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

‘Then the battle was lost and the Trojans were victorious?’

The old woman shook her head.

‘It ended in the same way as all its predecessors – the plain full of dead men and both armies licking their wounds behind the safety of their respective walls. And don’t ask me to tell you what happened,’ she said, intercepting his next question. ‘I don’t know and I don’t much care.’

‘Then tell me your name.’

‘I am Clymene,’ the woman said.

The name was common enough, but Eperitus followed his instincts.

‘Palamedes’s mother?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, a little surprised that he knew of her. Then her attitude stiffened. ‘You Greeks stoned him to death.’

Eperitus felt a pang of guilt as he recalled how Odysseus had brought about Palamedes’s execution, after discovering the Nauplian prince was secretly passing Agamemnon’s strategies to the Trojans. Only as Eperitus had escorted him to his death did he reveal that his mother was a servant woman in Troy – a Trojan herself – and that Apheidas had threatened to kill her if Palamedes did not betray his fellow Greeks. As the offspring of Greek and Trojan parents himself, Eperitus had sympathised with Palamedes, despite his treachery.

‘I had no part in his stoning,’ he said, ‘though I was the one who escorted him to his execution. It was then he told me about you and how he had been forced to betray Agamemnon for your sake. I pitied him and he made me promise to protect you if the Greeks ever sacked Troy.’

‘Then his last thoughts were of me,’ Clymene said. There were already tears in her eyes at the mention of her dead son. ‘Tell me, was his death –’

‘It was quick,’ he said, recalling how the rocks hurled by the Greek kings had split his skin and cracked his bones until he was no longer recognisable as a human being. They were silent for a while before Eperitus spoke again. ‘Tell me something, Clymene: are you still Apheidas’s servant?’

She looked away uncomfortably and nodded. ‘Yes, my lord, and you are a prisoner in your father’s house. He brought you back from the battlefield, even while his horsemen were still covering the long retreat to Troy. You had many cuts and bruises, gained falling from a horse – or so he told us – though by the blessing of some god your bones were not broken. You also had an arrow wound in your leg, and that was more serious. He gave you into our care and threatened us both with death if we did not save you; so we have tended your wounds for two days and a night while you slept, and you are already making a quick recovery.’

‘Then you have my thanks, Clymene. But you say there were two of you.’

‘Mine was the knowledge that healed your wounds, but the care – the love – that tended to them without resting was –’

‘Was mine.’

Eperitus recognised the voice, and this time as he struggled to sit up Clymene helped to lift him onto one elbow. He looked around the shadowy hall – by the darkness he knew it had to be late evening of the day after the battle – seeing the fire blazing in the hearth and noting the armed guard standing at a nearby doorway. And then he saw her.

Astynome stood in the shadows a few paces behind Clymene, dressed in a simple white chiton that did little to hide the outline of the tall, slim body he knew so intimately. Her hair hung down over her shoulders in broad black tangles, framing the fine features of the face he had fallen in love with: the full lips that had declared her love for him in words and kisses; the small nose and smooth cheekbones he had once touched with such affection; and the dark eyes that had looked into his with real longing, but had kept from him the secrets of her traitor’s heart. As they looked at him now he felt his veins flush with bitterness at the memory of her betrayal. Yet his anger could not completely conquer his desire to reach out and touch her, to hold her again and pretend nothing had ever come between them. For though she had been sent as a snare to draw him into his father’s clutches, she had instead caught him up in her own plans – plans for a home and a family, away from the wars and politics of more powerful men. For a while he had glimpsed an alternative to the violent and glorious, but ultimately lonely, life of a warrior, only to find that the woman who had sold it to him was a liar.

‘I have been at your side ever since Apheidas brought you wounded and unconscious from the battlefield,’ Astynome said, leaving the shadows and walking to his side. As she knelt beside him, Clymene stood and moved back. ‘I haven’t left you for a moment, unless it was to fetch water or clean bandages. I even slept beside you last night, Eperitus, with my head against your shoulder and my arm across your chest.’

She smiled as she spoke, almost forgetting he was now awake as she reached out to touch his muscular arm. He grabbed her wrist, making her gasp as she felt the anger in his grip.

‘Save me the mock affection. Whatever care you have administered was given on the orders of your master, not out of concern for me. If you had loved me, Astynome, you would have let me die; better that than to live as a prisoner of my father.’

‘Let you die? Not while it was in my power to save you. Besides, Apheidas may have commanded me to keep you alive on pain of death, but the prayers I’ve given for your life and the offerings that I sent to the temple of Athena were my own. I love you, Eperitus, even if you have learned to hate me.’

‘You were sent by my father to lead me into a trap!’

‘I didn’t know you then. When we first met, I was a loyal Trojan doing my lord’s bidding, under the illusion it would bring about the end of the war.’ She slipped her wrist from his grip and took his hand. ‘And then I fell in love with you.’

Eperitus sensed the walls of his fury bend beneath the touch of her warm fingers. He felt a powerful urge to take her in his arms and kiss her, healing the wounds she had inflicted on him. But his warrior’s caution maintained its defences against her, knowing she had deceived him once before. He took his hand from hers.

‘If you loved me, why did you continue your deceit? You could have told me the truth, but you chose to carry out my father’s commands to the very end.’

‘Weren’t you listening, that night at the temple of Thymbrean Apollo?’ she asked, her tone sharp with reciprocal anger. ‘Did you not hear, or did you not want to hear? I didn’t know he was planning to betray Troy to the Greeks in return for Priam’s throne, or that you were to be a pawn in his ambitions. When he told me he could make you join the Trojans and put an end to the war I trusted him, and that’s why I carried on with his plan. And what choice did I have? He is my master: if I had refused to do what he told me, he would never have allowed me to see you again.’

Eperitus looked into Astynome’s eyes and knew she was right. He had not considered the difficulties she had faced before, and now that he did he saw that she had never been given any option but to see out Apheidas’s orders. But as the hardness in his heart began to soften, so the memory of how much he had suffered because of her stopped him from taking her hand and confessing that he still loved her. Besides, he reminded himself, he was still a prisoner in his father’s house.

‘And where is Apheidas now? Has he sent you to soften me up – to persuade me to join him again?’

Astynome closed her eyes and turned her head away with a sigh, and Eperitus knew he had allowed his bitterness too much rein.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. You must know why I’m here, though, why he’s permitted me to live instead of killing me on the battlefield? Does he think he can appeal to the Trojan blood in my veins again? If so, you can tell him I’m loyal to my Greek ancestry, not to some foreign culture I’m more intent than ever on seeing destroyed.’