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'We are agreed then. Guilty with no extenuating circumstances.' Odysseus looked towards Agamemnon as he said this. One could never be quite sure of the King's responses; that reference to the sacrifice had been a calculated risk, it could have released a flood of self-pitying bombast. 'Great King, we wait for you to pronounce the sentence,' he said.
Agamemnon showed no hesitation. It is our judgement that Leucon the Athenian be delivered to the sword of the man he has wronged.'
The remaining moments of Leucon's life were brief. In spite of his tears and the loud displeasure of his countrymen, he was taken and made to kneel and his hands were tied behind him. He begged for mercy as he knelt there, offering himself as bondsman to Achilles, swearing to serve him all his life long without wages.
Achilles paid no heed to this. He exchanged the fan for a short sword, very heavy in the blade, which had been fashioned specially for him; having set his feet in just the right position to the side of the kneeling man he performed one or two preliminary passes to show how he could make the blade whistle. Then, with a beautifully coordinated pivoting movement of shoulders, arms and trunk, all below the waist remaining planted and immobile, he made a perfectly judged slicing cut, drawing the blade in an arc so cu
6.
Sitting in his accustomed place the Singer mingled past and present and future together, strands of a single rope. He sang of an ancient conflagration, how flames burst through the roofs of the caverns under the sea because they had stoked the fires too high in the workshops of Poseidon, burst up and made a mountain with a burning mouth and the discharge from this mouth destroyed the island of Thera and made the sea boil, killing all the creatures of the deep, rearing up in a scalding wave as high as the palace of Pylos that ran against Crete and destroyed all the ships in the harbours of Cnossus and Cydonia, and the ashes of the fire covered all the land and nothing would grow and the people starved.
He sang of the consummately skilful blow that had decapitated Leucon the Athenian, who had gone on begging for mercy without knowing he was a dead man. He gave out news of the knife, repeating the details of design and emphasizing the costliness of the materials. Then, for the fourth time that day, he traced the itinerary of Iphigeneia on her way towards them. This, he had discovered, went down very well – it brought her nearer; his audiences had doubled since the idea came to him. Indeed, so popular had the item proved that there was no need to bother with metrical form. He concentrated on cadence, chanting Iphigeneia's journey as a litany of place names. Many of his listeners, especially those coming from the places mentioned, joined in with obvious enjoyment. It was the first time in his career that the Singer had experienced audience-participation on anything like this scale.
Overland to Corinth on the good road, then by ship through the Saronic Gulf, steering between the islands of Salamis and Aegina, rounding Cape Sounion, hugging the shore to escape the wind, passing on the lee side of Macronisi, entering the mouth of the Euboean Strait. Then Brauron, the looming shape of Pendelicon, Rhamnus and the temples of Nemesis. At Rhamnus there were those waiting and watching, ready to light the bonfires as soon as she was sighted entering the narrow water. From Rhamnus to Aulis, less than a day's sail...
How eagerly she was awaited, how happy they would be when she came, what a glorious future awaited them once the sacrifice had been made and Zeus had released them from his displeasure, what undying fame would be achieved by the Greek heroes. The war would soon be over. Their leaders were men of high calibre, men to be trusted, and they had a
He had liked the zeugma, and tried a variant of it now, to round things off: 'Freighted with fame and the glorious trophies of conquest'. He made a brief pause and was about to begin on the story of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, he who sowed dragon's teeth and had a crop of armed warriors, when he became aware of the face of a boy near his own – a face which, even to his impaired vision, was revealed as beautiful. This face leaned towards him, whispering: 'Will you sing me the stories of Lemnos?'
7.
Calchas waited still for the right moment, the right form of words, a message to take to the King that should be true and compelling, like that perfect shape of the sun, so briefly seen above the headland before it streamed away and mixed its fire with baser elements, mist, the spume of the sea. He was alone more now, Poimenos was away more often and for longer. In these periods of solitude he kept mainly to his tent, but was sometimes seen walking slowly along the shore, beyond the camp, eyes lowered as if studying the ground before him. Sometimes he would stop dead and remain fixed for several minutes. All the energy of his mind was consumed in an endless reviewing of his failures and mistakes, a seeking to find, at least here, some pattern, some meaning. His slowness to discover the sender of the wind, his failure to understand that Stimon's dancing and the leaping flames had been symbols of life, and that life, whether of man or fire, is purchased by destruction. Why had Pollein misled him? Agamemnon's dream of the tongueless nightingale, he had lost an opportunity there to sound a warning. He might have told the King about his own dream, that tide of bronze that bore away the helmeted warriors, Greek and Trojan tumbled together in the bright flood, then drowned and lost in that strange silver peace of the horizon. Poimenos had wanted him to speak of this, had been disappointed at his failure to do so. Looking back now, it seemed to Calchas that this had been the boy's first disappointment in him, the first shadow. He had tried to conceal his fears and doubts so as to keep the boy's regard, this too a mistake – Poimenos no longer observed him, no longer imitated his movements, though he could not remember a definite time when that had ceased. If he could, even now, convince the King that Artemis was the sender, then Iphigeneia might be saved and the crime and the blood-guilt averted. For why should the goddess desire the death of her priestess? Why was there no help for him in smoke or cloud or embers or the light on water? The gods had deadened his eyes.
He continued to visit the smith and make his reports; he was becoming an expert in the manufacture of knives. The King wanted to know the progress of the work in detail, and this detail Calchas faithfully supplied. An exact model of the knife had been made in wax then covered in clay and heated so that the wax melted and drained off while the clay hardened, forming the mould – a process that Agamemnon knew well enough already but still wanted to hear related. Calchas praised the mould's sharpness of detail, described how it was grooved on both sides to make strengthening ribs for the blade.