The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus) (12 page)

‘Come on then, lad,’ the old man said, touching his heels to the flanks of his mount. ‘There’s still a long way to go, and I want to get there before nightfall. The gods have kept us safe so far, but I don’t want to spend another night in the open if it can be avoided.’

‘Halitherses?’

Halitherses turned to see Telemachus had not moved.

‘What is it, lad?’

‘Is my mother safe?’

‘Of course she is,’ the old man answered, trying to disguise his hesitation. ‘Her enemies are becoming more powerful, and they want your father’s throne – I’ve never kept that a secret from you – but they know they can’t get it without Penelope. She’s the key and they need her alive, or I wouldn’t have left Ithaca. And she’s more than clever enough to handle Eupeithes until your father returns.’

Telemachus frowned and looked down at the ears of his pony, twitching randomly in the faint mountain breeze.

‘What if my father never returns?’

Halitherses turned back and laid his large, sun-browned hand on the boy’s head.

‘Don’t worry about that, lad. Ithaca’s like a lodestone to Odysseus. He’ll come home again one day. I promise you.’

‘I wish I had your confidence in him,’ Telemachus said, then kicked back his heels and sent his mount trotting in the direction of Sparta.

Halitherses watched him thoughtfully, then, with a click of his tongue, urged his horse forward to catch up with his young charge.

Odysseus saw Helen appear at the battlements, her perfect face stricken with concern. A moment later he heard the squeal of wooden hinges as the Scaean Gate swung open. The movement raised a thin haze of dust, through which the figure of a man could be seen striding towards them.

‘He’s fallen for it,’ Odysseus said.

Philoctetes shifted nervously and Eperitus placed a hand on his bony shoulder.

‘Don’t be concerned,’ he reassured him. ‘You have Heracles’s bow and arrows that never miss. This is why the gods gave them to you. It’s time to fulfil your destiny.’

Philoctetes nodded but did not speak. Still in the shadow of the walls, Paris was removing the arrows from his quiver and pushing them point-down into the soil by his feet. When a dozen had been planted he tossed the heavy quiver to one side and stood with his legs apart. Helen sobbed quietly on the walls above, while all along the parapet a crowd of soldiers and townsfolk were gathering to watch the duel.

Philoctetes began pulling the arrows from his own quiver and setting them in the ground to his left. After the sixth he handed the leather tube to Odysseus, who replaced the lid and slipped it over his shoulder. There was a tension in the air that reminded him of the nervousness he felt before every battle, but was made oddly more acute by the knowledge he would not be fighting and could, therefore, do nothing to influence the outcome. The thought made him suddenly uncomfortable. The conclusion of the war had been compressed into a single action, to be decided between just two men. If Philoctetes failed, then the siege would drag on and it would be more long years before Odysseus saw Ithaca and his family again; if he succeeded in killing Paris, another barrier would be removed and the prospect of going home would come a little closer. But at that moment, there was little else Odysseus could do to sway his own destiny.

He slipped the thin, grubby scarf from about his neck and looked at Philoctetes.

‘Are you ready?’

The archer, tight-lipped and slightly pale, nodded. Odysseus glanced at Eperitus, who moved out wide to his right. When he was well beyond the range of even the wildest shot, the king turned and walked out to the midpoint between the two opponents. He glanced at Paris, who took a deep breath, exhaled and gave a curt nod. Odysseus stepped back a few paces then held up his hand and let the scarf dangle from his fingertips.

‘No arrows to be fitted before my signal,’ he declared. ‘When the scarf touches the ground – and
not
before – you will fit your arrows, aim and fire. After the first missile, you can continue shooting until either you or your opponent is dead or mortally wounded. There will be no other bloodshed, whatever the outcome,’ he added in the Trojan tongue, staring up at the walls where several archers had appeared.

Paris waved them back and they melted into the crowd. His eyes moved to Helen, lingered on her tear-stained beauty for a heartbeat, then returned to Philoctetes. Despite the cool morning breeze, beads of sweat stood out on both men’s foreheads. Their eyes squinted, reluctant to blink as the moment approached. Then Odysseus raised his hand a fraction and, suddenly, the scarf was falling.

It fluttered down onto the grass and the two men reached for their arrows. Philoctetes’s fingertips grasped clumsily at one of the flights and knocked the missile to the ground. He went for a second, but Paris had already seized his first and was fitting it to his bow. He fumbled slightly, causing the crowd to gasp as he almost dropped the arrow; then he was pulling the string back to his cheek and taking aim. Philoctetes plucked up an arrow, just as Paris’s missile whipped across his jaw and drew a red line through the flesh. He blinked with shock and Odysseus felt his heart thundering within his chest, wondering whether Philoctetes would falter and panic. Then the archer’s instincts took over. He fitted the arrow and pulled back the string.

‘Aim for the body,’ Eperitus shouted, forgetting that the arrows of Heracles were magical and could not miss.

Philoctetes’s hand rested against his bloody cheek. He closed his left eye and looked down the shaft at Paris, who was already fitting his second arrow. Philoctetes snatched half a breath, steadied his aim and fired.

The point hit Paris between the second and third fingers of his left hand, the bronze tip driving through the tendons and bones until it emerged spitting blood and flesh from the back of his wrist. Paris’s bow dropped to the floor as he lifted his hand above his head and cried out in pain. The crowd on the battlements shouted out in horror, but by this time Philoctetes’s second arrow was racing towards its target. It entered Paris’s right eye and the force of the impact spun him around so that his screams echoed back at him from the walls that he had fought so hard to defend. A third arrow then tore into his ankle, as if in cruel mockery of the shot with which Paris had claimed the life of Achilles a few weeks before. It knocked his leg from beneath him and brought him crashing to the ground, where he gnawed at the dust in his agony. Philoctetes had already fitted a fourth arrow to the giant bow and, when Paris began to claw at the earth in an effort to pull himself towards the Scaean Gate, raised the weapon to his cheek once more and took aim. But before he could release the string, Odysseus appeared beside him and pushed his arm down so that the arrow thumped into the ground at his feet.

‘Enough!’ the king exclaimed. ‘Damn it, Philoctetes, you could have killed
her
.’

They looked over to the shadow of the gates, where the radiant white figure of Helen had run out to be with her dying husband. She knelt beside him, cradling his head in her lap and hiding his disfigured face behind a veil of her black hair. Her shoulders shook and they could only imagine the tears she was shedding over her lover, from whose eye one of Philoctetes’s arrows still protruded.

‘Enough then,’ Philoctetes agreed as Eperitus joined them. ‘Let him die in peace with his wife. I’ve done what the gods demanded of me. Let’s return to the camp.’

A W
AY
O
UT

H
elen could still see Paris’s face in the darkness, a mass of blood with the open wound where one of his men had drawn the arrow from his eye. The other eye was a lifeless orb, finally still and dull after so much suffering. She saw it even though night had fallen and every light in the room had been extinguished. She even saw it when she closed her eyes and pressed the palms of her hands over the lids. Though ten days had passed since his death, his maimed features would not leave her.

She slid down in the fur-covered chair and flopped her arm towards the table, where the fingers groped clumsily for the krater of wine. She found it and pulled it to her lips, spilling it over her chin and slender white neck as she drank. A dark line of liquid raced down into her cleavage, but she hardly seemed to notice as she fumbled the empty krater back onto the table and drew herself heavily to her feet. The room swayed unsteadily about her as she stood, snapping back to its start point each time she blinked. But even among the uncertain blurring of furniture and darkened corners she could still see Paris’s dead features staring back at her. With an effort she walked to the window and tugged at the heavy curtains clinging on to them for balance until she found the sill of the window beyond and leaned out.

Just like the room behind her, the clustered buildings in the citadel below the palace slid towards the corner of her vision, as if a Titan had escaped from Tartarus and was tilting Troy onto its side. She leaned onto her elbows and buried her face in her hands, closing her eyes and finding Paris there waiting for her.

‘Enough!’ she shouted, not caring less for any eyes that might be watching her from the streets and buildings below. She slapped her hand down on the cold stone and looked up at the night sky, bejewelled with a thousand stars. ‘Enough. I told you not to listen to Helenus, not to leave me. Oh Paris, how long will I have to suffer like this?’

She listened to the silence, then steadied herself against the side of the window and stared down at the roof of the great hall a little below and to her right. A pool of red light marked the hole in its apex where a line of smoke from the fire below trailed out into the night sky. A murmur of voices escaped with it, competing against each other in anger or agitation. Helen looked at the red glow and closed her eyes despairingly, knowing that they were debating her fate at that very moment. Even before the ashes of Paris’s funeral pyre had grown cold, both Deiphobus and Helenus had asked for her hand in marriage. Deiphobus, she knew, had loved her from the very first, always showing her the highest respect and courtesy and never allowing a word to be said against her. Nevertheless, his request had outraged her and she had let him know this in the harshness of her rebuttal. Helenus had followed shortly after, brimming with arrogant self-confidence and no doubt buoyed by her refusal of his older brother. His determination to wed Helen and use her as a stepping stone for his ambitions was not lessened by the fact he had been a playmate of her son, Pleisthenes, or that his vision of Paris’s victory had led directly to his death. Consequently, Helen’s dismissal of him was even more severe than it had been of Deiphobus. But both men were princes and not used to having their requests denied, even by a woman who had once been the queen of Sparta. And so they had demanded of Priam that he choose one of them to marry Helen. The old king agreed, though not because of any sympathy for his sons. He informed his daughter-in-law that she should take a new husband. His subjects, he explained, were restless after the death of Paris and many wanted to send her back to the Greeks, something which Priam was determined would not happen.

Helen groaned.

‘Why did you leave me, Paris?’

And then, on the sighing of the wind, she thought she heard a voice answer her.

‘Come,’ it said. ‘Come to me.’

She sat on the stone sill and drew her knees up beneath her chin, looking down at the long drop. Her befuddled mind tried to calculate if it was enough – enough to kill her. She thought it was; all she had to do was relax and lean sideways. That was all, and then the torment of being apart from Paris would be over. The forgetfulness of Hades would envelop her. Helen of Troy would be no more.

But not the war. That would go on regardless of her fate. Thousands more would perish. Thousands more widows and orphans would have personal reason to hate her memory. Even though she would be gone and Agamemnon and Priam’s fight would become openly the struggle for power it had always been, they would still blame her as the spark that brought death to their husbands and fathers. And that was why she could not just take her own life. The only way to end the war was to find a way back to Menelaus. If she was with her first husband again, the oath taken by the other kings would no longer hold. She would not be a prisoner of Troy any more, and neither could Agamemnon use her death to call on the Greeks to avenge her. The war would have to stop.

She swung her legs off the sill and felt the smooth floor beneath her bare feet. Pulling herself up by the curtain she walked unsteadily to the chest at the foot of her bed, where she found her black travel cloak folded ready. She had always known, from the moment Paris had died in her arms, that this would be her fate – to return to Menelaus and end the war. And yet it had taken the realisation that Priam and his remaining sons were determined not to give her up to force her into action. The very thought of facing Menelaus again after so long filled her with fear and revulsion, but she could not put off her doom any longer. She pulled on her sandals, threw the cloak about her shoulders and crossed to the door.