Lindsay Clarke - The Return from Troy

Offering his awkward condolences, Odysseus gazed into the man’s grim face with sympathy; yet it was like listening to news from another, harsher world than the one he now inhabited. He struggled a little to connect with it.

‘But surely Agamemnon won’t let things stay that way?’ he said. ‘He needs Thessaly too much to let it go without a fight. He won’t risk letting the Dorians advance any further south.’

Guneus looked up from the handful of food he had just scooped from the calabash he had been given. ‘You haven’t heard? I thought the whole world must know of it!’ He took in the perplexity in Odysseus’s eyes. ‘Agamemnon’s dead and buried, man. There’s been revolution in Mycenae. Clytaemnestra murdered him as soon as he got back. Stabbed him to death in his own bath-house, they say.’ The Thessalian’s face wrinkled into a sour smile at the other man’s shocked gape. ‘It’s true,’ he declared. ‘True as I’m sitting here in Libya. The King of Men got even less profit from his war than I did. At least I’ve come away with my skin intact – even if I’ve lost everything else apart from my ship.’ Guneus wiped the back of his hand across his beard. ‘I’m looking to rebuild here in Libya. I hear there’s good country over to the west by the River Cinyps, and no one to claim it but a few beggarly nomads. It’s there for the taking.’ He scowled down at the mess of pottage in his bowl. ‘What is this sticky pap you’ve given me? It’s too sweet. Sets my teeth on edge.’

‘It’s an acquired taste,’ Odysseus said without thinking. ‘But what you said … it makes no sense to me. Agamemnon was coming home in triumph. He’d achieved everything he and Clytaemnestra planned together.’

And then, with a sickening lurch in his stomach, like that of a man waking from thick sleep to face the prospect of a dreaded day, he remembered the death of Iphigenaia.

‘Clytaemnestra hated his guts,’ Guneus said dryly, pushing his calabash aside. ‘Always had done, if you ask me, long before he cut the windpipe of that pretty child of theirs in Aulis. So she got the King of Men to do what she wanted him to do – bring home the treasure of Troy. And once it was in her grasp, she got rid of him.’ Grimacing, he licked his sticky fingers clean and wiped his hands on his kilt. ‘Is there no meat in this camp of yours? Don’t you Ithacans go hunting ever?’

‘There’s goat,’ Odysseus answered with a hot darkness swirling in his mind. ‘We’ll get some skinned and roasted in a minute … but I’m still trying to make sense of what you’re telling me.’

‘If you can make sense of this world,’ Guneus shrugged, ‘you’re a better man than I am.’

‘But I can’t believe the Mycenaeans would let a woman sit on the Lion Throne again – not even one as clever as Clytaemnestra.’

‘They don’t have to. She’s taken a lover. Aegisthus son of Thyestes, would you believe? Yes, he’s back in Mycenae again, and nominally king there now – though Clytaemnestra wields all the power of course. The two of them had the whole thing planned. They murdered the High King and Cassandra together, and the palace guard finished off any commanders who stayed loyal to Agamemnon.’

‘Surely it can’t have been that easy?’

‘Well, a couple of the leading citizens did try to organize resistance, but when they were put to death Clytaemnestra had absolute control of the city. There’s unrest in the army, of course, and in the hill country around Mycenae; and none of the other kings look likely to accept Aegisthus as suzerain. After all, who wants to pay tribute to a man who can’t keep the peace in his own backyard?’

‘But no one’s raising a force against him?’

‘There’s talk of it. Agamemnon’s son Orestes is still alive and he won’t have anything to do with his mother now. I hear he’s taken refuge with King Strophius in Phocis. Some of Agamemnon’s men are rallying around him.’

Astounded to learn that the bloody history of Mycenae had taken a further malevolent and vengeful twist, Odysseus asked, ‘What about Menelaus? Does he know what’s happened?’

‘There’s been no sign of him. He’s out east somewhere – Cyprus or Egypt, I don’t know. Cuddled up with Helen, I suppose, and staying out of trouble.’

Odysseus sat in incredulous silence. How could the world have undergone such changes while he lounged on this uneventful beach in a stupor of ignorance? How long must he have been stuck here that such drama could have unfolded while he dozed? And what were its consequences for the lesser kingdoms of Argos? How might Ithaca be affected?

He looked up to see Guneus frowning at him, shaking his head.

‘I’m sorry to have shocked you this way,’ the Thessalian said. ‘I thought you must know what kind of turmoil all Argos is in these days. I thought that’s why you were holed up here.’

‘What do you mean?’ Odysseus demanded with a further lurch of apprehension. ‘What else has happened?’

He listened in disbelief as Guneus informed him how Diomedes had returned to Tiryns after being shipwrecked in Lycia only to find that his wife and her lover had locked the gates of his city against him. Then he was shocked again to learn that Idomeneus had suffered the same humiliating fate on coming home to Crete.

‘The last I heard,’ Guneus said, ‘they were in council together at Corinth, hoping to enlist old Nestor’s help in regaining their lost kingdoms. But that would mean civil war right across Argos and, as you can imagine, there’s no appetite for that. Either way,’ he sighed, ‘it looks as though the poor bloody Thessalians can’t expect much help from the south right now.’

Struck by the cruel irony of it all, Odysseus said, ‘You mean that Agamemnon and the others fought for all those years to bring home another man’s faithless wife, only to find themselves betrayed by their own wives while they were gone?’

A touch uneasily, Guneus kept his gaze on the place where his crew were gathering eagerly around Eurylochus who was pouring wine into their gourds. ‘That’s about the size of it, I suppose.’

‘But that all three of them should have done it …?’ Odysseus puzzled aloud to himself, becoming aware of a dull throbbing at the crown of his head and of pressure building at his temples. ‘Clytaemnestra. Agialeia. Meda. And all around the same time, you say? It couldn’t just have happened by chance. Surely they must have been in conspiracy?’

‘The rumour is,’ Guneus muttered, ‘that King Nauplius of Euboea was behind it.’

‘Nauplius? But he was one of Agamemnon’s principal backers. He put up a huge amount of capital for the war. Without him …’

Odysseus faltered there. He caught the knowing glint in the other man’s eyes. A long-suppressed memory broke through the troubled surface of his mind.

‘Palamedes!’ he whispered.

‘That’s right,’ Guneus nodded and spat into the sand, ‘Palamedes. Old Nauplius never forgave Agamemnon for having his son stoned to death as a traitor. And who can blame him? It always struck me as a dubious business. Palamedes was too popular with the troops for Agamemnon’s liking. Anyway, it must certainly have been Nauplius who ordered the lighting of the false beacons that wrecked the Argive fleet off Euboea. It could never have happened without his consent.’ The Thessalian hesitated, glanced uncertainly at his friend, remembering too late how closely Odysseus had been implicated in the death of Palamedes; then he decided to proceed, though with less of the bluff confidence in his voice. ‘There’s a rumour that Nauplius had been travelling through the kingdoms of Argos long before that, trying to persuade the queens to betray their husbands. He wasn’t strong enough to avenge his son’s death any other way, so he turned himself into a viper pouring poison in their ears. He was definitely seen in Tiryns and Mycenae. It seems fairly clear he was in Knossos too.’