Valerio Manfredi - Heroes

‘Ulysses fell silent again and he seemed to be listening to the wind that whispered light through the courtyard.

‘ “Do you know that the queen of Crete has landed at Mases to attend a secret meeting? No, you don’t know. But I do. I also know that Queen Clytemnestra has sent a man she trusts to Ithaca, taking advantage of my absence. What do you make of all this?” said Ulysses.

‘I was astonished. “How do you know all this?” I asked him.

‘He did not answer. He said: “Send the other woman to the meeting, and have her make sure it takes place in the open, after sunset. We cannot run any risks.” I did as he had told me to do, and we came to learn of their pact. Ulysses and myself. No one else.’

The prince shook his head incredulously: ‘Not even my father? Why? It could have saved his life. .’ The boy’s gaze was murky, challenging again.

‘It wasn’t clear in the beginning. It seemed to be a pact of friendship among the queens, an agreement to meet every year to celebrate rites in honour of the Potinja . Only Ulysses continued to scent danger, and the day the fleet set sail from Aulis he was still tormented by suspicion.

‘Many years later, the night we stopped at Tenedos on our return voyage, he boarded my ship. I was awake, out on the deck, watching the bloody light illuminating the sky to the east: Troy was still burning. . He came close without making a sound and put his hands down on the ship’s railing, next to my own. He said to me: “Do not trust anyone, when you arrive home. Put ashore secretly, at night. Allow only the men who fought with you at Ilium to come close to you. I’ve warned Diomedes as well, but I fear he confides too much in his strength. He has not yet learned that deceit is infinitely more powerful.”

‘He turned towards the curved stern which my companion slept under, exhausted by the emotions and the hardships of those last days and nights. He said: “Send her to meet with the other queens, if they invite her.” ’

‘And why didn’t you return?’ insisted the prince. His eyes flashed with barely restrained ire.

The king lowered his head: ‘I sailed for Delos because I could no longer stay away from Helen. I had forced her into long, bitter solitude. I couldn’t wait any longer. I left the woman who was with me to the priestesses, so they could take her to a secret place in the Peloponnese. And I stayed with Helen.’

‘As you bedded Helen, my father was dying! Downed like an animal, along with all of his comrades!’

The king’s hands trembled, his eyes filled with tears. ‘It is as you say,’ he said. ‘I heard his last breath, distinctly, I felt the knife that cut his throat slash my own flesh, I saw his funeral mask rising like a bloody moon, hovering over the tower of the chasm! Son, my grief for his death bites into me every day and every night, like a ferocious dog. Do not condemn me, for you know not what paths your life may still take! You do not know if your courage will fail you one day, suddenly, if passion will cloud your mind and your good sense. Our destiny is not in our hands, and if the gods grant us a moment of happiness they make us pay for it bitterly, sooner or later. Do not judge me, do not condemn a man who suffers.’

He stood before the young man as if he was awaiting a verdict. Orestes looked up at him: his red eyes held an expression of dazed heartache, his face was deeply creased, his chin trembled imperceptibly and his mouth twisted in agony. Orestes got to his feet as well, and stared into his eyes for a moment, then burst into tears and clasped his uncle close.

They remained thus for some time, both wounded by the same pain, tormented by the same obscure fears. In the end, the youth pulled away and stepped back: ‘For that which they have done,’ he said, and his voice was cold and ruthless, ‘no mercy.’

The mountains seemed to have no end in the land of Hesperia, just as one day, long ago now, it had seemed to Diomedes and his men that the plains were without end. The Achaeans managed to avoid the Teresh who controlled the region to the west by journeying along the crests of the mountains, but they ended up in the land of the Ombro , where they had to struggle to force their way through, although the Chnan at times tried to negotiate with them. Their small communities were very belligerent and mistrustful, and they were scattered everywhere, behind every corner. The Achaeans were often forced to seek shelter in the forests, so that too many men would not be lost. Whenever they neared a town in search of food, Diomedes’s men were often attacked and forced to engage in unsparing combat.

The Ombro inhabited a splendid land, made of gentle hills and valleys full of flowers of every colour, edged with sparkling torrents. But it was a poor land, and very far from the sea; the Pica lived in the intervening territory, on the eastern side of the mountains. They were quite similar to the Ombro , cultivating the earth and raising animals in wooden pens. They burned their dead on woodpiles, then put their ashes into clay jars which they buried with a few humble belongings.

The Pica were dangerous because they knew the art of crafting metal, and they made spears, axes and knives and sometimes even laminated bronze vases which the Chnan considered with great interest, carrying off as many as he could when they managed to seize a town. Their women were beautiful, with long, smooth braided hair; they wore gowns woven at the loom in bright colours.

In the chiefs’ huts they sometimes found abundant quantities of amber, which certainly came from far away, perhaps from the fabled Electrides islands celebrated by sailors in every one of the Achaean ports.

At the centre of each village, the Pica planted a pole topped with the image of a woodpecker, their sacred animal or perhaps their god. They took their name from him. Their land was very bare, suited mainly to grazing sheep and goats. Sometimes the sea could be seen in the distance, a sea as green as the meadows and edged with white foam. But the coast was completely uniform and there was not a port to be seen; no promontories from which one could gaze into the horizon, no coastal plains that could be cultivated. Myrsilus claimed that that was the same sea that they had crossed years earlier when they had left Argos to head north, and that if Anchialus had lived, he would be looking for them along that coast. He wondered what fate had befallen their homeland, since Anchialus had surely died in the hands of those bastard Shekelesh without ever delivering Diomedes’s message of alarm.

One day, having pushed on in the direction of the eastern sea, Myrsilus returned with little objects of no value, but that he was never to part with; they were small vases and drinking cups that came from the land of the Achaeans. He showed them to the king, saying: ‘See, wanax ? Someone from our land has ventured this far. That must mean that nothing terrible has happened to them. If we succeed in founding a city one day, we can make contact with merchants who come from our land and have news of it whenever they come out this way.’

The king had taken those humble little objects into his hands and caressed them, so Myrsilus gave him one to keep for himself.

Diomedes still tried to breed confidence in his men, but he realized as time passed that they were living from hand to mouth. They always ate as though it were their last meal, slept with a woman as though it might be the last time they ever made love. It was sad, and made him sick at heart, but there was nothing he could do to change it.

Ros, the bride from the Mountains of Ice, loved him after all the time they had spent together, but she had not given him a child and this instilled a dark foreboding in Diomedes’s soul; if that woman had been summoned from lands far away to restore life to a dying people, then he must be the one who bore the seeds of destruction and annihilation within him. He realized that Aphrodite’s revenge would persecute him to the very end, to any corner of the land or sea. He had wounded her on the fields of Ilium and she punished him by extinguishing life wherever he now tried to sow it.