The Anger of Achilles Page 18

  ‘Unless he’s marching by land,’ I observed. That earned a calculating stare from both of them, for it could be taken in two ways: for Briseis the hope of rescue after all; for Odysseus the certainty of battle – against overwhelming odds. With nothing to fall back on but two ruined cities that Agamemnon and Achilles had rendered impossible to defend. But even as these thoughts filled my mind, I noticed that Odysseus staring fixedly south again. I automatically glanced that way again myself. I still could not see the distant ships but just for the most fleeting moment, I saw a silvery flash, as though a bolt of lightning had blazed across the surface of the water from east to west, away to the south there.

  ‘But what else does it all mean?’ persisted Briseis, unaware of Odysseus distant gaze or mine. ‘That the ship with the gold aboard has managed to find safe haven nearby? That it is anchored in some high sided bay further down the coast waiting for better conditions, like Agamemnon’s fleet at Aulis? Or for any chance for pursuit to die down? That it has moved away far faster than you believed possible and is already invisible even to your sharp eyes?’

  ‘Or does it mean that there never was a boat for the gold to go aboard or a ship designed to take it to Lesbos?’ I wondered. ‘That this whole thing has been a trick? A diversion?’

  ‘A diversion?’ scoffed Briseis. ‘What would be the point of that? And on such a grand scale?’

  ‘A grand diversion,’ I spat back, ‘to cover a great deception!’

  Although I had no real notion of what I meant by this, the anger in my voice made what I said seem to carry weight. ‘Very well, then,’ said Briseis. ‘What would this great deception be?’

  ‘The only one I can think of,’ I snapped back, ‘is that the gold was not brought to the river at all because it was taken back to Lyrnessus. Then all these tracks make sense because they lead not only our footsteps but also our thoughts and suspicions far away from the city!’

  ‘There’s only one way to prove whether your suspicions are true or false,’ said Odysseus. ‘And that is to start again from where we are certain that the gold was put in the stolen chariots and follow the tracks more carefully than Aias’ Locrian trackers did at dawn, and with the benefit of full daylight.’ He paused. ‘But if we are seriously proposing to follow that course, we will need to choose our time carefully and proceed as secretly as possible.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked more than a little stunned by the speed with which my ill-considered suggestion seemed to have found favour and hardly able to think things through because of it.

  ‘Because,’ said Briseis, her voice dripping helpfulness like honey, ‘if the gold is still in the city then it’s quite likely that whoever’s been cutting throats to get at it is there close beside it – and just as willing to keep on cutting throats in order to keep it.’

  v

  By the time we got back to Lyrnessus it was mid-afternoon and the pyres were all prepared for the fire ceremony. Odysseus was immediately swept up into this and so – much against her will - was Briseis. I was not needed, and noting my restlessness after a while, Odysseus assigned Elpenor and Perimedes to stay with me as I escaped from the tedious ritual. Other than that, he issued no orders. The observances had begun with the first pyre, that of King Idas. Even in the brightness of the mid-afternoon, it roared into dazzling golden light to the added sound of Aias’ formal lamentations and those of the King’s direct subjects. Mynes’ pyre was due to be ignited next and I suddenly realised I had no desire to see Princess Briseis abasing herself and howling lamentations over the blazing corpse of a man she had been forced to marry and who she frankly despised. Or over the body of his brother. Or, if she had any voice left, over the flaming corpses of her own brothers.

  So I left the field and made my pensive way back to the paddock, planning to do what Odysseus had suggested and go over the first section of the murderers’ escape route, looking more closely at the tracks Aias’ men had followed in the grey dawn before sunrise. As I walked, I tested my logic. If there was no ship carrying the gold away from the river mouth, then there had been no gold there to put aboard. And if there was no gold there at the river – nor any sign of it with the abandoned chariots and the corpse of Gul-Ses - then the whole thing had to have been one enormous diversion designed to distract us. But from what or where? That was the question.

  The paddock was now heavily guarded as it was where Aias’ horses were all carefully hobbled and his chariots stored once more in a lean-to shelter I hadn’t noticed before, though of course my last visit here had been in darkness. When I began to examine the ground at the point where the fence had been broken down, I found that I was by no means alone in my interest. Both Elpenor and Perimedes had followed me, as ordered by Odysseus. But as things turned out, they were much more than guards. They had both been involved in the situation as it unfolded. Although apparently peripheral, they were nevertheless fully engaged and well able to exchange observations and ideas with me. So much so, that I began to suspect Odysseus had actually planned for this, though I was aware from previous experience that Elpenor at least was well-able to use his eyes and his reasoning to excellent effect.

  Under the suspicious gaze of Aias’ guards, we began to examine the tracks which were still quite clear across the grass. Taking time and care, we began to follow the tell-tale marks which led away into the distance around the north of the city, away from the golden towers of fire, all rising high in the still air to the south and the lamentations which climbed like the smoke into the limpid sky above them. We proceed slowly and, unlike the Locrian trackers, we did so on foot. We were closely focused on the ground and were each deep in thought but by no means silent. The two oarsmen who had been remarkable for their taciturnity up to this point suddenly became quite eloquent. ‘Start with the basics,’ Elpenor said. ‘I can’t make out any footprints so I’ve no real idea how many men were walking alongside the chariots. But that’s not important; it’s the chariots themselves we’re tracking from here to the point we joined the Locrian trackers. The marks they were following seem clear enough but is there any way we can get more detail?’

  ‘One set of wheel tracks is clearly deeper than the others,’ I answered. ‘That must be the chariot carrying the gold. The others are pretty hard to distinguish agreed, but that’s not quite true of the horses pulling them. One horse in each pair has something remarkable about it. Look. This one had a split hoof, you see the marks? And that one’s lame, you see the left forefoot dragging?’

  ‘Ha!’ said Perimedes, caught between revelation and disgust. ‘I don’t know what they’ve been feeding this one but it’s come straight out the back in liquid spurts…’

  ‘That’s the four of them then,’ I observed, turning eastwards, looking away towards the farms, the forest and the inland hills. ‘We need to focus on the chariot carrying the gold.’

  ‘If anything starts looking odd about the one with the deeper wheel-tracks then we know something’s up,’ said Elpenor.

  ‘If there’s anything strange about the one with the deeper wheel-tracks,’ said Perimedes, ‘then how come the Locrian trackers didn’t notice it? And they didn’t, did they? It must have gone to the riverbank and unloaded there after all, just as we thought.’

  ‘I agree it looks that way,’ said Elpenor, drawing out the words to demonstrate an element of uncertainty, ‘Except that there was no ship for them to carry the gold away in. I keep coming back to that. But I must admit I was keeping a pretty close eye on the ground as we followed the trackers this morning and the fact is that the deeper wheel-ruts were there plain as day for all to see. Right the way down to the riverbank.’

  ‘You were able to see that while driving Odysseus’ chariot?’ I said. ‘Your eyes must be better than mine!’

  ‘Everybody’s eyes are better than yours!’ chuckled Perimedes.

  Elpenor struck in at once, ‘but only King Odysseus’ brain is sharper.’

  ‘King Odysseus’,’ I agreed. ‘And Princess Briseis’.’
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  ***

  As we were talking, we had been slowly and carefully following the tracks as they came up to the city itself. They now lay a long bow-shot from the city’s northern walls and were leading us up a slight slope. Whereas the walls on the east, south and west were clear, the northern walls were dangerously unkempt, especially for a city under siege. I guessed King Euenos had been struck down before he could order all the undergrowth cleared away. There were bushes and young trees growing right up against the stonework. Beyond the top of the outer fortification, the slope of the citadel rose in a gradient of house-walls and roofs which seemed to lean against the upper defences with the gate and the rear elevation of the palace at its crest. But looking upwards was an obvious waste of time. What was truly important lay beneath our feet. The grass through which we were walking was cropped short, no doubt by the sheep or goats now being ferried out to our transport ships, destined for the cooking fires at Troy. The ground beneath it was firm and grew firmer towards the crest of the low ridge. Here we could only see the infrequent wheel-rut and hoof print and the occasional squirt of liquid manure. But there was enough to keep us confident about what we were tracking and where it was heading.

  At the very crest of the ridge, we came to an outcrop of rocks. The tracks came close to these and we were led even closer still by the activity of a couple of birds which were no doubt nesting in the bushes by the wall. These were flying busily back and forth, but as we approached they fluttered off, calling urgently. The tracks led on eastward towards the piles of incinerated bodies and the farmland, showing that the chariots had moved around the rocks as they proceeded. But because of the rocks’ position and the activity of the birds, we paused to look at them. There were three rocks in all, each almost as big as Elpenor. But as the activity of the birds struck me as odd, I wandered closer.

  ‘What?’ asked Elpenor. Then he answered his own question, stopping, eyes focussed on the ground at his feet. ‘They stopped here, right at the top of the slope. Either that or the horse with the bad guts had a more serious attack than usual.’ He gestured at the manure which was indeed more copious than it had been further back.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Though I hadn’t even noticed that. This is what caught my eye.’ I gestured to an indentation in the ground, an area where the grass gave way to earth in a ragged circle. One or two white roots, looking like pale worms, were lying in the mud and these were probably what had attracted the birds. But it seemed to me that whatever had covered them could not have been gone for long. True, the ground was cold and the earth compacted but everything looked fresh, recently uncovered. ‘There was something here,’ I said. ‘But it’s gone now.’

  ‘It must have been a rock,’ said Perimedes. ‘But who would want to move a rock?’

  ‘Could it be part of the defence works?’ wondered Elpenor.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Nothing else of that sort has been done. Look at the bushes beside the walls. And I’d judge it was only moved sometime last night.’

  ‘Then what’s going on?’ wondered Perimedes. ‘Who would bother to take a rock in the middle of the night – and in the middle of everything else that’s going on?’

  The answer to that flashed into my mind at once as I remembered the rock standing on the lip of the underwater slope in the middle of the river.

  ‘Elpenor,’ I said. ‘The chariot which was leaving the deeper wheel-ruts. Could you tell which horses were pulling it?’

  ‘Not especially,’ he answered. ‘But I’m pretty certain which horses were not pulling it. Why?

  ‘Let’s go on a bit further,’ I suggested, ‘and see if we can spot anything.’

  We followed the intermittent wheel-tracks down the slope from the crest of the ridge almost to the end of the northern wall before we came to a wide hollow, floored with a patch of softer ground. We paused here and studied the tracks as closely as possible. ‘Our three horses are still here,’ said Elpenor. ‘Look. There’s the split hoof, there’s the lame one and there’s the other one.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now is there anything unusual about them?’

  Elpenor was silent for a moment more. Then he said, ‘I see what you mean. Yes. This is different.’ He gestured to the ground as he spoke. ‘The split hoof is digging much more deeply into the ground than it was doing earlier. It’s not just that the ground here is softer. There’s no doubt about it. The horse with a split hoof is now pulling something much heavier than it was pulling before.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to the rocks and look around really carefully. If I’m right, the gold went back to the city from the rocks and the missing rock went into one of the chariots - the one pulled by the horse with the split hoof and its companion - so no-one tracking it later would notice anything different. And the Locrian trackers certainly seem to have missed it this morning.’

  We disturbed the busy birds once again as we examined the grass all around the rocks. There was nothing obvious but we all agreed we were looking at turf that had been disturbed in a way it had not been disturbed along the tracks coming from the west or heading to the east. It seemed obvious, though, that no matter what the grass round the rocks looked like, we should assume that, if we were right and one of the chariots had moved away from the others, it must have headed south towards that unkempt city wall. So, even in the absence of any clues, we went towards the wall, our eyes fixed more closely still on the grass at our feet.

  It was Elpenor who spotted the tracks first, though they remained invisible to me. ‘There,’ he said. Although he spoke quietly, his voice trembled with excitement. The hunter in him had found the spoor of his quarry. Our pace quickened as he led us unerringly towards the wall. Not only towards the wall as things transpired, but towards a cleverly concealed postern gate hidden behind a stand of bushes that seemed to crowd hard against the stonework but which were actually a short spear-cast away from it. Between the bushes and the wall was an area of clear dry earth. This was marked not only with the tracks of horses and a chariot, accompanied by a range of footprints. It was marked with the quadrant of a circle showing where the postern gate had opened outward, no doubt to let the gold go in before the empty chariot rejoined the others. And the waiting priests in the meantime, had loaded the rock into one of the other chariots so that the deception could be continued and the confusion sustained.

  The gate was tightly closed now, but it had a barred opening at head-height slightly larger than my face and, made careless by my excitement, I pushed up against this, straining to see inside. I saw a long passage or alley, high-walled and full of shadows. Everything seemed to freeze in place for a moment. Then one of the shadows moved. I gasped with shock as I caught the most fleeting glimpse of a face turning away. It was all too quick for me to recognise who it was; to see anything, in fact, except for a glint of light in the narrow eyes that looked straight into mine for less than a heartbeat and then were gone.

  I stood there frozen like a rabbit trapped by a hunter’s hound. My mind flooded with Princess Briseis’ words. If the gold was here, so was the man willing to cut throats in order to keep it. And if he had a list, I thought, I had just put my throat right at the very top of it.

  7: The Bones

  i

  I had never considered the layout of the city up until then. I had seen it merely as a series of streets and alleyways leading from the great gate in the outer wall Odysseus’ men had broken down, via the agora up to the lesser gate of the citadel and the entrance to the palace behind it. Beyond the palace entrance, there seemed to be nothing more than a complex of passages, reception areas, temples and rooms where I performed, which I occupied or through which I passed, paying my environs as little attention as though I had actually been blind. But now, as the three of us hurried back from the postern in the north wall to the West Gate, I was forced to take a wider view. An eagle flying overhead might see the city as a great oval bounded by a high wall, with a
smaller circle sitting on top of a hill occupying the northern third of it, where a less imposing wall protected the citadel and the palace on the hilltop at its centre.

  The lower city had two major gates. The West Gate faced the sea and such port facilities as existed there – currently occupied by our forces. And there was the East Gate on the far side exactly opposite, through which we had exited to join Aias on his hunt for the stolen gold. The East Gate opened onto the hinterland behind the city. It was here that the farms which supplied the fruit, vegetables, grain, dairy and livestock required by the citizens could be found. They were all empty and untended, stripped to the bone, put to the torch and lying fallow now. Their produce had first been stockpiled by King Euenos before he fell ill to feed his city during the siege. Then it was moved to the agora after the city fell, where the grain made bread for our troops, the slaves and the captives; and the straw was fed to the animals who were watered from the wells surrounding the marketplace. What was left after feeding our army and furnishing our feasts was now being ferried out to our ships to supply Agamemnon’s massed troops beached and tented beneath the walls of Troy. The roads leading into the lower city from these two great gates were empty now, containing nothing more than fast-fading memories of the citizens who once converged at that great agora to socialise, visit the market stalls and draw water from the deep wells with the sort of pulley mechanisms I had seen used in Egypt. The hill crowned by the citadel stood above the northern extremity of the lower city. The gate in the citadel’s circular wall faced south, opening onto a wide, straight avenue that joined the citadel with the agora. Behind the citadel gate, at the upper end of this broad avenue, the palace also faced south.

  All of this might have appeared to have little importance were it not for the hidden postern through which the gold had been smuggled back into the city. For, if the palace faced south, then the open area behind it, where the occupants of the royal residence had been assembled and where we first met Hepat and Demir, faced north. So did the gate in the wall which bounded that open space. Behind the wall and the gate was a warren of streets and houses leading down the back of the citadel hill to the northern city wall and the postern hidden within it. Now, of course, I was bursting to explore, despite the nervousness resulting from my glimpse of the man in the shadows. Besides, I thought, Elpenor and Perimedes would protect me wherever I went and whoever I confronted.