Age of Heroes (18 page)

FOURTEEN

Piraeus, Athens – 5th Century BCE

O
DYSSEUS WAS LATE
.

Six weeks late.

But, Theseus thought, that was hardly unexpected. The man was famous for arriving well behind schedule. Known for it, some would say.

Besides, they had arranged this rendezvous twelve summers ago. What was a few weeks extra, in light of that? Relatively speaking, nothing.

He would turn up. Of that Theseus was confident. Odysseus had his failings, but when he set himself a goal he kept on going until it was met.

So, for six weeks, Theseus had been kicking his heels in Athens. Every morning he would set off from the city along the narrow strip of land that ran between the Long Walls, the fortified defences built recently by General Themistocles as a bulwark against invasion by the Spartans. The Long Walls offered a safe corridor between Athens and its port, and fenced enough territory that in times of crisis the entire Athenian populace might be afforded a refuge, with room to cultivate crops and graze cattle for the duration of any siege.

Reaching Piraeus, Theseus would take a table at a taverna in Kantharos, the harbour’s commercial sector. From there he would watch the merchant ships put in, offload their cargos and set sail again. Around him, sailors drank and roistered. They were of many nationalities, predominantly Greeks but with Phoenicians, Persians, Carthaginians, Nubians and even the occasional Iberian mixed in. Their voices were a polyglot babble.

Just visible from this vantage point were the other two sectors of the harbour, Zea and Munichia, between them providing berths for the entire Athenian navy, the three-hundred-strong fleet of triremes which gave the city-state unsurpassed supremacy in the Aegean and Ionian Seas. During peacetime, as now, the ships were drawn up above the shoreline and housed in pillar-sided sheds, to protect them from the elements and keep their timbers from rotting in the water. Slaves were engaged in scraping barnacles off the hulls and slapping on a coating of tar and wax.

Every day Theseus would eat lunch, usually lentil soup, flatbread, fruits and vegetables, washed down with a
skyphos
or two of thinned wine; and he would wait. Odysseus had been precise in his instructions. They were to meet this year at noon on the
noumenia
– the first day – of Hekatombaion. The meeting place was this taverna or, if for some reason it had closed down, whichever one was closest by.

Hekatombaion passed with no sign of Odysseus, and Metageitnion began, and by the middle of that month Theseus was finding it hard to think of a reason to remain. Summer was at its height, and Athens was dusty, stinking and hot. He was lodging at a tolerably well-appointed inn, but missed the comforts of home, which at present was a small farm up near Thessaloniki where cooling breezes blew even in humid weather and cypresses offered scented shelter from the sun.

There was the theatre, so he wasn’t starved of entertainment. There was the state-sanctioned Solonian brothel in the Kerameikos district, so that was another need taken care of. He could socialise in the Agora if the mood took him, or attend a symposium. These were all pleasures.

But there was no getting around it: he was becoming bored and impatient. He had taken to roaming the streets after dark, on the prowl for thieves and rogues, cutpurses and rapists. Athens had its police force, the
astynomia
, but they did not patrol at night, and when the sun went down, the lawlessness went up. The clusters of narrow streets nestling at the foot of the Acropolis became dark, winding warrens of danger. Several times Theseus was set upon by cudgel-wielding gangs or lone knife-men, all of them keen to relieve him of his money and, if he refused to surrender that quietly, his life. He taught them the error of their ways.

The irony was not lost on him. Here was the city he himself had for a time been king of, and had fostered and helped grow. Now, centuries on, he came to it as a visitor, an outsider, and while Athens still flourished and was everything he could have hoped it would be, the world’s pre-eminent nation-state, it had also developed social cankers, as all great cities did. Parts of it festered and demanded to be purged, just as a person in ill health must be bled in order to restore the balance of the humours. Its one-time monarch now fulfilled the role of secret surgeon.

On the day he seriously began to contemplate leaving Athens and heading homeward, Odysseus at last showed up.

The wanderer trudged into the taverna, looking footsore and exhausted. Theseus remembered Odysseus as lively-eyed and neatly turned out, his beard trimmed, his curly locks oiled, his clothes always freshly laundered and pristine-looking. This man was gaunt, sunburnt and unkempt. His beard straggled, as did his hair. His chiton and cloak were worn, torn and threadbare. Several of the leather thongs on his sandals had broken and been knotted back together rather than replaced.

He sat down at the table, helped himself to wine, and was silent for such a long time that Theseus began to wonder if he had lost the power of speech.

Then he croaked, “It’s done.”

“All hidden?” said Theseus.

“All. I said it would take twelve years, a year apiece, and so it did. You have no idea the places I’ve been. To the ends of the Earth and back. The storms I’ve weathered. The conditions I’ve endured.”

Odysseus’s Ithacan accent, which he had contrived to shed since his ignominious expulsion from the island of his birth, was back thicker than ever. For all his articulacy, it made him sound like a bumpkin. It seemed that the further he had travelled on this globe-girdling mission of his, the more he had returned to his roots.

He talked of a desert at such a high altitude, higher even than the peak of Mount Olympus, that the air was almost too thin to breathe. Of flyspeck islands so far from any land, you found them more by chance than by skill. Of icy wastes so vast and desolate, the sunlight glaring off the snow could turn you blind. Of uncharted wildernesses inhabited by bears and wolves that had no fear of humans because they had never encountered any.

In spite of all that, all the hardships and privations, the harshness of the environments he had ventured into, he had accomplished what he had set out to do, pulling off a feat he had thought nigh impossible. By comparison, Heracles’s Twelve Labours were nothing. Theseus’s Six Labours, likewise, were nothing. The poets would sing of the Labours of Odysseus, they would compose epics on the subject, if only they knew of them. Which of course they would not. Not ever.

“And you aren’t going to tell me where the artefacts are,” said Theseus.

“No. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? It’s not that I don’t think you’re trustworthy. Of all of us, I adjudge you probably the most trustworthy there is. But knowledge as important as this needs to be contained. After the fate Pollux meted out on Castor, we can’t afford anyone else gaining access to the artefacts, least of all one of our own.”

The murder of Castor had been the impetus for Odysseus collecting and sequestering the divine artefacts. The final straw. Castor and his twin had squabbled over the women they wished to marry, Phoebe and Hilaria, who happened to be their cousins and, as it happened, married already. The row had escalated, ending with Pollux bludgeoning his sibling’s head to a bloody pulp with a hammer.

The hammer was not just any hammer but one forged by Hephaestus himself, presented it to his son Philottos, to help him slay a Mormo, a vampiric creature that was attacking and killing children in Philottos’s kingdom. Destroying the Mormo was a noble feat, unquestionably heroic, but Philottos was a conflicted, complicated figure, prone to vice and rashness. Running out of money during a drunken game of dice with Pollux, he staked the hammer on the result of the next throw – and lost.

After Pollux used the hammer to murder Castor, a rumour had gone round that Castor had been merely mortal, Pollux inheriting the full dose of their father’s godhood at his twin’s expense. There was also talk that the women’s husbands Idas and Lynceus were the actual culprits. Theseus reckoned Odysseus was the one who had spun these webs of disinformation, in order to veil the truth: that there were weapons capable of felling demigods as surely as if they were human. The vast majority of mortals were unaware that demigods still walked among them, but some knew, and some of those who knew might be glad to learn that they were not as indestructible as they were reputed to be, and might try to exploit that vulnerability. In addition, demigods themselves, as Castor and Pollux had amply shown, could be their own worst enemies. Hundreds of divine offspring had been born during the Age of Heroes, and that number was still being added to, although the rate was tailing off steeply as the gods interacted less and less with mankind. Disputes and feuds cropped up among them, sometimes simmering for decades before suddenly turning bloody. The divine artefacts made it that much easier for them to slay one another, and that much likelier.

At any rate, after a long and determined campaign of cajoling and browbeating by Odysseus, a consensus was reached among the principal demigods. The vast majority of the divine artefacts had been reclaimed by their creators; they had been on loan only, each a gift given for a specific purpose and duly returned to the gods once that purpose had been fulfilled.

Twelve, however, still remained on Earth. Either the gods had forgotten about them or didn’t require them back. Gods weren’t known for their consistency, or their mindfulness. They were as profligate with their gifts as they were with their philandering.

These twelve artefacts, it was agreed, should be handed in to Odysseus for disposal. They could not be destroyed; the divine numen was too strong in them for that. Even the heat of a furnace would not so much as singe them, and throwing them into the ocean was no guarantee that they might not later wash ashore. But through Odysseus’s cunning they could be put beyond use.

Achilles was loath to give up his spear, but he did. Heracles did not want to lose the bow which Apollo had bequeathed him, but was persuaded. Orion was the hardest of all to convince to part with his own bow, which had been gifted to him by his one-time lover, far-darting Artemis. Odysseus had had to work on him for days before he could be made to see sense.

“For this amnesty to succeed,” Odysseus said to Theseus in the taverna, “it has to be total and unbreakable. I can’t have, for instance, Heracles come bleating to me at some future date, asking please can he have his bow back, and getting all stroppy when I refuse to tell him where it is. He might threaten to kill me unless I confess, in which case I can simply point out that if I die, he’ll never find out. That should be enough to deter him, or at least leave him so paralysed with indecision he’ll give up.” Odysseus sniggered. “Poor Heracles. Blessed with great brawn but little brain. It’s almost too easy, bamboozling a lummox like him.”

“So you’re willing to stake your life on the fact that only you know where the artefacts are?”

“Nobody would want to call my bluff; it would be entirely self-defeating. Heracles, or whoever, could dangle me over an active volcano, but wouldn’t dare drop me in.”

“Let’s say someone does, though, or you meet with some horrendous accident from which even a demigod can’t recover. What then? How will we ever find the artefacts if we need to?”

“Why would you need to?”

“I don’t know. The situation might arise. And it’s not like you not to have a contingency plan, Odysseus. Something to fall back on in case of emergency.”

The man of twists and turns gazed out over the wine-dark sea. “You know me too well, Theseus,” he said eventually. “That, in fact, is the reason for the delay in my returning. I took a small detour along the way, to deposit something.”

“Namely...?”

“I have made provision in the unlikely event that I die and the even unlikelier event that I forget where I cached the artefacts. I have drawn maps of the locations and written detailed itineraries, describing how and where to reach them. I have even drawn sketches of the landscape surrounding each spot. These instructions cover several sheets of vellum, which I have sealed up in a set of copper cylinders and left with a certain person of our acquaintance.”

“Who?”

“I am,” Odysseus said, “a man without a permanent home. So I have entrusted the cylinders to the safekeeping of someone who has several homes, all of them fairly impressive.”

“Who?” Theseus asked again. He had some inkling which person Odysseus was referring to, but he wanted to hear the name said.

“You, of all people, are not going to like the answer. But then, why should that matter?”

A third time, more insistent: “Who?”

“King Minos.”