Heroes Read online

  Heroes

  Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  Heroes

  1

  Silence fell over the room. Everyone was watching the guest, the castaway tossed up by the sea between the rocks and the sand. His hands were still bruised and scratched, his eyes red and his hair as dry as the grass at the end of the summer. But his voice was beautiful, deep and resonant and, as he told his story, his face was transfigured. His eyes shone with a mysterious fever, reflecting the hidden fire within him, burning brighter than the flames licking the hearth.

  We understood his language because we lived near the land of the Achaeans and we had once had commercial dealings with them. I myself am a singer of tales among my people and I know wonderful stories, stories so long they take up a whole winter’s night, when men lend an ear and linger over their wine, but I had never heard such a beautiful and terrible tale in all my life. It was the story of the end of an era, the story of the decline of the heroes. .

  Sad, it was, especially for a singer like me, because when the heroes disappear, the poets die as well, without a world to sing of.

  I am an old man now and I have no desire to live any longer. I have seen flourishing cities devoured by flames and reduced to ashes, I have seen ferocious pirates roam the seas and sack the coasts, I have seen unspoiled maidens raped by bloody barbarians. I have seen all those that I love die, one by one. Yet, from those far away days of my youth, no memory is more vivid in me than the story of that stranger.

  He had witnessed the most famous enterprise ever attempted. The taking of the mightiest city of all Asia! He had fought alongside one of the most powerful men of the earth, an indomitable and generous warrior who had dared to challenge the gods themselves, wounding the hand of Aphrodite and slashing open the belly of Ares, god of war, dark and unforgiving fury who never forsook revenge.

  Now you will listen to my story, sitting here on the hay and drinking goat’s milk, and perhaps you will not believe my words. I know, you’ll think that these are just tales that I’ve spun to entertain my audience, to gain me food and lodging. You are wrong. Before this uncultured, miserable era, a time existed when men lived in cities of stone, dressed in fine linens, drank inebriating wine in goblets of gold and silver, navigated on agile ships to the ends of the earth, battled on chariots of bronze with shining weapons in their grasp. In those times, poets were welcomed into the palaces of kings and princes. They were honoured as gods.

  Everything I am about to tell you is true.

  Our foreign guest stayed at the palace for several months until one day, at the end of the winter, he disappeared without a word and we never heard of him again. But I hadn’t missed a word of the tales he would tell in the evening, after dinner, in the assembly room. The echo of the great war fought on the shores of Asia had reached us, but that was the first time we had ever had the opportunity to listen to the words of a man who had taken part in it.

  The chief of our people and the nobles would ask him time and again to tell the story of the war, but he always refused. Too bitter a memory, he said. When he finally did begin to tell his story, he began with the night of the fall of Ilium, the city of Priam, which we know as Troy.

  And so, I will now tell you the story of what befell the city as I heard it from his lips. You shall learn how such a long and oppressive war was fought for nothing.

  Yes, before he disappeared the stranger revealed a secret to me: the true reason why Ilium was razed to the ground and her people destroyed. No. . it wasn’t about a woman. It wasn’t over Helen. I should say, instead, that she was one of the combatants, perhaps the most fearsome of them all. Why else would Menelaus have taken her back without making her pay for her betrayal? Some say that the sight of her naked breasts made the sword fall from his hand. No, the reason was another: a reason powerful enough to compel a king to put his queen into the bed of another man. . for years. Unless what I was told is yet another imperfect truth, concealing an enigma within an enigma.

  Anyway, that stranger, cast up by the sea on to our shores, had wanted to reveal it to me, a mere boy. In part he told me what he had seen in person, in part what he had heard and in part, I believe, what the gods themselves had inspired in him.

  Perhaps he thought that no one would have believed me, or perhaps he needed to free his heart from a weight he could no longer bear.

  Here is what he told me. Muse, inspire my story and sustain my memory. You are about to hear such a story as you have never heard, and you will pass it on to your children and to your children’s children.

  For seven days and seven nights burned the city of Ilium. The proud citadel burned and the fifty rooms of the royal palace burned, while her inhabitants, those who had survived the massacre, were massed together in the fields like sheep in a pen. There they waited to be assigned to the victors as spoils of the war. The women lay on the ground with their gowns torn and their hair loosed, their eyes cried dry. Almost all of them were the brides or daughters of Trojan warriors who had fallen during the night of the betrayal. They were destined to serve the wives of the victors or to be called as concubines to their beds, to be possessed and profaned, deprived of everything but the bitterness of their memories.

  The children cried, dirty and hungry. They lay on the ground until sleep overcame them and when they awoke they cried again.

  The Achaean chiefs assembled in the tent of Agamemnon, their high commander, king of Mycenae. They were discussing whether they should leave immediately or whether the army should remain to offer sacrifice in expiation for all the innocent blood spilled. The victory they had awaited for so many years had not brought them the joy they would have expected. Spoils were scarce because the exhausted city had long consumed all of its riches. The atrocities committed the night the city was taken had left in the heart of each one of them the dark expectation of inevitable punishment. They felt like drunks who had reawakened after a night of revelry, with their clothes soiled and the taste of vomit still in their mouths.

  They sat in a circle on seats covered with skins. First came Ulysses, the victor: the inventor of the horse, the machine which had tricked the defenders of Troy. But as the army had poured into the city, he had disappeared, and Eurilocus, his cousin, had taken command of his men, Ithacaeans and Cephallenians from the western islands. He had reappeared at dawn, pale and silent. He, the destroyer of the city, had taken just a small part of the spoils. Strange, really, since he was one of the poorest kings of the coalition, the sovereign of dry and rocky islands. And, what counted the most, the victory had been entirely his doing. No one had argued or sought to know what he had hidden in that meagre booty, so small that it aroused neither the jealousy of the other chiefs nor the envy of his men. And after all, he would be returning to Ithaca with the weapons of Achilles, which alone were worth the price of one hundred bulls.

  Ulysses, versatile and cunning! He sat, and listened, keeping his left hand on the hilt of his sword and the right on his sceptre, but he heard nothing of what was said because his labyrinthine mind was following paths hidden to all.

  Next to him was the seat, empty, of Ajax Telamon. Great Ajax with his sevenfold shield, his immense size a bulwark on both battlefield and ship. The only one of them who had never received help from one of the gods in battle. He had died in shame and grief, throwing himself upon his own sword because Ulysses had denied him the inheritance most sought after: the weapons of Achilles. His father, who day after day trained his gaze out over the waves pounding the rocks of his island, would wait for him in vain.

  Then came Nestor, king of Pylus, a wise counsellor whose true age no one knew, and after him Idomeneus, king of Crete, the successor of Minos, the lord of the labyrinth. Agamemnon was next, and then
his brother Menelaus, exhausted by the night of blood, of death and delirium. It was said that Menelaus had possessed Helen, his wayward queen, that night in the bed of Deiphobus, her last husband, that he had taken her in a pool of blood, alongside the mangled corpse of the Trojan prince. But no truth may come of such a night of trickery and of deceit!

  Ajax Oileus, Little Ajax, sat with his brow contracted and his hands tight between his thighs. The night before, he had raped princess Cassandra in the temple of Athena. The goddess herself was struck with such horror that she had closed her eyes so as not to witness the abomination. He had pinned Cassandra to the ground and ripped off her clothes, he had penetrated her like a ram, like a raging bull. For a moment, just a moment, he had met her eye and in that moment he understood that the princess had condemned him to death. To a horrible, certain death.

  Agamemnon then took Cassandra for himself. Only she knew the secret hidden in the king’s heart. But he, the great Atreid, eyed Ajax with great suspicion, knowing that he had been alone with her first.

  Last came Diomedes, son of Tydeus, king of Argos, he who had conquered Thebes of the Seven Gates. No one after the death of Achilles could rival his valour and courage. He had been inside the horse along with Ulysses and had fought the whole night through, searching for the only remaining Trojan adversary worthy of him, Aeneas. He found no trace of the Dardan prince. But he had slipped into the citadel as morning was breaking and had disappeared into one of its secret passages. Diomedes’s armour was now covered with dust and the crest of his helmet was full of cobwebs. And he watched Ulysses of the many deceptions warily, because they two alone, among all the Achaeans, had managed to steal into the city before the night of the wooden horse. They had got in one night long before the city’s fall, disguised as dirty, blood-stained Trojan prisoners. Only they had been familiar with the hidden conduits of the citadel.

  The chiefs went on with their discussion at great length, but could not reach an agreement. Nestor, Diomedes, Ulysses and Menelaus decided to depart regardless with their fleets; Agamemnon and the others would stay behind to offer a sacrifice of expiation to appease the gods and win their safe return. Or so they claimed, but perhaps there was yet another reason behind their staying. Agamemnon had been seen roaming with Cassandra through the still smoking ruins of Ilium, searching for the only treasure that really interested him; the one for which the war had truly been fought.

  The fleets of those who had set sail stopped for the night at the isle of Tenedos. But the very next day, Ulysses changed his mind about leaving. Agamemnon had been right, he said, a hecatomb must be offered to the gods. He turned back, although the others were all against it, and his comrades begged him not to take them back to those cursed shores where so many of them had fallen. Their pleas were useless. The Ithacaean ships turned sail with the wind against them, forcing their oars through high black waves that the northerly wind churned up and topped with livid froth. Ulysses, standing tall at the stern amidst a shower of sea-spray, had taken the helm of his ship himself. He was never seen again.

  It was rumoured that he had returned, in the deep of the night, to the shore where the Achaeans had raised a cairn over the bones of Ajax. Driven by remorse, while the heavens were rent by lightning and the mountains shaken by thunder, he had laid the weapons of Achilles on the votive altar. Too late, even if this were true, because the actions of the living are of no help to the dead. They mourn endlessly their life lost, and wander in the dark chambers of Hades longing for the light of the sun which they will never see again.

  What I think is that Ulysses realized that he had been deceived, and this realization was intolerable. No possible doubt could cloud the mind of the astutest man of the earth. And thus he defied the wind and the waves of the oncoming storm.

  I know for certain that the other companions, those who had remained behind with the great Atreid on the shore of Ilium, never saw them arrive, neither Ulysses nor his Cephallenian warriors. When he landed Agamemnon had already set sail, and Ulysses never succeeded in reaching him later. Perhaps he waited too long to return out to sea and was forced to fight the hostile winds of winter. Perhaps a god envious of his glory pushed his ship towards the Ocean without wind and without waves, or was holding him prisoner somewhere.

  The first of the Achaean leaders to pay for the excesses committed on that cursed night of the fall of Troy was Ajax Oileus. His ship was taken by a storm, run aground on the Ghire`an cliffs and rent in two. His comrades were immediately engulfed by the waves of the storming sea, but Ajax himself was a formidable swimmer. Clinging to a wooden crate, he fought off the billows and managed to save himself, hoisting himself on to a rock. Sitting on that crate, he berated the gods, claiming that he was invincible and that not even Poseidon could defeat him. The god of the sea heard his words and rose from the depths of the abyss, clutching his trident. With a single blow he shattered the hard rock: Ajax fell between the crumbling splinters and was crushed like wheat under a millstone. For a moment, his screams of pain could be heard over the din of the storm, before they were scattered by the wind.

  The others had managed somehow to brave the storm. Having reached Lesbos, they held council to decide whether to sail north of Chios towards the isle of Psiri`a, on their left, or south of Chios, rounding the Mimantes promontory. In the end they decided to cut through the sea in the direction of Euboea, by the shortest route. But although the sea had calmed and the temperature was mild, Menelaus disappeared during the voyage, on a moonless night with all of his ships. I will tell you more about him, and what happened to him, later.

  Nestor reached sandy Pylus with his men, his ships and his booty after having rounded Cape Malea. He reigned for many more years over his people, honoured by his sons and their wives.

  Quite a different fortune befell Diomedes, son of Tydeus.

  He berthed his ships on the beach of Temenium while the night was still dark. He had sent no herald to announce the fleet, and no one knew of his homecoming. He had Ulysses’s warning in mind: ‘Don’t trust anyone,’ his friend had told him, ‘upon your return. Too much time has passed, many things will have changed. Someone may have taken your place and be plotting against you. Above all, no matter how grievous this may seem, do not trust your queen.’

  Diomedes set off with Sthenelus, his inseparable friend, and reached his palace in Tiryns under the cover of night. He hadn’t seen it for ten years. It seemed changed, although he couldn’t say how. He was deeply moved as he contemplated the walls of the citadel, walls which were said to have been built by the cyclops. The gates of his palace were posted with armed guards. He recognized them: mere children when he had left, they were now in the prime of their youth and strength.

  He left Sthenelus out of sight with the horses to wait for him, and entered from a passage known only to him. He found the postern on the southern side of the walls, obstructed by the mud brought by the rains and by the roots of the trees which had invaded the passageway over the many years in which no one had used it. It joined the outer fortification to the palace walls and had been used, in times of war, for surprise attacks on the enemy. As Diomedes advanced he felt choked by emotion and by the sense of oppression created by the narrow conduit. He had envisioned his return much differently: his people in celebration, running to greet him along the road, the priestesses of Hera scattering flowers to welcome his chariot. And above all, Aigialeia, his bride, meeting him open-armed and taking him by the hand to their fragrant bed to make love with him after so many years of longing and of separation.

  Aigialeia. . how many nights he had dreamed of her, lying under his tent on the Ilium plain. No woman, not even the most beautiful of his prisoners, had ever satisfied his passion. The women captured in battle are only full of hate and of despair.

  Aigialeia. . her breasts were white and hard as cut ivory, her womb always burned with desire, her mouth, flushed with fever, could cloud his mind and drive him out of his senses.

  Perhaps this was why he w
as approaching his own home so furtively, stealing into the palace from a hidden subterranean passage. A thousand times in war he had faced death by the light of day. But now an unknown and much greater fear made him crawl through the darkness. The fear of having been forgotten. Nothing is more terrible for a man.

  He had reached the point where a narrow tunnel branched off from the postern passage; it ended up directly behind the niche in the throne room which housed an effigy of the goddess Hera, wife of Zeus. This most ancient simulacrum had always adorned the wall opposite the throne. The jewel which embellished the statue’s breast was a translucent stone of clearest quartz; it looked black when seen from inside the room but, when looked through from behind the statue, if the throne room was lit, it was as transparent as air. His father Tydeus had had it cut by the artificer Iphicles, who had set it with great expertise. No one could have guessed the trick unless they knew about it. And sounds flowed perfectly through the well-modelled ears of the statue as well.

  The throne room was empty but still illuminated although the hour was late, and the hero remained concealed behind the statue, wary that something was about to happen. He was not wrong. An armed man soon appeared and sat down; from another door entered the slim figure of a veiled woman. She uncovered her face only after she had closed the door behind her: Aigialeia!

  She was in the full prime of her beauty, more seductive than when he had left her, more desirable. Her shoulders, soft and round, had lost the cold purity of adolescence, her eyes were deeper, darker and bigger, and her mouth was like a ripe fruit, moist with dew. Two lines creased her forehead between her eyebrows, making her gaze both harsh and sorrowful. Aigialeia. .

  The man said: ‘They’ve pulled aground at Temenium in the dark near a pine forest. They evidently don’t want to be seen. They’re hiding, as if they were afraid.’