The Songs of the Kings

'Anyone who calls Achilles twister or dupe will soon find himself feeding his entrails to the crows.'

'No, no,' Odysseus said, 'these are not the right terms at all. The King has a lot on his mind, as we all know. No, it will simply be thought that, suppressing all personal feelings, acting for the common good, Achilles lent his illustrious name to our enterprise. The common good, what a wonderful, all-embracing concept that is.'

Achilles pursed his lips and glanced at Patroclus, who shrugged. 'But what if one of you should go round telling people that I didn't know, that I was fooled? It would ruin my image.'

'Why on earth should anyone do that? What purpose would it serve, other than to suggest discord and disunity at the very time that we want to convey the opposite impression? In any case, we would not be believed. It would simply be thought we were trying to blacken your name, make you out to be a simpleton, when all the world knows you are a shrewd fellow.'

'How can I be sure?'

Odysseus paused, savouring the moment. He had kept the most clinching argument to the last. 'Because, my dear Achilles, your greatness of soul, your patriotic readiness to forward the cause of the Greek Expeditionary Force, will be made official as of today, it will be told to the Singer immediately, and he will insert it into his programme of entertainment for this evening, at a time when the audience is at its peak, and he will repeat it at intervals during these coming days until it is common knowledge. Once a thing is common knowledge, there is no power on earth that can put it into question. I will see to this myself, in person, you can rest assured. He and I have an excellent understanding. Of course, it's always a good idea to give him a sweetener, it seems to increase the power of his performance. Perhaps you could provide me with something? Some trifle... That pendant of yours, the one that all the fuss was about, that would be just the thing.'

9.

Poimenos did not return. Thenceforth he cared for the Singer, foraged for him, made up his fire and slept beside him in his shelter of skins, while Calchas, lonelier than ever, lay grieving for his loss, remembering the foreshadowing of it on the boy's face, portents he had not fully appreciated, trapped as he had been in his role of mind-former, advocate of the critical spirit, corrupter of simplicity. The boy had chosen fictions and the choice was final: he would not come back – this Calchas knew with certainty, as he knew the fault was his own.

In the nights of his desolation he tried to find sleep through a discipline of the senses, striving to shut out the greater sounds of the wind and hear only the lesser ones, noises not audible except to the imagination, the manifold frictions along the surface of the earth, the tumbling or hopping or sliding of minute particles. He would drift away on this, only to wake in fear as the wind roared its anger at being cheated.

Meanwhile, the life of the camp continued. Big Ajax, in the course of training for the javelin-throwing event, which, like the weightlifting, he had every prospect of wi

The knife was finished and hammered into kee

Then, on a morning like any other, when the wind had lowered a little, quietening into gusts like sobs, as it quite often did in the first light of the day, it came to Calchas what he must say to the King. He lay still as the light strengthened, and the words came to him in the sobs of the wind. When the sun was over the horizon he went to Agamemnon's tent and asked the guards to a

'Great King, live for ever,' Calchas said, and hesitated a moment, only now aware of having used the ceremonial form of address common among the Hittites. In his solitude he was reverting to foreig

'You have hesitated long,' Agamemnon said. 'Too long. You are one who will always hesitate too long, which is something I did not know when I took you for my diviner.'

'You are wasting the King's time, in any case,' Chasimenos said. 'The whole army now accepts the meaning of the omen as given to us by Croton.'

Without looking at Chasimenos, Calchas said, 'Croton's meaning allows the King no way but one. It was here, in this place, that the man told us he had witnessed the eagles devouring the young of the hare. This was something that was not true before, it became a true story only as he spoke it; there was no knowledge of it in anyone's mind before. And because of this, because this new story was unwelcome to the others, or even just unexpected, his mouth was stopped. Croton knows, and all of us know, that Zeus does not concern himself with the creatures of earth and their young. Zeus lives above, he governs from above, his justice is not something you can see or touch, it does not live in concrete things or have a particular shape, like a hare that is killed by eagles in the morning, a hare with young. The creatures are in the care of the Lady, who has different names in different places, Rhea, Potnia, Cybele, Artemis. She spoke to us through the man's mouth.'

Chasimenos had risen to his feet and now stood close to the King. He said, 'We have reason to think that this man is in the pay of our enemies. We Greeks worship Artemis as the daughter of Zeus, but the Trojans deny she is the daughter, they say she was here before, that she has always been. It is now clear that this priest has been bribed to spread the Asian cults among us and so undermine the war effort.'

Calchas felt fear at this; there was no mistaking the menace in it. But he had gone too far to retract; the only way now was to convince the King, recover his favour. He had good hope of this; he had come with a gift for Agamemnon, something deserving of gratitude. He said, 'Those on guard with him, the other witnesses, why did they not immediately deny the man's words? When he said they had seen what they had not seen, why did no one speak? There can only be one reason.'