Читать книгу The Spoils of Troy - Lindsay Clarke - Страница 8

Odysseus stood in the painted chamber high inside the citadel of Troy, listening to the sound of Menelaus sobbing. Spattered in blood, the King of Sparta was sitting on a bed of blood with his head supported in his blood-stained hands. Helen cowered at his back, white-faced. The mutilated body of Deiphobus lay sprawled beside him. Though the streets outside rang loud with shouts and screaming, here beneath the rich tapestry of Ares and Aphrodite it felt as though time itself might have halted to hear Menelaus weep.

Even Helen, whose delinquent passion had precipitated all these years of suffering, had ceased to whimper. Having been so appalled by the sight of warm blood leaking across the bed that she might have screamed and been unable then to cease from screaming, she was now staring at her husband with a kind of wonder. For the first time in many weeks she was thinking about someone other than herself, and feelings that she had long thought petrified began to stir with an almost illicit tenderness. Was it possible then that, for all the offence she had given him, and all the anguish she had caused, this gentle-hearted man still loved her?

Afraid that she might break the spell that had so far spared her life, she raised a bare arm and stretched out her hand to comfort his quaking shoulder.

Instantly, as though that touch had seared like flame, Menelaus pulled away. He leapt to his feet and turned, lips quivering, to stare down at the woman lying beneath him. Unable to endure the naked vulnerability of her breasts, his gaze shifted away to where Deiphobus lay with his eyes open and blood still draining from the ragged stump of the wrist. Menelaus bared his teeth and uttered a low growl. Dismayed that he had been so visibly overcome by weakness, resolved to countermand all signs of it, he picked up his sword from where it had fallen to the floor and began to hack once more at the lifeless flesh.

Watching Helen cower across the bed, Odysseus knew he had seen enough. If, in his madness, Menelaus desired to murder the woman who had betrayed him, that was his business. Odysseus would not stay to witness it. Silently he turned away and passed through the door, leaving his friend to do as he wished with the dead body of his enemy and the terrified, living body of his wife.

As he stepped out into the night air, he caught a smell of burning drifting upwards from the lower city. From somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls, he made out the din of swords beating against shields: a host of Argive warriors were still climbing the ramp and roaring as they poured through the open gate. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – more were already inside the walls, taking command of the streets and extinguishing whatever resistance the bewildered citizens were managing to muster. The nearer sounds of screaming and shouting were hideous on his ears. Yet it would all be over soon, Odysseus thought as he crossed the courtyard of Helen’s mansion; the Trojans would come to their senses and lay down their arms in surrender of their captured city. Even to the bravest and most fanatical among them, any other course of action must soon come to seem futile and insane. But he was worried by that smell of burning.

When he came out into the street he found the cobbles underfoot slippery with blood and he was forced to pick his way among the corpses. Here they were mostly top-knotted Thracian tribesmen who lay thrown over one another in lax postures, with slack jaws, like too many drunkards in the gutters. There was no sign of movement anywhere among them. From the top of the rise, beyond their silence, came the shouts of Argive soldiers and a terrible screaming.

Afterwards Odysseus would wonder how he could not have been prepared for what awaited him there. After all, he had sacked towns before. He had killed men and taken women into slavery. In the heat of battle he was as ruthless as the next man and had never lost much sleep over what he had done. It was the way of things. It had always been so and nothing would change it. Yet when he turned the corner and saw three Spartans laughing as they tugged at the legs of a white bearded-old man who was trying to climb over a wall, then thrust their spears through his nightshirt into his scrawny belly, he was not prepared. He was not prepared for the way, all along the street, doors had been broken down and the terrified, unarmed figures of men and boys were being driven from their homes at spear-point and cut down by the warriors waiting for them.

When Odysseus saw their sergeant swing his sword at the neck of a sobbing youth with such force that it almost severed the head, he grabbed the man by the shoulder, shouting, ‘In the name of all the gods, what are you doing? These people aren’t putting up any resistance.’ But the sergeant merely shrugged and said, ‘So what? They’re Trojans, aren’t they?’ and turned away to pull the next cowering figure towards the sweep of his sword. Odysseus saw the naked man’s throat splash open as he crumpled and fell. He looked up through a slaughter-house stench of blood and saw such deft butchery repeated again and again along the length of the street while women with their hands in their hair stood screaming as they watched. One of them threw herself over the body of her husband only to be dragged away while a burly axeman finished him off.

Odysseus shouted out a demand to know who was in command here, but his voice was lost in the shrieking of the women and he received no answer. He pushed his way along the street, making for the square outside the temple of Athena, and saw Acamas, son of Theseus, who had ridden inside the wooden horse with him, holding a man by the hair as he twisted his sword in his guts. Hearing Odysseus shout out his name, Acamas looked up, smiled in recognition, let the man drop, and stepped back, wiping the sweat from his brow.

‘It’s going well,’ he said as Odysseus came up to him.

‘But none of these people are armed,’ Odysseus shouted above the din. ‘There was an agreement.’ He took in the warrior’s puzzled frown. ‘We gave Antenor our word!’ he shouted. ‘We said we’d spare the lives of all those who surrendered.’

Acamas glanced away at where his men were working their way like dogged harvesters through a huddled crowd of Trojan men and boys trapped in a narrow corner of the street. ‘That’s not what I was told,’ he said. ‘We’re under orders to kill the lot and that’s what we’re doing. It’s the same all over the city.’

‘That can’t be right,’ Odysseus protested. ‘Where’s Agamemnon?’

‘Probably strutting through King Priam’s palace by now. I haven’t seen him.’ Acamas wiped a bloody hand across his mouth. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s still a lot of work to do.’ Then he turned away, lifting his sword.

In what should have been the most glorious hour of his life, Odysseus was seized by a numbing sense of dread. To fight in open combat across the windy plain of Troy had been one thing: this slaughter of defenceless men, stinking of piss and panic as they stumbled from their sleep into narrow alleys from which there could be no escape, was quite another. Yet the havoc in these streets had already run so far beyond control it was clear that any male Trojan, man or boy, would be lucky to survive the night.

In a fury of disgust, Odysseus turned to push his way through the throng, looking for Agamemnon. The smell of burning was stronger now and through a thickening gush of smoke a lurid flame-light glared out of the darkness of the lower city. If fire had broken out among the weaving halls with their bales of cloth, reels of yarn, and timber looms, then more people might be burnt to death or trampled in the scramble for safety than would fall to the sword. The dogs of the city barked and whined. Coarse laughter surrounded a frantic screaming where a man was being tormented somewhere. Women cried out as they were pulled from the sanctuary of holy altars and driven like geese along the streets. Children sobbed above the bodies of their fathers. And when Odysseus strode into the square before the temple of Athena he saw the immense moonlit form of the wooden horse, like a monstrous figment from a dream, looming in silence over the spectacle of a city in its death throes.

Sick with shame, he remembered how he had harangued the troops on the day when it looked as though they might refuse to follow Agamemnon when he called for a renewed assault on the city. That had been months ago but he remembered how he’d incited them with the thought of the women waiting to be raped inside these walls. How easily the words had sprung to his lips. How little thought he’d given to the price they would exact in human suffering. But now Odysseus stood in the shadow of the horse that had sprung from his imagination, watching men kill and die in helpless multitudes. In conceiving his clever stratagem to breach the unbreachable walls of Troy, he had released ten murderous years of rage and frustration into the streets of the city. Never had he seen so many people cut down like cattle in a hecatomb. Never before had he felt so entirely culpable. When he looked about him, there seemed no limits to the horror he had wrought.

Still shaking from having seen her husband’s head lopped off by that monstrous boy Neoptolemus, Queen Hecuba was among the first of the women to be dragged beneath the open portico in the square. Her younger daughters, Laodice and Polyxena, were supporting her feeble frame while the women of the palace followed behind, wailing and tearing at their hair. Neither Cassandra nor Hector’s widow, Andromache, were anywhere to be seen.

Not long ago, for a few brief hours, the Trojan Queen had lain beside her husband in a dream of unexpected peace. Now the world had turned into a phantasmagoria around her aged head and so intense was the feeling of nightmare, so violent the alteration in her circumstances, that she could no longer trust the evidence of her senses. It was impossible that Priam lay dead with his regal head severed from his body. It was impossible that these streets and squares, which only a few hours earlier had been filled with thankful prayers and jubilant with revelry, should now echo to the brutal shouts of foreign voices and the anguish of her frightened people. It was impossible that the bronze helmets and armour of the soldiers dragging her away were anything other than the figments of a dream. Yet she knew from their gaping eyes and mouths that her womenfolk were screaming round her and, after a time, Queen Hecuba came to understand that she too was keening out loud with all the strength of her lungs.

Lifted by the breeze from the burning buildings in the city below, smoke gusted across the square so that the staring head and arched neck of the wooden horse seemed to rise out of fog. The women were left coughing as they moaned. Spectral in the gloom, their faces blemished by the streaks of paint running from their eyes, they looked more like creatures thrown up from the underworld than the graceful ladies of royal Troy they had been only an hour earlier. Then they were screaming again as the armoured figure of the herald Talthybius strode out of the torchlit smoke. He was clutching the slender, half-naked figure of Cassandra by the arm.

The girl’s eyeballs had turned upwards and she was singing to herself, not for comfort but in a crazy kind of triumph. Hecuba recognized the words from the Hymn to Athena. As though unconscious of the terror around her, Cassandra was singing of how, when the armed goddess sprang with gleaming eyes from the head of Zeus, all the gods had been awe-struck and the earth itself had cried out and the seas had stood still.

Pushed out of the swirl of smoke into the throng of women, Cassandra too might have sprung in that eerie moment from some unnatural source. But the suave pragmatist Talthybius had his attention elsewhere. Seeing Hecuba shivering in the night air, he berated their guards for putting the health of these valuable captives at risk. He ordered one of them to raid the nearest house for throws and blankets before the women caught their death of cold. Then he turned to confront the Trojan Queen where she stood with the cloth of her gown hanging open to reveal her depleted breasts.

‘Forgive me for not observing your plight earlier, madam. The guards should have shown greater courtesy. But I beg you to calm these women.’ Talthybius raised both his staff and his voice to silence the captives. ‘The High King himself has commanded that you be brought here to safety and kept under guard. No harm will come to any of you. You have my word on that.’

‘No harm!’ Hecuba’s thin grey hair had come unbound. It was blowing about her face like rain in wind. ‘You think it no harm to see our men struck down? You think it no harm to watch our city burn?’

‘Such are the fortunes of war.’ The herald glanced away from the accusation of her eyes. ‘Your husband would have done well to think of this when he threw our terms for peace back in our teeth all those years ago.’

‘Do not dare to speak of my husband, Argive. The gods will surely avenge what has been done to him.’

‘Isn’t it already clear that the gods have set their faces against Troy?’ Talthybius sighed. ‘Be wise and endure your fate with all the fortitude you can.’

Reaching out to take Cassandra into the fold of her arm, Hecuba said, ‘The Queen of Troy has no need of Agamemnon’s lackey to teach her how to grieve.’

‘The Troy you ruled has gone for ever, madam,’ the herald answered. ‘You are Queen no longer. When this night’s work is done, you and your kinswomen will be divided by lot among the Argive captains. I pity your condition but things will go easier with you if you school yourself in humility.’

‘Do as you like with me,’ Hecuba defied him. ‘My life ended when I saw Hector fall. It was only a ghost of me that watched my husband die. What remains here is less than that. Your captains will find no joy in it.’

Talthybius shrugged. ‘It may be so. But I give Cassandra into your care. Be aware that my lord Agamemnon has already chosen her for his own.’

‘To be at the beck and call of his Spartan queen?’

‘To be the companion of his bed, madam.’

Hecuba looked up at him with flashing eyes. ‘I would strangle her with my own hands first.’

But at that moment Cassandra reached her fingers up to her mother’s face and held it close to her own. She was smiling the demented smile that Hecuba had long since learned to dread. ‘You have not yet understood,’ she whispered. ‘This is what the goddess wants of me. I have seen her. I saw her in the moments when they sought to ravish me beneath her idol. Divine Athena came there to comfort me. She told me I would be married to this Argive king. She told me that we must light the torches and bring on the marriage dance, and go joyfully to the feast. So that is what we will do. And you too must dance, mother. You must dance with me. Come, weave your steps with mine. Let us rejoice together and cry out evan! evoe! And dance to Hymen and Lord Hymenaeus at the wedding feast,’ – her voice dipped to a whisper that the herald could not hear – ‘for Athena has promised me that this marriage will destroy the House of Atreus.’

And then, as Hecuba looked on in dismay, Cassandra broke free of her grasp and began to stamp her foot and clap her hands above her bare shoulder, crying out to the bewildered Trojan women to join her in the dance and honour the husband who would shortly share her marriage bed.

‘Look to your daughter, madam,’ Talthybius warned. ‘I fear she is not in her right mind.’ Then, commanding the guards to keep a watchful eye on both women, the herald left the square to go in search of his master.

Slowly the hours of that terrible night dragged past. The women trembled and wept together. As if drugged on her own ecstasy, Cassandra slept. Exhausted and distraught, her throat hoarse from wailing, her breasts bruised where she had pummelled them in her grief, Hecuba entered a trance of desolation in which it seemed that no more dreadful thing could happen than she had endured already. And then Hector’s widow, Andromache, was brought through the gloom.

Hecuba did not see her at first because her eyes were fixed on the twelve year old warrior Neoptolemus, who strode ahead of Andromache wearing the golden armour that had once belonged to his father Achilles. The last time she had seen this ferocious youth he had been standing over Priam’s body looking down in fascination as blood spurted from the severed arteries of the neck. Still accompanied by his band of Myrmidons, Neoptolemus was carrying his drawn sword but he had taken off his helmet so that for the first time Hecuba could see how immature his features were. Only a faint bloom of blond hair softened his cheeks, and the eyes that surveyed the captive women were curiously innocent of evil. They were like the eyes of a child excited by the games.

Unable to endure the sight of him, Hecuba glanced away and saw Andromache held in the grip of two Myrmidon warriors. It was obvious from her distracted eyes and the uncharacteristic droop of her statuesque body that they were there to support rather than restrain her. The women of Hector’s house followed behind, weeping and moaning. Evidently hysterical with terror, the body-servant Clymene seemed scarcely able to catch her breath as she gripped and tore the tangles of her hair.

Neoptolemus gestured with his sword for the women in his train to be brought forward and herded with the others. But when Hecuba held out trembling hands to receive Andromache into her arms she was appalled to see her daughter-in-law stare back at her without recognition through the eyes of a woman whose memory was gone.

Though Andromache said nothing Hecuba could hear her breath drawn in little panting gasps as though she was sipping at the air. Her cheeks and throat were lined with scratches where she had dragged her fingernails across the surface of the flesh. A bruise discoloured the skin around the orbit of her right eye, and there was such utter vacancy in the eyes themselves that Hecuba knew at once that this woman had already been made to endure the unendurable.

‘Where is your son?’ she forced herself to ask. ‘Where is Astyanax?’

Andromache’s eyeballs swivelled in panic as though at sudden loss. Then memory seared through her. Again, as though the scene were being played out before her for the first time, she saw Neoptolemus dragging Astyanax by the lobe of his ear across the upper room of her house. Again she saw the deft sweep with which the young warrior lifted her child above the parapet of the balcony. Again she released a protracted scream of refusal and denial, and again it was in vain. Neoptolemus opened his hands and Astyanax vanished, leaving only a brief, truncated cry on the night air.

Unable to stop herself, Andromache had run to the balcony and gazed down where the small body of her son lay twisted on the stones twenty feet below. A pool of blood oozed from his head like oil. In that moment she would have thrown herself from the parapet after him if Neoptolemus had not grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away. So she had stood with that gilded youth bending an arm at her back, screaming and screaming at the night.

But even the mind has its mercies and, for a time, Andromache had slipped beyond the reach of consciousness. When she was pulled back to her senses, she woke into an alien land of torchlight, noise and violent shadows. If she had been asked her own name she could not have recalled it. Still in that primitive state of near oblivion, she had been conducted through the streets of Troy until she was brought to the moment when Hecuba asked after Astyanax. At the sound of the name a whole universe of pain flashed into being again.

Wiping the back of his hand across his nose, Neoptolemus stepped forward to look more closely at the terrified group of women huddled beneath the portico. Wrapped in blankets now, their heads held low in the gloom, they were hard to distinguish from each other. He used the blade of his sword to edge one woman aside so that he could see the girl cowering behind her. ‘The boy had no father,’ he was muttering, ‘and now the mother has no son. But I have a remedy for that.’

Hecuba reeled where she stood. She felt as though she was striding against a dark tide and making no progress. She had seen her firstborn son Hector slain before the walls of Troy. She had seen her second-born, Paris, lying on his deathbed pierced and half-blinded by the arrows that Philoctetes had loosed at him. Others of her sons had failed to return from the battlefield. She had seen one of the youngest, Capys, die that night, cut down trying to defend his father. Then Priam himself had been murdered under her bewildered gaze. Now her six year old grandson Astyanax, Hector’s boy, who had been the only solace that remained to her in a world made unremittingly cruel by war, was also dead. Somewhere she could hear Neoptolemus saying, ‘One of you must be Polyxena, daughter of King Priam. Come forth. The son of Achilles wishes to speak with you.’ Had she not already been exhausted by atrocity, every atom of her being would have shouted out then in mutiny against the gods. As it was, this latest devastation had left the Trojan Queen reduced to the condition of a dumb animal helplessly awaiting the utter extinction of its kind.

And no one among the women moved.

‘Come, Polyxena, what are you afraid of?’ Neoptolemus cajoled. ‘I understand that my father was fond of you. It’s time that we met.’

Still there was no movement among the huddle of blankets.

From somewhere Hecuba found the strength to say, ‘Haven’t you brought evil enough on Priam’s house?’

The boy merely smiled at her. ‘We Argives didn’t seek this war. Troy is burning in the fire that Paris lit. We’re looking only for justice here. As for me, remember that this war took my father from me. He might still have been living at peace on Skyros with my mother if your son hadn’t taken it into his head to meddle with another man’s wife. Now tell me, where is your daughter, old woman?’

But at that moment the sound of Agamemnon’s voice boomed from across the square, shouting out his name and demanding to know where his generals were. As Neoptolemus turned to answer, Odysseus stepped out of the shadow of a nearby building, holding his boar-tusk helmet in the crook of his arm. Immediately Agamemnon demanded to know where he had last seen Menelaus.

‘I left him with Helen,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Deiphobus and his household are dead. The Spartan Guard have control of his mansion.’

‘Has he killed the bitch?’

‘I don’t know. Not when I left.’

Detecting an unusual shakiness in the Ithacan’s voice, Agamemnon looked at him more closely. ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you taken a wound?’

‘Have you seen what’s happening down there? Have you seen the blood in the streets? I gave them my word – I gave our word to Antenor and Aeneas that we would spare all the lives we could. But this …’

Brusquely Agamemnon interrupted him, ‘Aeneas and his Dardanians have already gone free. Antenor is safe enough if he stays indoors. And I’ve got my mind on other things right now. Memnon’s Ethiopians have broken out of their barracks. Diomedes and his men are having a hard time containing them.’

He would have turned away but Odysseus seized him by the shoulder and stopped him. ‘Antenor only agreed to help us because I gave him the most solemn assurances. I gave them on your behalf with your authority. Now you have to get control of this or they’re going to kill everybody. You have to do it now.’ But then he caught the shiftiness in the High King’s eyes. His heart jolted. ‘Are you behind this bloodbath?’ he demanded. ‘Is this what you want?

Agamemnon shrugged the hand from his shoulder and walked away to where Neoptolemus had abandoned his search for Polyxena and was now assembling his war-band for action.

‘Move your Myrmidons down into the lower city,’ Agamemnon ordered. ‘If you look lively we should be able to trap Memnon’s men between your force and Diomedes. I want it done quickly.’

The young warrior raised his sword in salute and, to a rattle of bronze armour, the Myrmidons jogged out of the square down a narrow street that would bring them out in the rear of the Ethiopians.

Agamemnon looked back with displeasure over the city he had conquered. ‘We need to start fighting this fire before half the treasure of Troy is lost to it.’

He was speaking to himself but Odysseus had come up behind him, determined to get the truth from him. ‘You intended this all along,’ he said. And when no answer came, ‘You never meant to hold on to Troy as we planned, did you? You were just making use of me to deceive Antenor and Aeneas.’

‘I’ve no time for this,’ Agamemnon scowled. He was about to walk away when he was snagged by a need to justify himself further. He looked back at Odysseus again. ‘Your stratagem of the horse worked well, old friend. Troy is finished. Poets will still be singing of this victory a thousand years from now. And you’ll be back home on Ithaca soon enough, a rich man, tumbling your wife on that great bed of yours.’ He grinned through the smoke at the grim face that frowned back at him, white as wax, in the moonlight. ‘Think of it, Odysseus. Just think of it. We are immortal, you and I. Whatever happens, our names are deathless now.’

And with that, Agamemnon, King of Men, summoned his bodyguard around him once more and advanced towards King Priam’s palace.

All night long, not speaking, refusing to be touched, Menelaus prowled the bloody chamber where the bed had begun to stink like a butcher’s stall. Helen crouched in a corner, stifling her whimpers. Sometimes, as the night wind gusted, smoke blew into the room, charring the air. After a time the oil-lamp that had been left burning on a tripod guttered out. Now the darkness was almost complete.

Menelaus went to the balcony once to look for the source of the fire and saw that the mansion was in no immediate danger. Beneath him, a tumult of screaming people ran along the street, looking back over their shoulders to where a company of spearmen advanced towards them rattling their shields. But he took almost as little interest in what he saw as did the many corpses already cluttering the gutters. He was remembering those moments in the bull-court at Knossos when he had first heard the news of Helen’s defection – how the roaring of the crowd had dimmed in his ears so that it sounded like the distant throbbing of the sea; how time had wavered strangely, and he had been possessed by the feeling that nothing around him was quite real.

Now it was much the same, for he was as little moved by the sacking of this city as he had been by the antics of the dancers in the hot arena or by the sleek rage of the bull. All this din and terror amounted to nothing more than an incidental accompaniment to the unappeasable clamour of his grief.

Menelaus could no longer see what was to be done. He had come to Troy with a single clear purpose in mind. But Paris had escaped him, fleeing from their duel in the rain like the craven coward he was. And though he had fallen later to the arrows of Philoctetes, it was an end in which Menelaus could take no pleasure because it deprived him of the personal satisfaction he had sought. And then, when the sickening news came that Deiphobus had taken Helen to his bed, Menelaus had found a new and still more violent focus for his hatred. Because of this further insult to his heart, he had driven on the Argive generals to fight when it looked, for a time, as if the two exhausted armies might settle for a negotiated peace. He had reminded them of the oath they had sworn to him in Sparta. He had made it clear that he would be satisfied by nothing less than the death of Deiphobus. So the war had gone on and now the war was won. Troy had been taken, as Helen had been taken, by stealth and treachery. Deiphobus was dead, and Menelaus had made sure that he had known in the moment of his death exactly who it was that killed him. But his body lay on the bed like the joints of horse-meat on which the princes of Argos had sworn to defend Menelaus’s right to Helen, and his troubles were now over. Yet even as Menelaus had hacked at his body, severing the head and limbs and genitals with his sword, he had found no satisfaction in the act. His arms were sticky with the man’s blood. His face was splashed with it. And almost as strong as the grief in the King of Sparta’s heart was the wave of disgust that left him retching in the night.

And still Helen lived.

Already Menelaus knew that if he was going to kill her he should have done it when he first found her in bed beside Deiphobus. But he told himself that he had wanted her to see her lover die. He wanted her to know how terrible his vengeful fury was. He wanted her to see what she had done to him, to learn how she had turned his gentle heart into a murderous thing. So the moment in which he might have acted had passed. And still, as she crouched in the corner like a frightened animal, he could not bring himself to finish her.

Nor could he command anyone else to do the deed.

Menelaus walked back from the balcony into the room and stood leaning against the door. He was still holding his sword. With the back of his free hand he tried to wipe the flecks of vomit from his mouth only to realize that the hand itself was wet with blood.

What was to be done? What was to be done? All across the city his comrades exulted in their triumph. Agamemnon must already be sitting on Priam’s throne. Young Neoptolemus would be taking bloody vengeance for his father’s death. The others would be revelling in the slaughter, toasting each other in captured wine as the women fell into their hands, or stripping the sacked palaces and temples of their treasure. Only he on whose behalf this long war had been fought stood in the darkness, empty and wretched, rejoicing at nothing.

Though the pain of the memory was almost more than he could bear, he was remembering the days long ago, in another time, in another world, when he and his wife had played together with their little daughter Hermione in the sunlit garden of the citadel at Sparta. How could Helen have dreamed of turning her back on such happiness? What must he himself have lacked in manhood that she should have spurned the unquestioning, utterly trusting fidelity of his heart, for a mad act of passion that could only ever have ended in disaster such as this?

Never, in all the long years since Helen had left him, had Menelaus felt so utterly alone.

Odysseus stood alone in the lurid night, beating his brains with the knowledge that this catastrophe was of his making and that he had intended none of it. His plan had been clear enough. He had discussed it carefully with Agamemnon and secured his agreement. Odysseus had always maintained that the long-term gain must be greater if the victorious Argives exploited the trading strength of Troy’s position rather than merely despoiling the city of its wealth. With this larger aim in mind he had pursued his secret negotiations with Antenor and Aeneas, and he had done so in good faith, certain that King Priam and Deiphobus would be more easily deceived by the stratagem of the wooden horse if the distrusted minister and the vacillating Dardanian prince were seen to suspect it. So the city would fall by stealth and need hardly be damaged in the taking. Crowned as a client king once Priam was dead, Antenor would owe his throne and his loyalty to Agamemnon. The presence of a strong garrison in the city would underwrite the alliance. And then, with Troy secured as an Argive fiefdom commanding trade with the Black Sea, the entire eastern seaboard must sooner or later fall under Agamemnon’s control. Meanwhile, Odysseus would go home to Ithaca a wealthy man, having crowned the Lion of Mycenae as undisputed ruler of an Aegean empire.

It was more than a plan: it was a vision – a vision that would change the map of the known world for ever. Even as he had climbed the ladder into the wooden horse, Odysseus had been sure that Agamemnon understood the dream and shared it. But he had come out of Helen’s mansion and stepped into a massacre.

The fire, he was prepared to concede, might have started by accident. But if, with the low cunning and purblind greed of a common soldier, the King of Men had already decided to opt for quick profit rather than the long-term benefits of a less certain vision then the logic became inexorable. To prevent Troy rising again and descending on Argos with the force of the avenging Furies, the destruction must be complete. The city must be burned, its walls torn down, its men exterminated, its women carried away. So even as he licensed Odysseus to give the assurances demanded by Antenor and Aeneas in return for their defection, Agamemnon must have known this was what he would do. He must have been hugging himself with glee when the Trojan defectors accepted those assurances. And why should they not have done when Odysseus had also been deceived?

All his care and craft and guile counted for nothing now. His brain was in flames with the knowledge. If Agamemnon had been standing beside him in that moment Odysseus might have struck him down. But it was another figure that came hurrying towards him out of the night, a huge Ethiopian, one of Memnon’s men, half-naked, his black skin glistening with sweat, his eyes wide and very white. Reflexively Odysseus drew his sword and stuck him through the belly.

The shock of the man’s weight jarred at his arm, driving the sword deeper. The Ethiopian hung there for a moment impaled, grunting with dismay. Odysseus pulled out the blade and stood back, watching him sag to his knees and fall, shuddering, to the ground. He could hear the black man muttering something in his own tongue – a curse, a gasp of execration, a prayer to whatever gods he served, who knew what those mumblings meant?

Odysseus stared down at the dying man, resentful that he had been drawn into the killing. Then his mind swirled in a blur of rage. If Agamemnon wanted blood, then blood he should have. He advanced across the square towards the sounds of slaughter and once he had begun to kill it seemed there was no stopping. He saw frightened faces gasp and cry as they fell beneath his sword. He saw the wounds splash open. He was killing people swiftly, without compunction, as though doing them a service. At one point he slipped on the entrails of a fat man he had butchered and found himself lying beside him, face to face, with the sightless, outraged eyes staring back into his own. Then he pushed himself to his feet again, driven on by an impulse of disgust, filled with fury and self-loathing.

Almost as deep in delirium as Ajax in his madness had once slaughtered the cattle in their pens, imagining them to be his enemies, Odysseus killed and killed again, working his way through the throng as though convinced that each body that fell before him might prove to be the last, so that he could be liberated, once and for all, from this dreadful duty. His mind was numb. His arm ached from the effort. His throat was parched. It all seemed to be happening in silence.