A Prince of Troy. Lindsay Clarke
arm his warriors, carry out his building projects, repair his ships, and make expensive offerings to the gods, all of this took a lot of gold. What could not be raised as tribute must be found elsewhere, so in company with the ageing Theseus, he turned pirate in the summer months and took to raiding the merchant ships and rich estates of the eastern seaboard.
He made his reputation as a valiant warrior and a generous king on those voyages, though his exploits never ranged as widely as those of his brother. Telamon had already sailed on Jason’s Argo in the quest for the Golden Fleece, and had become a close comrade to Heracles, who was renowned and feared from Epirus to Paphlagonia as the boldest, most vigorous and, at times, the maddest hero of the age. Having already made a further expedition round the coast of the Black Sea into the land of the Amazons, Telamon and Heracles were now mounting a campaign against the Phrygian city of Troy.
Telamon tried to talk his brother into joining forces with them, but Peleus lacked his restless appetite for battle and was reluctant to risk his kingdom’s hard won wealth in what promised to be an unprofitable attack on a bankrupt city recently visited by plague and earthquake. But neither did he wish to look weak in Telamon’s eyes. In the end the decision was made for him by a wound he took in a ship-fight that spring. A Sidonian sword cut his right hamstring as he leapt aboard the galley, putting him out of action for months.
That was also the year in which his sixth child died in early infancy, and the grief of it was more than he could bear. A marriage that had begun so inauspiciously was now eroded by mutual disappointment, and its passion had faded as its tensions increased. Peleus was often given cause to puzzle over what Cheiron had said about Thetis entertaining immortal longings, but it seemed to account for her restlessness and the way her spirit sometimes chafed against his own more practical concerns. These days she seemed to take comfort only in Harpale’s company, and Peleus grew to resent the power that the little Dolopian exercised over his wife’s imagination. Harpale soon learned to stay out of his way, though her name frequently cropped up in conversation with his wife, reproaching him like the sting of a seaurchin for the island life she was denied.
Of Thetis’s failure to provide him with an heir it became ever harder to speak, so when he finally decided to consult Cheiron about his injured leg, Peleus went against his wife’s wishes and raised this other, graver matter with him too.
Cheiron listened carefully as he applied thick poultices to his son-in-law’s leg. He asked questions about the practices of the cuttlefish cult, and took a particular interest in the part that Harpale had come to play in his daughter’s life. Knowing something of the Dolopians, he asked Peleus whether there had been any unusual signs of the use of fire in his daughter’s rites. Peleus was unable to answer, however, because he was now excluded from all that part of his wife’s life. His own service was to Zeus, to Apollo, and to the goddess, whether worshipped as Athena in Itonus or as Artemis in Iolcus; but as to his wife’s most secret mysteries, he was as ignorant as his horse.
Cheiron nodded. ‘Remain here till these herbs have shared their virtue. Had you come sooner I could have done more, but now you will always walk with a limp. Still,’ he smiled up into his friend’s face, ‘if you had been your horse I would have had to cut your windpipe!’ He fastened the bandage and sat back to wash his hands. ‘As to the other matter, I will reflect on it.’
When Peleus travelled back down the mountain he brought with him a Centaur woman called Euhippe, who wept such fat tears when they left the gorge that Peleus guessed that the old king’s pallet of grass would be a lonelier place after the parting. She was a small, round woman with a shyly attentive manner, and large, surprisingly delicate hands. Overtly she was to be taken into the household as a nurse for the care of Peleus’s wound, but he soon intended to make it known that Euhippe was a skilful midwife too.
By the time he returned to his palace at Iolcus, Thetis was already over two months pregnant. Moody, and still prey to sickness, she at once made it clear that she would have nothing to do with the little mountain woman, whom she dismissed first as her father’s hairy brood-mare, and then, after the cruel pretence of a closer look, as his jaded nag. Peleus protested. There was an unholy row between them that night, and silence for two weeks after.
Then the sickness passed, they talked and made love again, only to resume the queasy truce their life had become. Thetis still refused to include Euhippe among the women of her bedchamber, but the Centaur found an unobtrusive place for herself in the royal household and her medical skills soon won her grateful friends. After successfully treating one woman for a rash around her midriff, and another for a dangerous fever, she gained a reputation as a wise woman and became a great favourite among the Myrmidon barons and their wives. Only Thetis, as her belly grew rounder by the month, continued to ignore her existence.
If she feared that Euhippe had been placed to spy on her, then her fears were justified, for on the occasions when she came to examine his leg, Peleus questioned her closely about anything she had learned of his wife’s activities. For several weeks she found nothing unusual to report, but in the eighth month of Thetis’s pregnancy, Euhippe made friends with a young woman who was complaining of intense pain from her monthly bleeding. Euhippe gave her a potion made up of guelder rose, skullcap and black haw for immediate relief, and advised her to return soon for further treatment. When she came back, they began to chat, and it emerged that the girl served as a handmaid in the cuttlefish cult. Through cautiously worded questions, Euhippe learned that there had been nothing outwardly wrong with any of Thetis’s babies – no fevers or defects, nothing that would account for their early death. It was a mystery, the girl said, unless the Goddess had called them back to her.
When Euhippe asked her casually about Harpale’s role in the cult, the girl flushed a little, looked away, and said that her own degree was lowly and she was too young to be initiated into such matters. Nor was she prepared to speculate.
‘But there was a smell of fear about her,’ Euhippe decided. ‘She may not know much, but she knows more than she was letting on, and it frightens her.’
With his own suspicions now confirmed, Peleus asked Euhippe to keep her ears open, and eventually more emerged through one of the baron’s wives. It was this woman who first dared to speak of witchcraft, but she did so darkly, casting her suspicions only on the Dolopian, not on Thetis herself, and in a way that left Euhippe feeling the woman meant her to report what she said.
Knowing that Thetis had once offended this woman, Peleus suggested that she might be spreading rumours out of spite, but Euhippe merely shrugged.
‘You truly believe that something terrible is happening?’ he demanded.
‘For you it would be terrible,’ she said.
‘Do you know what it is?’
‘I may be wrong.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
Euhippe thought for a moment, then shook her head.
‘Then what am I to think,’ he demanded, ‘what am I to do?’
‘You need do nothing. Not until the baby is born.’
‘And then?’
‘Let us wait in patience. When the time comes we will see what to do.’
The truth of what happened at that time was known only to Peleus himself and he would not speak of it – not, that is, until some six years later when Odysseus arrived at his court for the first time. By then the child – Peleus’s seventh son, and the only one to survive – was already in the mountains with Cheiron, learning how to live. Peleus lived alone in his gloomy palace under the patient, mostly silent care of Euhippe, and for a time his melancholic condition had been the talk of Argos. Telamon and Theseus had both tried to shake him out of it and failed. Cheiron was too old to come down from the mountains, and Peleus lacked the heart to seek him out. So the King of the Myrmidons wasted in his loneliness, limping from hall to chamber, hardly speaking, and increasingly reliant on trusted ministers to handle the affairs of state. Old friends like Pirithous and Theseus died. Power shifted south to Mycenae. People began to forget about him.
Then Odysseus ran his ship ashore on the strand