Revolted and maddened, I dashed her hand away. ‘Why should I seek you out? What good will it do me with Priam if I’m seen dancing attendance on the Great Harlot?’

She listened to this unmoved, eyes lowered. The black lashes lifted then, her green eyes looked up at me gravely. ‘I agree with all of that,’ she said, settling herself on a seat, shaking out her frills and ruffles with little chiming noises. ‘In the eyes of a man,’ she said composedly, ‘a woman is a chattel. A piece of solid property he owns. He may abuse her as he sees fit without fear of reprisal. Women are passive creatures. We have no voice of authority because we are not deemed capable of logical thought. We bear men, though that is forgotten.’

I yawned. ‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you,’ I said.

‘I like you,’ she said, smiling, ‘because you’re so turned in upon your own ambitions. And because you’re like me.’

‘Like you?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m Aphrodite’s bauble. You’re her son.’

She came into my embrace with eagerness and dizzying caresses; I lifted her into my arms and walked with her through the silent corridors to my own private room. No one saw us. I suppose my mother ensured that, the vixen.

Even when the depths of her passion shook me to the core of my being, there was a part of her which didn’t even know that she was possessed, some corner of herself withdrawn and secretive. I met her in an agony of pleasure, but while she drained me of all my spirit she kept her own locked fast in some hiding place, and I had no hope of ever finding the key.

21

NARRATED BY

Agamemnon

Battle orders had long been issued to the army, but Priam remained within his walls. Even the Trojan raiding parties ceased to plague us; my troops fretted from uncertainty and inaction. Having nothing to discuss, I called no council until Odysseus appeared.

‘Sire, would you call a council for noon today?’ he asked.

‘Why? There’s nothing to say.’

‘Don’t you want to know how to lure Priam out?’

‘What are you up to, Odysseus?’

Came a brilliant, laughing look. ‘Sire! How can you ask me to reveal my secrets now? As well might you ask for immortality!’

‘Very well, then. A council at noon.’

‘Another favour, sire?’

‘What?’ I asked warily. He was using that irresistible grin he saved to get what he wanted. I weakened; I could do nothing else when Odysseus smiled like that. One had to love him.

‘Not a general council. Only certain men.’

‘It’s your council, ask whom you like. Give me their names.’

‘Nestor, Idomeneus, Menelaos, Diomedes and Achilles.’

‘Not Kalchas?’

‘Least of all Kalchas.’

‘I wish I knew why you mislike the man so much, Odysseus. If he was a traitor we’d know it by now, surely. Yet you insist upon excluding him from every significant council. As the Gods bear the man witness, he’s had innumerable opportunities to give our secrets to the Trojans, but he never has.’

‘Some of our secrets, Agamemnon, he knows as little about as you do. I believe that he waits for the one secret worth his betraying where his heart belongs.’

I chewed my lip, huffed. ‘All right then, no Kalchas.’

‘Nor can you mention it to him. More than that, I want the doors and windows sealed with boards once we’re assembled, and guards posted outside so thickly they touch each other.’

‘Odysseus! Isn’t that going too far?’

He grinned wickedly. ‘I’d hate to make Kalchas look like a fool, sire, so we have to finish this business in the tenth year.’

The handful of men Odysseus had asked for came expecting a full council, and were curious when they understood they were all.

‘Why not Meriones?’ asked Idomeneus a little peevishly.

‘And why not Ajax?’ asked Achilles truculently.

I cleared my throat; they settled down. ‘Odysseus asked me to call you together,’ I said. ‘Just the five of you, him and I. The noises you can hear are guards boarding up this room. Which will tell you more emphatically than I could how secret our business is. I require your individual oaths on this: whatever is said here can’t be repeated outside these walls, even in sleep.’

One by one they knelt and took the oath.

When Odysseus began, his voice was soft; a trick of his. He would commence so quietly one had to strain to hear him, and as he outlined his ideas his voice would rise, until at the end it resonated among the rafters like beating drums.

‘Before I begin to talk about the real reason for this very small council,’ he said almost inaudibly, ‘it’s necessary to tell some of you what others among you already know. Namely, the actual function of that jail of mine in the hollow.’

I listened in growing anger and amazement as Odysseus told the rest of us what Nestor and Diomedes had always known. Why did it not occur to any of us to investigate activities in that hollow? Perhaps because, I admitted in the midst of my outrage, it had suited us not to enquire; Odysseus had removed some of our worst problems, which had never returned to plague us. Not, I learned now, due to weary prison sentences. They were his spies.

‘Well,’ I said at the end of it, tight lipped, ‘at least now we know how you can predict what Troy is going to do next so uncannily! But why the secrecy? I am King of Kings, Odysseus! I was entitled to know from the very beginning!’

‘Not,’ said Odysseus, ‘while you favoured Kalchas.’

‘I still favour Kalchas.’

‘But not the way you did, I suspect.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps. Go on, Odysseus. What have your spies to do with this meeting?’

‘They haven’t been as idle as our army,’ he said. ‘You’ve all heard the rumours as to why Priam has made no move to come outside his walls. The commonest one is that his reinforcements haven’t come up to expectations – that he lacks our numbers. That isn’t true. At this moment he has seventy-five thousand men, a figure not including almost ten thousand chariots. When Penthesileia of the Amazons and Memnon of the Hittites arrive, he’ll outnumber us drastically. Added to which, he’s under the misapprehension that we’ll be lucky to field forty thousand men. You may take it all of this is accurate. I have people in the confidence of Priam and Hektor.’

He took a little turn about the room, sparsely populated and therefore free of obstacles. ‘Before I go any further, I must talk about the King of Troy. Priam is an old, old man, and prone to the doubts, vacillations, fears and prejudices of the very old. In short, he’s no Nestor. Never think he is. He rules Troy with a far more autocratic hand than any Greek king owns – he’s literally king of all he surveys. Not even his son and Heir would dare to tell him what to do. Agamemnon calls councils. Priam calls assemblies. Agamemnon listens to what we have to say and heeds us. Priam listens to himself and whoever echoes what he’s thinking.’

He stopped to face us. ‘This is the man we must outwit, this is the man we must bend to our will without his ever suspecting it. Hektor weeps as he walks the battlements, counting his own men and seeing us sitting on the Hellespont shore like fruit ripe for the plucking. Aineas chafes and burns. Antenor alone does nothing, because Priam is doing as Antenor wishes – Priam too does nothing.’

Another march around the chairs; every head followed him. ‘So why exactly is Priam unwilling to commit himself when he has more than a good chance of driving us out of the Troad right now? Does he truly wait for Memnon and Penthesileia?’

Nestor nodded. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he said. ‘That’s what a very old man ought to do.’

Odysseus drew a breath; his voice was swelling. ‘But we cannot allow him to wait! He must be lured from the city before he can afford to lose men by the countless thousands. My sources of information are much better than Priam’s, and I can tell you that both Penthesileia and Memnon will arrive before winter closes the passes from the interior. The Amazons are horsed, so they count as cavalry. With them, Troy will field over twenty thousand cavalry. In less than two moons she’ll be here, with Memnon hard on her heels.’