The Songs of the Kings Read Free Page A

nothing but what they stand up in, apart from their weapons, and those they can’t risk losing surely.”
    Poimenos hesitated a little before replying. He was easily abashed when it came to speaking and had difficulty in finding words. “The bets are what you say you will give, they are like promises.”
    â€œBut that is always so with bets.”
    â€œNo, master, the promises are for when we take Troy.”
    â€œAh yes, I see. Then we will all be rich.” From the fabled spoils of the city the debt would be paid. A girl, a gold seal, a bronze tripod, a certain weight of amber or silver. It was a form of dreaming. In that great tide of plunder there could be no losers. He thought of the other tide, the one he had seen as the scented smoke rose to his nostrils and the voice came from below the ground in broken words and snatches of song. A flood of red between the banks and the armed bodies rolling in it like the tumbling of debris in the swollen waters of the Maeander River in early spring, which he remembered from childhood. “The dead won’t have to pay,” he said. “But of course those making promises expect to kill, not to die, don’t they?”
    Poimenos might have found some answer to this, but Calchas did not give him time. Prey to sudden curiosity, he said, “Who will be the winner today, in your opinion?”
    This time there was no hesitation. “Opilmenos, master. Opilmenos will win.”
    Calchas looked at his acolyte for some time in smiling silence. The boy was particularly beautiful to him at this moment, touching too, his face radiant with the force of his opinion, not so much an opinion, the priest thought, as a view of the world. Poimenos had chosen the one who was better made, more handsome, more like the kind of hero he would have wished to be himself. These were the qualities that carried success, how could one live in a world in which things were otherwise? One day the boy would wake up in that world and never leave it again . . . With an intensity that brought the beginnings of tears to his eyes Calchas found himself hoping that this would not happen for a long time. In the candor and simplicity of the boy he had found solace and repose, a refuge from the tortuous purposes of the gods and his own tormented subtleties; and he never prayed to Pollein, whom the Greeks called Apollo, without remembering to give thanks for the gift.
    Poimenos, emboldened by the kindness in the priest’s regard, now gave way to curiosity in his turn. “Master, which do
you
think will win?”
    But Calchas shook his head, still smiling. A diviner of status did not indulge in unofficial forecasts even to those he held dear. The question was the one Chasimenos had asked; and he gave now the same reply: “I have no ideas on the matter.”

2.
    The fire was out and he was already thinking of getting dressed when the army started to assemble. There was no need for him to make any immediate move. This was a military assembly, a marshaling of combatants. There was no place for him in these ranks, any more than for the priest of Zeus, or scribes like Chasimenos, or the bronzesmith and his slave assistants. He watched for a while, from this higher ground, as they formed up in rank upon rank on the shore under the direction of their officers and in accordance with the plans drawn up by Chasimenos, a naked host—in this hot weather they wore only loincloths and the improvised leggings essential for anyone moving about in the thorny scrub above the shore. The nakedness gave an impression of unity entirely misleading, Calchas thought, seeing how carefully the men were kept within their tribes, Molossians from the mountains of Epirus, Aetolians from the northern shores of the Corinthian Gulf, the seventy from Arcadia under their chief Inachus, speaking a language that did not sound like Greek at all. Then the combined force from the cities of the Argolis, headed by