A PRINCE OF TROY
Lindsay Clarke

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain as part of The War at Troy by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Lindsay Clarke 2004

Map © Hardlines Ltd.

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Lindsay Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008371043

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008371036

Version: 2019-09-30

Dedication

For

Sean, Steve, Allen and Charlie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

The Bard of Ithaca

The Apple of Discord

An Oracle of Fire

The Judgement of Paris

Priam’s Son

A Horse for Poseidon

The Supplicant

The Trojan Embassy

The Madness of Aphrodite

The Flight from Sparta

A Perfect Case for War

Glossary of characters

Acknowledgements

Also by Lindsay Clarke

About the Publisher

Map

The Bard of Ithaca

In those days the realm of the gods lay closer to the world of men, and the gods were often seen to appear among us, sometimes manifesting as themselves, sometimes in human form, and sometimes in the form of animals. Also the people who lived at that time were closer to gods than we are and great deeds and marvels were much commoner then, which is why their stories are nobler and richer than our own. So that those stories should not pass from the earth, I have decided to set down all I have been told of the war at Troy – of the way it began, of the way it was fought, and of the way in which it was ended.

Today is a good day to begin. The sun stands at its zenith in the summer sky. When I lift my head I can hear the sound of lyres above the sea-swell, and voices singing in the town, and the beat of feet stamping in the dance. It is the feast day of Apollo. Forty years ago today, Odysseus returned to Ithaca, and I have good reason to recall that day for it was almost my last.

I was twenty years old, and all around me was blood and slaughter and the frenzy of a vengeful man. I can still see myself cowering beside the silver-studded throne. I remember the rank taste of fear in my mouth, the smell of blood in my nose, and when I close my eyes I see Odysseus standing over me, lifting his bloody sword.

Because Ares is not a god I serve, that feast of Apollo was the closest I have come – that I ever wish to come – to war. Yet the stories I have to tell are the tales of a war, and it was from Odysseus that I had them. How can that be? Because his son Telemachus saved me from the blind fury of Odysseus’s sword by crying out that I was not among those who had sought to seize his wife and kingdom. So I was there, later, beside the hearth in the great hall of Ithaca, long after the frenzy had passed, when Odysseus told these stories to his son.

One day perhaps some other bard will do for Odysseus what I, Phemius of Ithaca, have failed to do and make a great song out of these stories, a song that men will sing for ever. Until that day, may a kind fate let what I set down stand as an honest man’s memorial to the passions of both gods and men.

The Apple of Discord

The world is full of gods and no one can serve all of them. It is true, therefore, that a man’s fate will hang upon the choices that he makes among the gods, and most accounts now say that the war at Troy began with such a choice when the Trojan hero Paris was summoned before the goddesses one hot afternoon on the high slopes of Mount Ida.

The Idaean Mountains stand some ten miles from the sea, across the River Scamander in that part of the kingdom of Troy which is known as Dardania. Odysseus assured me that an ancient cult of Phrygian Aphrodite existed among the Dardanian clan of Trojans at that time, and that as one of their chief herdsmen, Paris would have grown up in an atmosphere charged with the power of that seductive goddess. So it seems probable that he was gifted with a vision that brought him into her divine presence during the course of an initiatory ordeal on the summit of Mount Ida. But it is not permissible to speak directly of such secret rites, so we bards must employ imagination.

It began with a prickling sensation that he was being watched. Paris looked up from a pensive daydream and saw only his herd of grazing animals. They seemed, if anything, less alert than he was. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a brief shimmering of light. When he turned his head, the trembling in the air shifted to the other side. Perplexed, Paris moved his gaze in that direction and heard a soft chuckle. Directly ahead of him in the dense shade of a pine, a male figure shivered into focus. Wearing a broad-brimmed travelling-hat and a light cloak draped across his slender form, he leaned against the trunk of the tree with the thumb of one hand tucked into his belt and holding a white-ribboned wand in the other. His head was tilted quizzically as though to appraise the herdsman’s startled face.

Paris leapt to his feet, sensing that he was in the presence of a god.

A buzzard still glided through the sky’s unsullied blue. The familiar view stretched below him to the rivers watering the plain of Troy. Yet it was as though he had stepped across a threshold of light into a more intense arena of awareness, for the feel of everything was altered. Even the air tasted thinner and sharper as though he had been lifted to a higher altitude. And it was the god Hermes who gestured with his staff.

‘Zeus has commanded me to come. We need to talk, you and I.’

And with no sign of having moved at all, he was standing beside Paris, suggesting that they both recline on the grass while he explained his mission.

‘Firstly,’ Hermes said, ‘you might care to examine this.’ He took something shiny from the bag slung at his belt and handed it to Paris who looked down at the flash of sunlight from the golden apple that now lay in the palm of his hand. Turning it there, he ran his thumb over the words of an inscription and glanced back up at the god in bewilderment.

Hermes smiled. ‘It says To the Fairest. Pretty, isn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe the trouble it’s caused. That’s what brings me here. We gods are in need of help, you see.’ He took in the young man’s puzzled frown. ‘But none of this will make any sense to you unless I first tell you something of the story of Peleus.’

It’s possible, I suppose, that it all started that way, though Odysseus always insisted that the war at Troy began where all wars begin – in the hearts and minds of mortal men. By then he had come to think of war as a dreadful patrimony passed on from one generation to the next, and he traced the seeds of the conflict back to the fathers of the men who fought those battles on the windy plain. Peleus was one of those fathers.

Odysseus himself was still a young man when he befriended Peleus, who had long been honoured as among the noblest souls in a generation of great Argive heroes. There had been a time too when Peleus had seemed, of all mortals, the one most favoured by the gods. Yet, much to his dismay, the young Ithacan adventurer found him to be a man of sorrows, prone to long fits of silent gloom over a life that had been shadowed by terrible losses. During the course of a single night Peleus told Odysseus as much of his story as he could bear to tell.

It began with a quarrel among three young men on the island of Aegina, a quarrel which ended with two of them in exile, and the other dead. Only just out of boyhood, Peleus and Telamon were the elder sons of Aeacus, a king renowned throughout all Argos and beyond for his great piety and justice. If Aeacus had a weakness it was that he favoured the youngest of his sons, a youth named Phocus, who had been born not to his wife, but to a priestess of the seal-cult on the island.

Displaced in their ageing father’s affections, Peleus and Telamon nursed a lively dislike for this good-looking half-brother who was as sleek and muscular as the seal for which he was named, and excelled in all things, especially as an athlete. Their resentment turned to hatred when they began to suspect that Aeacus intended to name Phocus as his successor to the throne. Why else should he have been recalled to the island after he had voluntarily gone abroad to keep the peace? Certainly, the king’s wife thought so, and she urged her own sons to look to their interests.

What happened next remains uncertain. We know that Telamon and Peleus challenged their half-brother to a fivefold contest of athletics. We know that they emerged alive from that contest and that Phocus did not. We know too that the elder brothers claimed that his death was an accident – a stroke of ill luck when the stone discus thrown by Telamon went astray and struck him in the head. But there were also reports that there was more than one wound on the body, which was, in any case, found hidden in a wood.

Aeacus had no doubt of his sons’ guilt, and both would have been killed if they had not realized their danger in time and fled the island. But the brothers then went separate ways, which leads me to believe that Peleus spoke the truth when he told his friend Odysseus that he had only reluctantly gone along with Telamon’s plan to murder Phocus.

Whatever the case, when his father refused to listen to his claims of innocence, Telamon sought refuge on the island of Salamis, where he married the king’s daughter and eventually succeeded to the throne. Peleus meanwhile fled northwards into Thessaly and found sanctuary there at the court of Actor, King of the Myrmidons.

Peleus was warmly welcomed by King Actor’s son Eurytion. The two men quickly became friends, and when he learned what had happened on Aegina, Eurytion agreed to purify Peleus of the guilt of Phocus’s death. Their friendship was sealed when Peleus was married to Eurytion’s sister Polymela.

Not long after the wedding, reports came in of a great boar that was ravaging the cattle and crops of the neighbouring kingdom of Calydon. When Peleus heard that many of the greatest heroes of the age, including Theseus and Jason, were gathering to hunt down the boar, and that his brother Telamon would be numbered among them, he set out with Eurytion to join the chase.

Outside of warfare, there can rarely have been a more disastrous expedition than the hunt for the Calydonian boar. Because the king of that country had neglected to observe her rites, Divine Artemis had driven the boar mad, and it fought for its life with a fearful frenzy. By the time it was flushed into the open out of a densely thicketed stream, two men had already been killed, and a third hamstrung. An arrow was loosed by the virgin huntress Atalanta which struck the boar behind the ear. Telamon leapt forward with his boar-spear to finish the brute off, but he tripped on a tree-root and lost his footing. When Peleus rushed in to pull his brother to his feet, he looked up and saw the boar goring the guts out of another huntsman with its tusks. In too much haste, he hurled his javelin and saw it fly wide to lodge in the ribs of his friend Eurytion.

With two deaths on his conscience now, Peleus could not bear to face his bride Polymela or his friend’s grieving father. So he retreated to the city of Iolcus with one of the other huntsmen, King Acastus, who offered to purify him of this new blood-guilt. But the shadows were still deepening around Peleus’s life for while he was in Iolcus, Cretheis, the wife of Acastus, developed an unholy passion for him.

Embarrassed by her approaches, Peleus tried to fend her off, but when he rebuffed her more firmly, she sulked at first, and then her passion turned cruel. To avenge her humiliation, she sent word to Polymela that Peleus had forsaken her and intended to marry her own daughter. Two days later, having no idea what Cretheis had done, and assuming therefore that all the dreadful guilt of it was his, Peleus learned that his wife had hanged herself.

For a time he was out of his mind with grief. But his trials were not yet over. Alarmed by the consequences of her malice, Cretheis sought to cover her tracks by telling her husband that Peleus had tried to rape her. But having bound himself to Peleus in the rites of cleansing, Acastus had no wish to incur a sacrilegious blood-guilt of his own, so he took advice from his priests. Some time later he approached Peleus with a proposal.

‘If you dwell on Polymela’s death too long,’ he said, ‘you’ll go mad from grief. Eurytion’s death was an accident. In the confusion of the chase, it could have happened to anyone. And if your wife couldn’t live with the thought of it, you are not to blame. You must live your life, Peleus. You need air and light. How would it be if you and I took to the mountains again? If I challenged you to a hunting contest would you have the heart to rise to it?’

Thinking only that his friend meant well by him, Peleus seized the chance to get away from the pain of his blighted life. A hunting party was assembled. Taking spears and nets, and a belling pack of dogs, Peleus and Acastus set out at dawn for the high, forested crags of Mount Pelion. They hunted all day and at night they feasted under the stars. Relieved to be out there at altitude, in the uncomplicated world of male comradeship, Peleus drank too much of the heady wine they had brought, and fell into a stupor of bad dreams.

He woke in the damp chill of the early hours to find himself abandoned beside a burned-out fire, disarmed, and surrounded by a shaggy band of Centaur tribesmen who stank like their ponies and were arguing in their thick mountain speech over what to do with him. Some were for killing him there and then, but their leader – a young buck dressed in deerskins, with a bristling mane of chestnut hair – argued that there might be something to be learned from a man who had been cast out by the people of the city, and they decided to take him before their king. So Peleus was kicked to his feet and hustled upwards among steep falls of rock and scree, through gorse thickets and stands of oak and birch, across swiftly plunging cataracts, and on into a high gorge of the mountain that rang loud with falling water.

As the band approached with their prisoner, a group of women looked up from where they were beating skins against the flat stones of a stream and fell silent. The leader of the band climbed up a stairway of rocks and entered a cave half-way up a cliff-face. Kept waiting below, Peleus took in the stocky, untethered ponies that grazed a rough slope of grass. Goats stared at him from the rocks through black slotted eyes. He could see no sign of dwellings but patches of charred grass ringed with stones showed where fires were lit, and his nose was assailed by a pervasive smell of raw meat and rancid milk. Two children clad in goatskin smickets came to stand a few yards away. Their faces were stained with berry-juice. If he had moved suddenly, they would have shied like foals.

Eventually he was brought inside the cave where an old man with lank white hair, and shoulders gnarled and dark as olive wood, reclined on a pallet of leaves and deeply piled fresh grass. The air of the cave was made fragrant by the many bundles of medicinal herbs and simples hanging from its dry walls. The man gestured for Peleus to sit down beside him and silently offered him water from an earthenware jug. Then, wrinkling his eyes in a patient smile that seemed drawn from what felt like unfathomable depths of sadness, he spoke in the perfect, courtly accent of the Argive people. ‘Tell me your story.’

Peleus later told Odysseus that he regained his sanity in his time among the Centaurs, but the truth is that he was lucky to fall into their hands at a moment when their king, Cheiron, was gravely concerned for the survival of his tribe.

The Centaurs had always been a reclusive, aboriginal people, living their own rough mountain life remote from the city dwellers and the farmers of the plain. Cheiron himself was renowned for his wisdom and healing powers and had, for many years, run a wilderness school in the mountains to which many kings used to send their sons for initiation at an early age. Pirithous, King of the Lapith people on the coast, had attended that school when he was a boy and always cherished fond memories of King Cheiron and his half-wild Centaurs. For that reason he invited them to come as guests to his wedding feast, but that day someone made the mistake of giving them wine to drink. The wine, to which their heads were quite unused, quickly maddened them. When they began to molest the women at the feast, a bloody fight broke out in which many people were killed and injured. Since that terrible day the tribe of Centaurs had been regarded by the uninitiated as less than human. Those who survived the battle at the feast fled to the mountains where men hunted them down like animals for sport.

By the time Peleus was brought before Cheiron in his cave there were very few of his people left. So during the long hours when they first talked, the two men came to recognize each other as noble souls who had suffered unjustly. At that moment Peleus had no desire to return to the world, so he accepted the offer gladly when Cheiron suggested that he might heal his wounded mind by living a simple life among the Centaurs for a time.

The days of that life proved strenuous, and in the nights Peleus was visited by vivid, disturbing dreams which Cheiron taught him how to read. He felt healed too by the music of the Centaurs, which seemed filled with the strains of wind and wild water yet had a haunting enchantment of its own. Through initiation into Cheiron’s mysteries, Peleus rediscovered meaning in his world. And through his bond with Peleus, Cheiron began to hope that one day he might ensure the survival of his tribe by restoring good relations with the people of the cities below. So as well as friendship, the old man and the young man found hope in one another. That hope was strengthened one day when Peleus said that if he ever had a son, he would certainly send him to Cheiron for his education, and would encourage other princes to do the same.

‘But first you must have a wife,’ said Cheiron, and when he saw Pelion’s face darken at the memory of Polymela, the old man stretched out a mottled hand. ‘That dark time is past,’ he said quietly, ‘and a new life is opening for you. Several nights ago Sky-Father Zeus came to me in a dream and told me that it was time for my daughter to take a husband.’

Amazed to discover that Cheiron had a daughter, Peleus asked which one of the women of the tribe she might be. ‘Thetis has not lived among us for a long time,’ Cheiron answered. ‘She followed her mother’s ways and became a priestess of the cuttlefish cult among the shore people, who honour her as an immortal goddess. She has given herself as daughter to the sea-god Nereus, but Zeus wants her and her cult must accept him. She is a woman of great beauty – though she has sworn never to marry unless she marries a god. In my dream, however, Zeus said that any son born to Thetis would prove to be even more powerful than his father, so she must be given to a mortal man.’ Cheiron smiled. ‘That man is you, my friend – though you must win her first. And to do that, you must undergo her rites and enter into her mystery.’

As with all mysteries, the true nature of the shore women’s rites can be comprehended only by those who undergo them, so I can tell only what Odysseus told me of the account Peleus gave him of his first encounter with Thetis. It took place on a small island off the coast of Thessaly. Cheiron had advised him that his daughter was often carried across the strait on a dolphin’s back. If Peleus concealed himself among the rocks, Thetis might be caught sleeping at mid-day in a sea-cave on the strand.

Following his mentor’s instructions, Peleus crossed to the island, took cover behind a myrtle bush, and waited till the sun rose to its zenith. Then all his senses were ravished as he watched Thetis gliding towards the shore in the rainbow spume of spindrift blowing off the back of the dolphin she rode. Naked and glistening in the salt-light, she dismounted in the surf and waded ashore. He followed her at a distance, keeping out of sight, till she entered the narrow mouth of a sea-cave to shelter from the noonday sun.

Once sure she was asleep, he made his prayer to Zeus, lay down over her and clasped her body in a firm embrace. Thetis started awake at his touch, alarmed to find her limbs pinioned in the grip of a man. Immediately her body burst into flame. A torrent of fire licked round Peleus’s arms, scorching his flesh and threatening to set his hair alight, but Cheiron had warned him that the nymph had acquired her sea-father’s power of shape-shifting, and that he must not loosen his hold for a moment whatever dangerous form she took. So he grasped the figure of flame more tightly as Thetis writhed beneath him and took him on a fierce dance that wrestled him through all the elements.

When she saw that fire had failed to throw him, the nymph again changed shape. Peleus found himself floundering breathlessly as he clutched at the weight of water in a falling wave. His ears and lungs felt as though they were about to burst, but still he held on until the waters vanished and the hot maw of a ferocious lion was snarling up at him, only to be displaced in turn by a fanged serpent that hissed and twisted round him, viciously resisting his embrace. Then, under his exhausted gaze, the serpent took the shape of a giant cuttlefish, which sprayed a sticky gush of sepia ink over his face and body. Already burnt, half-drowned, mauled by fangs and talons, and almost blinded by the ink, Peleus was on the point of releasing his prize, when Thetis suddenly yielded to this resolute mortal who had withstood all her powers.

Gasping and breathless, Peleus looked down, saw the nymph resume her own beautiful form, and felt her body soften in his embrace. The embrace became more urgent and tender, and in the hour of passion that followed, the seed of their first son was sown.

The wedding-feast of Peleus and Thetis was celebrated at the full moon outside King Cheiron’s cave in the high crags of Mount Pelion. It was the last occasion in the history of the world when all twelve immortal gods came down from Mount Olympus together to mingle happily with mortal men. A dozen golden thrones were set up for them on either side of the bride and groom. Sky-Father Zeus himself gave away the bride, and it was his wife Hera who lifted the bridal torch. The Three Fates attended the ceremony, and the Muses came to chant the nuptial hymns, while the fifty daughters of the sea-god Nereus twisted their line about the gorge in a spiral dance of celebration.

As their gift to Peleus, the Olympian gods presented him with a suit of armour made of shining gold, together with two immortal horses sired by the West Wind. King Cheiron gave the groom a matchless hunting spear, the head of which had been wrought by the lame god Hephaestus in his forge, while its ash-wood shaft had been cut and polished by the hands of Divine Athena. With the whole remaining tribe of Centaurs gathered in garlands for the occasion, and all the other revellers carousing on nectar served by Zeus’s cup-bearer Ganymede, everyone agreed that there had been no more joyful marriage-feast since the Olympians had honoured the wedding of Cadmus and Harmony with their presence many years before.

Yet alone among the immortal gods, Eris had not been invited. Her name means Strife or Discord, and she is twin-sister to the war god Ares. Like him she delights in the fury and tumult of human conflict. It is Eris who stirs up trouble in the world by spreading rumours. She takes particular pleasure in the use of malicious gossip to create envy and jealousy, and for that reason none of the gods and goddesses other than her brother cares to have too much to do with her. For that same reason her name had been omitted from the list of guests at the wedding-feast of Peleus and Thetis. Yet all of the immortals have their place in the world and we ignore any of them at our peril.

Furious and slighted that she alone among the immortals had not been invited, Eris looked on at the festivities from the shadows of a nearby grove, waiting for the right moment to take her revenge. That moment came as Hera, Athene and Aphrodite were congratulating Peleus. The groom’s eye was caught by a flash of light as something rolled towards him across the ground. All three of the goddesses exclaimed in wonder when he picked up a golden apple that lay glistening at his feet. With their curiosity excited by the goddesses’ cries of delight, other guests quickly gathered round. Only Cheiron, to his dismay, saw the figure of Eris in her chequered robe slip away into the trees.

‘Look’, Peleus exclaimed, ‘there’s an inscription here.’ Holding the apple to catch the light, he read aloud, ‘To the Fairest.’ He turned to appraise the three goddesses standing beside him, and his smile instantly faded with the realization that he could not give the apple to any one of them without immediately offending the others.

‘But I’m surrounded by beauty,’ he prevaricated. ‘This riddle is too hard.’

Aphrodite smiled at him. ‘To the Fairest, you say? Then there’s no difficulty. The apple must be meant for me.’ The goddess was holding out her hand to take it when Hera said that as wife to Zeus, Lord of Olympus, there could hardly be any doubt that the apple should be hers.

‘There is every possibility of doubt,’ Athena put in. ‘Any discriminating judge would agree that my claim to the apple is as strong as either of yours – if not a good deal stronger.’

Aphrodite laughed, dismissing Athena’s claim as ridiculous. Who would look twice, she asked, at a goddess who insisted on wearing a helmet even to a wedding? Smiling in reparation, she conceded that Athena might be wiser than she was, and there was no doubting Hera’s matronly virtue, but if beauty was the issue, then she had the advantage over both of them. Again, sidling closer to Peleus who stood in a consternation, wondering how he had got into this quandary and how to get out of it again, she held out her hand.

‘Can’t you see you’re embarrassing our host, flaunting yourself like that with his bride looking on?’ Athena protested. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll learn that true beauty is also modest.’

Sensing the imminence of an unseemly quarrel, Hera intervened, warning her divine sisters to restrain themselves. Then she smiled at Peleus and suggested that it would be best to settle the matter quickly by giving the apple to her. At which both the other goddesses turned on her, each clamouring to be heard over the other until all three were tangled in a rancorous exchange. The Muses faltered in their song, the Nereids ceased their dance, a nervous silence fell across the Centaurs, and the bride and groom looked on in dismay as the dispute became ever more acrimonious.

Hera spoke sharply above the others. ‘If you two won’t see reason, there’s only one way to resolve the matter – Zeus must decide.’ But neither of the others was about to accept that solution, nor did Almighty Zeus show any enthusiasm for it. Though he’d been drinking nectar all afternoon, he remained too astute to put himself in a position where his life would be made miserable by his wife if he was honest, or by two resentful goddesses if he was not. Hoping the row would peter out, he turned away. Only moments later, netted in a trance of rage, all three contenders began hurling insults at each other.

‘Enough!’ bellowed Zeus in a voice that briefly silenced everyone. ‘If it’s golden apples you want, all three of you can have a whole orchard of them any time you like.’

‘It’s not the apple!’ Hera answered hotly. ‘None of us cares about the apple!’

‘Of course we don’t,’ Athena agreed.

‘Then why are you embarrassing us all like this?’ Zeus demanded. When no immediate answer came, he said it was time the goddesses remembered who they were and where they were. They should stop this bickering and sit down and enjoy themselves, so that everyone else could do the same. Again he tried to turn away but Aphrodite widened her eyes, protesting that the dispute was a matter of simple justice. She wasn’t about to let some pretender lay claim to a title that everyone knew was rightly hers.

Sensing that her husband might be wavering, Hera hissed, ‘Don’t you dare take any notice of that mindless bitch.’

‘And you shouldn’t let your wife push you around,’ Athena put in, ‘not if you expect anyone ever to respect your judgement again.’

At which point Zeus shouted that he was damned if he would choose between them. Looking around in embarrassment, he turned back to the goddesses and said more quietly that, in his opinion, they were all beautiful. All three of them. Each in her own inimitable way. They should forget the apple and let that be an end to it.

‘Things have gone too far for that,’ said Hera. ‘We demand a decision.’

Zeus met his wife’s eyes with gloomy displeasure. For all his might, he could see no way of resolving this argument without causing endless resentment on Olympus. Yet when he shifted his gaze, it was only to see the assembled mortals staring at him, aghast and bewildered. Part of him already begrudged having ceded a nymph as beautiful as Thetis to a mere human. Now he was thinking that this trouble had come from mixing up the affairs of mortals and immortals, and when he caught himself thinking that way, he realized that Eris must be at the back of this quarrel and, if that was the case, there could be no reasonable solution. But the harm was done and he couldn’t yet see how to undo it. Neither could he allow this disgraceful performance to carry on in front of mortal eyes.

‘My decision,’ he said at last, ‘is that we shall return to Olympus immediately, and leave these good people to their feast.’

Moments later the immortals were back among the clouds on high Olympus. But when it quickly became clear that Zeus was still not prepared to make a judgement, the goddesses resumed their argument with uninhibited vehemence and no sign of a solution.

Meanwhile, having begun so joyfully, the wedding feast faltered to a dismal end. Thunderheads had been building over Pelion for some time and the gods had vanished in a livid flap of lightning. Now came the rain, and people ran for shelter, slipping among the rocks and stumbling about as though the storm had wrecked all expectations of peace and order in the world. As soon as the downpour eased, they made their apologies and dispersed back down the mountainside to their comfortable lives in the cities of the plain.

Dismayed that Sky Father Zeus had not been able to contain the fractious energy of the goddesses, Cheiron withdrew gloomily to his cave. The last time his Centaurs had attended a wedding-feast they had been depraved by wine and then hunted down like wolves. That had been the fault of men; but now it seemed even the gods had lost their senses. With the world so out of joint he decided that his people would keep to themselves from now on. If Peleus and his friends wanted to send their sons to be educated in the mountains, he would care for them, instruct them in music and the healing arts, and do what he could to set them on the path of wisdom. But with the gods at loggerheads, and most men’s hearts no longer content with a simple, wilderness life such as he and his people led, he saw only dark omens for the future.

The years passed and things did not go well with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. However uneasily, the couple had tried to laugh off the dismal fiasco of their wedding day, but it wasn’t long before Peleus woke up to the fact that he knew almost nothing about his wife.

For a time, out there on the mountain, he had come to believe he might be happy once again. Exhilarated by his passionate encounter with Thetis, he began to be sure of it. They would make a good life together, raising children in the clear air of the mountains, far away from the ambitions and duplicity of the courtly world. But Thetis was a creature of the shore. She loved the salt-wind off the sea, the surge of a dolphin’s back beneath her, the moonlit rush of surf, the smell of sea-wrack, the way the shingle tugged between her toes, and the marble world of rock pools. Up there in the mountains, she felt stranded. She pined for the long strands of sand and the sound of the sea, or raged with disgust and frustration at the horsy smell of the Centaur people and their stubborn, earth-bound ways. Having quarrelled with her father, and offended his chief tribesmen, she made it clear to Peleus that though they had been consigned to each other by Zeus himself, if he kept her in that gloomy mountain gorge against her will she would, quite simply, die.

Peleus already had a dead brother and a dead bride on his conscience. The first had been named for a seal and had also loved the sea. The second had hanged herself because instead of staying at her side, he had gone chasing a wild boar in the Calydonian hills and killed her brother. The thought of another such death was more than he could bear. So he had already made up his mind that they would have to leave the mountain by the end of the summer, when a rider came looking for him out of Thessaly.

He brought the news that King Actor, who had never recovered from the loss of his son and his daughter, was now dead. The Myrmidons – those implacable soldier-ants of Thessaly – were now leaderless, and the messenger had been sent to ask Peleus to return and take up his rightful heritage as Actor’s heir. He could be sure of a warm welcome, for some of the Myrmidons had been on the Calydonian boar-hunt and knew that Eurytion’s death was an accident. Moreover the wife of Acastus had gone mad and had been heard boasting crazily that she was responsible for Polymela’s suicide. In these circumstances, Peleus’s right to rule would go unquestioned.

Here was a god-given answer to his problems. Both duty to his people and concern for his wife required him to leave the mountain. He would move the royal court from Athena’s sanctuary in the inland city of Itonus down to one of the coastal strongholds. His wife would soon have the sound of the sea in her ears again. Thetis would be happy there.

Immediately Peleus set about making preparations for his return. Solemnly he said his farewells to the friends he had made among the Centaur people, promising that he would not forget them and that they would be welcomed as guests in his house should they ever want to come. Then he spent a long time alone with Cheiron, up on a windy shelf of rock high above the gorge, from where they could look out across all the summits of Thessaly and Magnesia to the eastern sea beyond. An eagle scaled the blue spaces about their heads. Everything else felt still and ancient round them. They were almost outside time up there, and watching the wind blow among the white locks of the old king’s hair, Peleus knew that Cheiron was looking deeper into the heart of things than words could reach. And his own heart too was lost for speech – not because there was nothing to say but because there was too much. Yet in the silence of the mountain it felt as though it went understood.

After a time, Cheiron turned to look at him. ‘You will do what you can for my people when I am gone?’

‘It goes without saying. But you Centaurs live long. I think you have many years in you yet.’

‘Perhaps.’ Cheiron turned his face back to the wind. ‘But my daughter,’ he sighed. ‘When I first spoke of her, I did not understand that she has immortal longings. A man will find it hard to live with that.’

Peleus frowned at the thought, and then made light of it. ‘I’m not easy to live with myself. And Thetis will be content when we are by the sea.’

Again the Centaur said, ‘Perhaps.’

The eagle glided high above them now, its pinions bent like a bow against the wind. Cheiron stared up at the way that strong span gleamed in flawless sunlight. Quietly he said, ‘Remember that your son will be greater than you. Try not to resent him for it.’

‘I shan’t – because it will be your blood that makes him so. When he is of age I will send him to you.’

Cheiron nodded his old head. ‘Then I shall live for that.’

Yet Thetis fell pregnant six times in the following years and each time she came to term, but not one of the infants lived for more than a week or two.

At each small death, Peleus found the sadness harder to bear, and all the more so because it was his wife’s custom to withdraw to a sanctuary of the shore people between the start of her labour and the day when she hoped to present a living child to the world. When Peleus asked the reason for this practice, she told him it was a woman’s mystery and not to be questioned.

Yet she returned each time, pallid and drawn, as if hollowed out by failure.

But she would say nothing more, so Peleus harboured his grief and returned to giving judgement in the world of men, and they lived a life that became ever more fraught with the silence that was left between them.

After the loss of the third child, he argued more strongly that it would be wise for them to consult her father who was more renowned for his medical knowledge than almost any man alive. But Thetis would not hear of it. She was a woman, she said, not a sick mare, and she wanted no truck with his mountain magic. Her trust was in her own understanding of these things as a seapriestess to the moon-mother. In any case, had it not been prophesied that her son would be a stronger man than his father? Any child of hers that was not strong enough to survive the trials of birth had no place on the earth. He should not mourn them so.

Her ferocity astounded him, but he put it down in part to an effort to mask her own sorrow, and in part to the influence of the Dolopian priestess who was his wife’s constant companion. A small, intense woman with deep-set eyes and a strawberry-birth mark shaped like a sea-horse on her neck, her name was Harpale. Thetis honoured her as a kinswoman, one of her mother’s people, and she had begged Harpale to stay with her at the court of Peleus rather than joining her clan’s recent migration to the island of Skyros.

The Dolopians were a restless people who had travelled from the far west a generation or two ago and settled about the shores of Thessaly. Now, under their king Lycomedes, some of them had felt the urge to move out to the Scattered Islands in the eastern sea and they had established a stronghold of their own on the windy island of Skyros. The move happened not long after Peleus had established his kingship over the Myrmidons, and feeling the strong call of island life, Thetis had wanted to go with them.

For a time it had been a struggle between them. Born on an island himself, Peleus knew the nature of the call, but he was king over a mainland people now and it was his wife’s duty to remain with him and provide him with an heir. Was it not enough that he had already shifted the court to the coast for her sake? He had understood her need for the sea. He was content for her to hold to cult practices which he did not share, and which – though he did not say it – he did not greatly trust. But she must respect the constraints imposed by royal duty on their life. They would remain where they were in Thessaly.

Meanwhile Peleus had been kept busy enough. Once he was secure on his throne he had harnessed the power of the Myrmidons to settle his score with Acastus. A swift, brutal campaign took them through Magnesia into Iolcus. Acastus was killed in the fight and his mad wife was quickly put to death. Giving thanks to Zeus and Artemis, who had a powerful cult centre in Iolcus, Peleus was declared king there and made Iolcus his new coastal capital.

Having learned the laws and customs of the Myrmidons, he set now about harmonizing them with those of Magnesia, trying to run a peaceable kingdom, and giving judgement in the quarrels with which his warlike men filled the boredom of their peaceful days. Also there was always a pressing need to raise money. To feed and clothe the royal households, to pay his retainers, arm his warriors, carry out his building projects, repair his ships, and make expensive offerings to the gods, all of this took a lot of gold. What could not be raised as tribute must be found elsewhere, so in company with the ageing Theseus, he turned pirate in the summer months and took to raiding the merchant ships and rich estates of the eastern seaboard.

He made his reputation as a valiant warrior and a generous king on those voyages, though his exploits never ranged as widely as those of his brother. Telamon had already sailed on Jason’s Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece, and had become a close comrade to Heracles, who was renowned and feared from Epirus to Paphlagonia as the boldest, most vigorous and, at times, the maddest hero of the age. Having already made a further expedition round the coast of the Black Sea into the land of the Amazons, Telamon and Heracles were now mounting a campaign against the Phrygian city of Troy.

Telamon tried to talk his brother into joining forces with them, but Peleus lacked his restless appetite for battle and was reluctant to risk his kingdom’s hard won wealth in what promised to be an unprofitable attack on a bankrupt city recently visited by plague and earthquake. But neither did he wish to look weak in Telamon’s eyes. In the end the decision was made for him by a wound he took in a ship-fight that spring. A Sidonian sword cut his right hamstring as he leapt aboard the galley, putting him out of action for months.

That was also the year in which his sixth child died in early infancy, and the grief of it was more than he could bear. A marriage that had begun so inauspiciously was now eroded by mutual disappointment, and its passion had faded as its tensions increased. Peleus was often given cause to puzzle over what Cheiron had said about Thetis entertaining immortal longings, but it seemed to account for her restlessness and the way her spirit sometimes chafed against his own more practical concerns. These days she seemed to take comfort only in Harpale’s company, and Peleus grew to resent the power that the little Dolopian exercised over his wife’s imagination. Harpale soon learned to stay out of his way, though her name frequently cropped up in conversation with his wife, reproaching him like the sting of a seaurchin for the island life she was denied.

Of Thetis’s failure to provide him with an heir it became ever harder to speak, so when he finally decided to consult Cheiron about his injured leg, Peleus went against his wife’s wishes and raised this other, graver matter with him too.

Cheiron listened carefully as he applied thick poultices to his son-in-law’s leg. He asked questions about the practices of the cuttlefish cult, and took a particular interest in the part that Harpale had come to play in his daughter’s life. Knowing something of the Dolopians, he asked Peleus whether there had been any unusual signs of the use of fire in his daughter’s rites. Peleus was unable to answer, however, because he was now excluded from all that part of his wife’s life. His own service was to Zeus, to Apollo, and to the goddess, whether worshipped as Athena in Itonus or as Artemis in Iolcus; but as to his wife’s most secret mysteries, he was as ignorant as his horse.

Cheiron nodded. ‘Remain here till these herbs have shared their virtue. Had you come sooner I could have done more, but now you will always walk with a limp. Still,’ he smiled up into his friend’s face, ‘if you had been your horse I would have had to cut your windpipe!’ He fastened the bandage and sat back to wash his hands. ‘As to the other matter, I will reflect on it.’

When Peleus travelled back down the mountain he brought with him a Centaur woman called Euhippe, who wept such fat tears when they left the gorge that Peleus guessed that the old king’s pallet of grass would be a lonelier place after the parting. She was a small, round woman with a shyly attentive manner, and large, surprisingly delicate hands. Overtly she was to be taken into the household as a nurse for the care of Peleus’s wound, but he soon intended to make it known that Euhippe was a skilful midwife too.

By the time he returned to his palace at Iolcus, Thetis was already over two months pregnant. Moody, and still prey to sickness, she at once made it clear that she would have nothing to do with the little mountain woman, whom she dismissed first as her father’s hairy brood-mare, and then, after the cruel pretence of a closer look, as his jaded nag. Peleus protested. There was an unholy row between them that night, and silence for two weeks after.

Then the sickness passed, they talked and made love again, only to resume the queasy truce their life had become. Thetis still refused to include Euhippe among the women of her bedchamber, but the Centaur found an unobtrusive place for herself in the royal household and her medical skills soon won her grateful friends. After successfully treating one woman for a rash around her midriff, and another for a dangerous fever, she gained a reputation as a wise woman and became a great favourite among the Myrmidon barons and their wives. Only Thetis, as her belly grew rounder by the month, continued to ignore her existence.

If she feared that Euhippe had been placed to spy on her, then her fears were justified, for on the occasions when she came to examine his leg, Peleus questioned her closely about anything she had learned of his wife’s activities. For several weeks she found nothing unusual to report, but in the eighth month of Thetis’s pregnancy, Euhippe made friends with a young woman who was complaining of intense pain from her monthly bleeding. Euhippe gave her a potion made up of guelder rose, skullcap and black haw for immediate relief, and advised her to return soon for further treatment. When she came back, they began to chat, and it emerged that the girl served as a handmaid in the cuttlefish cult. Through cautiously worded questions, Euhippe learned that there had been nothing outwardly wrong with any of Thetis’s babies – no fevers or defects, nothing that would account for their early death. It was a mystery, the girl said, unless the Goddess had called them back to her.

When Euhippe asked her casually about Harpale’s role in the cult, the girl flushed a little, looked away, and said that her own degree was lowly and she was too young to be initiated into such matters. Nor was she prepared to speculate.

‘But there was a smell of fear about her,’ Euhippe decided. ‘She may not know much, but she knows more than she was letting on, and it frightens her.’

With his own suspicions now confirmed, Peleus asked Euhippe to keep her ears open, and eventually more emerged through one of the baron’s wives. It was this woman who first dared to speak of witchcraft, but she did so darkly, casting her suspicions only on the Dolopian, not on Thetis herself, and in a way that left Euhippe feeling the woman meant her to report what she said.

Knowing that Thetis had once offended this woman, Peleus suggested that she might be spreading rumours out of spite, but Euhippe merely shrugged.

‘You truly believe that something terrible is happening?’ he demanded.

‘For you it would be terrible,’ she said.

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘I may be wrong.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

Euhippe thought for a moment, then shook her head.

‘Then what am I to think,’ he demanded, ‘what am I to do?’

‘You need do nothing. Not until the baby is born.’

‘And then?’

‘Let us wait in patience. When the time comes we will see what to do.’

The truth of what happened at that time was known only to Peleus himself and he would not speak of it – not, that is, until some six years later when Odysseus arrived at his court for the first time. By then the child – Peleus’s seventh son, and the only one to survive – was already in the mountains with Cheiron, learning how to live. Peleus lived alone in his gloomy palace under the patient, mostly silent care of Euhippe, and for a time his melancholic condition had been the talk of Argos. Telamon and Theseus had both tried to shake him out of it and failed. Cheiron was too old to come down from the mountains, and Peleus lacked the heart to seek him out. So the King of the Myrmidons wasted in his loneliness, limping from hall to chamber, hardly speaking, and increasingly reliant on trusted ministers to handle the affairs of state. Old friends like Pirithous and Theseus died. Power shifted south to Mycenae. People began to forget about him.

Then Odysseus ran his ship ashore on the strand at Iolcus. King Nestor of Pylos had encouraged him to come. Everyone responded to the lively young prince of Ithaca, he’d said – perhaps old Peleus might. ‘Why not see if you can’t tempt him to join you in your raid along the Mysian coast. Peleus was a good pirate in his day. He might be so again.’

There was, Odysseus quickly saw, no chance of it. The man could barely lift a smile let alone a sword. Shrugging his shoulders, he had made up his mind to cut his losses and push off at dawn, when Peleus looked up from his wine-cup for the first time in nearly an hour and said, ‘It was good of you to come. Everyone has forgotten how to smile around me. You seem to do little else.’

‘It costs me nothing,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘Does it disturb you?’

Unsmiling, Peleus shook his head. After a time he began to talk and a god must have entered him, for once he began it became unstoppable. That night witnessed a huge unburdening because Odysseus was the only person to whom Peleus ever spoke about what happened between himself and his wife. Odysseus listened in spellbound horror to a tormented account of how, at the prompting of Euhippe, he had cleansed himself before Zeus, begged forgiveness of the Goddess, and broken in to the sacred precinct around the sea-cave where Thetis held her rites. It was the dark of the moon after the birth of the child. Pushing aside the drug-intoxicated women who tried to stop him, Peleus entered the cave and saw the dark figures of Thetis and Harpale standing under a primitive wooden idol to the Goddess beside an altar of burning coals. Harpale held a finely meshed net of mail. Thetis was unwrapping the swaddling bands from her howling baby, and Peleus saw at once what they intended to do. If he had he not come in time to prevent it, she and Harpale would have done what they must have done many times before – they would have seined the child with fire, passing its tiny body back and forth along the shimmer of hot air above the altar’s glowing coals until it was immortalized.

With a howl of execration, Peleus drew his sword, cut Harpale down where she stood, and snatched the baby from its screaming mother. Had the child not been squalling in his grip like a small storm, he might have killed Thetis also, but by the time he could lift the sword again the frenzied moment had passed and he could not bring himself to do it. Thetis saw the conflict in his face. Astoundingly, she released a small, frustrated laugh.

With the baby tussling in his arm, he stared at her as at a mad woman. She held his gaze, and they stood unmoving in the heat and sea-smell of the cave, knowing that the infant might have been spared its flames, but the fire that Thetis had lit had instantly consumed all traces of their love for one another.

Heart-broken, and unwilling to command the death of Cheiron’s daughter, Peleus had her kept under close confinement for a time. The child he gave to a wet-nurse, one of Euhippe’s friends, a Centaur woman who had been brought back from a hunt, freed at Peleus’s insistence, and now lived with one of the palace cooks. It was she who named her tiny charge Achilles, the lipless one, because his lips had never been warmed into life at his mother’s breast. But Peleus found it hard even to look at his son because the child’s cries always recalled the horror of that night. On one thing, however, he was resolved – that Thetis should never come close either to the child or to himself. So in the end, on the understanding that she would die if ever she returned to Thessaly, he gave her leave to do what she had always wished to do and Thetis joined her mother’s people on the remote island of Skyros.

‘But the boy lived,’ Odysseus said at last, filled with sympathy for the man who sat across from him, staring at the dying embers of the fire. ‘You have a son and heir.’

‘Whom I hardly know,’ Peleus answered, ‘and who knows nothing of me.’

‘That can be repaired. You can recall him from Cheiron’s school at any time.’

‘To live in this darkness with me?’

‘The child might lighten it.’

Sighing, Peleus searched the young Ithacan’s face. ‘Fortunately, it was prophesied that the boy will be a greater man than his father.’

Odysseus said, ‘Then he will be a great soul indeed.’

Warmed by the company of this new friend, Peleus asked Odysseus to stay with him in Iolcus for a time. The Ithacan gladly agreed and the two men talked often together, exchanging stories of former exploits and discussing the changes in the world now that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, had reclaimed the throne in Mycenae and was expanding his power to such an extent that he must soon be acclaimed as High King of all Argos. They talked of lighter matters too and Odysseus had at last got his host laughing merrily one evening when the arrival of another visitor was announced.

As a bastard son of King Actor, Menoetius was loosely related to Peleus by marriage, and he had sailed around the straits from the Locrian city of Opus in search of help from him. Menoetius had a six year old son who was in trouble, having killed one of his friends when an argument over a game of knucklebones turned into a fight.

‘There’s no great harm in the boy,’ he said, frowning, ‘apart from his passionate temper. And it breaks my heart, but I can’t keep him with me in Opus. There’s blood guilt on him now, and the father of the boy he killed loved his son as much as I do mine.’

Peleus nodded. ‘So what are you asking of me?’

Menoetius asked if he might bring his son into the hall, and when permission was given, Peleus and Odysseus found themselves confronted by a scrawny six-year-old with a thick shock of hair and a downcast gaze firmly fixed on his own freshly scrubbed feet. Remembering how his own early fate had been shaped by the death of another, Peleus said, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

Briefly the small face glowered up at him in sulky defiance, then immediately looked down again, saying nothing.

‘His name’s Patroclus,’ Menoetius said, ‘though, as you see, he hasn’t brought much glory on his father so far.’

‘There’s still plenty of time,’ Odysseus put in lightly.

Menoetius looked back at Peleus in appeal. ‘I hear that you’ve sent your own son to the Centaur?’ When Peleus nodded again, he added. ‘I was wondering if you thought he might be able to sort this boy out.’

‘He sorted me out,’ Peleus said quietly.

‘But that dreadful business at the wedding of Pirithous … when they got drunk …’ Menoetius saw Peleus frown. He hesitated and began again. ‘I mean, weren’t you already a man when you went to Cheiron.’

‘I was more of a man when I came away. As were Pirithous and Jason, though they were sent to him as boys. And I might have been a better man still if I’d stayed among the Centaurs.’ Peleus shook his head. ‘But that was not my fate. As it is, I was glad to send my son to Cheiron. And since then a number of my Myrmidons have done the same.’ He turned back to where Patroclus shifted uneasily on his feet. ‘Look at me, boy.’ Grimly, Patroclus did as he was bidden. ‘Would you like to hunt and learn how to talk to horses? Would you like to know the magic locked in herbs, and how to sing and finger the lyre so that the animals come out of the trees to listen?’

Uncertainly Patroclus nodded.

‘I think I’d like to go to this school myself,’ Odysseus smiled.

Astounded by himself, Peleus said suddenly, ‘Then come up the mountain with me tomorrow.’

Odysseus looked up, surprised at the transformation in his friend. Some god must be at work here. He felt the hairs prickle at the nape of his neck. But he smiled and nodded. Why not? Yes, he would be glad to go.

Peleus turned back to Menoetius. ‘It’s time I went to see how my own son’s doing. You’ve done the right thing. Leave your boy with me.’

Apart from a tree that had been struck by lightning and the number of scruffy children to be fed, Peleus found the gorge hardly changed since the last time he had been there. But Cheiron felt much older, his cheeks were hollower than Peleus remembered, and the wrinkles deeply pouched about his eyes. His movements were slower too, though he was still limber, and his hands trembled as he offered a libation of mare’s milk in thanksgiving for the return of his son and friend. He welcomed Odysseus warmly among his people, and smiled kindly at Patroclus, questioning him a little, before packing him off to play with some of the other children by the stream. A boy was sent to search for Achilles in the woods and, as they walked to the cave, Peleus explained why Patroclus had been sent to him. But Cheiron merely nodded in reply, and then shook his head over the way Peleus was limping across the rocks. ‘You should have come to me sooner,’ he said, ‘then as now.’

As they ate together, Odysseus expressed his admiration for Cheiron’s way of life. ‘We still like to keep things simple on Ithaca,’ he said. ‘Some people find us rude and barbarous, yet we’re honest and we have all we need there. It’s only a restless lust for adventure that draws me away, but I’m always glad to get home again.’

Peleus sighed. ‘I should never have left this place.’

‘A man must follow his fate,’ Cheiron said, ‘and yours has been a hard one. I should have seen it sooner, but there are things the heart sees and will not believe.’ Peleus insisted that none of the blame for his fate had been Cheiron’s, but the old king gravely shook his head. ‘Though she followed her mother’s ways, Thetis is of my blood, and I have failed as a father.’

When Odysseus protested that Cheiron had been a good father to many of the greatest heroes of the age, the old Centaur sighed that a man could care well for the children of others yet be a fumbler with his own. ‘It is only boys who come to me here,’ he said, ‘and though the power in the world may have passed to Sky-Father Zeus, the Goddess still has her claims to make on us – though sometimes it is hard for men to understand her mysteries.’ He gazed up into the troubled eyes of Peleus and drew in his breath. ‘But you have a fine son. He’s already a skilful huntsman and he runs like the wind. Also he has a singing voice that will break your heart. You will be proud of Achilles – as he is already proud of you.’ Cheiron took in the dubious tilt of Peleus’s head. ‘Oh yes, he knows that his father is a great king in Thessaly and has already taken a knock or two for bragging of it.’

At that moment all three men heard the eager, rowdy sound of boy’s voices shouting in the gorge. They tried to resume their conversation, but the noise went on until Cheiron got up and said, ‘It’s time I put a stop to it.’

His guests followed him to the mouth of the cave where they looked down at the sward of rough grass among the rocks and saw two boys scrapping like fighting dogs inside a shifting circle of young, tousle-headed spectators who were urging them on. When they struggled back to their feet from where they had been flinging punches at each other on the ground, blood was bubbling from both their noses.

Peleus recognized Patroclus by the dark red tunic he was wearing. ‘His father warned me that he had a bad temper, but this is a poor start. I trust the other fellow is strong enough to stand up to him.’

‘I should think so,’ Cheiron turned to him and smiled. ‘He is your son.’

An Oracle of Fire

After the wedding-day of Peleus and Thetis a whole generation passed in the world of mortals, but the quarrel among the goddesses raged on and Zeus was no nearer to finding a solution. At last, out of all patience with the bitter atmosphere around him, he called a council among the gods, and Hermes, the shrewdest and most eloquent of the immortals, conceived of a possible way through.

It was obvious, he said, that none of the three goddesses would be satisfied until a judgement was made. It was equally clear that none of the immortals were in a position to choose among them without giving everlasting offence. Therefore it was his opinion that the decision should be placed in the hands of an impartial mortal.

Not at all displeased by the idea of returning the dispute to the mortal realm, Zeus asked if he had anyone particular in mind.

‘I think,’ smiled Hermes, ‘that this is a matter for Paris to decide.’

Ares looked up at the mention of the name. That handsome bully of a god, who had come swaggering back from Thrace where they make war their sport and take as much delight in the lopping off of heads as others do in the finer points of art, had no doubt about which of the goddesses should be given the apple. He had long since grown bored therefore by a conflict that lacked real violence. Now he declared impatiently that Paris was an excellent choice. He knew him to be a fair-minded fellow with a good eye for the best fighting bulls in the Idaean Mountains.

Though she was restless to get back into the wilds, Artemis pointed out that being a bull fancier might not be the ideal qualification for the matter in hand. But before Hermes could respond, Ares went on to tell how Paris had once offered a crown as prize for any bull that could beat the champion he had raised. Just for the sport of it, Ares had transformed himself into a bull and thoroughly trounced Paris’s beast. Yet even though the odds had been stacked against him, Paris had cheerfully awarded him the crown. So yes, Ares was quite sure of it – Paris could be relied on to give a fair judgement.

‘I should perhaps add,’ said Hermes, smiling amiably at the goddesses, who had, at that moment, no passionate interest in fighting bulls, ‘that Paris is also the most handsome of mortal men.’

Zeus grunted at that. Sternly he looked back at the goddesses. ‘Will all three of you be content to submit to this handsome mortal’s judgement?’ And when they nodded their assent, the lord of Olympus sighed with relief.

‘Very well, Paris it shall be.’ And asking Hermes to conduct the goddesses to Mount Ida, Zeus gratefully turned his thoughts to other matters.

As he sat in the sunlight watching his herd graze the pastures of Mount Ida, Paris was, of course, quite unaware that the gods had elected him to solve a problem that they could not solve themselves. But at that time he was ignorant of many other matters too, not least of the mystery of his own birth, for the youth entrusted with this awesome responsibility was rather more than the humble herdsman he believed himself to be.

Many years earlier, in the hours before he was born, his pregnant mother had woken in terror from a prophetic dream, and that dream was now beginning to cast a lurid light across the world. Yet as parents beget children, so one story begets another, and one cannot understand who Paris was without also knowing something about his parents, and something of his father’s father too.

There were many Troys before the last Troy fell. One of them was ruled by a king called Laomedon, and the lore of the city tells how, as a humiliating punishment for displeasing Zeus, the gods Apollo and Poseidon were once forced to work for a year as day-labourers in that king’s service. In return for a stipulated fee, Apollo played the lyre and tended Laomedon’s flocks on Mount Ida while Poseidon toiled to build the walls around the city. Knowing that the walls would never fall unless some mortal was also involved in their construction, Poseidon delegated part of the work to Aeacus, who was the father of Peleus and Telamon. But Laomedon had a perfidious streak in his nature, and when the work was done he refused to make the agreed payment of all the cattle born in the kingdom during the course of that year.

It was not he but Zeus, he argued, who had put the gods to their tasks, and in any case what needs did the immortals have that they could not supply for themselves? So he turned them away from the city empty-handed.

The gods were not slow to take their revenge. In his aspect of a mouse-god, Apollo visited a plague upon Troy, while Earthshaker Poseidon unleashed a huge sea-monster to terrorize its coastline. When a people already sickening from pestilence found their land made infertile by the huge breakers of salt-water that the monster set crashing across their fields, they demanded that Laomedon seek counsel from the oracle of Zeus as to how the gods might be appeased. The answer came that nothing less than the sacrifice of his beloved daughter Hesione would suffice.

Laomedon did all he could to resist the judgement, trying to force others in the city to offer their own daughters to the monster in Hesione’s place. But the members of the Trojan assembly were fully aware that the king’s perfidy was the cause of their grief, and would consent to no more than a casting of lots. In accordance with the will of the gods, the lot fell on Hesione. So Laomedon had to look on helplessly as his daughter was stripped of everything but her jewels, chained to a rock by the shore, and left alone to die.

The sea was rising and breaking round Hesione’s naked body when she was found by Heracles as he returned with his friend Telamon from their expedition to the land of the Amazons. Using his prodigious strength, Heracles broke the chains and set Hesione free. But the sea-monster was still at large, so the hero struck a bargain with Laomedon, offering to put an end to the beast in return for two immortal white mares which were the pride of the king’s herd.

The king accepted the offer and, after a fight that lasted for three terrible days, Heracles managed to kill the monster.

Once again Laomedon proved faithless. Ignoring the counsel of his son Podarces, he substituted mortal horses for the immortal mares that had been promised, and when Heracles discovered the deceit he declared war on Troy.

It was a war that left the city ravaged. As the son of Aeacus, Telamon was able to discover which part of Troy’s walls had been built by his father and were, therefore, the weakest. He breached the city’s defences at that place, Heracles joined him in the assault, and the palace was sacked. Driven by vengeful rage, Heracles killed Laomedon together with most of his family. Though Hesione’s life was spared, she was given against her will to Telamon, and carried off by him to his stronghold on Salamis. But before she left Troy, Hesione was allowed to ransom the life of one other captive. The life she chose to save was that of her sole surviving brother, Podarces. It was he whom Heracles appointed as the king of a city reduced to smoking rubble. The new king was known ever afterwards as Priam, the ransomed one.

That anyway is how the story is told among the Trojan bards, and there were aspects of the tale that Telamon and Heracles were pleased to propagate among the Argives. But Odysseus was given a rather different version of the story by Telamon’s brother Peleus. This is how he told it to me.

When they were boys, Telamon and Peleus had known for years of the longstanding feud between their father and King Laomedon of Troy. As a man widely known for his wisdom and skill, Aeacus had indeed been commissioned to rebuild and strengthen the ring wall around Troy. Because the city stood on a site prone to earthquakes, Aeacus entreated the divine help of Poseidon and those who understood his mysteries. He also brought with him a bard consecrated to Apollo. It was he who led the music which eased the men in the hard labour of carving, moving and lifting the great blocks of stone. The work went well. Lofty new gates guarded by bastions were built. The limestone blocks were skilfully laid to give a steeply angled batter to the lower part of the wall. Above it rose a gleaming crenellated parapet. So the new walls of Troy, rising from the windy hill above the plain, were both robust and beautiful.

Before the work was complete, however, it became clear that Laomedon was running short of money. When Aeacus saw that the king was unlikely to pay for the remainder of the work, he downed tools and returned to Salamis, leaving a stretch of the western wall unimproved and vulnerable. Eventually, infuriated by Laomedon’s failure to come up with the money he was still owed, he called down the curses of Poseidon and Apollo on the city.

Many years later the Trojans were woken one morning by a dreadful sound. The waters of the bay between their two headlands were being sucked back towards the Hellespont, leaving the sea-bed exposed as a stinking marsh, strewn with rocks and slime and the carcasses of ancient ships. The ground under the city began to move. Buildings cracked, sagged and collapsed. People fled their houses as the sea came crashing back in a huge tumbling wall, higher than a house, that did not stop at the shore but rushed on to flood the fertile plain, destroying the harvest and salting the land.

Though the walls of Aeacus withstood the shock, the western defences and many houses inside the walls did not. Hundreds of lives were lost that day, trapped under fallen masonry or drowned by the wave. Soon a stench of decay polluted the city’s air. Within a few days pestilence came.

Telamon and Heracles were caught in the turbulent waters as they sailed through the Black Sea into the Hellespont in the single ship that remained to them after their violent expedition to the land of the Amazons. By the time they sailed along the coast of Troy, the dirty weather had cleared and the waters calmed a little. But as they followed the shoreline, they were amazed to see a naked young woman bound to the rocks with the breakers surging round her.

The girl was half-dead from cold and fear, but Heracles cut her down, took her aboard ship and brought her round. She was not Princess Hesione, of course, for Laomedon had taken precautions to withhold his daughter’s name from the lottery that had been held in the city. It was from the young woman on whom the lot had fallen that they learned of the city’s desperate condition. Reduced to a primitive state of terror by their misfortunes, the Trojan people had resorted to human sacrifice to propitiate the gods.

Seeing an opportunity, Telamon sailed to Aegina and told his father that his curse had finally born fruit. If Aeacus would finance ten ships, he would return to Troy and take as plunder what had been withheld as payment. Aeacus agreed to put up only part of the money, so Telamon approached Peleus for the rest, but without success. In the end he and Heracles advanced against Troy with only six ships, but they carried enough men to breach the weakest part of the wall and sack the already devastated city.

In terms of hard coin and plunder, the expedition failed to make much profit, but Laomedon was killed and Telamon took his beautiful daughter Hesione as part of his share in the spoils. Priam’s most prudent son, Podarces, only survived the slaughter when he ransomed his life by revealing where Laomedon had hidden what was left of his treasure. Before sailing away, Telamon placed a battered crown on the young Trojan’s head and hailed him as King Priam.

Terrified, humiliated, but alive, Podarces swore to himself that he would wear the new name with pride, that he would do whatever was needed to redeem the fortunes of Troy, and that one day he would have his revenge on the barbarians from across the sea.

Before that time the Trojan people had tended to look westwards across the sea to Argos from where their ancestors had come in previous generations. The young King Priam now turned eastwards, opening up negotiations with the great bureaucratic regime of the Hittite empire, looking for loans to help him rebuild, and for trade to repay them. He met with a favourable response. Merchants of the Asian seaboard were also quick to see the advantages of a well-ruled city on a site commanding access to the Black Sea trade. Soon ships were putting in from Egypt too. New buildings began to rise inside the walls of Troy, not just new palaces and houses but also great weaving halls where the people were put to work manufacturing textiles from the raw materials that came into the city from the east as well as from their own mountain flocks. The Trojans’ capacity for work became proverbial and the quality of that work was high, so trade profited. Beyond the city walls, Priam encouraged his people’s traditional skills as horse-breakers until discriminating buyers began to look to Troy for their horses. And the king also took a particular delight in the powerful strain of bulls raised by his Dardanian kinsmen on the pastures of the Idaean Mountains.

Priam was not slow to thank the gods for the favour they had shown him. Soon after coming to the throne, he endowed an ancient mountain shrine to Apollo Smintheus, the bringer and healer of pestilence. Next he gave a new temple to the god inside the city, and then dedicated another on the sacred site at Thymbra. As his wealth increased, he built a spacious market square, surrounded by workshops and warehouses, and overlooked by a new temple which housed the Palladium, an ancient wooden image of the goddess standing only three cubits high that had been made by Pallas Athena herself, and on which the preservation of the city was said to depend.

Meanwhile the king had married. His wife Hecuba was the daughter of a Thracian king and their wedding sealed an important military and trading alliance. But there was also love between them, and Priam’s happiness seemed complete when his queen gave birth to a strong son whom they named Hector because he was destined to be the mainstay of the city. Not long afterwards, Hecuba fell pregnant again and everything seemed set fair until a night shortly before the new child was due, when Hecuba woke in terror from an ominous dream.

In the dream she had given birth to a burning brand from which a spawn of fiery serpents swarmed until the entire city of Troy and all the forests of Mount Ida were ablaze. Disturbed by this dreadful oracle of fire, Priam summoned his soothsayer, who was the priest to Apollo at Thymbra and had the gift of interpreting dreams. The priest confirmed the king’s fears – that if the child in Hecuba’s womb was allowed to live, it would bring ruin on the city.

Two mornings later, the seer emerged from a prophetic trance to declare that a child would be born to a member of the royal house that day. Evil fortune would be averted only if both mother and child were put to death. To Priam’s horror, Hecuba immediately went into labour.

Yet the queen was not the only pregnant woman in the royal household, and during the course of the morning, Priam received news that his sister Cilla had given birth to an infant son. Sick at heart, yet relieved to be spared the loss of his own wife and child, he commanded the immediate death of both his sister and her baby. Having seen the bodies buried in the sacred precinct of the city, Priam returned to his wife’s chamber hopeful that the gods were now satisfied and the safety of his city assured. But night had not yet fallen when Hecuba also gave birth to a son.

Priam looked up from the peaceful face of the child to see the priest and priestess of Apollo entering the bedchamber. He knew at once what was required of him, yet he could not bring himself to order these further and still closer deaths. ‘Isn’t it enough that one royal mother and her child have died today?’ he demanded. ‘Let the gods be content.’

Gravely the priest reminded him of the terrible fate that had fallen on Troy when his father Laomedon had tried to cheat the gods, and the priestess remained implacable in her conviction that the child at least must die. Had not Hecuba’s own dream warned her that she carried the ruin of the city in her womb? Could it be wise to let it live at such dreadful cost?

‘You have brought this evil into the world,’ she said. ‘Have the strength and wisdom to let it die by your own hand.’

When Hecuba could only wail out her refusal, the priest turned his gaze on the king. ‘Will you risk all you have built for the sake of an ill-omened child?’

‘I have served Apollo well,’ Priam protested. ‘How have I wronged him that he should persecute me so?’

The priest opened his hands. ‘Apollo looks deep into the well of time. His concern is for the protection of this city.’

‘If your kingdom is to live,’ the priestess insisted, ‘the child must die.’

‘My sister and her newborn child are already dead at my command,’ Priam cried. ‘Would you have all the Furies roost in my mind? How much blood guilt do you think I can bear?’

The priest looked away. ‘It’s not we who demand this sacrifice. The king must choose between his city and the child.’

Looking for mercy where none was to be found, Priam lifted his eyes. ‘Then let it be the child. But not at my wife’s hand. And not at mine either.’ He dragged the wailing infant from his wife’s arms and gave it to the priestess. ‘Do with it as you will,’ he gasped, ‘and leave us to our grief.’

With Hecuba screaming behind them, the priests left the chamber and handed over the baby to be killed by a palace guard. But the man could not bring himself to do the deed. When he consulted his friends, one of them said, ‘Give the job to Agelaus. He’s used to butchery.’

And so, hours later, in the village where he lived in the Dardanian mountains beyond the plain of Troy, the king’s chief herdsman was drawn from sleep by a horseman hammering at his door. Told what was required of him, Agelaus looked down where the infant’s swaddling bands were coming unwrapped.

‘It seems a fine boy,’ he said. ‘Why does he have to die?’

‘Because the king commands it,’ the horseman replied.

Wondering why this unwanted task should have fallen to him, Agelaus shook his head. ‘Did the king say by what means the child should die?’

‘By any means you choose.’ The man wheeled his mount to gallop away. ‘This thing is the will of the gods,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Be free of it.’

Though he had slaughtered countless animals in his time, Agelaus had no more stomach than the guard for cutting an infant’s throat. Frowning down at the scrap of life in his arms, he muttered, ‘If the gods think you should die, let the gods attend to it.’ Then he took the child to a forest glade on the slopes of Mount Ida and left it there to perish or survive as fate decided.

Three days later, driven by his wife’s insistence, the herdsman returned to the glade. When he saw the tracks of a bear headed that way, he expected to find nothing more than bloodied swaddling bands, but as he came closer a thin sound of crying drifted towards him on the breeze. Hurrying through the brakes, he found the baby still alive, bawling for food and almost blue with cold. Instantly his heart went out to it.

Holding the infant against his chest for warmth, he said, ‘If the gods have sent a she-bear to suckle you, boy, they must mean you to live.’ Tenderly, he placed the baby in the wallet slung at his side, and brought it home to his wife. It was she who spotted the birthmark like a kiss on the baby’s neck and her heart was quickly lost to it. This child had been sent to them, she declared, and she would care for it. She named him Paris, which means ‘wallet’, because of the strange way in which he had come to her.

As the years went by, Paris soon distinguished himself both in courage and intelligence from the herdsmen round him. Even as a child he showed no fear among the bulls, and his greatest delight was to watch them fight one another and to see his own beast triumph. Under the patient tutelage of Agelaus, he soon proved himself a good huntsman and a skilful archer too. And he was still only ten years old on the day when he used his bow for a deadlier purpose than shooting wildfowl, though that had been his only intention when he took off into the woods.

The sun was thunderously hot that day and the air heavy. Paris had set out cheerfully enough but by early afternoon he was feeling drowsy and irritable. Casting about in the bracken for the arrows he had loosed and lost, he felt as though the thunder had got inside his head, so with only an old buck-rabbit and a partridge hanging at his belt, the boy was coming listlessly back down the hillside through the trees when he heard a restive sound of lowing from the cattle penned below.

Dismayed that his father had decided to move the herd without telling him, Paris was about to run down to join the drive when he heard men shouting – unfamiliar voices, strangely accented, barking out commands. He came to a halt while still under the cover of the trees and saw a gang of cattle-lifters breaking down a fence that Agelaus had built that spring.

He had counted nine of them, all armed with spears or swords, when more shouts drew his eyes to the right where Agelaus was running across the hillside from the settlement, followed by two of his herdsmen. They had no more than staves and a single hunting-spear between them. A burly man wearing a helmet and a studded leather jerkin advanced to meet them, drawing his sword and shouting to the others for support.

Paris’s grip tightened on his bow. He saw that there were seven arrows left in his quiver. Swallowing, dry-mouthed, he took one of them between his fingers and nocked it to his bowstring.

By now six of the rustlers confronted Agelaus and his followers on the open meadow, and the other three were coming up quickly. As Agelaus grabbed the spear from the older man at his side, the helmeted leader brandished his sword and ordered one of his spearmen to throw. The man lifted his spear and was about to loose it when an arrow whistled out of the trees and pierced his neck. Herdsmen and rustlers alike watched in amazement as a gush of blood spluttered from his mouth, the spear fell from his hand and he crumpled to the ground. Seconds later, with a sparking of metal against metal, another arrow glanced off the leader’s helmet. Taking advantage of the shock, Agelaus hurled his spear with such force that it drove through the jerkin and dragged the man down to the ground where he lay writhing and slobbering.

Again, for several moments, everyone stood transfixed.

A third arrow flew wide and stuck quivering in the grass. The rustlers had lost their leader but all three herdsmen were now weaponless with seven armed men standing only yards away. Paris loosed another shot at a scrawny rustler, who instantly dropped his spear to clutch at the shaft stuck in his thigh. The remaining cattle-lifters turned uncertainly, not knowing how many assailants were hidden in the trees. When a fourth man grunted and stared down to see an arrow trembling in his belly, three of the others started to run off down the hill. Moments later, unnerved as much by the unexpected alteration in their fortunes as by the groans of those dying around them, the others made off, stopping only to aid their injured comrade.

Agelaus and his companions were watching them hobble away down the hill when Paris came out from between the trees, carrying his bow. He heard his friends calling to him as if from a far distance. The air wobbled about his head. His throat was very dry. ‘I had only two arrows left,’ he mumbled as he fought free of Agelaus’s embrace. Then he stood, looking down at where the dead leader lay with the spear-shaft through his lungs. Turning away in recoil, he saw the body of the man with the barb through his throat, and a third, who gazed up at him as if beseeching him to take back the arrow from his belly.

A nimbus of darkness circled behind the boy’s eyes. He was watching the dying rustler choke on a gush of blood from his mouth when that dark circle widened and thickened so swiftly that it consumed all the light in the day.

He woke to the sound of water running over stones. He was beside a river in the shade of a thatched awning, lying on a litter, and the flash of white rapids came harsh against his eyes. The air about his head was aromatic with herbs. Savouring the mingled scents of balm, camomile and lavender, he moved his head and moaned a little at the dizziness. Then he saw the grey haired man sitting on a nearby rock, fingering the long curls of his beard.

A girl’s voice said, ‘I think he’s awake.’ Paris turned to look at her. ‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘he is,’ and her face broke into a bright, gaptoothed smile. Her hair also hung in curls, but so fair and fine they might have been spun from the light about her head. Wearing a white smock marked with grass stains, she was playing with a mouse that ran between her small hands. She was perhaps six years old. At her back, some distance away, were two grassy hummocks with stone portals, which looked like burial mounds.

‘Bring him some water,’ her father said, putting a gently restraining hand to the boy’s shoulder. ‘Lie still for a while,’ he smiled. ‘All will be well.’

Paris tilted his face to watch the girl as she stretched out to hold a drinking cup under a freshet of water bursting from a dark cleft in the rocks. The inside of his head felt burned out with pain. It was as though his violent dreams of fire and smoke and blazing buildings were still smouldering in there.

The girl came back and lifted the cup to his lips. ‘You’ve been very sick, Alexander,’ she said with the air of one endowed with privileged knowledge, ‘but my father has the gift of healing. You’ll soon be strong again.’

The water flowed across his tongue to break like light in his throat. He licked his parched lips, drank some more, then laid his head back. Struggling to retrieve the recent past, he remembered how the flies had gathered round the bloody wounds of the men he had slaughtered. His breath whimpered a little. Then he said, ‘My name isn’t Alexander.’

‘No, it’s Paris, I know. But you’ve been given another name since you drove off those cattle-lifters. They say you may only be a boy but you’ve become a defender of men, so that’s what they call you now – Alexander. I like it better.’

‘That’s enough now,’ her father said. ‘Give him time to come to himself.’ He smiled down at the boy again. ‘I’m Apollo’s priest at this shrine. My name’s Cebren. Your father brought you here three days ago to be cured of the burning fever. He’ll be glad to learn that the mouse-god has looked kindly on you. In two days he’ll come to bring you home. All you need now is rest.’

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