Heroes (formerly Talisman of Troy) (15 page)

The other comrades were done in as well, one after another. The
Shekelesh
took only two of them alive, and tortured them all that day to avenge the heavy losses they had suffered without any advantage, for there was nothing on the vanquished ship worth plundering.

Anchialus gripped a piece of planking; he could hear the cries of his comrades and he bit his lips bloody in rage, but he could do nothing to help. His pilot had given his own life to save him and allow him to carry out the task that Diomedes had given him. He had no choice but to try to survive and go on his way.

His limbs numb from the cold, Anchialus swam to the island and from there, before nightfall, to the mainland. He was drenched and starving, and the chill of the night would surely have killed him had not fortune finally come to his aid. He found a little shack made of sticks and dried branches, a shelter for animals.

There were no animals, nor even a bit of hay, but there was plenty of manure. Anchialus took off his clothing and buried himself naked in the pile of dung, whose warmth kept him alive that night.

The next morning, he bathed in the sea and put on the clothing which had dried overnight. The
Shekelesh
ships could just barely be seen at the horizon; the wind was carrying them west, towards the land of Hesperia, where king Diomedes was directed or perhaps had already arrived.

He was cold, for he had lost his cloak, so he ran southward all that day, to keep warm and to dismiss thoughts of hunger and fatigue. He ran, his heart heavy with pain, thinking of his lost comrades lying on the sea bottom, food for fish. He feared that he would never succeed in reaching the land of the Achaeans, to launch the alarm so that the kings could prepare their defences.

He would stop every so often when the path touched the seashore and collect molluscs and little fish, eating them raw to assuage his hunger pangs, soon resuming his journey. When he crossed a forest, he would gather snails and larva attached to the shrubs in their winter slumber. When night fell, he sought shelter in a little cave, lining the floor with dry leaves which he also used to wall up the mouth. He fell asleep disparaging such a pitiful existence, more similar to an animal’s than to a man’s. In just one day, he who was the commander of a ship with fifty Achaean warriors had lost everything, and was reduced to a brute who slept in animal dung and ate raw meat. He clenched his jaw, closing his wounded soul between his teeth; he knew that if he gave in to despair, his world would be engulfed and annihilated by that horde of barbarians that scoured land and sea with no end in mind. More desperate, perhaps, than he was, more lost, even, than his king Diomedes, who sought a kingdom in the mists of night. Perhaps an entire world would continue to exist, with its labours and hopes, if he, Anchialus, found the strength to go on.

The next day, as he left his shelter with his limbs aching and his eyes puffy, he saw a woman, standing before him. She was covered with hides from head to foot and was bringing a flock of sheep to pasture. He looked at her without saying a word and she did not draw back; she was not frightened by his wretched appearance. She had him stretch out next to one of her goats and squeezed the animal’s teats into his mouth, satiating him with the milk.

She took him that night into her hut near a stream, a shelter made of stakes and branches and covered with mud, where she lived alone. She milked the sheep and goats, making a curd which she shaped into cheese and placed on grates hanging over the hearth. She fed him smoked cheese and flat millet bread roasted on the embers and gave him milk to drink. When they had finished eating, she took off her coarse garment and stood before him nude, in silence. Her hands were large and cracked and her nails were black, her hair was dirty and tangled, but her body seemed lovely and desirable in the glow of the fire. Strain and exertion had marked her face, but had not erased an austere, simple grace; her nose was small and straight, her deep, dark-eyed gaze modest, nearly frowning.

Anchialus drew close and took her into his arms. He lay with her on the sheepskins which covered the floor near the fire. She caressed his hair and shoulders with her dry, rough hands as he entered her moist, warm belly and her ardour blazed within him like the heat of the embers.

He spent the whole winter with her. He helped her to tend to the animals and milk the goats and sheep. They hardly ever spoke and, when the snow fell to whiten the mountains and the valleys, they would sit in silence watching the big flakes whirling in the cold, grey sky. And so Anchialus survived and waited for the season to change, so he could begin his journey once again. He was certain that not even the
Dor
or
Shekelesh
could proceed when the snow covered the ground and the storms raged at sea.

One evening at the end of winter, she crouched near the fire and took some bones out of a little sack, shook them in her fist and then threw them on to the floor, three times. She suddenly stopped, looked at the knuckle bones scattered over the ashes, and raised her tear-filled eyes to his. She knew that the moment had come to let him go. The next morning she filled a sack with food and gave him a skin with fresh water drawn from the stream, pelts to protect him from the chill of night, and a walking stick. Anchialus took his smoke-blackened sword from the wall and departed. When he reached the mountain ridge that had closed off his horizon towards the south for so many days, he turned back. She was small and very far away, a dark figure standing in front of a solitary hut. He waved his hand but she did not move, as though her grief and the cold wind which blew from the mountainside had changed her into a statue of ice.

*

Diomedes left the mouth of the Eridanus and sailed yet another day up the river, taking advantage of the wind blowing from the east which swelled his sails, without finding any signs of human presence. The men heaved the ships aground on the southern side of a bend in the huge river. They had cast their nets before going ashore and caught a great deal of fish, which they roasted on the fire. Some of them were so big that they had had to run them through with their spears to stop them from destroying the nets.

The next day the king decided to venture inland. He had a trench dug and a palisade built for the men who would remain to guard the camp and the vessels. He had them unload the ships’ cargo so that maintenance work could be done on the hulls. He had the crew put ashore the chest that he always kept tied to his ship’s mast and disembark his horses, the ones he had taken from Aeneas after he had fought and wounded him on the fields of Ilium. He appointed Myrsilus to take command in his absence. He instructed his escort to wear battle gear and to take enough food rations for three days. They departed, following what seemed to be a torrent that strangely took water from the river instead of feeding into it. They marched the entire first day along the little stream, and towards evening they sighted a village. It was surrounded by a wide moat fed by the canal that they had been following all day. Within the moat was an embankment topped by a palisade, beyond which the roofs of a great number of large dwellings could be seen, apparently all quite the same, arranged in orderly, parallel rows. A wooden footbridge had been lowered over the moat at the entrance to the village: a door of tree trunks flanked by two towers, made of tree trunks as well and covered by roofs made of branches. The fields all around revealed the signs of man’s labour, yet seemed to be abandoned; they were scattered with patches of stubble and with piles of hay, now soaked through and covered with whitish mould. Rotten or dried fruits hung from trees planted in lines along the borders of the cultivated lands; the ground at the base of the trunks was thick with fallen fruits. Not a wisp of smoke rose from the rooftops of the village houses, nor could a single sound be heard: not a voice, not the bleating of a sheep nor the lowing of a calf.

To the west, the sun was emerging from a dense bank of clouds just before setting, and it cast its last light on to the village and the fields, scoring the earth with the long shadows of the Achaean warriors on the march.

Diomedes signalled for them to stop and he advanced with two or three men, those closest to him, towards the bridge. He called out but there was no answer, only the barking of a dog that sounded after a while from behind the palisade. He advanced cautiously over the bridge and entered the village. The dog they had heard, which was gnawing on the fleshless bones of a carcass, growled, then slunk away whining, and the whole place fell into the most profound silence. Diomedes called out again, and still receiving no response, began to advance along the road that crossed the village from one side to the other. As they moved forward, his warriors patrolled the side roads that divided the town into regular districts.

He sought the residence of the chief, but could not find it; all the dwellings were equal in size, made of gratings of intertwined branches coated with fire-hardened clay, and topped by straw and hay roofs.

‘All men seem equal in this city,’ said Evenus. ‘All of the houses have the same dimensions and are made in the same way. How can the people understand who is to command and who is to obey?’

‘There are no people here,’ said Diomedes. ‘Not any more. Something happened. Something that killed them or forced them to flee.’

‘What could it have been?’ asked Evenus. ‘In all my life I’ve never seen a similar thing. Could it have been . . . the chariot of the Sun?’

‘We shall see,’ said the king. ‘Look inside the houses and tell me what you find.’ He himself entered one of the houses. There was only one room inside. Along the wall were a series of dusty mats topped with gleaming white skeletons. Their mouths were stretched wide in a spasm of agony, their arms curled on their bellies, backs bent as if cramping over a point of piercing pain. At the centre was a hearth with a thick layer of ash; dark jars of varying dimensions, carved with simple decorations, stood all around. Half-burnt animal bones were mixed with the ashes, fish bones, walnut shells and fruit pits. There were no lamps, nor were there tables or other furnishings. The only other thing Diomedes saw was a bronze horse’s bit hanging on the wall, still fitted with its reins.

One of his men was waiting for him when he walked out. He could read the fear in his eyes: ‘
Wanax
, the houses are all empty . . . we’ve found only corpses, what’s left of them. But in one of the houses, down there, we’ve found something strange.’

Diomedes followed him and entered a house located at the crossing of the two main roads. The door was open and the light of the setting sun poured in, striking an object lying on a sort of raised platform at the centre of the house, a bright disc that glittered like a little sun. The king approached it and saw that it was made of embossed gold with spiral decorations which looked as if they were moving; it sat on four little wheels. On the ground was a clay basin full of rainwater, adorned with bulls’ heads, with a little fragment of gold taken from the edge of the disc, at its bottom.

‘What is it,
wanax?
’ asked the warrior. ‘It seems like magic, like sorcery . . . I don’t like this place . . .’

The king stretched his hand towards the disc and suddenly the shimmer vanished. The sun had just descended below the horizon. He looked at the little wheels and at the fragment at the bottom of the basin.

‘A piece of the chariot of the Sun has fallen into the swamp . . . that’s what it means.’ He said nothing else, so as not to frighten his men, but he realized that those people had wanted to leave a sign for those who would come, perhaps to warn them, or perhaps to leave a token in memory of their end.

‘Let us go now,’ he said. ‘Do not touch anything, because this place is like a sanctuary.’

They walked out through the southern door, opposite to where they had entered. They passed the bare bones of a calf; nothing was left but a few strips of dried skin around the horns and the ribs. The empty eye sockets seemed to stare with surprise at the line of crested warriors who advanced through the dead city.

There was a broken bridge at the southern door as well, which crossed the rushing waters of the canal, but what they found on the other side was much more sinister than what they’d seen within.

Two rows of scorched stakes crossed a recently ploughed field; at the top of each stake was the burned head of a ram with great twisted horns, with scraps of skin and scorched flesh still clinging to the skulls. At the end of these eerie rows was an even more disturbing scene: the skeletons of two oxen lay on the ground under the yoke of a plough still stuck in the ground. The remains of a man lay nearby. Dogs had ripped him apart, fighting over the pieces: the gnawed, fleshless arms and parts of the legs lay at some distance from the torso, which was still protected by a sort of large leather tunic. The satchel he wore around his neck was of leather as well.

The king neared the man, took the satchel and opened it: teeth, the large pointed fangs of unknown animals. Diomedes looked around and saw that more teeth had been tossed into the furrows that the plough had made.

Evenus approached: ‘
Wanax,
what does all this mean? That man was sowing teeth . . .’

‘Dragon’s teeth . . . like Jason, in Colchis. Dragon’s teeth, to call a new race of warriors from the ground.’

‘And those rams’ heads!’ murmured Evenus, looking around as darkness descended over the valley behind him. A thin lick of fog was rising from the moat, creeping across the earth, lapping at the bases of the stakes, enveloping the bones of man and animal.

‘Perhaps this man was performing a ritual to propitiate the sowing; an ancient, sacred rite of his ancestors, called upon out of the deepest despair.’

‘Let us leave this place,
wanax!
It is inhabited by the shadows of the unburied, shades without peace. They’ll drag us down to Hades with them if we stay here. All of our comrades are afraid as well; we have faced many dangers, fought without sparing our strength, we fear no enemy! But this land populated only by shadows has filled us with dread. It is not in this land that you shall found your kingdom!’