Before we pushed off Agamemnon made it clear that he didn’t expect to be greeted by hostile men bearing arms; he expected to invest the city without organised opposition.
But the Gods were not with us that day. The moment the seventh ship in Agamemnon’s line rounded the tip of Tenedos, great billows of smoke arose on the headland flanking Sigios. They had learned that we lurked nearby and they were ready for us.
Our orders were to take Sigios, then press on immediately to the city. When my own ship sailed out into the strait I could see the Trojan troops lining up along the beach.
Even the winds were against us. We had to furl our sails and break out the oars, which meant half of our army would be too weary to fight well. To add to our woes, the current issuing from the mouth of the Hellespont fanned out into the open sea, and it too was against us. It took the whole morning to row the short distance to the mainland.
I smiled sourly when I noticed that the order of precedence had changed; Iolaos of Phylake forged ahead of Agamemnon now, with the men of Phylake in their forty ships close behind him and the High King’s mighty fleet out on his left. Did Iolaos curse his fate, or welcome it? I wondered. He had been elected the first King ashore, he was the one Kalchas said must die.
Honour dictated that I should ask a bigger effort of my oarsmen, yet prudence urged that I ensure my Myrmidons retained enough breath to do battle.
‘You can’t catch Iolaos,’ Patrokles said, reading my mind. ‘What will be, will be.’
This wasn’t my first military engagement, for I had fought alongside my father since I came down from Pelion and the years with Chiron; but all those campaigns were as nothing compared to what awaited us on the beach at Sigios. The Trojans were lining up in thousands upon thousands, more and more of them, and the few ships which had sat on the pebbles yesterday were now inland, beyond the village.
When I touched Patrokles on the arm I felt it shaking, looked down at my own limbs: firm.
‘Patrokles, go to the stern and call across to Automedon in the next ship. Tell him to have his steersmen close up the gap between us, and tell him to pass the message on, not only to our ships, but to everyone else’s. When we beach we’ll not be doing much more than floating in the water, so the beaks won’t break down hulls. Tell Automedon to get his men across my deck onto the beach, and everybody else the same. Otherwise we’ll never manage to get enough troops ashore to avert a massacre.’
He sped through the waist to the afterdeck, cupped his hands about his mouth and shouted to the vigilant Automedon, whose armour sparkled in the sun as he shouted back. Then I saw him obey, saw his ship closing upon ours until it ran with its beaked bow just clear of our beam. The other ships in view were doing the same; we had turned into a floating bridge. Below me my men were up from their oars and arming, our impetus sufficient to run us aground. There were only ten ships ahead of me now, and the first of them belonged to Iolaos.
It plunged its beak into the shingle and came to a halt, shuddering; for a moment Iolaos stood in its bow hesitating, then he shrieked the Phylakian war cry and sped down into the waist. He was over the side with his men after him, swarming as they took up the battle song. Frightfully outnumbered, they did some havoc nonetheless. Then a massive warrior in a suit of gold cut Iolaos down and hacked him to ribbons with an axe.
Others were beaching now. Ships to my left were sliding in, their men jumping from the rails down into the mêlée, not willing to wait for ladders. I strapped on my helmet and clipped its golden plume out of the way, wriggled inside my gold-trimmed bronze cuirass to straighten it, and picked up my axe in both hands. It was a lovely thing, one of the pieces of plunder Minos had picked up during a foreign campaign, bigger and heavier by far than any Cretan axe. My sword brushed my leg, but Old Pelion lay put away, no use in close fighting. This was axe work, and my arms could swing that double-bladed beauty back and forth the whole day without flagging. Only Ajax and myself chose an axe for hand-to-hand combat; an axe big enough to be more useful than a sword was too cumbersome for an ordinary man. Little wonder then that I hungered to come at the gold-suited giant who had killed Iolaos.
Too intent upon the beach, too engrossed in taking everything into account, I lost whatever passed through my mind during those last few moments. When a shudder told me that we were aground, another followed hard upon it, almost causing me to lose my balance. A glance behind me revealed that Automedon had married his ship to mine and that his men were already pouring across my deck. Like some pampered Cretan woman’s monkey I leaped onto the prow and hung there looking down on the heads of such a mixture of men I could hardly tell friend from foe. But it was necessary that I be seen by all the men who surged behind, those on Alkimos’s vessel coming across Automedon’s deck, more and more of them as my ship still endured the weakening spasms of collisions occurring further and further away.
Then I brandished my axe high above my head, roared out the war cry of the Myrmidons in a brazen voice, and sprang from the prow down onto the seething mass of heads below me. Luck was with me; a Trojan head shattered beneath the impact of my heels. I fell on top of him still holding the axe fast in my hands, my shield somewhere on the deck above, too much of a hindrance in a struggle like this. In an instant I was upright, howling the battle call at the top of my lungs until the Myrmidons took it up and the air resonated with the chilling sound of Myrmidons out to kill. The Trojans wore purple plumes atop their helms, another piece of good luck; purple was forbidden to any Greek save the four High Kings – and Kalchas.
Eyes glared at me, a dozen swords menaced, but I reared up and brought the axe down with such force that I cleaved a man in two from skull to groin. It stopped them. Good counsel from my father, who had taught it to every Myrmidon: that absolute ferocity of aggression in hand to hand combat would make men back away instinctively. I used the axe again, this time in a circle like a spoke on a wheel, and those who were still foolish enough to try to get at me felt its blade slice their bellies through their armour, which was bronze. No leather for a Trojan! But then, they had the bronze monopoly. How rich Troy must be.
Patrokles was behind me with his shield to protect my back and Myrmidons were dropping countless in our rear from ships to shore. The old team was in action. I advanced, the axe breaking the ranks in front of me like a priest’s wand, cutting down anyone wearing a purple plume. This was nothing like the battle of a true test of strength; there was neither time nor room to single out a prince or a king, no space separating the opposing forces. This was just a pack of warriors of all degree, breast to breast. What seemed like years ago I had vowed to keep a tally of those I slew, but I soon became too excited to count, in love with the sudden give of soft flesh through hard bronze as the axe bit.
Nothing existed for me save blood and faces, terror and fury, gallant men who tried to parry the axe with their swords and died for it, cowards who met their fates in gibbering dread, worse than cowards who turned their backs and tried to flee. I felt myself invincible, I knew none on that field would bring me down. And I took pleasure in the sight of faces split wide in bloody yawns; the lust to kill soaked into my very marrow. A kind of madness, reaping a harvest of chests and bellies and heads, the axe dripping blood, blood running down the handle into the rough rope fibres wound around its base so that my hands wouldn’t slip. I forgot everything. All I wanted was to see purple plumes dyed red. If someone had put a Trojan helmet on my head and turned me loose on my own men I would have slaughtered just the same. Right and wrong did not exist, only the lust to kill. This was the meaning of all my years under the sun, this was what I had been left a mortal man to become: a perfect killing machine.
