Read Online The Songs of the Kings by Barry Unsworth - Free Book Online

pride. “He’ll need help with the adding-up,” he said. “That much is certain.”
    â€œHe spoke of bringing the other Ajax into it, Ajax the Lesser.”
    â€œDid he so?” A faint smile came to the King’s face. “Two likely peacemakers there, they do nothing but quarrel whenever they are together. You have our leave to go. See that you are here again by sunset tomorrow. And see that you come with the right words.”
    He smiled again, saying this, and the smile was terrible to Calchas, as was the threat contained in the quickened tone. They were still present to his mind as he left the tent. Hatred there, not for him only. Again it came to him that the King was mad. A man who had scented in his soul the disfavor of the gods and still demanded the right words rather than the true ones . . .
    Poimenos had returned and together they made ready. The diviner abandoned his long-skirted robe and girdle for a sleeveless vest and short kilt such as the Greeks used. Poimenos wore cotton drawers, tied at the waist with a strip of crocodile skin which Calchas had given him and of which he was very proud.
    Calchas watched him as he moved about, passing inside the tent and out again, getting together the provisions for their journey. And again his heart was wrung by the boy’s beauty, which was without knowledge of itself in this bustle of preparation, the slight but well-defined muscles of the shoulders and thighs, the warm olive tone of the skin, no flaw or fleck in it, lustrous—it was as if the hot sun oiled him, spread him with unguents. By what mystery, what casual gift, had a goatherd, a descendant of goatherds, been endowed with such unconscious grace of movement and form? In the crisis that had come upon him, in the danger that he felt, Calchas was swept by longing for negation, freedom from the torment of alternatives, he wanted the boy’s body next to his, in a light so pure and strong that it contained no faintest hue and so was indistinguishable from darkness. No conflicting voices could live in such a light, only peace of the senses and vacancy of the mind.
    It was not possible now, as it had never been before, to know whether Poimenos understood the refuge he gave, the sheltered place where the light and the dark were one. Almost certainly not, the priest thought; it was outside the range of the boy’s conceptions, though he was sensitive and quick when it came to the messages of the body. He recognized the need in the eyes, but thought it only for the pleasure he knew how to supply. Now, it seemed, he saw something of his master’s foreboding too, for he paused in his preparations to touch the priest’s shoulder and smile and say, “The goddess will reveal the truth to you, and you will reveal that truth to Agamemnon, tamer of horses, the great oak that shelters us.”
    He had not understood—it was the truth itself that Calchas feared most. But as the priest made up his mixture of hemp seed and dried bay leaf, as they put their bread and cheese, and the wine for the libation, into a cloth bag, as they set out along the shore together, away from the camp, to look for a local fisherman who might take them across, all the while he held to the simplicity of the words. For Poimenos truth was triumph over uncertainty, peace after struggle, complete and unmixed. It was why he would remain always a server, always in the anteroom of the temple, never knowing the terrible obscurity of the god’s purposes. Like looking at a great tree, Calchas thought. At a distance, one single shape, a dome, a spire. Approaching, one saw the articulation of the limbs, the separate masses of the foliage. But what mortal man, drawing nearer yet, looking up through the canopy of the branches, could keep the whole marvelous structure present to his mind? And if, nevertheless, there was still the terror of failing to see the vein in the leaf . . . Suddenly, unexpectedly,