The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

Odysseus leaned against one of the laurel trees at the entrance to the temple of Thymbrean Apollo and looked down the slope to the wide bay below. Once it had been home to hundreds of vessels, from visiting merchant ships and high-sided war galleys to the small cockle boats favoured by the local fisherman. Now it was empty, its occupants either destroyed or driven away by the war. Two rivers fed the bay – the Simöeis to the north and the Scamander to the south, the latter gleaming darkly in the faint starlight. Rising up from the plain beyond the river were the pallid battlements of Troy that had defied the Greeks for so long. At the highest point of the city was Pergamos, a fortress within a fortress, its palaces and temples protected by sloping walls and lofty towers where armed guards kept an unfailing watch. Further down, sweeping southward from the citadel like a half-formed teardrop, was the lower city. Here rich, two-storey houses slowly gave way to a mass of closely packed slums where thousands of the city’s inhabitants lived in squalor and near starvation. Here, also, were camped the soldiers of Troy and her allies, ready at a moment’s notice to man the walls or pour out onto the plains and do battle. And though it was the Greek army that laid siege to Troy’s gates and penned its citizens in like sheep, the very stubbornness of its defenders ensured that the Greeks were no less prisoners themselves, doomed never to see their homes and families again until those god-built walls could somehow be breached and the bitter war brought to its bloody conclusion.

A little way off, sitting on a boulder overlooking the slope, was Eperitus, his back turned to the temple as he looked down at the few lights that still burned in the sleeping city. Odysseus wondered whether he had sensed his presence or was too consumed by whatever thoughts had driven him away from his comrades to seek his own company among the rocks and shrubs of the ridge. Odysseus could guess what those thoughts were though, and felt it best not to disturb them.

‘He’s still asleep,’ said a voice behind him.

‘Good,’ Odysseus replied, turning to face Podaleirius as he emerged from the shadows of the temple. ‘It’s the best thing for him.’

Podaleirius had cut away the dead flesh from Philoctetes’s foot while they had been on the beach, and, after bathing the wound with a mixture of herbs from his leather satchel and binding it, had insisted on them carrying him on a stretcher all the way to the temple of Thymbrean Apollo. There they had found a trail of fresh blood leading to the headless body of a snake on the altar, but Podaleirius had said it was a good sign and set about offering prayers to Apollo for Philoctetes to be healed. The ceremony, it seemed, was over and Podaleirius had left his patient in the care of Antiphus.

He looked over to where Eperitus sat.

‘Is he alright?’ he asked, with the natural concern of a healer.

‘He will be,’ Odysseus replied, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘This isn’t a good place for him.’

Podaleirius nodded, as if he understood, and looked over at the great city on the other side of the vale.

‘I’ve heard his father is a Trojan,’ he whispered back. ‘A nobleman, some say.’

‘A highborn commander in Priam’s army, but no less a bastard for it. He was exiled to Greece many years ago, making his home in the north in a city called Alybas. There he married a Greek woman, Eperitus’s mother. Then when Eperitus was barely a man, his father killed the king, who had once accepted him as a suppliant, and usurped his throne. Eperitus refused to support him and was banished – that was shortly before I met him. Sometime later, the people of Alybas rebelled against his father and he fled back here to Ilium, but Eperitus never forgave him for his treachery.’

‘He chose honour over blood, then,’ Podaleirius said. ‘But the call of a man’s ancestry is strong. Are you certain he can be trusted not to go over?’

He tipped his chin toward the city to indicate what he meant. Odysseus could have taken offence at the questioning of his captain’s loyalty, but Podaleirius, it seemed, had already guessed some of the truth.

‘Not to his father,’ he replied. ‘He has already faced that test.’

‘Then he passed?’

‘Barely.’

‘I think I see,’ Podaleirius said. ‘And the test happened here, in the temple. Am I right? That’s why he doesn’t like the place.’

Odysseus had been regarding Eperitus’s back throughout the conversation, but now turned his gaze on Podaleirius.

‘You’re an astute man.’

‘I can gauge the moods of others, that’s all. Healers learn to read things that warriors cannot. How was he tested?’