The Songs of the Kings

He was no longer allowed to attend alone upon the King – that mark of favour had been withdrawn. He did not apply for audience now, he waited until sent for, and there were always others present when he came. When Poimenos accompanied him, he left the boy outside the tent, where he was subject to the indecent proposals of the guards.

'Such a mould is used only once and must then be thrown away,' the diviner said, and saw the King nod with satisfaction.

'And the casting of the bronze?'

'Lord, it is done already.' It had been a source of fearful wonder to Calchas, whose mind was so fluid in its co

I am mad too, he thought, to lend myself to this game. He said, 'Molten bronze has a special property, or so the smith tells me. It chooses the final moments before solidifying to enlarge its body in the mould, and so it picks up all the fine detail. As it cools it dwindles again so as to be the more easily extracted. This property of swelling and shrinking is possessed by neither of the parent metals. It is a gift to the alloy from the god Hephaestus.'

The King's eyes glistened. 'He knows my design for the decoration of the blade?'

'Your instructions have all been made known to him.'

The King said nothing for some moments, chin sunk on chest as if pondering. Chasimenos, the only other person present on this occasion, also remained silent, his thin face stiff and expressionless. Calchas became aware again of the insistent, petulant snapping of the wind in the folds of the canvas, the seeping hiss of the air below the edges of the walls. Overhead, where sunlight trembled through the membrane of the roof, he counted four tortoiseshell butterflies fluttering together, and heard or imagined small thuds of collision among them. All the tents now were haunted by butterflies and moths and small creeping things that had taken the only refuge they could find against the unceasing onslaught of the wind. Even the men sleeping in the open would be troubled by beetles and lizards and mice that crawled under the covers with them or hid in the folds of their clothing.

As the silence continued it seemed to Calchas that all his experience of patience, all the times in the whole of his life when he had longed for release, were summed up in these few moments of waiting for Agamemnon to make known his further wishes regarding the knife, moments that lay clasped and enclosed within all the other things there were to wait for: a sign to guide him, the courage to speak, the arrival of Iphigeneia, an end to the wind, an end to this cold fever of his life. Like square boxes of juniper wood, one fitting within another, that he had once seen on a market stall in Miletus, seen and wanted at a time of poverty when he had nothing to tender in exchange. Fashioned in the far north, the Thracian traders had told him; wood from the lands of snow. But the scent of the wood had come warm to his nostrils, like a breathing of the sun...

'I want the inlay of silver to go the whole length of the blade from the haft to the point. I want the width of it to be so.' Agamemnon held out his right hand with thumb and forefinger a little extended. 'Come closer, priest,' he said.

Calchas approached and looked down at the hand. 'Yes, I see,' he said.

'You will tell the smith. This is the width I want for the inlay.'

'Lord, I will deliver your instructions.' The required width of the inlay had been conveyed to the smith once already; due allowance had already been made for it.

'He will be well rewarded. I have some ideas for the incising of the inlay, but we will talk of that later. One thing at a time, eh?' The King's mouth formed into a thin smile. 'You too will rewarded,' he said. 'When the time comes.'

Calchas emerged from the tent with these words still in his ears. There was no sign of Poimenos. He heard a booming voice that carried over the sound of the wind and saw Ajax the Larger below him on the shore, watched him lower from his face and then raise again a long, cone-shaped object. He set the narrow end to his mouth and the strange booming came again.

'What is that?' he asked one of the guards.

'He is getting them lined up for a foot race.'

'No, I mean the thing he is shouting through.'

'Palamedes invented it, they say. He calls it a voice-booster. Both the Ajaxes have one. The voice is made bigger – down there they have the sound of the water as well as the wind to contend with. But they mainly use them for shouting at each other.'

Calchas glanced round in search of Poimenos. 'Why is that?'

The guard spat delicately aside. 'They don't see eye to eye on anything, those two. These games won't come to anything, if you ask me. No one is going to burst his lungs for the sake of a few bloody leaves.'

Tension broke from Calchas in a short, barking laugh. 'Those two will never see eye to eye, that much is certain.' He lingered some moments, glancing at the guard's face. It was rare that anyone spoke so freely to him these days, and this man had even accompanied him a little way as he was leaving the tent. The eyes that regarded him expressed no friendliness, but there seemed nothing of hostility in them either, small in the big-chi

A sudden recklessness came to Calchas, akin to the laughter that had just broken from him. He said, 'Does it not seem to you that this world of the camp is a world turned upside down? Two champions of unity always divided, a god who blesses and curses us in the same breath, a victim whose i

The guard said nothing. No particular expression had appeared on his face. Calchas turned away, already regretting his words. 'It takes some understanding, doesn't it?' he said.

He was begi