The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

‘You can’t blame him,’ Diomedes said with an apologetic shrug. ‘The men are keen to return to Greece and do something other than sitting around in camp or fighting Trojans, but they’re wondering what the point of all this is. And they’re not alone. I mean, why are the gods sending us after an old bone?’

‘I know nothing more than you do,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Although it’s possible the clue to the oracle lies in the legend of Pelops himself.’

‘There are plenty of stories about Agamemnon’s grandfather,’ Diomedes said. ‘But I don’t see how any of them can show us how to beat the Trojans.’

‘Well, I know nothing about Pelops,’ Eperitus said. ‘Although you promised in Agamemnon’s tent you’d tell me the significance of this bone.’

‘That’s something we’d all like to know,’ Sthenelaus agreed as he watched the wave caps ahead of the galley.

‘The story’s familiar enough,’ Odysseus answered with a sigh, ‘but if you’ve never had the patience or inclination to listen to it then I’ll recount it for you. Many have called Agamemnon ambitious and evil, and with good reason, but he is the natural product of his ancestors, a line of men cursed with wickedness. His great-grandfather was Tantalus, about whom there are numerous tales, but none so depraved as the trick he played on the Olympians. He lived in the time when the gods walked freely among men, and some men walked with the gods. Tantalus was one such man, being regularly invited to banquet with them on Mount Olympus. Unfortunately their favour didn’t inspire him to worship them more, only to regard them with contempt. He saw their frivolity as a sign of childish stupidity, rather than the result of a nature free from the shadow of pain, suffering and death. And so he decided to test their power, stealing ambrosia and nectar from their feasts and sharing it with his fellow mortals, just to see if the Olympians noticed. They said nothing because they loved him, but this only made Tantalus despise them more. As a further test, he invited them to a banquet of his own, where, in his wickedness, he served the immortals a stew from an iron pot in which he had cut up and boiled the flesh of his own son.’

‘He fed them his own child?’ Sthenelaus exclaimed in disbelief.

‘Didn’t Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter at Aulis, just to appease the anger of Artemis?’ Eperitus reminded him, a hint of bitterness in his voice. ‘The man’s a monster.’

‘It was the undoing of Tantalus,’ Odysseus continued. ‘The gods were not as foolish as he took them to be, all but one of them realising the meat before them was human. Only Demeter, distracted by grief at the recent loss of her daughter, ate the stew. As revenge, Zeus contrived a special torment for Tantalus, condemning him to an eternity of hunger and thirst in Hades. There he stands, up to his neck in a pool of cool water and with the heavily laden boughs of a fruit tree bending over him; but whenever he lowers his lips to the water it recedes before they can touch it; and whenever he reaches for the fruit of the tree, a gust of wind blows it just beyond his grasping fingers.

‘As for his son, Zeus ordered his dismembered body to be placed back in the pot in which Tantalus had boiled them. The only missing part was the shoulder blade that Demeter had eaten whole, but the goddess replaced this with one of ivory. Once inside the pot, the parts of the body reformed and took on new life, the boy emerging even more handsome than he had been before his father had murdered him. The boy’s name,’ Odysseus added, leaning in towards the others, ‘was Pelops.’

‘By all the gods,’ Sthenelaus said. ‘Then this bone we’ve been sent to find is the ivory replacement made by Demeter.’

Eperitus frowned. ‘But how is the bone significant? It was made by the gods, just like Agamemnon’s sceptre, Achilles’s armour and dozens of other artefacts already in our possession, but I don’t see how it will help us defeat the Trojans.’