Glyn Iliffe - The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

Eperitus adjusted his sword in its scabbard and said nothing. Then Odysseus signalled to him from the archway, where he was waiting with Diomedes.

‘We want you to listen, Eperitus,’ Odysseus said. ‘See if you can hear anything.’

‘Silence!’ Diomedes ordered, instantly stilling the chatter among the men.

Eperitus took Odysseus’s torch and entered the mouth of the passageway, taking a few steps down into the consuming darkness that neither the flaming brand nor the thin daylight from the entrance could penetrate. It reminded him of the Stygian caves of Mount Parnassus, where long ago he and Odysseus had been guided into the presence of the Pythoness, the priestess of Gaia who had prophesied to them in riddles. He shut his eyes and concentrated.

At first, all he could hear was the fizz and sputter of the torches behind him, mingled with the suppressed breathing of fifteen other men crowded into a confined space. Then the sounds faded, pocketed away in another part of his consciousness as he pushed out with his senses. He could feel the gentle breath of chilly air rising from deep below the hillside, drawn naturally towards the comparative warmth that had spilled in from outside. Then, as he reached further and further down into the darkness, he felt the soft, absorbent earth of the tunnel suddenly give way to walls of hard stone. These branched out into narrow corridors that twisted and turned and left him quickly confused. He had found the maze and his senses could penetrate no further, except to register the faint echo of scuffling and scratching coming out of the stillness.

‘Do you hear anything?’ Diomedes asked.

Eperitus nodded. ‘I can hear rats.’

‘That’s all? Then there’s nothing else?’

‘That I can’t say, Diomedes. The tunnel leads down to more tunnels, which my senses cannot follow. The only way we’re going to discover what’s down there is to look for ourselves.’

‘Then let’s not waste any more time,’ Odysseus said, taking his torch from Eperitus’s hand and pushing past him into the tunnel.

Chapter Seventeen

T HE M AZE

Not for the first time, Odysseus wondered why the gods had led the Greeks to this half-forgotten tomb, many days sail away from Troy and with no obvious relevance to the war there. As he thrust his torch into the unyielding blackness, he tried to guess at the significance of Pelops’s shoulder bone, and what other things they might find in the subterranean crypt. Eperitus, Diomedes and the others followed him in single file and soon the ground was falling away at a steep incline beneath them, forcing them to advance slowly if they were to keep their footing. As they left the daylight of the antechamber behind and plunged deeper into the earth, they were consumed by an oily darkness that their torches struggled to throw back more than an arm’s length before them. Dense cobwebs caught in the flames and were incinerated, but many more – crawling with long-legged spiders – snagged on their hair, clothing and armour to hang from them like rags. The walls of the tunnel were irregular and confusing to the senses, sometimes widening beyond the reach of their groping hands and at other times suddenly narrowing so that they could barely squeeze their shoulders between them. The ceiling, too, would undulate, rising above the heads of the tallest and then plunging again so that even Omeros, the shortest among them, had to stoop. As their senses grew tired and bewildered, Eperitus shouted a warning and seized Odysseus’s shoulder, pulling him back sharply. Thrusting his torch close to the ground, he showed him a hole big enough to swallow an unsuspecting man. Odysseus shuddered at the doom his captain had saved him from. Picking up a stone, he dropped it into the hole and a few moments later the bunched warriors heard a small ‘plop’ as it fell into unseen waters far below.

After each man had leapt the gap safely to the other side they set off again with Eperitus in the lead, his torch held before him as he probed the darkness with his superior senses. They found no more traps, but when eventually Odysseus felt the ground level out beneath his feet and saw the passage branch into two before them he had lost all sense of time.

‘So this is the beginning of the labyrinth,’ he said, standing beside Eperitus. ‘The first challenge we must overcome if we are to discover Pelops’s sarcophagus.’

‘What’s your plan?’ Diomedes asked.

Odysseus held his torch down each branch of the fork in the tunnel, and to the surprise of all they saw the dull gleam of stone floors and walls reflecting back from the darkness.

‘I don’t have a plan, only an idea,’ he replied. ‘I spent last night drawing out different mazes and trying to see if there was a foolproof method of finding a way through. I drew circular mazes and square mazes, mazes with the object on the opposite side of the entrance, and mazes with the object at the centre of the pattern. And I think I’ve worked out a solution. Unless the architect of this labyrinth was more cunning than I’ve anticipated, then all we need to do is keep our hands on one wall – left or right – and follow every twist or turn until it leads us to our goal.’

The others looked sceptical, especially the Argives, who were less familiar with Odysseus’s sharp mind.

‘Theseus used a ball of twine in the Cretan Labyrinth,’ said Trechos.

‘That was to help him find his way out again,’ Omeros replied. ‘It was Ariadne who told him the correct way in, after she received instructions from Daedalus.’

‘I don’t see how keeping a hand on one wall is going to help,’ Diomedes said. ‘Not that I don’t trust your wits, Odysseus – not after all these years – but it seems to me our best hope is to split up and cover as much of the maze as we can.’

There were concerned murmurs from the others, including Diomedes’s own men. Their instincts had been unnerved by the dark, confining space of the tunnels and their imaginations had had too long already to contemplate the rumours that the tomb was cursed. Odysseus shook his head.

‘I think we should stay together. We don’t know how big this place is, and if we separate we could spend days trying to find each other again. If my suggestion proves wrong, then we can consider something else. Do you agree?’

Diomedes shrugged and drew his sword. ‘Lead the way.’

Odysseus felt a hand on his arm.

‘Be careful,’ Eperitus warned him.

Odysseus hesitated. ‘What do your senses tell you now?’

‘The air isn’t entirely stale. There must be other ways in and out, but only small enough for rats and bats. And there’s something else. A lingering sense of malice.’

‘I feel it, too,’ Odysseus agreed. ‘The evil things Pelops did in life still haunt his resting place. But that’s all it is – a phantom of the past. The sooner we find this bone, the sooner we can return to the daylight.’

He took a few steps down the left-hand passage and paused with his torch raised before him. After a moment’s contemplation, he placed his fingertips against the wall to his right and moved forward. A dozen paces further on he stopped again. There was a large, black opening ahead of him to the right, which his torch seemed barely able to penetrate. He shook his head, as if in denial of the instinctive fear he felt, and entered. At once he stepped back in alarm, covering his face with his arm as black shapes came darting out of the tunnel. A sound like wind tumbling through the leaves of a tree filled the tunnel and small bodies were caught momentarily by the light of the torches as they fled in panic, startled by the unexpected intrusion into their secluded world.