Authors: Colleen McCullough
Naturally the King preferred giving the God maidens to gold; the new scheme went ahead. The trouble was that he never really trusted the priests in the matter, not because he was a sacrilegious man – he gave the Gods what he considered their due – but because he detested being bled. So each spring and autumn every virgin maid aged fifteen years was covered head to foot in a white shroud to prevent identification and lined up in the courtyard of Poseidon Maker of Walls, where the priests chose six of these anonymous white bundles for the sacrifice.
The ploy worked. Twice a year the lion passed through, killed the girls as they stood huddled in their chains, and left the horses unmolested. To King Laomedon, a paltry price to pay for the salving of his pride and the preservation of his business.
Four days ago autumn’s six offerings were chosen. Five of them were girls from the city; the sixth was from the Citadel, the high palace. My father’s most beloved child, his daughter Hesione. When Kalchas came to tell him the news, he was incredulous.
‘Do you mean to say that you were idiot enough to leave her shroud unmarked?’ he asked. ‘
My
daughter treated the same as all the rest?’
‘It is the God’s will,’ said Kalchas, calmly.
‘It is
not
the God’s will that my daughter should be chosen! His will is that he receives six virgin maids, nothing else! So choose another victim, Kalchas.’
‘I cannot, Great King.’
From that stand Kalchas would not be budged. A divine hand directed the choice, which meant that Hesione and no other girl would satisfy the terms of the sacrifice.
Though none of the Court was present during this tense and angry interview, the word of it swept through the Citadel from end to end and top to bottom. Favour curriers like Antenor were loud in condemning the priest, whereas the King’s many children – including me, his Heir – thought that at last our father would have to break down and pay Poseidon those annual hundred talents of gold.
Next day the King summoned his council. Of course I attended; the Heir must hear the King deliver all his judgements.
He looked composed and undistressed. King Laomedon was a tiny fellow far past the flush of youth, long hair silver, long robe gold. The voice which issues out of him never ceased to surprise us, for it was deep, noble, melodic, strong.
‘My daughter Hesione,’ he said to the assembled ranks of sons, near cousins and remote cousins, ‘has consented to go to the sacrifice. It has been required of her by the God.’
Perhaps Antenor had guessed what the King would say; I did not, nor did my younger brothers.
‘My lord!’ I cried before I could stop myself. ‘You cannot! When times are hard the King may go to the sacrifice for the sake of the people, but his virgin daughters belong to Virgin Artemis, not to Poseidon!’
He did not care to hear his eldest son chide him before the Court; his lips thinned, his chest swelled. ‘My daughter was chosen, Podarkes Priam! Chosen by Poseidon!’
‘Poseidon would be happier,’ I said through my teeth, ‘if one hundred talents of gold were paid to his temple in Lyrnessos.’
At which moment I caught sight of Antenor smirking. How he loved to hear the King and his Heir at loggerheads!
‘I refuse,’ said King Laomedon, ‘to pay good, hard-earned gold to a God who didn’t build the western wall strong enough to survive one of his own earthquakes!’
‘You can’t send Hesione to her death, Father!’
‘
I
am not sending her to her death! Poseidon is!’
The priest Kalchas moved, then stilled.
‘A mortal man like you,’ I said, ‘should not blame the Gods for his own failings.’
‘Are you saying that I have failings?’
‘All mortal men do,’ I answered, ‘even the King of the Troad.’
‘Take yourself off, Podarkes Priam! Get out of this room! Who knows? Perhaps next year Poseidon will ask that heirs to thrones form the sacrifice!’
Antenor was still smiling. I turned and left the room to seek comfort from the city and the wind.
Cold, damp air blowing from the far-off peak of Ida cooled my anger as I strode along the flagged terrace outside the Throne Room and sought the steps, two hundred of them, which led ever upward to the summit of the Citadel. There, far above the plain, I closed my hands on man-made stones; for the Gods had not built the Citadel, Dardanos had done that. Something reached into me from out of those carefully squared bones of Mother Earth, and I sensed in that moment the power residing in the King. How many years, I wondered, would have to pass before I donned the golden tiara and sat on the ivory chair which was the throne of Troy? The men of the House of Dardanos were very long-lived, and Laomedon was not yet seventy.
For a long while I watched the changing march of men and women below me in the city, then looked farther afield to the green plains where King Laomedon’s precious horses stretched out their long necks to nudge and tear at the grass. But that was a vista only increased the pain. I looked instead to the western isle of Tenedos and the smear of smoke from fires lit against the chill in the little port village of Sigios. Beyond to the north the blue waters of the Hellespont mocked at the sky; I saw the long greyish curve of the beach which lay between the mouths of Skamander and Simois, the two rivers which watered the Troad and nurtured the crops, emmer wheat and barley, rippling in a soughing, perpetual wind.
Eventually that wind drove me from the parapet to the great courtyard which lay before the entrance to the palaces, and there I waited until a groom brought my chariot.
‘Down into the city,’ I said to the driver. ‘Let the horses lead you.’
The main road descended from the Citadel to join the curve of the avenue which ran around the inside of the city walls. The walls built by Poseidon. At the junction of the two streets stood one of the three gates let into Troy’s walls, the Skaian. I could not remember its ever being closed; men said that happened only in times of war, and there was no nation in the world strong enough to make war on Troy.
The Skaian Gate stood twenty cubits tall, and was made of huge logs bolted together with spikes and plates of bronze, too heavy to be swung on the biggest hinges a man could forge. Instead it opened on a principle said to have been devised by Archer Apollo as he lay in the sun watching Poseidon toil. The bottom of the gate’s single leaf rested upon a great round boulder set in a deep, curving ditch, and massive bronze chains were cast about the shoulders of the stone. If the gate had to be closed, a team of thirty oxen was harnessed to the chains and pulled the leaf shut fraction by fraction as the boulder ground along in the bottom of the ditch.
As a little boy, burning to see the spectacle, I had begged my father to hitch up the oxen. He had laughed and refused, yet here I was, a man of forty years, husband of ten wives and owner of fifty concubines, still hankering to see the Skaian Gate shut.
Across the top of the gate a corbelled arch connected the walls on either side of it, thus permitting the pathway which ran along the top to be continuous right around the perimeter of the city. The Skaian Square inside the gate lay in permanent shadow from those fantastic, God-built ramparts; they towered thirty cubits above me, smooth and sleek, sheeny in the sun when it bathed them.
I nodded to my driver to move on, but before he could shake the reins I changed my mind, stopped him. A party of men had come through the gate into the square. Greeks. That was manifest in their garb and manner. They wore leather kilts or tight-fitting, knee-length leather breeches; some were bare from the waist up, and others sported tooled leather blouses open to display their chests. The clothes were ornate, decked in gold designs or sporting tassels or rolls of dyed leather; their waists were clipped in narrow by wide belts of gold and lapis-studded bronze; polished crystal beads depended from the lobes of their ears; each throat was girdled with a great gem-encrusted collar; and their very long hair flowed loose in careful curls.
Greeks were taller and fairer than Trojans, but these Greeks were taller, fairer and more deadly looking than any men I had ever seen. Only the richness of their clothes and arms said they were not common marauders, for they carried javelins and longswords.
At their head strode a man who was surely unique, a giant who towered over the other members of the group. He must have stood six cubits high, and had shoulders like dark mountains. Pitch-black and trimmed into a spade, a beard coated his massively jutting lower jaw, and his black hair, though cut short, was wild and unruly above a brow which overhung his orbits like an awning. His only clothing was a huge lion pelt flung over his left shoulder and under his right arm, the head a hood on his back with frightful jaws open on mighty fangs.
He turned and caught me staring. Overwhelmed, I found and looked into his wide still eyes – eyes which had seen everything, endured everything, experienced every degradation the Gods could mete out to a man. Eyes which blazed with intelligence. I felt myself mentally backed up against the house behind me, my spirit a naked scrawn, my mind his for the taking.
But I marshalled my sinking courage and drew myself upright proudly; mine was a great title, mine a gold-embossed chariot, mine a pair of white horses finer than any he had ever seen. Mine, this mightiest city in the world.
He moved through the racket and bustle of the marketplace as if it did not exist, came straight up to me with two of his companions close behind, then put out a hand the size of a ham to stroke the black muzzles of my white horses gently.
‘You are from the palace, perhaps of the King’s house?’ he asked in a very deep voice, though it lacked imperiousness.
‘I am Podarkes called Priam, son and Heir of Laomedon, King of Troy,’ I answered.
‘I am Herakles,’ he said.
I stared at him with mouth agape.
Herakles!
Herakles was in Troy! I licked my lips. ‘Lord, you honour us. Will you consent to being a guest in my father’s house?’
His smile was surprisingly sweet. ‘I thank you, Prince Priam. Does your invitation include all my men? They are of noble Greek houses, they will not shame your court or me.’
‘Of course, Lord Herakles.’
He nodded to the two men behind him, a signal that they should step out of his shadow. ‘May I present my friends? This is Theseus, High King of Attika, and this is Telamon son of Aiakos, King of Salamis.’
I swallowed. All the world knew of Herakles and Theseus; the bards sang their deeds incessantly. Aiakos, father of the stripling Telamon, had rebuilt our western wall. How many other famous names were there in that little band of Greeks?
Such was the power in that single word Herakles that even my miserly father was moved to put himself out, give the famous Greek a royal welcome. So that afternoon a feast was laid out in the Great Hall, with unlimited food and wine off gold plate, and harpers, dancers and tumblers to provide entertainment. If I had been awed, so too was my father; every Greek in the party of Herakles was a king in his own right. Why, therefore, I wondered, were they content to follow a man who laid no claim to any throne? Who had mucked out stables? Who had been gnawed, bitten and chewed by every kind of creature from gnat to lion?
I sat at the high table with Herakles on my left and the lad Telamon on my right; my father sat between Herakles and Theseus. Though the imminence of Hesione’s sacrificial death overshadowed our hospitality, it was so well concealed that I told myself our Greek guests had noticed nothing. Talk flowed smoothly, for they were cultivated men, properly educated in everything from mental arithmetic to the words of the poets they, like us, committed to memory. Only what kind of man was a Greek underneath that?
There was little contact between the nations of Greece and the nations of Asia Minor, which included Troy. Nor, as a rule, did we of Asia Minor care for Greeks. They were notoriously devious people famed for their insatiable curiosity, so much we knew; but these men must have been outstanding even among their own Greek kind, for the Greeks chose their Kings for reasons other than blood.
My father in particular did not care for Greeks. Of late years he had formulated treaties with the various kingdoms of Asia Minor giving them most of the trade between the Euxine and the Aegaean Seas, which meant that he had severely restricted the number of Greek trading vessels allowed to pass through the Hellespont. Not Mysia and Lydia, not Dardania and Karia, not Lykia and Kilikia wanted to share trade with the Greeks, for the simplest of reasons: somehow the Greeks always outwitted them, emerged with better bargains. And my father did his part by keeping Greek merchants out of the black waters of the Euxine. All the emeralds, sapphires, rubies, gold and silver from Kolchis and Skythia travelled to the nations of Asia Minor; the few Greek traders my father licensed had to concentrate their efforts upon fetching tin and copper from Skythia.
Herakles and company, however, were far too well bred to discuss incendiary topics like trade embargoes. They confined their conversation to admiring remarks about our high-walled city, the size of the Citadel and the beauty of our women – though this last they could gauge only from the female slaves who walked among the tables ladling stews, doling out bread and meats, pouring wine.
From women the talk veered naturally to horses; I waited for Herakles to broach the matter, for I had seen those shrewd black eyes appreciating the quality of my white horses.
‘The horses which drew your son’s chariot today were truly magnificent, sire,’ said Herakles at last. ‘Not even Thessalia can boast such stock. Do you ever offer them for sale?’
My father’s face took on its avaricious look. ‘Yes, they are lovely, and I do sell them – but I fear you would find the price prohibitive. I ask and get a thousand gold talents for a good mare.’
Herakles shrugged his mighty shoulders, face rueful. ‘I could perhaps afford the price, sire, but there are more important things I have to buy. What you ask is a king’s ransom.’
He did not mention the horses again.
As the evening drew on and the light began to fail my father started to sag, remembering that on the morrow his daughter would be led to her death. Herakles put his hand on my father’s arm.