The Songs of the Kings

Now Croton raised his staff, shouting as he did so, barely waiting for the nod of permission. 'Lies! How dare you speak to this assembly in such a ma

At the sight of Croton's contorted face, Calchas felt his body stiffen with a passion of rage stronger than any he could remember, stronger far than caution. 'Madman,' he said loudly, 'we live in a world of movement and you try to understand it by casting dead things on the ground, bones and stones and entrails, and so you see only death. Your Zeus stands for death. Who truly sent the wind, who stopped it, what do you care? You call the woman a witch and kill her in the name of Zeus and so you gain power for the priests of Zeus.' He ceased and hung his head to hide the trembling of his lower lip – he had never, even as a young man, been robust enough to contain anger.

'I say we wait a day or two and see what happens,' Ajax the Larger said in his loud, clotted voice. 'You know, sort of test it out. If the wind doesn't come back we're in the clear. That way we could get to the finals of the javelin-throwing and weightlifting events, and in the meantime I could hope to bring my small friend here to see reason over this blood-price business.'

'See reason? I see the reason well enough, you want me to pay for your fucking blunders.'

Odysseus smiled very slightly and raised a hand. He had been waiting for the right moment to intervene. It was always a good thing to follow upon fools, they gave one a chance to drive things home. 'Croton has a point,' he said. 'What if Zeus has ended the wind because he takes it on trust that the sacrifice will be performed? How can we be sure? There is no sense in trying to test it out, as Ajax suggests. It's Zeus who would be playing the waiting game, not us. The gods are immortal, they have all the time in the world. If Zeus is holding the wind over us, as seems very likely to me, he will obviously wait till we are at sea before bringing it back, because embarking without performing the sacrifice will be taken as the final proof that we don't intend to perform it. If that happens we'll be worse off than ever, there'll be nowhere to run to, the fleet will be wrecked, we'll all be drowned. The only way to be sure is to hedge our bets and carry out the sacrifice as pla

The saliva of pleasure had gathered in his mouth as he spoke, slightly thickening his words. Here they were, discussing the sacrifice of a man's daughter. And there was the man himself, the one most vitally affected, wordless, helpless, all trussed up – precisely because he was the father. It was neat. Agamemnon could not speak against the sacrifice now, he would risk being overruled and thus losing what shreds of authority he had left. His voice had been needed once and once only. He had given it and could not take it back. He was superfluous now and he knew it; but the fiction had to be maintained, there had to be a figurehead, a vehicle for the general will. Agamemnon knew that too. Agamemnon, the Commander-in-Chief...

Odysseus swallowed to clear his mouth. 'There is one circumstance that nobody has remarked on. Only one man received news of the ship and felt the wind cease at precisely the same moment. We can't count those with him, the message was not delivered to them. The men on lookout knew of the ship but only felt the wind drop later, and this applies to any they told on the way. The man I refer to is Agamemnon. It was granted to our Commander-in-Chief to understand the intimate co

'There's the moral aspect too,' Menelaus said. 'I've been thinking about this for some time now. I've been doing some soul-searching. I think I may have been too hard on the Trojans because of Paris carrying off my Helen, who is a very valuable woman, in fact she is unique, being the only woman currently alive today who can claim to have been born from a swan's egg. Now it is true that the Trojans are Asians, but they can't help that, can they? Most of them have never had a chance to be anything else. I mean, there they are, they are stuck with it. They are kept in ignorance and superstition, they live in the midst of squalor and bad smells, they are unhygienic, they have the wrong gods. Now we could save them from that, we could bring light into their darkness. I mean, we are streets ahead of them, especially in metalwork and catapults. We have a duty towards these people. Once the territory has been occupied and the trouble-makers rounded up – I don't believe in leniency towards those responsible for the war, I have every intention of personally hanging Paris up by his balls – we could set about civilizing the population and changing their ways. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of this. I see it as a mission. I am with Odysseus, we should take no chances.'

The clinching voice, however, came from one of the least important of the chiefs, a man named Nineus, who had brought a small force from the island of Simi. 'You really amaze me,' he said. 'You are all talking as if we had the luxury of choice. Do you really think it is we who decide? If so, you are out of touch with reality. The whole army is waiting for Iphigeneia. They have seen the knife made, they have laboured to erect the altar and make the processional way. The one thing that has kept them going, kept them cheerful and joking among themselves, is the prospect of this colourful and unusual spectacle, a king's daughter on the slab. They may believe this will bring an end to the wind, but that is an abstract matter. It is the prospect of the show itself that has held them together, given them something to look forward to. They are only human, they have to have some colour and excitement in their lives. If we cheat them out of it now, we'll have a full-scale mutiny on our hands. No, let's face it, if we want to save our own skins, she'll have to be sacrificed now.'

Dressing up

1.

Early in the morning, soon after first light, as the ship rounded the headland of Attica and passed into the open sea north of the island of Ceos, the hostile wind suddenly dropped and a period of calm descended. Then a breeze from the south-east sprang up, bearing them forward, to the great relief of all on board. By noon they were well into the Euboean cha

It was time to prepare the princess for her arrival. Her litter, an awning to protect her from the sun, and a tent improvised with the help of Macris and one or two of his men from canvas and spars were in place already on the high poop of the ship. Here while the ship was propelled smoothly forward by the auspicious breeze – surely sent by Artemis in favour of the nuptials – under the skilful hands of Sisipyla, the princess was dressed for her meeting with the groom. She wore a long skirt, hooped with copper wires to make it bell-shaped, and made up of numerous small strips of different colours falling in flounces and decorated in half-moon patterns in honour of the goddess, and a red jacket brocaded in a darker shade, open at the front from throat to navel, with the breasts lightly veiled by a high-necked diaphanous vest. Her cheeks were touched with rouge and her eyelids darkened with a dye made from the black poplar, Hecate's tree, symbolizing the renewal of the moon.