The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

Odysseus raised his eyebrows. ‘Most things are possible, with a little deception. After you tried to save Astyanax, Eperitus, I remembered there was the body of an infant on the rocks by the gate – he was thrown down from the walls just as the Council was convening this morning. When I took Astyanax through the gate, I simply picked the boy’s corpse up as I went past. Once inside the tower, I swapped Astyanax’s princely garments for the plain sackcloth the dead child was wearing, then threw him down from the top of the tower. The head was already a mess, but I’m hoping nobody will look too closely at the body. The hardest part was carrying them both up the ladder – Astyanax under my cloak, and the other dangling by his ankle.’

Peisandros knelt by the child and offered him a thick, dirty finger. Astyanax took it and pulled, laughing at the Myrmidon.

‘So what are you going to do with him?’ Eperitus asked. ‘You can’t leave him here. He’ll just be found and thrown from the walls anyway. And if the Council find out –’

‘I didn’t have time to think about that,’ Odysseus confessed, ‘but I think I have the answer now.’

‘Oh?’

‘You, Peisandros. Neoptolemus is your leader and Astyanax’s mother has been allotted to him.’

‘So?’

‘So you smuggle the boy on board with you and take him back to Phthia. There’re plenty of soldiers doing the same with other Trojan boys; I’ve seen it – they haven’t the heart to throw them from the walls, so they’re disguising them as girls and taking them back to Greece. You can do the same and bring Astyanax up among your own family.’

‘What?’

‘And make sure you tell Andromache that her boy is safe, so she can watch him grow up from a distance. But Astyanax is never to know his true identity, you understand?’

‘Well, of course, but –’

‘That’s settled then,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘You’ve always been a good man, Peisandros. I’ll make sure you get a little extra from the plunder, too. Just to help you feed the additional mouth when you get home, naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ Peisandros sighed.

Astyanax tugged at his finger and giggled, causing the Myrmidon to laugh out loud, despite himself.

As they walked back to the ships at the end of the day, with the sun already melting into the distant edge of the Aegean, Eperitus turned to his king.

‘You took a big risk for the sake of that child. A child you’ve never even seen before, and the son of your enemy.’

‘I hold no enmity towards Hector,’ Odysseus replied. ‘He was just a man fighting for his homeland, and now his soul is in Hades where it can’t harm any more Greeks. If I took a risk, it wasn’t for Astyanax’s sake.’

‘Then whose?’

Odysseus smiled at him.

‘Yours. When I realised why you wanted to save the child – because you’d been unable to save Iphigenia, and because that failure has eaten away at you for ten years – I knew I had to help you. If I took a risk in doing what I did, then I did it for your sake Eperitus. Who else’s?’

‘Thank you,’ Eperitus said, quietly.

They reached the Ithacan galleys, which were turning black against the crimson sunset.

‘And now,’ Odysseus said, looking up at the muddle of masts, cross spars and rigging, ‘I suppose we had better think about going home.’

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Despite not appearing directly in The Iliad or The Odyssey, the story of the wooden horse is probably the most iconic and familiar of all the myths associated with the Trojan War. The idea of a simple trick succeeding where ten years of brute force had failed has an appeal that has stood the test of time. Naturally, there isn’t a thread of historical evidence for the horse – after all, mythology is not history – though many have tried to interpret it in more realistic terms. Perhaps the most convincing is the suggestion, first put forward by the Romans, that the horse was a metaphor for an ancient siege tower. I preferred the courage and desperation of the original story, with the surviving heroes of the Greek army (except Agamemnon, of course) hiding in a wooden horse and hoping their enemies will take the bait.

The oracles that foretold the fall of Troy are less well-known. To the ancient Greeks the gods were as much a part of life as working, fighting, eating and sleeping. The fact that everything rested “in the lap of the gods”, as Homer puts it, was unquestioned, so to have the outcome of the war depend on the fulfilment of divine prophecies was only natural. As ever, there are a variety of different versions of who predicted what and when, so I have chosen the ones that I believe best suit the story I’m trying to tell.