Eperitus thought, now was the time. Diomedes snapped angrily at the others, who were still beguiled by the treasures around them, and ordered them to place their torches in the remaining brackets and ready their swords. Eperitus hung his own torch on one of the columns, snatched up a dusty shield and joined Odysseus at the foot of the dais. As the other Ithacans and the Argives formed a defensive semicircle around the sarcophagus, he stared down at the skeletal remains before him. Whether the other robbers had reached as far as Pelops’s burial chamber, Eperitus did not know, but this man had made it through the maze only to die at the steps of the sarcophagus. The manner of his death was not clear, though Eperitus noticed there was an unnatural angle to his neck.

‘This is it, then,’ Odysseus said, staring up at the carved horse with its bowed head and rigid, wooden mane. ‘Inside that sarcophagus is a riddle that will give us the key to the gates of Troy. We just have to work it out.’

‘Why a horse?’ Eperitus asked.

‘The Pisans are great horse breeders. They love their animals and revere them like gods, honouring them in their art, their rituals, even their funeral rites.’

‘Just like the Trojans.’

Odysseus did not answer, but narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he stared at the effigy of the horse standing atop the tomb.

Diomedes joined them. ‘Let’s not delay any longer. This place is making my men nervous. And me too, if you want the truth.’

They took the few steps to the dais, careful not to tread on the skeleton of the grave robber, and looked down at the stone sarcophagus. It was twice the length of a normal man and twice the width, and was capped by a heavy granite lid that formed the base for the wooden horse. The horse stared down at them in disdainful silence as they laid their hands upon the rough stone and began to push. Their arm and leg muscles strained with the effort, the veins bulging as their grunts filled the chamber, but the lid would not move.

‘We need something to prise it off with,’ Eperitus said.

He returned to the piles of weapons stacked amid the columns and picked up a sword. But as he was about to return to the dais, his eyes fell on a spear leaning against the wall by the shattered chariot of Oenomaus. It had a long, black shaft of some unknown wood and was tipped by a broad head. Though it must have lain there for as long as all the other weapons, the bronze had not been dulled or tarnished by the years. Instead, it shone out fiercely in the torchlight, beckoning to him irresistibly. He picked it up, surprised at how light it felt in his hand despite its monstrous size. It was then he noticed the shaft had been intricately carved and inlaid with faint traces of gold and silver, only catching the torchlight as he moved it in his hands – the work of a great craftsman. The carvings began at the head of the shaft, beneath the socketed point, and seemed to depict a race between pairs of chariots. Only when Eperitus’s eyes reached the base did he realise it was the same pair of chariots, repeated at intervals, and that it was not a race but a pursuit, with the last scene showing the occupant of the second chariot impaling the first from behind with his spear.

A call from Odysseus reminded him of where he was. Picking up two more spears, he ran to the line of warriors and gave one to Polites and the other to Trechos.

‘Come with me,’ he ordered.

As they took the steps up to the dais, Odysseus looked at the spear in Eperitus’s hands.

‘It’s magnificent.’

‘It was lying among the other weapons. I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at the carvings on the shaft.’

Odysseus took the weapon in his hands while the others looked on, equally fascinated. He studied the depictions with a frown, then handed it back to Eperitus.

‘This is Oenomaus’s spear, the one given to him by Ares. It can’t be anything else.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘You said yourself you’d never seen anything like it. Just look at how the bronze still gleams, as if it were newly burnished; and feel how light it is in the hand. Only Hephaistos himself could have made such a spear. And these pictures recall Hippodameia’s suitors, whom he pursued to their deaths – until Pelops, that is.’

‘Put it back, Eperitus,’ Diomedes insisted. ‘You’ll bring the curse down upon us. If we take nothing, perhaps we’ll be spared.’

‘What about the bone?’ Eperitus countered.

‘I agree with Diomedes,’ Odysseus said. ‘Put it back and fetch another.’

Eperitus reluctantly did as he was ordered, returning with spears for himself, Odysseus and Diomedes. Together with Polites and Trechos, they forced the bronze points into the gap between the sarcophagus and its lid and pushed upwards. The heavy granite resisted for a moment, then with a grating protest began to move. The wooden horse quivered as the five men prised the lid slowly backwards, until finally it fell with a crash on the other side of the dais. The sarcophagus shook with the impact and sent up a cloud of dust that momentarily obscured the open tomb. Squinting and beating the air with their hands, the men stepped up and looked inside.

The skeleton of Pelops lay on its back with its arms by its side and its legs close together. It was of an immense size – in life, Pelops would have been a full head taller than Polites – and even in death the empty eye sockets contained a malice that was alarming to witness. Eperitus felt a small sense of relief to see that the left shoulder blade was creamy white, nothing like the ash-coloured bones of the rest of the skeleton; but his relief was quickly stifled by the feeling of evil that emanated from the sarcophagus. Then he began to notice the strangest thing about Pelops’s remains. The bones were not separated as they should have been – lying in disjointed pieces at the bottom of the stone coffin – but were fused together and retained their human shape. Arms, legs, spine, ribs, even the oversized skull remained connected to each other, as if the flesh that had once surrounded them was still there. Eperitus opened his mouth to comment on the peculiarity of it, when he thought he saw the fingers on one hand move. An icy coldness gripped him and his instincts told him to flee, but a grim fascination kept him there. Then, with a dry, grating sound, the skull began to move, rotating slowly on the spinal column to stare up at the horrified men.

Eperitus felt a rush of fear. His logical mind tried to explain away the movement as a delayed result of them shifting the heavy sarcophagus lid. Then there was a second movement, much quicker than the first, and Trechos began choking and clutching at his neck, trying desperately to throw off the skeletal hand that had seized his throat. Eperitus reeled back in shock, catching his heel on the bones of the dead grave robber and tumbling in a heap at the foot of the dais. A moment later there was a loud snap and Trechos fell back across the steps, his neck broken.

An involuntary shout of terror left Eperitus’s lips. He stared wide-eyed at Trechos’s upturned face, and then began to crawl backwards on his elbows, not daring to turn his back on the sarcophagus for even a moment. The others were leaping down from the dais, their cries of horror and disbelief echoing around the chamber. Odysseus appeared above Eperitus and, seizing his hand, pulled him to his feet. Over his shoulder, Eperitus saw bony fingers clutching at the granite edge of the tomb, followed slowly by the giant skull with its hateful eye sockets and death’s head grin.

‘How is it possible?’ he gasped, stumbling back with Odysseus towards the crescent of warriors, who were shouting in dismay. ‘What gives it life?’

Odysseus’s hands were shaking as they clutched the black shaft of his spear.

‘I don’t know what makes it move, but it’s not life. Perhaps this was the dying curse of Myrtilus – that his betrayer’s bones would never find rest.’

They blundered back into the rank of Argives and Ithacans – Diomedes and Polites had already sought refuge among their comrades – and stared incredulously as the giant skeleton raised itself to its full height and stepped stiffly out of the sarcophagus, its joints rasping like blocks of stone as they moved. It turned towards the cowering warriors, looking at them with a loathing that was unfettered by human sentiment. They had violated its resting place and every last one of them would pay with their lives.

Odysseus was the first to throw off his disbelief and come back to his senses. He pulled the spear back over his shoulder and hurled it with all his might at the skeleton. The head plunged through its ribcage, raising a cheer from the others as the horror that had once been Pelops staggered back against the sarcophagus. It stared down at the shaft that protruded from its fleshless body, but instead of collapsing in a clatter of bones, closed its fingers around the weapon and, passing one hand over the other, slid it back out. Raising the spear over its head it launched it back at the waiting warriors. The bronze point narrowly missed Omeros and sparked on the stone floor behind.

Now Diomedes ran towards the dais, brandishing his sword and snarling with anger at the death of Trechos. The copper light of the torches glittered like fire across the blade as it swept down against the monster’s thigh. The blow would have cut through the flesh and bone of any ordinary man, but the curse that animated Pelops’s remains must also have given them supernatural protection. The sword bounced off the bone without even marking it. Skeletal hands now seized hold of Diomedes as if he were but a child, and with inhuman strength hurled him across the cavern to land with a crash in a pile of spears.

The Argives gave a furious shout and dashed forward. The colossal skeleton moved jerkily down the steps to meet them, knocking aside the first two men as they threw themselves at him. The others quickly formed a circle about it, hacking uselessly at the hard bone or thrusting the points of their swords between its empty ribs. Epaltes, the veteran warrior whose wife had told him long ago about the curse of Pelops’s tomb, ran at the monster with his sword held in both hands over his head. He swung the blade against its neck, but the sharpened bronze sprang back and flew from his grip. The next instant, the skeleton had seized hold of his arm and pulled it clean from its socket, spraying the others with droplets of gore as it tossed the detached limb into a corner of the chamber and let Epaltes fall to the floor.

‘By all the gods!’ Omeros exclaimed.

‘How do we fight that?’ Eurybates asked, slipping his shield onto his arm and picking up a spear.

‘We must try to cut off its arms and legs,’ Odysseus replied, drawing his sword from its scabbard. ‘Strike at the joints – it’s our only hope.’

After a glance at Diomedes, who was groggily raising himself from the pile of spears, he led the Ithacans into the fray. The skeleton had picked up Epaltes’s sword and was fighting the Argives, bronze against bronze. But the superior numbers of the warriors counted for nothing: the stabbing and slashing of their weapons were ineffectual, whereas a single sweep of the fiend’s sword took the head clean off one man’s shoulders, and a second blow – delivered with devastating speed – pierced the heart of another, killing him instantly. Eperitus rushed into the gap left by the slain man and, remembering his king’s words, sliced down at the skeleton’s elbow joint. It was as if he had struck stone. The impact vibrated up his arm and the sword fell from his numbed hand. The monster opened its jaws in a silent cry of hatred, but Eperitus ducked away just in time as its blade cleaved the air above his head.

He leapt back, unarmed and defenceless. Before a second blow could kill him, Diomedes dashed in with his sword and a shield he had taken from among the ancient weapons that littered the chamber, meeting the edge of the skeleton’s sword with the thickly layered oxhide. Eperitus snatched up his weapon and ran to Diomedes’s side as the monster turned upon them with a flurry of blows that, even with their great fighting skill and experience, they were barely able to survive. A moment later, Odysseus was beside them.

‘There must be a way to stop this thing,’ Diomedes shouted over the clang of bronze. ‘If our weapons can’t harm it, how can we hope to take the shoulder blade? Use your brains, Odysseus.’

‘Perhaps we don’t need the bone,’ he replied.

The three men fell back, breathing heavily as the skeleton turned to fend off another attack from the Argives and Ithacans.

‘What did you say?’ Diomedes asked.

‘Perhaps it’s not the shoulder blade that’s the key.’

‘Whatever the gods sent us here for,’ Eperitus said, ‘we won’t get out again until we’ve defeated that thing.’

Another Argive cried out and staggered back against one of the stone columns, blood gushing from a wound on his inner thigh. A moment later he slid to the floor and was still. Diomedes shouted with rage, but before the three men could rejoin the fight there was another roar. Realising bronze alone was useless, Polites cast aside his sword and threw himself against the guardian of the tomb, seizing its wrists and pushing it back against the sarcophagus. The skeleton’s own weapon fell with a clatter and, throwing a foot back against the steps, it fought against the might of Polites. For a while they seemed not to move. Polites gritted his teeth and, with sweat pouring off his face and limbs, tried to impose his flesh and blood strength over his enemy. But the supernatural curse that had taken possession of Pelops’s bones was greater still. The Ithacan’s shoulder muscles strained in protest as, with slow inevitably, his arms were forced back. Omeros gave a shout and ran forward to hack uselessly at the hard bone of the fiend’s arms. Wrenching free of Polites’s grip, it swatted Omeros aside and in the same move seized Polites’s shoulder. Polites threw his head back and screamed in pain as he felt the malicious power tearing at the ligaments in his arm.

And then the words Athena had spoken on the galley as they had approached the Peloponnesian shore came tumbling back into Eperitus’s head.

‘The only way to overcome the curse of Pelops’s tomb,’ he said aloud, ‘is for Ares’s gift to complete its purpose.’

Odysseus turned to him and in an instant they both understood.

‘Oenomaus’s spear!’ the king cried.

Eperitus did not wait, but ran back to the wall by the broken chariot where he had reluctantly laid down the weapon. He took it in one hand, his mind recalling vividly the story Odysseus had told as they had set out on their voyage back to Greece. Oenomaus’s spear was a gift from Ares, which the king had used to pursue Hippodameia’s suitors to their deaths. Its aim was straight and true, as was to be expected from a weapon gifted by the gods; but there had been one occasion when it had failed in its purpose – against Pelops. Now was the time for it to complete its task.

A shout of pain rang from the walls. Eperitus looked across and saw the skeleton tearing at Polites’s arm, determined on ripping the heavily muscled limb from its torso. Odysseus, Diomedes and a host of others were pulling at the monster’s arms and legs in an attempt to save Polites, though forlornly.

‘Stand clear!’ Eperitus called.

He pulled the spear back and took aim. The skeleton seemed to sense danger and turned to look at Eperitus. The light of the torches glowed on its grey bones and cast strange, enlarged shadows on the walls behind. Suddenly, it released Polites and began running towards the captain of the Ithacan guard, at the same moment as Eperitus launched the spear. It went clean through the fleshless ribs and carried on to stick quivering in the flank of the wooden horse that had crowned the sarcophagus. But as the bronze head passed between the bones, the ancient curse that held them together was broken and the skeleton fell in pieces to the floor. The skull rolled over to rest between Odysseus’s feet. The king picked it up, looked into its empty eye sockets, then threw it against a wall where it shattered into fragments.

Omeros and Eurybates ran to help Polites, who was groaning with pain, though his arm had remained in its socket by the sheer density of his muscles. Diomedes walked over to the pile of bones and picked out the ivory shoulder blade.

‘So this is what five of my men died for,’ he said, bitterly. ‘And yet you think we don’t even need the damned thing.’

He offered it to Odysseus, who took the untarnished ivory and held it up to the light of the nearest torch.

‘We must take it back to Troy, of course – the others will expect it – and yet the gods didn’t bring us here just for the sake of a bone. There’s something else, a riddle or a clue that will give us victory over Troy. I just have to find out what it is.’

Eperitus pulled the spear out of the wooden horse and looked about at the bodies of the dead men.

‘What if there is no riddle, Odysseus? What if the gods are playing with us, giving us hope where there isn’t any? What if there never was anything more here than a dead king hidden beneath a wooden horse? Perhaps the Olympians want the war to go on for another ten years.’

‘A king hidden beneath a wooden horse,’ Odysseus repeated, to himself. ‘Or inside a horse.’

Diomedes shook his head. ‘No, the gods wouldn’t lie to us. They sent us to find this bone and take it back to Troy. That’s all there is to it. Why does there have to be something else, Odysseus?’

Odysseus ignored him and walked over to the wooden horse on its toppled granite lid. He stroked its smooth mane and frowned.

‘The Trojans revere horses,’ he said, quietly. Then he turned to Eperitus and smiled. ‘I have it, Eperitus,’ he whispered. ‘I know what the riddle is, and I know the answer. I have the key to the gates of Troy.’

Chapter Nineteen

EURYPYLUS ARRIVES

Helen stood behind Cassandra as she sat on the high-backed chair, staring gloomily at her reflection in the mirror. The polished bronze surface was uneven in places and a little tarnished around the circumference, but there was no hiding the girl’s natural beauty.

‘White suits you,’ Helen said conclusively, gathering Cassandra’s thick, dark hair in her fingers and holding it behind her head to expose the long neck and slim shoulders.

Cassandra laid a modest hand across her exposed cleavage.

‘Black would be more appropriate.’

‘For your husband? Come now.’

‘Did you want to wear white when Deiphobus forced you to marry him against your wishes?’ Cassandra replied, harshly. ‘Besides, Eurypylus will not be my husband until he and his army have defeated the Greeks. My father was clear on that, at least.’

Helen looked across the bright, sunny chamber to where the wind from the plains was blowing the thin curtains in from the window. The air in Cassandra’s room was warm and humid, and carried with it the sound of pipes, drums and the cheering of crowds. Eurypylus’s army had already entered the Scaean Gate and was marching in premature triumph through the lower city on their way up to the citadel of Pergamos. Soon thousands of soldiers would be filling the palace courtyard below, where Priam would formally greet the grandson he had never met and give him Cassandra – Eurypylus’s aunt – to be his wife. And through the wine-induced fog that had obscured her thoughts and emotions almost every day since the death of Paris, Helen recalled how she had stood in her own room in Sparta, twenty years before, and listened with disdain as Agamemnon persuaded her stepfather, Tyndareus, to offer her in marriage to the best man in Greece. She shuddered at the memory and turned back to look at Cassandra.

‘Nevertheless, Hecabe has asked me to make you look your best for him, and your mother’s request is as good as an order.’

‘They say Eurypylus is an ugly man.’

‘Who says, and who would know?’ Helen laughed as she gathered Cassandra’s hair up at the top of her head and pinned it in place. ‘After all, who in Troy has seen him? Mysians and Trojans have hardly been good friends since Astyoche’s feud with Priam.’

‘I have seen him in my dreams,’ Cassandra insisted, ‘and he has a brutal face to match his brutal character. His heart is black, too, made so by an indulgent mother who has never denied him anything.’

‘Really?’ Helen responded, a hint of scepticism in her voice.

She finished tying up Cassandra’s thick locks and lifted her chin a little with her fingertip. The sombre face that had for so long been hidden behind drapes of black hair was now revealed in all its loveliness. She had a small but perfectly proportioned mouth, a slightly pointed chin with the merest hint of a dimple, pale, petite ears pressed forward by the volume of hair behind them, and large eyes heavily rimmed with long eyelashes. Cassandra looked at herself in the mirror and seemed surprised at what she saw, perhaps realising for the first time that she was a woman worthy of any man’s attention. Behind her, Helen stared at her own reflection and saw the beauty that had never withered with the loss of her youth, or been blemished by her grief for Paris. If anything, the years and her suffering had made her more beautiful, as if the divine blood that coursed in her veins had made itself more obvious with maturity. And something inside her suddenly wanted to tell Cassandra to cover up her beauty again, to hide it from a world that would kill and maim, burn and destroy for the sake of a woman’s looks.

Outside, the sound of pipes and drums was growing closer while the cheering had faded. The Mysians had left the crowds of the lower city behind and entered Pergamos itself.

‘Everyone knows there’s nothing Astyoche won’t do for her son,’ Cassandra continued. ‘And in return he hangs upon her every word, doting over her like a pet puppy.’

There was a hint of disgust in her tone, and Helen laid a comforting hand on her shoulder.

‘If she has spoiled him, it’s exactly because she wants him as her pet – a creature that will do her bidding without question. But I don’t believe she has given him everything. Not her heart. Else, why would she send him out to risk his life in battle, for the sake of a father she despises? In her pride she wanted Priam to come begging for her help – as she knew he would, one day – and that victory, symbolised by the Golden Vine, is worth more to her than Eurypylus.’

Another gust of wind blew the curtains inward again, brushing them against a small clay jar filled with perfume that Helen had brought with her for Cassandra. It fell from the table and smashed, making the two women start. As their maids had already been dismissed, Helen slipped her hand from Cassandra’s shoulder and walked over to the broken pieces, picking them up one by one and placing them in her palm. Kneeling there, she heard the pulsing of the drums and the heavy tramp of marching feet coming up the last ramp to the courtyard below, followed by a loud command and then silence. She looked at Cassandra, then stood and moved to the window. Dropping the shards of clay on the table, she brushed the fluttering curtain aside with her arm and looked out.

The large courtyard below was filled with armed men. On three sides, dressed in double-ranks, were Priam’s elite guard – Troy’s fiercest warriors, who wore the richest armour and carried the best weapons. On the far side were the men of Mysia: a sea of soldiers with dusty armaments, all of them young and strong with faces that were keen for war, not beleaguered and desperate for peace like the Trojans and their other allies. Behind them, on the ramp that led up from the lower tier of the citadel and stretching back into the streets beyond, were the ranks of their comrades – spearmen, archers, chariots and cavalry. They numbered in the thousands, an army that could indeed turn the tide of the war against the exhausted Greeks.

In the space at the centre of the courtyard were a handful of men. The figure of Priam stood tallest, his purple robe resplendent in the sunshine and his black wig and face powder belying the age that had so rapidly caught up with him since the death of Hector. On one side of the king were his herald, Idaeus, and Antenor, the elder; while on the other were Deiphobus and Apheidas, the highest-ranking commanders in his army. Before them all was a tall, powerfully built warrior with a broad black beard and long hair that flowed from beneath his plumed helmet. A sword was slung from a scabbard under his arm and a shield hung from his back.

Helen sensed Cassandra’s presence over her shoulder.

‘That’s Eurypylus,’ she said with certainty. ‘And is he not as ugly as I told you?’

Helen stared down at his broken nose and crooked teeth, and at the cruel, selfish eyes that squinted against the bright sunshine. As she watched, Eurypylus took the hand his grandfather offered him, though with deliberate hesitation and without warmth.

‘Looks are not everything,’ she said. ‘No-one thought Paris handsome, not with that scar; but he was the noblest man in Troy – except perhaps Hector – and for a while he offered me freedom from everything that had tied me down. That’s why I fell in love with him, and love him still.’

‘Look at his eyes, Helen. How could Priam give his own daughter to a man with such evil eyes?’

‘Priam gives the women of his household to whomever he pleases,’ Helen answered, her gaze wandering to Deiphobus, whose once cheerful face was now stern and detached. ‘It’s the lot of a princess to be married to men not of her own choosing. Paris helped me escape from Menelaus, but now I’m married to Deiphobus against my will. And if the Greeks ever conquer these walls, I will be Menelaus’s again.’

‘Eurypylus will never have me.’

Helen was not listening. Her eyes were on Deiphobus and she wanted a cup of wine.

‘Marriage is inescapable,’ she muttered, half to herself.

‘In time, another man will take me against my will. But I will not marry Astyoche’s son.’

Helen caught Cassandra’s last words and turned to her.

‘There are worse husbands than Eurypylus. Deiphobus forced me to marry him while I was still in mourning for his brother. But if you’re planning to run away –’

Cassandra shook her head. ‘There’s no need, Sister. Eurypylus will be killed by Achilles before he can marry me. I have seen it.’

‘Achilles is dead.’

‘He will return.’

Helen looked pityingly at Cassandra’s sad, pretty face.

‘Well, whatever may or may not happen to Eurypylus, your mother still wants you to be ready to meet him at this evening’s feast. I’ll find your maid and send her to clear up the rest of this mess.’

She left Cassandra looking out at her husband-to-be and found her slave waiting outside the door. As the girl rushed off to attend to her mistress, Helen felt the darkness of her grief for Paris stealing up on her again. She lowered her head into her hands and succumbed to the sinking sense of loss once more. Then, with tears in her eyes, she went to find her own room, where she would bury her face in the single tunic of his that she had kept and cry until the mood passed. And then she would drink the wine she had hidden there and ease some of her pain.

The voyage to the island of Scyros, skirting the coastline of southern Greece, had been quiet and smooth. Water, provisions and shelter had been easy to find in the many harbours and coves along the way, though the few people who dared speak to them were at best suspicious, at worst hostile. But for the men of Ithaca and Argos it was a joy to be back in Greece again, to see her mountains and islands and every evening to sleep on her beaches. The survivors had quickly forgotten the horrors of Pelops’s tomb and put behind them their grief for the comrades who had been slain there; now their minds were on the end of the war and an imminent return to their families and homes. For a while, as they sailed beneath a Greek sun and ate Greek food, their spirits were bubbling with optimism, as if the defeat of Troy was now a mere formality.

It was not, of course, and none knew that more than Odysseus, Diomedes and Eperitus. In those long days, blessed by sun and wind that required them to do little between rowing out to deeper waters in the morning and finding a sheltering cove before dark, they had plenty of time to think about what now lay ahead of them. After retracing their way out of the maze – dragging the bodies of the dead Argives with them to be burned on a pyre beneath the evening stars – Odysseus had explained the significance of the bone to Eperitus and Diomedes.

‘The bone itself is nothing more than a token,’ he told them as they made camp by the banks of the Alpheius. ‘It will be an encouragement to the army, because the oracle Helenus gave us said Troy will not fall without it. However, it isn’t the reason the gods sent us to Pelops’s tomb.’

‘Then what is the point of it?’ Diomedes had asked.

They were sitting away from the others, around a small log fire of their own. The flames cast an orange glow over their faces, distorting their features with strange shadows. Eperitus looked at Odysseus and had absolute faith in the power of his friend’s mind. There was no situation he could not think his way out of, and no riddle he could not decipher. He had found a way through the maze, and he would know the meaning of the shoulder bone. That was why Athena, the goddess of wisdom, had chosen him.

‘The gods were giving us a clue to conquer Troy. The walls were built by Poseidon and Apollo: they can’t be smashed down or scaled, and as long as there are men to defend them the city can never be conquered from the outside. But if we could get men inside the walls – enough of them to capture the gates and hold them open until the rest of the army arrive –’

‘As simple as that,’ Diomedes said, sardonically. ‘And how do we get a large force of men into the city in the first place? Turn them into birds so they fly over the walls?’

‘The maze!’ Eperitus exclaimed, thinking he understood. ‘You mean we should dig a tunnel beneath the walls and into Troy. The gods sent you into the maze to give you inspiration!’

Odysseus shook his head.

‘No tunnels, Eperitus. The ground Troy is built on is too hard. Besides, the Trojans would see what we were up to and guess our intent. You’re right in one sense, though: we were sent into that tomb to see something, something that would show me how to get inside Troy. Do you remember I once said I’d been given an idea by Astynome smuggling herself into the Greek camp in the back of that farmer’s cart, and by Omeros’s retelling the story of how I got past those Taphian guards hidden in a pithos of wine? Well, Pelops’s tomb has finally shown me how I can smuggle an army into Troy.’

‘How?’ Eperitus and Diomedes asked.

‘You’ll see in time,’ Odysseus replied with a grin.

Despite having tantalised his comrades, Odysseus stubbornly refused to say any more about the inspiration he had received in Pelops’s tomb, so their thoughts and discussions now focussed on the two remaining oracles: how they would steal the Palladium from the temple of Athena in Troy and, more urgently, how they would persuade Achilles’s son, Neoptolemus, to join Agamemnon’s army. Eperitus remembered the small, light-haired boy he had seen in the palace gardens on Scyros the day Achilles had joined the expedition to Troy. He sympathised with the doubts of the ordinary soldiers who questioned the value of a fifteen-year-old lad who had never seen combat before, and who had been hidden away behind the skirts of his mother’s chiton all his young life. But these uncertainties never bothered Odysseus or Diomedes. The two kings understood that a son of Achilles would be worth all the effort spent in bringing him to the war. The only problem that concerned them was how to prise him away from the clutches of his deceitful grandfather and – a greater problem in Odysseus’s eyes – his jealous mother.

Finally, the day came when they saw the high, rugged hills overlooking the wide harbour of Scyros. The noon sun caught the copper gates of the palace halfway up the highest hill, which flashed to them like a beacon. As they slipped towards the calm, sheltered waters of the harbour, Sthenelaus called for the sail to be furled and the anchor stones to be made ready. At first, Eperitus was surprised to see the numerous fishing boats drawn up on the shingle beach and the handful of merchant vessels at anchor. A throng of people left their homes or their chores to watch the approach of the fighting galley, showing no signs of fear, only curiosity. Then he understood: Scyros had survived the depravations of the rest of Greece because its king had not been one of the oath-takers and thus had refused to send his army to the war against Troy. Scyros had remained safe and prosperous because Lycomedes had stayed at home.

Small boats came out to meet the warship, manned by fishermen or boys offering to take the crew ashore. Soon, Odysseus, Diomedes and Eperitus were leading half a dozen Argives up the cobbled road to the palace gates, while the remainder were ordered to stay on board. Odysseus knew King Lycomedes could not be trusted and had told Sthenelaus to stay alert while they were gone, ready to come to their aid if necessary. From his lofty viewpoint, Lycomedes would have known of the galley’s approach long before its anchor stones were cast overboard. There was no telling what sort of reception he might give them.

The copper gates swung open to reveal two dozen well-armed soldiers and a short, officious looking herald who insisted they leave their weapons with the guards. They had expected nothing less and gave up their spears and swords with little more than a show of reluctance. They were ushered into the great hall, sombre and shadowy despite the column of dusty light that shone down through the smoke hole in the ceiling to touch on the low flames of the hearth. Eperitus remembered the chamber well from his first visit to Scyros ten years before, though then it had been evening and the hall had been filled with nobles and lit by numerous torches. Now it was empty but for an old man and a woman. The man was seated in a wooden throne draped in furs. His hair and beard were white and his skin was ashen grey. His thin nose seemed to twitch slightly as they entered, while his small, closely set eyes watched them keenly from beneath heavy eyebrows. The woman had a chair next to his, but chose to stand as the newcomers entered, placing her hand on the back of the throne. Like him she was tall, though she was many years younger. Her hair was long and dark and her natural beauty was made more aloof and alluring by the stern gaze that she fixed on the men.

Eperitus did not recognise King Lycomedes at first, so old and gaunt had he become, but he could see by the clear eyes and hawklike stare that he had lost none of his wits. The woman he knew immediately was Deidameia, Achilles’s widow – though she would not know that yet – and the mother of Neoptolemus. Of Achilles’s son there was no sign.

‘Welcome to Scyros, my lords,’ she said. ‘Step forward into the light and tell us who you are and what it is that King Lycomedes can do for you.’

‘I am King Diomedes of Argos, son of Tydeus. This is King Odysseus of Ithaca, son of Laertes, and these are Eperitus, captain of the Ithacan royal guard, and our companions. We have brought a message for the wife and son of the great Achilles.’

At the mention of Odysseus’s name, both Lycomedes and his daughter turned to stare at the broad figure in the shadows behind Diomedes. Lycomedes’s eyes were filled with sudden suspicion, remembering how Odysseus had tricked him before; but Deidameia’s face had lost its austere self-assurance and turned pale, as if already guessing the news the men had brought.

‘I am Deidameia, daughter of King Lycomedes and wife of the great Achilles. What is your message?’

Odysseus stepped forward and touched Diomedes’s elbow, indicating he would reply.

‘Our message is for Neoptolemus also,’ he said. ‘Where is your son?’

‘I will not allow you to speak to my grandson, Odysseus,’ Lycomedes answered. ‘The last time you were here you fooled Achilles into joining Agamemnon’s army, and we have not seen him since. What’s to say you won’t try to take Neoptolemus back with you this time?’

Deidameia lifted her hand to silence her father, a gesture that raised eyebrows among their guests.

‘Give your message to me, Odysseus, and I shall tell my son. He can hear it just as well from my lips as yours.’

‘Very well, my lady. Your husband is dead. He fell storming the gates of Troy, where he was struck down by the arrows of Prince Paris.’

The statement was spoken evenly, but the silence that followed seemed to fix the words in the air about them. Deidameia shrank a little, as if something had gone out of her. Eperitus saw her grip on Lycomedes’s chair tighten slightly. Then she drew on her inner strength and pulled herself back up to her full height. Her lips became thin and pale, her eyes stony and hard.

‘Achilles died ten years ago, when he left this island in your ship, Odysseus. Thank you, my lords, for coming all this way to bring me your news. I will sacrifice to Poseidon and pray that you have a safe journey back to Ilium.’

‘And Neoptolemus?’ Odysseus asked, showing no signs of moving. ‘He will have questions. He’ll want to know how his father died.’

‘You’ve already said he was shot by Paris,’ Deidameia replied. ‘I will let him know.’

‘It won’t be enough,’ Diomedes said. ‘If he has anything of his father in him, he’ll want to know every detail. And not just about Achilles’s death, but also about the things he achieved while alive: the men he killed, the cities he conquered –’

‘That is my fear, King Diomedes. He has too much of his father in him, and to hear of Achilles’s deeds will turn his mind towards Troy at a time when his thoughts should be of home. Lycomedes is right: you have not come here to tell me of my husband’s death, but to take my son away to replace Achilles on the battlefield! Part of me feared it as soon as your sail was spotted, even though I didn’t know who you were. And yet he is my son, not yours. I won’t stand by and allow you to take him away like you did my husband.’

‘Neoptolemus is nearly a man, my lady,’ Odysseus countered. ‘Such decisions can only be made by him. What’s more, if you send us away without giving him the chance to question us about his father – to question the men who knew Achilles best in life, and who witnessed his death – you are denying him something every man has an elementary right to: a knowledge of his sires and an understanding of his roots. Do that, Deidameia, and his love for you may turn to hatred.’

‘We will take that risk,’ Lycomedes said, struggling to his feet and pointing to the doors they had entered through. ‘Neoptolemus will never be yours. Now, leave my island and return to Troy.’

But as Eperitus was expecting the king to have them thrown out and put an end to their hopes of ever fulfilling the oracle, Deidameia laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder and gently eased him back into his throne.

‘You will excuse my father. Neoptolemus is the sole heir to the kingdom and he doesn’t want to see him go off to a war that has nothing to do with Scyros. But what you say is true, Odysseus. Neoptolemus deserves to hear about his father and it’s not my place to deny him that. I’ll allow you to speak with him tonight, if you still wish it, at a feast we will hold in your honour.’

‘We do wish it,’ Diomedes answered, glancing uncertainly at Odysseus beside him.

Deidameia smiled at him, something of her earlier authority and self-assurance returning.

‘You see, I have faith in my son. He has his father’s love of fighting, but he is less driven by passion and more inclined to follow his intelligence. He will know why you’re here, but he’ll not rush madly off to war. And by ill chance for you, tomorrow morning will marry Phaedra, the girl I have chosen to be his wife and bear his children. You may tempt him, Odysseus, but in the end he will choose love over glory.’

She bowed to them, then turned and walked from the great hall.

Chapter Twenty

NEOPTOLEMUS

After the audience in the great hall, Odysseus, Diomedes, Eperitus and their escort were taken to the same wing of the palace the Ithacans had been quartered in on their first visit to Scyros ten years ago. They climbed the steps to the roof and looked down at the galley in the bay below.

‘It’s a thin hope now,’ Diomedes said. ‘If the lad’s getting married, the last thing on his mind will be coming with us to Troy. We couldn’t have arrived at a worse time.’

Odysseus didn’t share his gloom.

‘I’d say the gods have brought us here at exactly the right moment. Tomorrow, we would have found him a married man, freshly committed to his new life as a husband. Today he’s in that strange, fleeting place where the old has gone but the new hasn’t yet come. His mind may be full of love for this girl he’s due to marry, and yet it’ll also be stricken with doubt. He’s young, remember. He’s never ventured beyond the shores of Scyros. The news of Achilles’s death may open a new door – a chance to follow his father’s path, away from domesticity and into adventure. I’ve seen it happen to others in his position. More than that, he has Achilles’s blood in his veins: when Neoptolemus sees the gift I’ve brought him, it’ll be enough to challenge even his strongest convictions about getting married.’

‘We’ll see,’ Diomedes replied.

In the afternoon, after they had eaten a modest lunch, Eperitus was resting on the mattress in his room when a slave brought him a clean tunic and told him he was to go to the garden as soon as was convenient. He left before Eperitus could question him, so the Ithacan changed his clothes and went to answer the summons. He followed the scent of flowers and the rich aroma of well-composted earth until he found the walled gardens where he had first seen Achilles – disguised as a girl by Lycomedes to prevent him from being taken off to the coming war against Troy. He entered it through an arched gateway and saw it had not changed much since his first visit, except then it had been spring and there had been fragrant blossoms on the trees on either side, and now it was autumn and the leaves were turning an ochre colour and peeling off to form a patchy carpet on the lawn. The circular pond at the centre of the garden was filled with lilies that boasted a handful of white flowers. Dressed in a yellow chiton and seated on a stone bench at the water’s edge was Deidameia, looking at him expectantly.

‘I’m glad you came, Eperitus. Please, join me.’

She patted the space beside her and he sat. He could smell her perfume, potent even in a garden full of flowers. She gave him a smile and he could see the fullness of her lips and the way her skin was still soft and supple with her youth, despite the advanced maturity he could read in her eyes.

‘What do you want of me, Deidameia?’

‘A warrior’s bluntness, I see. I just wanted to talk a little.’

‘You picked the wrong man, my lady. Odysseus is the one for talking –’

‘Ah, but can I trust him? I think I can trust you, though. You have an honest look about you.’

‘I think you’d find my conversation a little dull, unless you want to hear about war and death.’

‘But that’s precisely what I want to hear about,’ she replied. ‘Particularly the war in Troy and my husband’s death. Were you there?’

Eperitus nodded and, reluctantly at first, told her what he had witnessed on the day Achilles had died. It would have been a short account – he had none of Odysseus’s ability to embellish a story – if Deidameia had not teased out every important detail from him. She showed little emotion as the full truth was laid before her, and when the story was done insisted on hearing more about Achilles’s achievements before his death. Eventually, after Eperitus’s clumsy retelling was done, she turned to the real reason she had summoned him.

‘Do you think Neoptolemus will be a replacement for Achilles?’ she asked. ‘Do Odysseus and Diomedes really believe that?’

‘We do. He has his father’s blood in him, after all.’

‘But he is not Achilles. You will know that when you see him tonight. He can’t do the things his father failed to do! So why are you here? Why leave the war in Troy for the sake of one man?’

Eperitus stood.

‘It’s not my place to say, my lady. Odysseus and Diomedes were charged with this mission, not me. If you had hoped to trick me –’

‘Of course not,’ she said, her tone conciliatory. She took him by the elbow and encouraged him to retake his seat. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, Eperitus. I’m just a mother worried for her son. You must have children of your own.’

‘A daughter.’

‘Then don’t you miss her?’

‘She died before the war.’

Deidameia faced him and laid her hand on his forearm. Her eyes were full of compassion.

‘How old was she?’

‘She was nine. The truth is I hardly knew her. I slept with her mother in Sparta ten years before, but I didn’t learn she’d given birth to my daughter until a short while before she died.’

‘And how did she die?’

Deidameia’s voice was soft now. Eperitus looked down at her slim, long-fingered hand on his arm, felt the hotness of her skin against his, and wondered whether he should answer. Whether he could answer. Then he felt the old anger rising as he thought of his daughter’s murder and his own inability to save her.

‘She was sacrificed to appease the gods. King Agamemnon murdered her so that his fleet could sail in safety to Ilium.’

Deidameia’s eyes narrowed in confusion.

‘But that was his own daughter, Iphigenia, born of Clytaemnestra. Everyone knows the story.’

‘They know some, but not all. Clytaemnestra was my lover in Sparta and Iphigenia was my daughter. I tried to stop Agamemnon, but –’ He stood again and stepped away from the bench. ‘I must go. Odysseus will be wondering where I am.’

‘Tell me why they want my son, Eperitus. As a father yourself –’

‘I sympathise with you, Deidameia, I do, but that’s for Odysseus to say, not me. He’ll tell you why we’re here tonight. And as for your son, he’s not a boy any more; he’s old enough to be a warrior now, like his father before him. And part of him will want to follow Achilles. You say you have faith in him, that you know him, but you don’t. How can a woman really know what’s in a man’s heart? A man lives under the shadow of his father, for good or bad, and at some point he wants to be free of it and live his own life. How Neoptolemus does that is up to him, not you.’

He held her gaze for a moment, then turned and left.

The sun had set and the first stars were beginning to prick the deep blue of the evening sky outside when torch-bearing slaves came to their quarters with a summons to the promised feast. Without armour or weapons, Odysseus, Diomedes and Eperitus followed the slaves through the palace to the copper gates, where they were awaited by Polites, Eurybates and Omeros who had come on Odysseus’s orders. Polites held a great wooden chest on his shoulder, making light of the burden, while Eurybates wore Achilles’s shield on his arm, its splendour hidden behind a covering of sail cloth. Omeros was struggling to even hold the huge ash spear that Achilles had wielded with such devastation in battle. At first the gate guards were reluctant to let them carry weapons into the palace, but agreed when Odysseus said they were gifts for Neoptolemus and suggested a detail of warriors could accompany them to the great hall.

‘Wait here,’ Odysseus told his men as they reached the tall double doors. ‘I’ll send for you when I need the gifts, but do not enter before then – whatever you may hear from inside. Do you understand?’

The muffled sound of voices and music became suddenly loud and clear as the guards threw open the doors and ushered them in. The hall was filled with the nobility of Scyros, men of all ages who had never been called to the fields of Ilium. They were seated at long tables, piled high with food and drink that was constantly being replenished by lines of slaves. These seemed to move in eddying currents through the crowded chamber, balancing platters of bread and meat on their heads, or pouring wine into the empty kraters that were waved before their faces. The hearth was ablaze with fresh logs and pumped a twisting pillar of sparks and smoke up to the ceiling. As the newcomers were led to a vacant table there was a flicker of interest from the other guests in the hall, but it passed quickly.

Odysseus glanced up see Lycomedes watching them closely from his throne. Deidameia was seated next to her father, dressed now in a sable chiton with her hair covered in black cloth. Beside her was a young girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen. Her youthful beauty shone out like a beacon in the shadow-filled chamber, sensualised by her bright red lips and painted eyes. Deidameia leaned across to speak in her ear and the girl looked over at the battle-hardened men who had just entered the great hall.

‘I’m guessing that’s Phaedra, the girl Neoptolemus will marry tomorrow,’ Odysseus said as they sat at the benches.

Eperitus nodded. ‘And that must be Neoptolemus.’

A youth stood by the hearth, holding his krater at arms length and pouring a libation into the flames. Odysseus had not noticed him before among the movement and noise of the hall, but now that he saw the figure beyond the heat haze of the fire he could not take his eyes off him. Neoptolemus was tall and tautly muscled, and though he had short, light brown hair and was clean-shaven – Achilles had been blond with long hair and a beard – the likeness to his father was striking. It was as if the warrior who had killed Hector, Penthesilea, Memnon and countless others on the Trojan plains had been brought back from the dead. Then Neoptolemus’s eyes met his and the illusion was broken. Whereas Achilles’s perfect and terrifying anger was equalled by his capacity for friendship, hospitality, pride, honour and love, his son’s gaze was filled only with a cold and fearsome hostility, untainted by the oceanic passions that had made his father so humanly fallible.

Odysseus took a krater of wine from the hand of a passing slave and walked to the hearth, pouring a libation to the gods. Neoptolemus continued to stare at him and Odysseus returned his gaze for several moments – long enough to show the young prince he was not afraid of him – before raising the krater to his lips and bowing his eyes to the dark liquid. Diomedes and Eperitus joined him, slopping dashes of wine into the flames as they watched Neoptolemus return to a vacant chair beside Lycomedes. He looked at Phaedra and gave her a nodding smile, then at his mother, to whom he bowed his head with reverent formality.

‘He has the eyes of a born killer,’ Diomedes commented. ‘Very like his father, and yet lacking something. That lust for glory, perhaps?’

‘He has that, I think,’ Eperitus said. ‘But I don’t see Achilles’s love of life in him, that joy you could see in his eyes whether he was feasting with friends or riding out to battle in his chariot.’

‘What he lacks is compassion,’ Odysseus said. ‘I don’t trust him, but the gods have a purpose for Neoptolemus in Troy and so we must persuade him to come with us, whether we like it or not. And more to the point, whether Deidameia likes it or not.’

As he spoke, Lycomedes rose to his feet and walked to the edge of the dais, holding his hands up for silence. The music fell away and the hubbub of voices stuttered to a halt.

‘Friends, our guests have arrived. You already know the ill tidings they brought with them from Troy, calamitous news that grieves my heart and plunges it into despair. But I will not mourn the death of my son-in-law tonight. Tonight we will celebrate the greatness of his life. Eat and drink to his memory, and be thankful that the gods have saved you from a similar end on the shores of Ilium.’

There was a cheer from the crowded benches, though many of the men there would barely have remembered Achilles, let alone have known him well during his short years on Scyros.

‘Be thankful?’ Odysseus challenged, raising his voice above the clamour so that voices were stilled again and all eyes turned to the Ithacan king. ‘If you knew anything about his glorious achievements you would consider yourselves cursed not to have fought at his side. And just because you baulk at the prospect of war, Lycomedes, that doesn’t mean Neoptolemus shares your delicate disposition. Surely Achilles’s own son will want to hear something of his father’s deeds in the war against Troy? And who better to tell him than men who fought in the battle line beside him?’

‘You are the guest, Odysseus, not the host,’ Lycomedes warned, barely able to contain his own rage. ‘If I want a story, I will call for my bard. Until then, keep your silence!’

The hall rang with his words and no man dared to break the tension between the two kings. Deidameia looked anxiously from Lycomedes to Odysseus, and finally to Neoptolemus. As her eyes fell on her son, he rose from his chair and stared at his grandfather.

‘Let Odysseus speak. I want to hear what he has to say.’

Lycomedes looked at Deidameia, who gave an almost imperceptible nod.

‘Very well, Odysseus,’ he said. ‘Tell to us of the deeds of Achilles in the years since he left us. Stand and earn your food and wine, like the beggar you are. Speak so that Neoptolemus can understand something of the man his father was, and learn from his errors.’

Lycomedes’s insult had little effect on Odysseus, who stood and looked around at the faces that were now turned to him. There was the flicker of a sneer on some as they stared at the bulky Ithacan, with the faded purple cloak his wife had given him and his long red hair and unkempt beard. Balanced on his short legs, his muscular torso and arms looked ungainly and almost comical, though few would have dared laugh into his battle-hardened face or his knowing green eyes. And yet even on Scyros they had heard about the legendary voice of Odysseus, and despite his vagabond appearance they waited in silence for him to speak.

‘Ten years ago, King Agamemnon charged me with the task of finding the greatest warrior in all Greece – Achilles – who was said to be here on Scyros. When we eventually found him he was disguised as a girl, hiding away from unwelcome visitors at the insistence of his mother, Thetis.’ Here he looked at Deidameia, who held his gaze firmly. ‘She had foreseen that her son would die if he ever went to Troy, and thought that if she could prevent him going he would live a long and prosperous life. But, goddess though she was, she could not change her son’s nature. Achilles sailed with us to Troy in search of glory, and became the fiercest of all the Greeks, the bane of every Trojan who ever faced him in battle.’

He went on to describe the long years of the war, from the first skirmish on Tenedos to the great battles that had rolled back and forth across the plains of Ilium, all the time focussing on the part played by Neoptolemus’s father. With far greater skill than Eperitus’s stumbling efforts with Deidameia in the walled garden earlier, he recalled in detail Achilles’s grief at the loss of Patroclus, his return to war in the magnificent armour presented to him by Thetis, and how he took his terrible revenge on Hector. Though he briefly mentioned Achilles’s refusal to burn Hector’s corpse, he made clear how his anger was ultimately tempered by compassion for Priam. He followed this with vivid accounts of his slaying of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, and soon after, Memnon, leader of the Aethiopes. As Odysseus described each victory he pointedly did not look at Neoptolemus, speaking instead to the rest of the crowded hall and winning the audience over to his tale, so that they shouted in anguish or triumph as he described Achilles’s various trials. Indeed, he did not need to look at Neoptolemus to know that his icy expression was slowly thawing, encouraged by the crowd around him, and that a fire had been kindled in his heart that blazed in his eyes, to the exclusion of everything else in the great hall.

Finally, Odysseus came to the death of Achilles before the Scaean Gate. The room fell into a hush as he described the shadow of Apollo falling across the closely packed soldiers, and the hiss of the poisoned arrow as it found Achilles’s vulnerable heel and brought him down.