A Prince of Troy. Lindsay Clarke
tempt him to join you in your raid along the Mysian coast. Peleus was a good pirate in his day. He might be so again.’
There was, Odysseus quickly saw, no chance of it. The man could barely lift a smile let alone a sword. Shrugging his shoulders, he had made up his mind to cut his losses and push off at dawn, when Peleus looked up from his wine-cup for the first time in nearly an hour and said, ‘It was good of you to come. Everyone has forgotten how to smile around me. You seem to do little else.’
‘It costs me nothing,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘Does it disturb you?’
Unsmiling, Peleus shook his head. After a time he began to talk and a god must have entered him, for once he began it became unstoppable. That night witnessed a huge unburdening because Odysseus was the only person to whom Peleus ever spoke about what happened between himself and his wife. Odysseus listened in spellbound horror to a tormented account of how, at the prompting of Euhippe, he had cleansed himself before Zeus, begged forgiveness of the Goddess, and broken in to the sacred precinct around the sea-cave where Thetis held her rites. It was the dark of the moon after the birth of the child. Pushing aside the drug-intoxicated women who tried to stop him, Peleus entered the cave and saw the dark figures of Thetis and Harpale standing under a primitive wooden idol to the Goddess beside an altar of burning coals. Harpale held a finely meshed net of mail. Thetis was unwrapping the swaddling bands from her howling baby, and Peleus saw at once what they intended to do. If he had he not come in time to prevent it, she and Harpale would have done what they must have done many times before – they would have seined the child with fire, passing its tiny body back and forth along the shimmer of hot air above the altar’s glowing coals until it was immortalized.
With a howl of execration, Peleus drew his sword, cut Harpale down where she stood, and snatched the baby from its screaming mother. Had the child not been squalling in his grip like a small storm, he might have killed Thetis also, but by the time he could lift the sword again the frenzied moment had passed and he could not bring himself to do it. Thetis saw the conflict in his face. Astoundingly, she released a small, frustrated laugh.
With the baby tussling in his arm, he stared at her as at a mad woman. She held his gaze, and they stood unmoving in the heat and sea-smell of the cave, knowing that the infant might have been spared its flames, but the fire that Thetis had lit had instantly consumed all traces of their love for one another.
Heart-broken, and unwilling to command the death of Cheiron’s daughter, Peleus had her kept under close confinement for a time. The child he gave to a wet-nurse, one of Euhippe’s friends, a Centaur woman who had been brought back from a hunt, freed at Peleus’s insistence, and now lived with one of the palace cooks. It was she who named her tiny charge Achilles, the lipless one, because his lips had never been warmed into life at his mother’s breast. But Peleus found it hard even to look at his son because the child’s cries always recalled the horror of that night. On one thing, however, he was resolved – that Thetis should never come close either to the child or to himself. So in the end, on the understanding that she would die if ever she returned to Thessaly, he gave her leave to do what she had always wished to do and Thetis joined her mother’s people on the remote island of Skyros.
‘But the boy lived,’ Odysseus said at last, filled with sympathy for the man who sat across from him, staring at the dying embers of the fire. ‘You have a son and heir.’
‘Whom I hardly know,’ Peleus answered, ‘and who knows nothing of me.’
‘That can be repaired. You can recall him from Cheiron’s school at any time.’
‘To live in this darkness with me?’
‘The child might lighten it.’
Sighing, Peleus searched the young Ithacan’s face. ‘Fortunately, it was prophesied that the boy will be a greater man than his father.’
Odysseus said, ‘Then he will be a great soul indeed.’
Warmed by the company of this new friend, Peleus asked Odysseus to stay with him in Iolcus for a time. The Ithacan gladly agreed and the two men talked often together, exchanging stories of former exploits and discussing the changes in the world now that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, had reclaimed the throne in Mycenae and was expanding his power to such an extent that he must soon be acclaimed as High King of all Argos. They talked of lighter matters too and Odysseus had at last got his host laughing merrily one evening when the arrival of another visitor was announced.
As a bastard son of King Actor, Menoetius was loosely related to Peleus by marriage, and he had sailed around the straits from the Locrian city of Opus in search of help from him. Menoetius had a six year old son who was in trouble, having killed one of his friends when an argument over a game of knucklebones turned into a fight.
‘There’s no great harm in the boy,’ he said, frowning, ‘apart from his passionate temper. And it breaks my heart, but I can’t keep him with me in Opus. There’s blood guilt on him now, and the father of the boy he killed loved his son as much as I do mine.’
Peleus nodded. ‘So what are you asking of me?’
Menoetius asked if he might bring his son into the hall, and when permission was given, Peleus and Odysseus found themselves confronted by a scrawny six-year-old with a thick shock of hair and a downcast gaze firmly fixed on his own freshly scrubbed feet. Remembering how his own early fate had been shaped by the death of another, Peleus said, ‘What’s your name, boy?’
Briefly the small face glowered up at him in sulky defiance, then immediately looked down again, saying nothing.
‘His name’s Patroclus,’ Menoetius said, ‘though, as you see, he hasn’t brought much glory on his father so far.’
‘There’s still plenty of time,’ Odysseus put in lightly.
Menoetius looked back at Peleus in appeal. ‘I hear that you’ve sent your own son to the Centaur?’ When Peleus nodded again, he added. ‘I was wondering if you thought he might be able to sort this boy out.’
‘He sorted me out,’ Peleus said quietly.
‘But that dreadful business at the wedding of Pirithous … when they got drunk …’ Menoetius saw Peleus frown. He hesitated and began again. ‘I mean, weren’t you already a man when you went to Cheiron.’
‘I was more of a man when I came away. As were Pirithous and Jason, though they were sent to him as boys. And I might have been a better man still if I’d stayed among the Centaurs.’ Peleus shook his head. ‘But that was not my fate. As it is, I was glad to send my son to Cheiron. And since then a number of my Myrmidons have done the same.’ He turned back to where Patroclus shifted uneasily on his feet. ‘Look at me, boy.’ Grimly, Patroclus did as he was bidden. ‘Would you like to hunt and learn how to talk to horses? Would you like to know the magic locked in herbs, and how to sing and finger the lyre so that the animals come out of the trees to listen?’
Uncertainly Patroclus nodded.
‘I think I’d like to go to this school myself,’ Odysseus smiled.
Astounded by himself, Peleus said suddenly, ‘Then come up the mountain with me tomorrow.’
Odysseus looked up, surprised at the transformation in his friend. Some god must be at work here. He felt the hairs prickle at the nape of his neck. But he smiled and nodded. Why not? Yes, he would be glad to go.
Peleus turned back to Menoetius. ‘It’s time I went to see how my own son’s doing. You’ve done the right thing. Leave your boy with me.’
Apart from a tree that had been struck by lightning and the number of scruffy children to be fed, Peleus found the gorge hardly changed since the last time he had been there. But Cheiron felt much older, his cheeks were hollower than Peleus remembered, and the wrinkles deeply pouched about his eyes. His movements were slower too, though he was still limber, and his hands trembled as he offered a libation of mare’s milk in thanksgiving for the return of his son and friend. He welcomed Odysseus warmly among his people, and smiled kindly at Patroclus, questioning him a little, before packing