The Songs of the Kings

Calchas' eyes rolled strangely in their darkened sockets. 'I don't feel well,' he said. 'Shall we sit down? Outside here is better – everything's in a mess inside.' He set down the lamp and squatted near it, but after a moment lost balance and sat back heavily. 'I tried to tell him meanings,' he said from this half-recumbent position, 'but he didn't want that, he wanted only stories.'

Macris watched the diviner struggle upright again. 'Something is wrong,' he said. 'I sensed it when we landed, the way we were treated. Has Achilles changed his mind?'

'Achilles hasn't got a mind, he has only certain attitudes. Nor has Poimenos, in a different way. That was what I valued in him, that beautiful absence of thought. I am always so caught up, so harassed. Then the gods withheld their messages, how terrible to lie night after night, listening to a wind that was only a wind. It all began with my failure to see the truth about the dancer and the flames.'

Macris felt his patience giving out. He reached forward and took the thin arm of the priest and gripped it hard for a moment. 'What is all this to me?' he said. 'I have just come here to Aulis, with the party that accompanied Iphigeneia. What is this talk of sacrifice?' Again he felt the fingering of horror along his spine. 'But the wind has dropped,' he said, as if answering a suggestion someone had made to him. 'Has he brought her all this way only to humiliate her? If so, I will call him to account were he invulnerable twenty times over.'

'Achilles is not invulnerable,' Calchas said slowly. 'He will kill a certain number of times then he will be killed and that will be all his epitaph, at least all the epitaph that he deserves. It is only his heart that ca

The question, in its gentleness, took Macris by surprise, robbed him of defences. 'She fills my mind,' he said huskily, and immediately regretted giving so much away to no purpose.

'I see, yes.' Calchas felt the fumes of the wine clear a little, leaving the begi

4.

Next morning, soon after sunrise, Odysseus, accompanied by Chasimenos, made his first report to the King. It was rather like the business of the knife. Agamemnon had to be kept, not informed exactly, but reassured that the details of the design were being carried out, that his daughter was being persuaded of her high destiny. What he didn't want to hear about was suffering; he would have found it intolerable that any suffering should be added to his own.

A careful touch was needed, and Odysseus was tired this morning. After this first session with the girl he had not been able to sleep, his mind had been so stimulated. There had been the shock to be managed first of all; he had known from the very begi

That was the ideal; but this first meeting had been far from easy. He could not feel he had got far yet. The girl was spoilt and obdurate and there was no immediate self-interest that could be appealed to, as had been the case with her father. As he had earlier remarked to Chasimenos, having your throat cut before a large crowd of spectators was hardly something that could be presented as materially rewarding, even by a hugely talented advocate like himself. No, they would have to go directly, at a leap, to the abstract, there was no other way. Still, a begi

'No,' he said, 'I can reliably report that a start has been made in opening her eyes to the high, I might even say glorious, role she has to play.'

'It is not given to every girl,' Chasimenos said, 'to hold the fate of a whole army in her hands. And at such a tender age too. I mean, most girls of that age have scarcely finished playing with dolls.'

Odysseus suppressed a feeling of irritation. There was something distinctly insensitive and tactless about Chasimenos, he had noticed it before. He was looking forward to the time when their collaboration would no longer be necessary. 'Mycenae was not built in a day,' he said. 'We must gain ground by degrees, we must remove petty notions of complacency and self-regard from the girl's mind, all sloth and egotism; in their place we must put worthwhile goals and objectives, we must get her to raise her sights, aim high, what's the word I'm looking for?'

'Incentivize.'

'Incentivize, there you go again, Chasimenos, absolutely brilliant. What it is to have a solid culture behind one. We must incentivize her, but it will take a little time. We have made a good start, we are making progress. In fact, this first report can be summed up in that one word: progress.'

Interested in words as he was, he had always liked this one. It had magical properties if properly applied. Any movement, in any sort of direction, could be called progress. It was a notion that blunted present discontents, directing the thoughts to a future of greater prosperity, higher consumption and a more equitable distribution of wealth for oneself. 'It's not where you start from but where you finish that's the important thing,' he said. 'I can promise the King that his daughter will be brought to embrace her high destiny and walk with light steps and a willing heart to the altar, having accepted the will of the people and the gods.'

Agamemnon nodded at this and even smiled a little, it being exactly the sort of thing he wanted to hear. As the bronze had been docile and the knife made beautiful, so would Iphigeneia be docile, even happy, and make a beautiful end. 'She was always a high-minded girl, and one who knew her duties,' he said.

'She takes after her father in that.' Odysseus wondered briefly why he went on bothering to salve Agamemnon's conscience, when it was perfectly clear that the King was trapped. It was not only a matter of greed and ambition. The problems at home that had driven Agamemnon to embark on the war would be waiting for him much aggravated if he returned discredited and stripped of his command. Rivals to his power in the royal house, jealousy among kinsmen, the constant drain on the state of maintaining an army strong enough to protect him against an uprising. Odysseus was well-informed about the situation in Mycenae. The textile workshops in the Argolis were on half-production, exports of pottery had been declining for many months, the weapons industry, and in particular the sale of bronze swords to Egypt and Cyrenaica, depended on supplies of copper and tin which had to come by complicated routes, sometimes from far away, from Cyprus or Sardinia, with loss of cargoes from weather or piracy, and consequent shortages and increased prices. The ravishment of Helen by a Trojan prince had come as a godsend to him, the perfect pretext... It must be the artist in me, Odysseus thought, the desire for excellence, that makes me want to keep him smiling in the sticky web. 'It is there in her,' he said. 'Nobility like a fire burning within her, that sense of responsibility which is such a dominant characteristic of your own, that readiness to sacrifice herself for the common good. Mark my words, Agamemnon, your father's heart will be proud of her on the day.'