Heroes (formerly Talisman of Troy) (12 page)

‘It’s best to avoid clashing with them,’ said Myrsilus, who had handed the helm over to one of the men. ‘We have nothing to gain, and much to lose. Since they’ve seen us, we must speak with them. The
Chnan
surely knows their language. Have him come.’

The king nodded and the
Chnan
succeeded in arranging an encounter. The
Peleset
flagship and Diomedes’s ship both left their formations and met half-way. They manoeuvred slowly with oars and helm until they were nearly touching, side to side. The
Peleset
chief and King Diomedes, both armed and carrying a spear in their right hands, faced one another.

‘Tell him to let us pass,’ said Diomedes, ‘and we will do them no harm.’

‘The heavens have sent you, powerful lord,’ said the
Chnan
instead, ‘to free me from indescribable suffering.’

‘I am glad you speak my language,’ said the
Peleset
. ‘We’ll have no difficulty understanding one another. Tell him to turn over everything he has and we will spare your lives.’

‘The chief pays you his respects,’ translated the
Chnan
, turning to Diomedes, ‘and he asks if you have wheat or barley to sell him. They are short on food.’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned again to the
Peleset
chief: ‘If you want my personal advice, you’d best attack these people immediately, because the rest of the fleet will be here at any moment; thirty battle ships loaded with warriors are close behind us. This is just the advance guard. In exchange for this information, I beg of you, take me as your slave! These people are savage and cruel. They have sown death and destruction wherever they have passed, burning down villages and setting whole cities aflame! They subject me to the worst of torments for the mere pleasure of ill-treating a poor wretch. With my own eyes I have seen my master, this man here, at my side,’ he continued, indicating Diomedes, ‘rip the beating heart out of his enemy’s chest and devour it avidly. Free me, I beseech you, and you will not regret it.’

The
Peleset
chief was dumbfounded, and in Diomedes’s stern gaze he thought he saw all of the terrible things that the slave had warned him of. ‘You can die for all I care,’ he said to the
Chnan
. ‘We’re going our own way.’

‘We have no food to sell him,’ said Diomedes.

‘Of course,
wanax
, I took the liberty of giving him this answer, already knowing what you would say. They’ll be off on their own way now.’

The
Peleset
ships paraded past them, one after another, about twenty in all. They turned to the right, heading south. The fog was thickening again and the damp chilled them all to the bone. The last
Peleset
vessel passed at just a short distance from them, but before it was swallowed up into the mist they heard someone shout from the deck: ‘Achaeans! I am Lamus, son of Onchestus, Spartan. I was made a slave in Egypt! Remember me!’ His words were followed by the sound of blows, moaning and then silence.

Diomedes started: ‘Gods!’ he said, ‘an Achaean like us in such a distant land . . . and
Peleset
. . .’

‘And Trojans, and Enetians . . .’ said Myrsilus.

Diomedes spun around to face him: ‘What did you say?’

‘There were Trojans and Enetians in the village we visited last night.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I could make you pay dearly for lying to me.’

‘Not a lie,
wanax
, silence. I waited until now to tell you. If I had told you then you would have launched an attack.’

‘Certainly. They are our enemies.’

‘Not any more,
wanax
. The war is over.’

‘Only when I say so. Did you recognize anyone? Aeneas? Had he been there, would you have recognized him?’

‘Of course,
wanax.
. But he was not among them. Their chief was an older man with grey hair, but his beard was still dark and his black eyebrows thick. Tall, with slightly bent shoulders . . .’

‘Antenor,’ murmured Diomedes. ‘Perhaps you saw Antenor. It was Ulysses who asked Agamemnon to spare him the night of the fall of Troy because Antenor had treated him with respect and had given him hospitality when he had gone that first time to ask Priam to give Helen back. But why here? What does he seek in this land?’

The
Chnan
drew closer: ‘Something terrible must have happened. Perhaps a war greater than the one you fought, perhaps a gigantic battle, or some cataclysm. The
Peleset
would never have ventured so far! Those Trojans must have known, and have chosen to seek out a place far away from everything, a tranquil and solitary place.’

‘Do you have orders to give me,
wanax
?’ asked Myrsilus.

‘We’ll go forward, but stop as soon as you find a suitable place. If we can, we’ll try to free that wretch. Those ships can’t be too far.’

They proceeded until darkness fell, without ever sighting the
Peleset
fleet. They moored their ships on the beach of a sandy island, low on the surface of the sea, and lit a fire. The coast of the continent was very close. The king called Myrsilus: ‘They must be anchored somewhere near here, on the mainland. Go aground with a group of selected men and see if you can liberate that Spartan. Take the
Chnan
with you; he understands their language and he’ll be useful to you. I don’t want you to suffer any losses; if the endeavour proves too difficult, turn back.’

As the others went ashore on the island, Myrsilus and the men he had chosen walked to the mainland; since the water was so shallow at that point, they were no more than knee-deep. A breath of wind was picking up from the sea, dispelling the fog and letting a little moonlight through. Myrsilus had never seen such a land in all his days; the coast was a vast expanse of fine white sand that sparkled in the pale glow of the moon. The waves swept across the wide beach and then withdrew with a gurgling sound. Here and there were gigantic trunks, abandoned on the waterline, stretching their enormous skeletal arms towards the sky.

‘There must be a great river near here,’ said the
Chnan
.

‘Why?’ asked Myrsilus.

‘Those trunks. Only a great river can uproot such colossal trees and drag them to the sea, where the waves wash them back to the shore.’

Myrsilus was once again astonished at the wisdom of this foreigner that they had rescued from the sea; all he knew must come from having journeyed so far and having met diverse peoples with different languages. They walked and walked, so far that the moon had risen by nearly a cubit at the horizon; finally, at the end of a small bay, they saw the
Peleset
fleet at anchor. The place was completely deserted and there were only a couple of sentinels standing guard near a small campfire. Every so often one of them would break some dry branches from a trunk lying on the sand to add to the fire. Myrsilus and the
Chnan
crept close, so close that they could hear the crackling of the fire and the voices of the two sentinels.

‘How can we find the man we’re looking for?’ asked the
Chnan
. ‘We can’t search the ships one by one.’

‘You’re right,’ said Myrsilus. ‘The only way is to make ourselves heard.’

‘But then they’ll all be upon us!’

‘No, not if something is keeping them busy.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like their fleet catching fire.’ The
Chnan
widened his eyes and shook his head incredulously. Myrsilus turned to his comrades: ‘You go that way, to the edge of the forest, and lure the sentinels away from the fire, then kill them. We’ll take firebrands in the meantime and go set fire to the ships. When the confusion is at its peak, I’ll call him out and we’ll all meet up at the big dry trunk. If you are careful and do as I say, none of us will die, and we will have liberated a long-suffering comrade.’

A small group of men went off towards the woods; soon after there was a sound of branches being broken, followed by the close beating of wings and a loud rustling.

The sentinels turned and stopped talking, straining to hear. More noise, and the two
Peleset
each took a brand and headed to where the sounds were coming from; presumably a wild animal was roaming about their camp, since the place seemed completely deserted and uninhabited.

As soon as they had left the halo of light of the fire, Myrsilus and his comrades seized blazing firebrands and rushed off towards the ships. They ran barefooted on the sand like shadows, without making any noise at all. Each chose his ship and set fire to it. The pitch and caulking pressed into the seams of the planks ignited immediately. Flames licked at the hulls and dense spirals of smoke curled upward. The two sentinels turned back to raise the alarm but they were stricken down at once by the men hiding in the wood.

In just a few moments, four of the ships were completely enveloped by the blaze. The men sleeping on board flung themselves out through a barrier of flames, yelling for help. Their comrades rushed from the other ships, carrying jugs and buckets of water to douse the flames.

In that confusion of blood-red light and crazed shadows, Myrsilus raised a cry in the language of the Achaeans, knowing that only one man aboard would be able to understand him. He shouted: ‘Spartan! Join us at the dry tree trunk at the seashore!’ In that chaos of cries and laments, Myrsilus’s words floated like the peak of a mountain above the clouds of a storm and Lamus, son of Onchestus, heard them.

He jumped ship and began to run towards the burning vessels where, amidst all the uproar, he slipped away from the area illuminated by the raging fire and took shelter in the darkness, by the great dry trunk. He looked around, seeking the voice that had called him; he saw no one and feared he had imagined the whole thing. As he was about to return to his destiny, a voice rang out behind him: ‘We are Argives and we heard your voice. We have come to free you.’

Lamus embraced them one by one, sobbing like a baby. He could not believe that he had escaped the grievous destiny already marked out for him. Myrsilus urged them all to leave that place at once and to rejoin their comrades, but before they started their march, he was seized by doubt. He felt he had to make the freed Spartan understand that the fate awaiting him might be worse than any he had faced up until then.

‘Before you join us, consider what you are doing; you are still in time, surely no one will have noticed your escape. You must understand,’ said he, ‘that we shall never again return to Argos and the land of the Achaeans. We fled our homeland where betrayal awaited us, and here we seek a new land where we can settle and found a new kingdom for our king, Diomedes, son of Tydeus, victor of Thebes of the Seven Gates and of Troy.’

‘Diomedes?’ said the Spartan and his voice trembled. ‘Oh gods . . . oh gods of the heavens! I fought with you in the fields of Ilium. I was with Menelaus.’

‘Then think about it, I tell you. If you remain with those pirates perhaps you will return home some day, perhaps someone will pay your ransom. It was a storm that drove them here; they have not come of their own free will. We instead have come here to stay. Forever.’

The man was struck by those words. He turned towards the
Peleset
ships and his face lit up with their scarlet glow. Then he turned towards Myrsilus and his face was sundered by the darkness, as were his thoughts.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘For you, I am a man, a comrade. Anything is possible for a free man. I thank you for having faced all this danger for me.’

They set off in haste and did not notice that behind them a wounded man was dragging himself through the sand; it was one of the two sentinels whom the men had attacked after luring him away from the campfire. He was bloodied, but alive, and he had seen everything.

Myrsilus and his comrades began to sprint along the beach, and when they were out of danger, past the little promontory that closed off the bay, they looked back. The burning ships were destroyed; all that was left of them were their fiery masts which sank sizzling into the dark water. Around them, many tiny black shapes scurried in every direction, like ants whose nest has been devastated by the farmer’s hoe.

The king awaited them, standing vigil at the fire, alone. All of the other comrades, done in by their hard labour at the oars, had succumbed to sleep in the ships, or stretched out on the sandy beach. When he heard the men splashing through the shallow water that separated the beach from the island, he went out to meet them.

‘We’ve brought back a Spartan,’ said Myrsilus. ‘The one who made his voice heard in the midst of the fog. We told him that perhaps he would be better off staying with the
Peleset,
but he decided to join us nonetheless.’

The man advanced towards the fire, then threw himself at Diomedes’s feet and kissed his hand: ‘I thank you,
wanax
, for having liberated me,’ he said. ‘I fought at Ilium as you did, and I never would have thought I would see other Achaeans in this desolate place, in this land at the ends of the earth.’

They remained near the fire at length, and Lamus told of how he had ended up in Egypt. During a great battle, he had fallen into the sea grasping on to a piece of flotsam. He was fished up by the
Peleset
, who intended to sell him in the first city they landed at. But the wind had pushed them north for days and days until they had ended up in that sad, dreary place.

‘What do the
Peleset
plan to do?’ asked Diomedes.

‘They want to return to their home territory, but they fear facing the winter sea. Perhaps they will seek a place where they can pull their ships aground, where they can find food and water to drink until the season changes.’

‘Your king . . .’ Diomedes asked again, ‘King Menelaus . . . did he survive?’

‘He was alive when I last saw him, but I have heard nothing more since then. Oh
wanax
, the gods blew us out to the sea, and our small vessels were tossed to and fro, on to the shores . . . the gods toy with our lives like a boy playing in a pond who pushes his boat back out whenever the waves bring it close to shore . . .’