Hector and I crouched at the watchtower window which commanded the plain and saw the Argives fall; I had never realised that a Scythian arrow could go through a shield. They pinned the shields to the men behind, through seven layers of ox-hide, through leather helmets and through the chinks in bronze armour. One after another they reaped the attackers as with a scythe; the Argives fell in their formation, in a neat horse-shoe shape, with stone-tipped bolts through them. Their battering ram lay draped in corpses.
It took one of them all watch to die. He cried for his mother.
At dusk Hector ordered the Scythians to kill him. They were unwilling; they relished the sound of their enemy's cries, saying that it pleased their bloodthirsty gods. But Hector insisted, the bow twanged, and the cries ceased.
I hated the Scythians, at that moment, more than I loathed the Achaean army.
Â
Pan threw aside his pipes. The shapely, long-fingered hand clenched into a fist. He seized a cup of nectar and drained it in a gulp, flinging it aside so that it smashed. Shards of red terracotta decorated with dancing maidens scattered across the stones of Olympus with a sound like dry leaves.
`Warriors and ships,' he snorted. `Siege and death! Mortals are frail and easily broken. Why have you begun this slaughter? I see gods here - powerful gods, Children of Time and Chaos. What are you doing to this earth which Demeter made?'
`Goat-God,' sneered Apollo. `Your worship is dying and your devotees can't even write your name. What call have you to meddle in our game?'
`You play an evil game, one stinking of murder,' Pan stamped goat feet on the smooth floor. `Death is final to these mortals. They have little life as it is. How will they breed more men if you kill them like flies? The race will die out. That is not good husbandry.
`You offend the old gods, Demeter called Gaia; Dionysius, God of Wine and Madness; and me, God of Forests and Darkness. We were here before any of you came to trouble the woods, where men innocently coupled, danced and bred, slept and died under the leaves, in Arcadia before the Titans warred in Heaven. Humans call on us for justice. What shall we say, Sun Bright?
`What will you say when the smoke rises from their altars and mortals beg for mercy?'
`Mercy?' mused Apollo. `Mercy for mortals?' The undying afternoon gilded his perfect face into a bronze mask, distant, unchanging, beautiful. `I do not know the meaning of that word.'
I had been mad for a time - I do not know how long. I remembered, vaguely, the voices of priests; I recalled weeping until I could not see; I could hear my own voice calling on the gods, cursing them as if I believed in them.
After three days of agony I had stolen a flask of poppy and wine and drunk it all, trying to die, calling on Thanatos to come, because I now longed for death. Instead, in black dreams I saw the angel turn away from me. Even death had rejected me and Chryseis was gone.
Every expression on her face, the curl of her hair, the scent of her skin, they all bloomed in my darkened mind to torment me. No one now would finish my sentences, or draw me close to her bright countenance and kiss my mouth with a taste of flowers. No dearest wife would lie beside me and warm my chest with her sweet breath. I lay in the tholos and howled for Chryseis. I heard the echo of her name, and the murmur as it died.
There was no sunset or morning in the night of the gods, but I woke hearing a movement, and someone embraced me. I felt a body, smooth and female and young. She wore the mask of Aphrodite, dimly visible in the light of a small oil lamp set against the wall.
`Chryse Diomenes, it is time to return,' she said. `You have despaired long enough.'
`I know these tricks,' I snarled. `Take off the mask, slave woman. There are no gods.'
She took off the golden face of the goddess and revealed her own; a slender girl, perhaps sixteen years old, with dark hair and bright eyes. She bent over me and kissed me. `You have wandered in the dark for long enough; so the priests say,' she said simply. `They sent me here to bring you back. If I fail I will be beaten. Chryse, I knew Chryseis; I mourned for her too.'
`They sent you here because they have not succeeded in making me forget her,' I said, lying back in her arms. She stroked me gently, turning my face into her breast.
`I know you cannot forget her. They are fools if they think that you will lose your pain, Diomenes the Healer. But pain can be borne,' she said, her hands finding my tunic hem and drawing it up. `I did not want to be a slave and tried to die, but I live now, and will continue to live.'
Her kiss was sweet, her touch deft. Her body received me and some of my agony lessened in her embrace. I let her lead me to the surface; I would not have her beaten on my account. I had tried to die and failed. Now I would have to try and live.
I went back to my house and found that it had been cleaned. All trace of Chryseis had gone. My master waited at my door and told me gently, `It is all in this box, Diomenes. When you feel strong enough, you may open it. There are bodies to be healed, my dear son, people need you; you cannot waste yourself.'
`Then I will go to Troy,' I said dully. `There the need must be greatest and I cannot stay here where...' I choked and regained command of my voice. `where I have taken an incurable wound.'
`A ship sails from Navpolion, Diomenes, before the middle of the season; after that it is dangerous to try the wide seas and Boreas blows all the time; so the shipmasters tell me. You have a week to prepare; I am sending a load of medicines to Troy, you can take them to my sons. Now you must come with me.'
`Master,' I said, and trailed at his heels. We came into his house where a slave woman was nursing two children. It was cruel to make me see them; I was about to appeal to my master's mercy when he said, `These are your children, Diomenes. I have named them and the god has accepted them. Chryse and Chryseis; they are twins.'
I staggered to a seat on the bench beside the woman. Small faces, golden skin and blue eyes. A little hand clutched one of my fingers in a firm grasp. I stared at them and then detached the grip roughly, making the baby cry.
`I cannot bear them,' I managed to stutter. `I wish they had died. They killed their mother.'
My master sent the nurse out of the room, clucking indignantly.
`I will care for them nonetheless,' he observed. `Take some bread and meat, my Diomenes, and I will tell you of your voyage. You have survived tragedy, my son, and now you must learn to love again. If not another wife, then humanity as a whole. Men need your love to be healed. You more than others will understand pain now, just as you will understand madness, having been mad.'
I stopped shaking with loathing and took some wine. He was right. I had been a child, playing games with my Chryseis in the sunlight. Now I was a man, and I wished with all my heart that it was not so.
I attended more demonstrations of surgery, I checked and packed and re-packed the herbs which the master was sending to Polidarius and the razor-sharp bronze knives for Macaon. I ate and I slept, falling into the routine of the temple as though I had never railed on death in the darkness of the tholos.
I did not forget, but I was doomed to live.
On the night before I set out for Troy, I took the box and opened it. Not much to show for her short life, my own golden one. Just three tunics, the white shell-shaped stone I had given her, a string of amber beads which matched her eyes, a golden coin and seven copper ones, a pair of sandals worn through the heels. Her red wedding gauze was there as well. Tears poured from my eyes. I wiped them impatiently away lest they spot the fabric.
I folded Elene's veil and Chryseis' together, tying the bundle to the necklace, which I looped over my head. Then I added to the box my best tunic, embroidered with gold, twenty gold coins of Mycenae and eleven of the Phrygian trading currency, a chunk of rock with a garnet in it and a set of instruments given to me by my master when I had been made an asclepid. I took the box to the master's house and gave it into his hands.
`For my... for the children,' I said, and he folded me in a close hug, kissed me and blessed me.
The journey to Navpolion was uneventful. There were bandits on the roads, but they would not attack an asclepid. Indeed, I attended to various wounds, including a serious compound fracture, for three robber chiefs along the way and received safe conduct from one to the other. This might have amused me once. Now I was so solemn that my fellow travellers accorded me great respect as one favoured with a god's attention and possibly under an interesting curse.
I saw my face in a clear pool as I was drinking from another spring of the nymph. I was amazed to find that I looked much the same; hazel eyes, golden hair falling straight to my shoulders, no lines on my forehead, no brand that said `tragedy'. My eyes showed no sign of all the tears I had shed. But my face was still, unmoving, like a mask.
I was sixteen years old.
The ship was called the
Ram
and had a ram's head for Mycenae on her single sail. I had never sailed before, and I was almost interested. She was about twenty-five paces long, had benches for twenty rowers, and a little space fore and aft for gear and passengers, one of which was me. I saw the precious herbs stowed in the bow and greeted the shipmaster. He was short, stocky, black-bearded and gruff.
`It is late for a voyage to Troy,' he said. `It may take longer than you expect, Asclepid. Have you ever been in a boat before?'
`No, never.'
`Then if there is any trouble, you will stay in your place, hang on tight and don't talk,' he ordered. `If you please, Asclepid,' he added hurriedly, `she's a well-found ship. See, here, the way she is put together.' I saw little pegs hammered into the hull as he pointed. `Mortice and tenon,' he said proudly. `Every peg marks a locking joint.' He demonstrated with his fingers a tongue-and-groove arrangement. `Every plank is locked to another plank like dogs in heat, and she takes the sea like a swan. The crew is all here, now that I have retrieved them, the lazy drunken rogues, so if you are ready, Asclepid, we will catch this tide.'
I scrambled to my place at the stern, next to the man handling two steering oars, and they shoved us off into the channel. Oars shot out and they began to row, hauling at the thick, unbending wood. We did not slip into the sea, but trudged like old women carrying burdens, out of the channel and into the Aegean. The land slid past slowly, grey cliffs and pebbly beaches. I was leaving behind all that I had ever known.
I was spared any further grief. I was sick, and I stayed sick for days. The sea did not agree with me and I racked my brains, between bouts of vomiting, to wonder whether I had offended Poseidon by refusing to believe in him.
Each night we found anchorage and rowed ashore, or swam ashore if it was not too far. I had learned to swim in a river; the ocean was different. It was colder, to begin with, and it kept slapping me in the face, so that I arrived on shore spluttering, to various comments about land-dwelling beasts. I had already failed to appreciate them telling me that the only cure for seasickness was to sit under a tree. I had retorted that the other cure was death, and they left me alone after that.
From Navpolion to Idra; Idra to Salamis; Salamis to Skiathos; Skiathos to Skioni, the journey took two weeks, most of it rowing. The shipmaster said that he hoped to catch a south-west wind which would take us across the Aegean to Lemnos, then into the bay of Troy to the beaches where the Argive army dwelt.
`Troy still stands,' he said. `The armies have not made a dent in it and they are dying in hundreds. I reckon that there were more than a thousand men with the Atreidae; forty-seven hollow ships, maybe forty men in each, not to mention the light, fast beaked ones like the
Ram
. The Trojans won't come out and we can't get in; and they have bowmen. Agamemnon waits as we do, asclepid, for a change of wind.
`Can you have a look at my steersman's hands? He says they're sore, the scoundrel, and that's why he heeled her over so hard that we all got wet today.'
I examined the sailor's hands and was amazed that he could use them. They were like goatskin mittens, the palms as hard as the sole of a foot, but cracked and blistered beyond belief. There were new blisters rising under the old ones, the whole hand was raw and must have been very painful.
`You see, asclepid,' said the man shyly, `they get nice and calloused, then they get wet and the salt water softens them, and they blister again.'
I made him a poultice of thyme and vervain, and gave him a pot of sheep's grease to rub into the insulted flesh. Then I made a new infusion to try and cure my seasickness, which I would try out tomorrow, and went to sleep in green silence with the stars blazing overhead.
Dawn brought the south-west wind, and we ran into the sea and climbed aboard the
Ram
as she rocked and swayed at her mooring. The anchor hauled up, the sail filled and bellied, the halyards were tied down and we were off. Oars were shipped and the steersman laughed.
`No more rowing, mates,' he cried.
`No,' agreed the shipmaster. `Time to grease the oar-straps and make good the gear.'
A ball of white mutton fat was produced and they began to anoint the leathers, while two stood at the nine light ropes which anchored and manoeuvred the sail, in case the notoriously fickle wind should change or drop.
`She's running like a horse,' reported the steersman. `Sweetly she goes!'
I had drunk the infusion I had given to Chryseis and for the first time I was not sick. I had leisure to look around, and the sea was wide and blue. Distant creatures broke the surface. They leapt curving into the air, landing to splash and turn. We were close enough to see the smiles on their beaked faces.
`What are they?' I asked. The shipmaster grinned. `Dolphins, asclepid; Dionysius' darlings. There was a bard once, I heard, rode one of them to Tarentum. What was his name, now?'
`Arion,' I said, smiling. `Arion Dolphin-Rider. He's at Troy. I know him well.'