The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

She was thrown onto her back. Her wide eyes stared up at the ceiling of dark leaves traced with silver. Then there was a rush of light as if the moon had expanded to a hundred times its own size, filling the temple and swamping her retinas with whiteness. At the same time, the gentle rustling of the wind grew to a roar like the sound of a monstrous wave rolling towards her. The cold night air bit into her flesh with the intensity of fire, burning her nerve endings and arching her back until, with a scream, she felt her conscious mind ripped from her body and pulled upward through the branches of the temple into the cloudless, moon-dominated sky. She continued to ascend, glimpsing the Scamander and the dark mass of Troy to her right, while away to her left was the semicircular wall of the Greek camp with the beetle-like hulls of their thousand ships blackening the shoreline. Then she was plunging forward, not by her own will but drawn inexorably on towards the great, glittering blanket of the ocean, until she was leaving Ilium behind and soaring over the waves at a height that made the islands below appear like stepping stones. Formless in her flight, as if she were a ghost rushing on its way to the eternal halls of Hades, she could neither feel the wind that herded skeins of cloud across the face of the moon, nor hear its roar filling her ears; neither could she taste the dampness in the air, nor smell the cold clarity of the night. But she could see. Like a great eye she could see far and wide, all the way back to Ilium – already in the dim distance behind her – and beyond. To the north she saw the mountainous lands of Troy’s former rivals, before the Greeks had come and Priam had bought their allegiance. South, she could see the country of Egypt, even though it was many days journey by ship and several weeks on foot. Yet it was towards the west, to the never-before-seen land of her enemies, that her mind was focussed.

The gods had shrouded Greece in cloud, but beneath its tattered edges she glimpsed mountains and valleys, rugged and beautiful, dotted throughout with white-walled cities and towns that slumbered peacefully in the darkness. This was the cradle of the fleet that had brought so much destruction to her homeland, and she felt nothing but revulsion as it came rapidly closer. Then the sea was gone and she fell through the clouds to skim bird-like across the land below. Now she could see orchards and vineyards; ramshackle villages and hillside enclosures half-filled with sheep; roads left unguarded by abandoned watchtowers, from which the soldiers had long since been called to war. She passed a city nestled beneath two mountain peaks and felt a surge of black fear at the sight of it, but before it could overwhelm her she had moved on, over more mountains and plains until she saw a river below, its surface shining like glass as the moon broke momentarily free of the clouds. She followed its course and saw a high mound that she instinctively knew was the barrow of a long-dead warrior, and without any lessening of speed plunged towards it. If she had possessed hands to throw before her face, or a mouth with which she could have screamed, she would have; but there was no sense of impact as she passed into the barrow, or of having come to a stop as she found herself inside the high-ceilinged chamber beneath. Though there was no light in the tomb, she could see a sarcophagus before her with the carved figure of a horse above it. Inside was a bone, one of many that made up the giant skeleton of a man, but this single shoulder blade was starkly white – made of ivory, the work of the gods. Briefly she wondered why she had been brought here, and immediately she knew that this was one of the answers that she had sought. A voice spoke the name of the man whose tomb this was, and she understood at once that unless the Greeks took the ivory shoulder blade from the sarcophagus the walls of Troy would never fall.

Then she was free of the chamber and returning east, moving through the air at great speed until the clouds opened to reveal a large island far below her. She saw a palace on top of a hill overlooking the main harbour, and as her mind’s eye descended to enter its empty halls she wondered what the significance of the island was and why Apollo had brought her here. Then a vision of a great warrior appeared, dressed in magnificent armour that she had seen once before from the walls of Troy. The helmet was gold with a red plume, the breastplate shaped in the perfect likeness of a man’s torso, and the shield had seven concentric circles filled with figures that moved as if alive. The armour had been made by Hephaistos, the smith-god, for Achilles. But Achilles was dead, his ashes buried beneath a barrow on the plains of Ilium. And then she understood the meaning of the revelation. The warrior in the armour was to take Achilles’s place on the battlefield; without him, the Greeks would return home defeated.