A Darker God (2 page)

She’d made him point out the peak she had in mind to be sure he’d understood. And then the curt instructions were followed by an appeal to his Achaean honour. “You, my man, are the final link in a long chain of vigilant and dutiful men. Do not fail your compatriots at the last.” She had sighed, staring with distaste at his rheumy eyes and bony frame, assessing his competence. Her voice took on a brisker tone: “The fire will be of brushwood and heather. You can expect it to be bright, but it won’t last long. The moment you see the summit of the Black Widow ablaze, you run and tell
me
. No one else. I don’t want you screeching the news all over the palace. Do you understand? If you fall asleep … if you miss it … I’ll have you impaled.”

She hadn’t explained—just delivered orders and threats as usual. But he’d worked it out anyway. It was the prophecy, of course. This was the year, they said. Her lord, the High King of Mycaenae, would come sailing home victorious from Troy before the year was out. How many summers had it been? Too many. Some had said it might even stretch to ten. Now, that was an exaggeration, surely? A nice round sum of years that would trip off the tongues of the storytellers. But there were boys running around the town with wooden swords, boys
who’d been squawking babies when their fathers had sailed away in their black ships.

Agamemnon’s queen, Clytemnestra, would have made a bloody good general, the watchman often thought. She got things done. Had to, of course; with her man away at the war, she’d had the running of the kingdom. And it had survived. After a fashion. It hadn’t been easy, with the men of fighting age (with one glaring exception) off besieging Troy and only the useless old men and a few young lads left behind to keep things going.

Little news of the war got back to the city. Occasionally, a trading ship would put in to the home port or to Aulis, one of those opportunists, more pirate than trader, who’d made it into the war zone carrying supplies in and spoils out. They were always eager to report the bad news: “Won’t be long now! Word has it that there’s been a nasty spat between King Agamemnon and one of the generals—Achilles it was. All over possession of some girl. Naw! Not that one! Some other local charmer … Tetchy blighter, Achilles! He was threatening to pull his Myrmidons out and bugger off back home. And if that happens … well … it doesn’t look good. Men’ll be back soon—what’s left of ’em!”

But mostly the accounts were dull: “… bogged down … no sign of defeat or victory. A little light skirmishing going on in the lands around Troy but the city walls stand strong while the ships of the Greek fleet moulder to dust on the beach. Nothing more than worm-eaten hulks, most of ’em … Some have been upturned to make housing of a sort for the men of the army … and their native concubines and fresh litters of children … Very pretty, you know, some of these Hittite women …” The remarks were delivered with a slanting and cruel smile. And the reports always ended with the same rigmarole: “Any good—all right, then, they’ll settle for any
bad
—
carpenters available? How about
you
, laddie? You’re needed up there at the war. Fancy working your passage? What about it?” And, last and most tantalisingly: “Well, then. The bit you’ve all been waiting for … Anyone recognise any of this lot?… Cost you—don’t forget! You know the rules: If you touch—you keep! If you keep—you pay!”

The contents of a leather bag would be casually emptied onto the beach and the women would press around, eyes devouring the mass of clay objects, demanding to see one or another more closely, turning them over, throwing them back into the sand, most often, in disappointment. Sometimes, with a gasp of delight and relief, a wife would hold out a hand for a tablet bearing the imprint of her husband’s seal stone and, fondling it, she would try to squeeze from the trader more news than he had or her small fragment of silver would buy.

The watchman grinned to himself. His old wife was too smart to part with a honey cake, let alone a hen or a tenth of a silver bangle. At every docking, she’d be down there, rummaging through the bag-loads, and every time she’d find one—a tablet sealed with a ram’s horn. He’d carved the simple device himself on a piece of soapstone and handed it to his son before he sailed. Thersites never failed. Clever lad with a quick tongue on him. A tongue and a brain to direct it—the boy got that from his mother. She’d never been content for her son to waste his life watching sheep. It was a good thing he’d been taken off with the army before he could get himself into more trouble. Pushy little bastard … Oarsman, carpenter, general dogsbody, it didn’t much matter what he was doing … at least the lad was away adventuring. He’d have stories to tell his own children, as long as he lived to have children, that is. And always assuming there’d be some girl desperate enough to have him. Not exactly favoured by Apollo, Thersites. With his narrow shoulders and hair like sheep’s wool, he’d never been
much of a catch. But it was that stroppy mouth of his that would wreck his chances! He could talk himself out of any good deal. Still—so far, so good. At least he was still alive. The tablets kept arriving. Thersites’s mother spotted them all right, but she never picked them out and paid for them. She stirred them up and put them back. Enough for her to see that they were there. Still coming. Thersites would have laughed at her trick and approved. In fact, they’d probably hatched the plan together.

And here the citizens were, placing all their hopes on seal stones and a prophecy. But also on the determination and devotion of a queen who had the foresight to set up a chain of mountaintop bonfires to warn her that her husband was returning. How much warning? The watchman had little idea of the distances involved, but he’d discussed it casually in a tavern with a seaman who’d worked the Egypt-to-Troy trade route and he’d reckoned that with a following wind and no storms, ten days should do it from Troy to the Bay of Argos. But the bonfires—they could zip across the island-dotted sea and hop from peak to peak down the coast in a single night. What was the queen intending to do with her ten days’ warning? How long did it take to slaughter the beasts, pick the figs, and mix the wines for a banquet? Time enough for all that when the king’s ship was sighted off the point. Even if he drove his chariot at a fast lick from the coast, she’d still be ready, every last bangle in place, every instrument tuned, the bath filled, all the lamps lit.

It was no business of his to know the reason behind her urgency, but the watchman thought he could guess. The sky and the mountains weren’t the only things you could see from this vantage point. The palace courtyards were full of movement on a summer’s night. Lamps skittered like dragonflies from one room to another. Forgotten up here behind his concealing frieze of decorated bulls’ horns and bored out of his wits, he’d
followed the lights and, with his shepherd’s instinct for order, his alertness to wayward behaviour in the flock, he’d worked out a pattern. A disturbing pattern.

He longed to tell someone what he’d seen, to share the burden of his suspicions, even with his old wife, but he’d said nothing. “I have the weight of an ox on my tongue!” he’d muttered, reminding himself. “And there it must stay!” If he ever spoke of it, she’d have his poor old tongue out, and his eyes. Before she impaled him.

“Agamemnon! Where are you? What’s keeping you?” the old man wondered with a rush of anguish. “Hurry back! Your kingdom’s rotting from the core!”

He allowed himself the swift satisfaction of picturing his lord arriving in triumph at the palace, striding ahead of the army, trailed by a retinue of spear slaves and carts laden with booty. A head taller than his men, long-haired and massive-shouldered, Agamemnon would be instantly recognisable. He’d have taken the time to put on his boar’s-tooth helmet and his best armour, polished for the occasion. And the lion’s-skin cloak he always wore on state occasions? Thrown casually over his left shoulder perhaps, to reaffirm his kingship … To remind them: The Lion of Argos is entering his city through the Gate of the Lions. All is as it should be. In his fantasy, the old shepherd saw himself on his knees before Agamemnon, who recognised him and spoke his name and thanked him and his son for their loyal service. Every inch of him a kingly Atreid, he would play his part, do his duty. The people would be acknowledged, the gods honoured, and lastly, he would look for the attentions of his dutiful wife. That’s how it would happen.

The watchman fumbled with the faïence beads he kept, out of habit, on a long string at his belt. For years he’d told the numbers of the flocks with them, click-clicking as he counted them in to safety at the end of the day. A grunt marked a stray
ironic thought: All his days had been spent with the herds and flocks out on the hilltops, protecting them from wolves. And now, at the end of his life, where did he find himself? Atop the royal citadel. Still keeping watch.

But the wolf was already inside the fold doing his deadly work.

He crushed the treacherous thought before it could take hold and freeze his mind with terror. He began to count the stars. It helped him to stay awake as the beads slid over and over between his busy fingers.

The wind was rising, finding a gap in his cloak. The end of the sailing season, surely? The seaways would be closed for traffic any day now. The Greek army would have to stay in Troy, if that’s where they were, or shelter until spring on one of the islands scattered like stepping-stones between there and here. It wasn’t safe to be caught in mid-ocean with the sea god in a bad mood. No, they’d be holed up in some snug billet if they had any sense. Before the week was out, the queen would call him down from the roof until the next spring, acknowledging she must live through another winter without her husband. He yawned and began to hum the songs of his youth as he stared into the darkness.

It was his string of beads falling from his hands with a clatter onto the stone roof tile that woke him. Guiltily, he looked about him. How long had he slept? The sun was showing over the horizon already. No … it couldn’t be … He collected his senses, trying for calm. The palace below was silent. The moon was still high. The red glow he was seeing was in the northeast.

Alert now and mewing with panic, he scrambled to the edge for a better view. A bonfire was flaring on the peak of the Black Widow, right there in front of his eyes, not five miles away, and there, further to the north and fading fast, was the dying echo of an earlier signal fire.

A surge of triumph and pleasure and affection oiled his limbs, easing his movement towards the ladder. “He’s on his way!” he told himself, remembering to preserve a strict silence. “All will be well! Our lord, our shepherd, is coming home! Agamemnon, High King of Hellas, sails for home!”

Chapter 1

May 16, 1928. London
.

G
eorge the Second, High King of the Hellenes, was decidedly not on his way back home to Greece. He would have been turned away at the border had he attempted to enter the country, his passport confiscated. He was striding about his room in Brown’s Hotel in the heart of Mayfair, dressing for the evening’s performance at Covent Garden. He hummed a snatch of the opera he’d seen the night before:
Siegfried
. Tonight he would enjoy
Tannhäuser
and, after a day to recruit his strength,
Götterdämerung
.

He posed himself before the cheval glass checking his tailcoat and white tie with a critical eye. His valet stood by anxiously with a clothes brush in hand. After a well-judged interval, an imperious finger pointed to a thread, a speck, a flake, invisible to any but the kingly eye. The valet silently flicked with the brush, tilted his head and surveyed the royal shoulder afresh, administered a second judicious flick, and stood back. Brooking was on loan from the Marquis of Melton to the King of the Hellenes for the duration of his stay in London, and Brooking was longing for the Wagner season to be over.

The evening clothes were perfect and perfectly fitted the
elegant figure. Fussy bugger, was Brooking’s opinion of his temporary master—but a rewarding man to dress. He knew how to wear a suit, all right. In the prime of his life—thirty-eight years old according to his passport (Brooking had checked)—his spine was as straight as a flagpole, his shoulders square, his bearing reflecting his formative years in the Prussian Guard. Unable to challenge the valet further, George lingered in front of the mirror, as he always did, apparently finding surprising and rather distasteful the image of himself in anything other than uniform. An active soldier, he had risen to the rank of Major General in the war against Turkey and had been devastated when he had been stripped of his military rank, along with his Greek nationality and his possessions, four years before. Forced out of office and into exile by a Revolutionary Committee. A committee led by a man who had become his personal enemy, his cynical tormentor.

But it could have been worse. At least he’d fared better than his Russian kindred; George II Oldenburg still had his handsome head on his shoulders. And the courts of Europe, many of them stocked with German relations of one sort or another, welcomed him. With Queen Victoria as his great-grandmamma, what doors would not open to him? He was a notable and sought-after figure on the social scene. “And, of course, George of Greece will be of the party …” were the words every hostess longed to utter.