The Songs of the Kings

Chasimenos got slowly to his feet again. He was visited by a sense of discouragement. He was getting old, his joints felt stiff. 'This is your raw material,' he said. 'This is the clay that awaits the potter's hand. It is in the nature of raw material to be, initially at least, raw. That is the challenge.'

'Challenge, that's it, you have hit the nail on the head there, Chasimenos.' Odysseus was scenting victory now. A little fellow-feeling, a suggestion of intolerable shame... 'Think of it this way,' he said. 'For you as a father there is a certain point of view, no one would deny it. But a father is only one individual. As Commander-in-Chief you are responsible for a thousand individuals. What about the massive collective pain that would follow from the collapse of this expedition, the frustration of all our hopes? Have you the right to be so selfish? I know you are a family man, with a belief in traditional values. I am like that myself, but there are times when we need to be alive to changing circumstances, responsive to the requirements of the moment, ready to yield a little so as to achieve our goals, what's the word I'm looking for?'

'Adaptable.'

'Adaptable, brilliant, there are times when we need to be adaptable. Do you want to go down to posterity as a man who was so hidebound that he passed up on his patriotic duty and neglected the opportunity to forge a nation? I can just see what the Singer will make of it, I can hear those verses rolling out through generation after generation. Once things get into the Song you never entirely succeed in getting them out again. Think of the shame. I wouldn't care for it myself, that's all I can say.'

'What will they sing about me?'

'They will sing that you lacked resolution, honesty, courage, patriotism, ambition.'

'Lord Agamemnon has never lacked ambition,' Chasimenos said, practising his straight look again.

'No, I mean what will they sing about me if I... accept this heavy burden?'

'They will sing that here was a hero who was ready to shoulder his responsibilities, ready to set his private feelings aside for the sake of his country. They will call him the conqueror of Troy, they will call him the founder of Greater Mycenae. They will celebrate his return from the war, Agamemnon, Sacker of Cities, loaded with slaves and plunder, a five-star general, clasped in the welcoming arms of his queen Clytemnestra.' He paused for a moment and there was no sound but the fretting of the wind and the distant howling of wolves. 'We know what you are going through,' he said. 'Our hearts are with you. But what choice has a man when the gods have singled him out for greatness?'

It was the coup de grace, he knew it as he spoke, the timing was perfect. Agamemnon's eyes filled with tears. 'It is true,' he said. 'We who are destined for greatness must bear the burden for all. It is a heavy thing that is laid upon me. My own child, who I dandled on my knee, whose first steps I witnessed, who sang to honour me at the banquet table, among the guests, before the third cup was offered to the god. She always had a good singing voice. But I must go forward in spite of the pain, I must shoulder my responsibilities. The army depends on me. Chasimenos, I make you responsible for conveying my decision to the Singer. Make sure he understands the nature of this sacrifice. Promise him a fur-lined cloak for the winter. Singers work best on promises.'

The intense relief at having won the King over, coming as it did after feelings of discouragement, caused Chasimenos to lose track of things for a moment. 'The nature of it? No need for him to sing of that, the men will be familiar with the nature of it, they will have seen it before, not with a royal princess, I grant you, but the procedure doesn't vary much. The victim undergoes ritual purification, the hair is cut short so as not to–'

'No, you fool, I was speaking of the sacrifice of a father for the sake of the army, for the sake of the war, so that Zeus will lift this curse of a wind from us. You can forget about that lapis lazuli.'

Chasimenos recovered himself and bowed low. 'Pardon me, Lord King. I will go at once and give him a full account of it, making sure that your noble motives are present to his mind. He will be somewhere out there.' He made a gesture towards the night outside the tent. 'He never seems to sleep,' he said.

Odysseus hesitated a moment, but there was nothing more to say now; Agamemnon must be left for the night to the voice of Zeus, which would come to him on the wind, and to the knowledge that the Singer's voice would soon – and irrevocably – follow. 'I'll go with you,' he said to Chasimenos. 'We must make sure no detail is overlooked that could add to Agamemnon's glory and his reputation for statesmanship.'

At Mycenae

1.

The morning of the day the delegation arrived from Aulis was remembered by Sisipyla as being her last happy one at Mycenae. It was the day before the full moon and for a part of the morning she was alone with Iphigeneia, just the two of them together.

They had gone to the foothills below the citadel, as they did every month at this time, to hang the effigies in the grove of plane trees sacred to Artemis, leaving the women attendants and the guards of the escort and the grooms below, ascending the last part of the way alone, on foot, carrying the straw figures.

She had loved the place, though never the grove, ever since first seeing it years before. They had come here as children sometimes, in the care of Iphigeneia's nurse, before the princess had assumed the duties of priestess. It was a fold among the hills with a narrow stream that sprang from the rocks high above and fell through a steep ravine in a series of cascades. You could see the course of it as you approached. At first the water was a mist, a soft dazzle in the morning sun, then it gleamed and shivered, half concealed among foliage, then it was sheer and smooth like silk, or oiled hair when it is combed out. This last was a sort of beautiful swelling of the water, as it seemed to Sisipyla, a mood of the goddess, whose place this was, who had many moods, who was present in the voice of the water and the dazzle of the mist and the shine on the rock face where the water skimmed and the seething where it met with obstacles. She was still there when you saw no water, only movement. Like a breath, like a snake.

She had said nothing to Iphigeneia about this feeling of hers, this sense of the goddess's presence in the light and the water and the stirring of the leaves, being afraid that her mistress would not share the feeling or even approve much of it, that she might think it sloppy – a term she used often and for a variety of things. She thought it more than likely that for Iphigeneia the goddess was only to be found in definite places, before her altars, in her shrines, in this grove of plane trees. The princess knew far more than she did and was more firm-minded; she knew a great many facts and could put her ideas into words without hesitating, and find answers to remarks that were made to her on difficult subjects, things beyond the range of a slave girl from Lydia, who knew only how to attend on her mistress.

The sacred grove oppressed her and she was ashamed of this feeling but unable to overcome it. Near the foot of the falls, where the water broadened into a pool among the rocks, the tall trees grew in a straggling circle round an i