‘Did you sit down and bathe in blood, Achilles?’ the High King asked. ‘Are you hurt?’

I shook my head dumbly; the reaction against the storm of emotions I had experienced was beginning, and what I had learned about myself threatened to summon the Daughters of Kore permanently into my mind. Could I live with such a burden and not go mad? Then I thought of Iphigenia, and understood that to live on as a sane man was a part of my punishment.

‘So it was you with the axe!’ Agamemnon was saying. ‘I thought it must be Ajax. But you’ve earned our thanks. When you brought back the body of the man who killed Iolaos, the Trojans lost heart.’

‘I doubt I was responsible, sire,’ I managed to say. ‘The Trojans had had enough, and we kept spewing men ashore without end. The man Kyknos was a personal thing. He mocked my honour.’

Odysseus took my arm again, but this time gently. ‘Your ship lies yonder, Achilles. Get aboard before it sails.’

‘Where to?’ I asked blankly.

‘I don’t know, except that we can’t stay here. Let Troy cope with the dead bodies. Telephos says there’s a good beach inside a lagoon around the corner on the Hellespont shore. We intend to have a look.’

In the end most of the Kings sailed aboard Agamemnon’s ship, north along the coast until we reached the mouth of the Hellespont; the first Greek ships to enter those waters in a generation surged serenely on. Only a league or two further the hills dabbling their flanks in the sea gave way to a beach longer and wider by far than the one at Sigios, more than a league in length. At either end of it a river flowed into the water, their sandbars forming an almost landlocked lagoon. The sole entrance to the salt lake was a narrow passage in the middle; within, the sea was dead calm. The farther bank of each river was crowned by a headland, and on top of the one beside the bigger, dirtier river was a fortress, deserted now, its garrison undoubtedly fled to Troy. No one emerged from it to see Agamemnon’s flagship sail in, and every neat little toll-collecting warship was still beached.

As we lined up along the rail, Agamemnon turned to Nestor. ‘Will this do?’ he asked.

‘It looks quite splendid to my untrained eye, but ask Phoinix.’

‘It is a good place, sire,’ I offered diffidently. ‘If they try to raid us here they’ll find their task a hard one. The rivers make it impossible for them to outflank us, though whoever lies against each river will be most vulerable.’

‘Then who will volunteer to draw his ships up on the rivers?’ the High King asked, then added, a trifle shamefaced, ‘Mine will have to be in the centre of the beach – ease of access, you know.’

‘I’ll take the bigger river,’ I said quickly, ‘and fence my camp off with a stockade in case we’re attacked. A defence within a defence.’

The High King’s brow darkened. ‘That sounds as if you think we’re going to be here for a long time, son of Peleus.’

I looked him in the eye. ‘We are, sire. Accept it.’

But he wouldn’t. He started giving orders as to who would beach whose ships where, emphasising impermanence.

The flagship remained in the middle of the lagoon as one by one the ships were slowly rowed in, though not a third of them had been beached before night fell. My own vessels were still riding the open Hellespont, as were those belonging to Ajax, Little Ajax, Odysseus and Diomedes. We would be last of all. Luckily the weather was holding well, the Hellespont was unruffled.

As the sun died into the sea at my back I took my first cool look at the place, and was satisfied. With a good stout defence wall behind the rows of beached ships, our camp would be almost as invulnerable as Troy. Which rose in the east like a mountain, closer here than at Sigios. We were going to need that good stout defence wall; Agamemnon was wrong. Troy wouldn’t fall in a day, any more than it had been built in a day.

Once all the ships were in and properly beached, the chocks hammered under their hulls and their masts stepped down – there were four rows of them – we buried King Iolaos of Phylake. His body was fetched from his flagship and set on a high bier atop a grassy knoll while one by one the men of Greece’s nations marched past as the priests chanted and the Kings poured the libations. As slayer of his slayer it was my duty to give his funeral oration; I told the silent host how calmly he had accepted his fate, how gallantly he had fought before he died, and the identity of his slayer, a son of Poseidon. Then I suggested that his courage be marked by something more enduring than a eulogy, and asked Agamemnon if he might be renamed Protesilaos, which meant ‘the first of the people’.

Solemn consent was accorded; from that moment on his people of Phylake called him Protesilaos. The priests fitted the death mask of hammered gold over his sleeping face and twitched his shroud away to reveal him clad in all the fire of a robe woven from gold. Then we laid him on a barge and rowed him across the biggest river, to where the masons had worked day and night, hollowing his tomb out of the headland. The death car was rolled inside, the tomb was closed and the masons began to tip earth across the stone-filled doorway; in a season or two no eye, even the most discerning, would be able to see whereabouts King Protesilaos was interred.

He had fulfilled the prophecy and made his people proud.

14

NARRATED BY

Odysseus

Beaching over eleven hundred ships took all my time and energy in the few days after that first battle on Trojan soil. The tally had diminished a little, for some of the poorest among Helen’s suitors had not been able to afford ships as well built as, for instance, Agamemnon’s. Several dozen vessels had gone down, holed during the frantic rush to get sufficient men onto Sigios beach, but we had not lost any of the supply ships or those holding horses for our chariots.

To my surprise, the Trojans didn’t venture anywhere near our mushrooming camp, a fact which Agamemnon interpreted as a sure sign resistance was finished. Thus, with the entire fleet safe ashore so the hulls wouldn’t swell and crack by sucking up too much water, our High King held a council. Flushed by his success at Sigios, there was no stopping him as he made much of what I thought would soon prove to be very little. I let him run on, wondering who else would question his confident opinions. As was his due, he had his say amid silence, but no sooner had he handed the Staff to Nestor (Kalchas was not in attendance, why I didn’t know) than Achilles was on his feet demanding it.

Yes, of course it would be Achilles. I didn’t trouble to conceal my smile. The Lion King had bitten off a large mouthful in the lad from Iolkos, and from the frown gathering on his brow I fancied he was suffering acute pangs of indigestion. Did any enterprise so brave and bold ever get off to a worse start than ours? Tempests and human sacrifice, jealousy and greed, no love lost between some who might end in needing each other. And what had possessed Agamemnon to send his cousin Aigisthos to Mykenai to mount guard over Klytemnestra? An action I judged as foolhardy as Menelaos’s wandering off to Crete with Paris in his house. Aigisthos had a legitimate claim to the throne! Perhaps the problem was that the sons of Atreus had forgotten what Atreus had done to the sons of Thyestes. Stewed them and dished them up to their father at a banquet. The much younger Aigisthos had escaped the fate of his elder brothers. Well, it wasn’t my problem. Whereas the widening rift between Agamemnon and Achilles most definitely was.

Had Achilles been a simple fighting machine like his cousin Ajax the rift would not have opened. But Achilles was a thinker who also excelled in battle. The smile slipped from my mouth when I realised that if I had been born with this young man’s size and circumstances, yet retained my own mind, I might have conquered the world. Mine was the stronger life strand; it seemed likely that I would be there watching when they covered the lipless face of Achilles with a lipless mask of gold, but there was a glory about him that was never mine. I felt a sensation akin to loss, understanding that Achilles owned some key to the meaning of life always dangling just out of my reach. Was it a good thing to be so detached, so cool? Oh, just once to burn, as Diomedes yearned just once to freeze!