When she got to her feet to return to the shore where she had left her clothing she found King Diomedes before her, sitting alone on a boulder.
The low sun struck him in full, setting his hair ablaze around his bronzed cheeks, mixing it with the curls of his beard like the waves of the river amid the willow bushes. He was wearing only his chlamys over his nude body, and his leg was propped up on a stone. She realized that he had been watching her for some time, without her knowing. She did not run away, because there was nowhere she could go. She was drawn towards him by the melancholy look in his eyes; the same that she had seen in Nemro’s black eyes, but without his gleam of hope. In those few steps that separated her from the king she realized that he was sadder, more alone, more desperate; she understood that Nemro’s death for him had been nothing more, nothing less than an unavoidable turn of fate.
She looked at his awesome hands, the hands of an annihilator. The strong fingers, the turgid veins under his skin. Hands that gave death or a caress without much difference. She looked into his eyes and laid her hands on his shoulders; they felt hard, and strong. She ran her fingers through his soft, smooth hair. She pressed his head to her bosom and he put his hands around her waist and kissed her breasts and her smooth stomach still dripping with river water. Without standing, he pulled her against him, pulled her into his lap and penetrated within her holding her in his arms like a child, letting her rest her head on his shoulder, as though she were sleeping. One drop of her virgin’s blood stained the white chlamys of the king and she pressed her lips together without a moan. She clasped the hard body of the king with her tender arms and with her long, slender legs. She thought of Nemro’s black eyes, dead, forever, she thought of her distant land, beyond the immaculate peaks of the Mountains of Ice, and she wept. She wept while the king laid her on the sand and unleashed all the power of his loins within her, gripping her by the shoulders, by her hair. . She wept because she felt the whole world stifled by sadness, in the murmur of the river and the woods, in the slow, opaque dusk, in the remote screeching of the scops owl, in the whisper of the wind.
The king cried out in the moment of supreme delirium, a cry as hoarse as the growl of a beast, then collapsed, exhausted, his fists clutching the river sand. The girl slipped away from under his heavy body and immersed herself again in the river to purify herself in its gelid waters. When she emerged, Diomedes had disappeared; there was nothing left of him but the footprints in the damp sand and his feral odour in the air, but as she was gathering up her clothing she found a flower resting on her gown, a wild melilot. She picked it up and brought it to her face, inhaling its scent. The moon was just rising between the boughs of the poplars and the day past was nothing but a thin vermilion strip on the mountain crest. She felt that the king had left her a kiss and a caress.
10
When Queen Clytemnestra learned that Helen had returned to Sparta together with her husband Menelaus at the end of a sultry summer, the news filled her with joy and at the same time with great anxiety. She was impatient to embrace the sister she had last seen when she was only twenty, and to learn from her many things about the long war that she still did not know; above all, she was impatient to know whether she would serve the cause of the great conspiracy. But she feared Menelaus.
The younger Atreid would immediately seek news of Agamemnon and it was not improbable that he would soon know the truth. Many witnesses to the massacre had been eliminated; only the most faithful had been spared. But how to establish who was faithful in a palace where the queen shared her bed with the accomplice who had helped her kill her legitimate husband, where son and daughter no longer trusted their own mother?
Her informers had told her that Menelaus had been greeted by a city astonished and troubled, but not hostile.
The mothers and fathers of the warriors who were returning after so many years had thronged along the road that led into the city from the south. They anxiously watched the ranks of foot soldiers, scanned the rumbling battle chariots as they paraded by with their gleaming decorations of silver and copper.
Some of them suddenly lit up, shouting out a name, and began to run along the column so as not to lose sight of the beloved face, not for a single instant. The man who answered to that name did not turn his head, remaining in the ranks, closed in his polished armour, but his gaze rested on those well-loved heads, on those faces so harshly lined by their long wait.
Others, after having watched the very last man parade by, dragged themselves back to the head of the line to have another look, or crossed to the other side, not willing to resign themselves to the despair of a loss, telling themselves that time and the war can make a son unrecognizable to the father who sired him, to the mother who bore him.
Still others, after having futilely called out the names of one or more of their sons, again and again, after having run up and down the ranks with their hearts in a flurry, and after having frantically searched the rows of warriors arrayed in front of the king’s palace waiting to be discharged, gave themselves up to despair. The women raised shrill cries and soiled their hair in the dust, the men, their cheeks streaked with tears, stared silently at the dull, lightless sky hanging over the city.
At nightfall several guards exited the palace with torches, accompanied by scribes who had inscribed the names of the fallen on fresh clay tablets. Then came the king in person, armed, flanked by his field adjutants. He had been responsible for the war and he was responsible for the fallen, for all the young men run through by merciless bronze, buried in a foreign land, in the fields of Asia or the swamps of Egypt. He had to answer to the grief-shattered parents.
The great courtyard of the palace was packed with a silent crowd, but soon someone began to shout: ‘Bring us back our sons! What have you done with them? You took the best of our young men and brought them to war. . over a woman!’
The king was pale, subdued. He wore his long red hair tied at the nape of his neck and was barefoot, like a beggar.
‘Even I mourn my dead!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Where is my brother Agamemnon? And where are his comrades? Where are my brother’s children, Prince Orestes and Princess Electra? Why haven’t they come to welcome me?’ He advanced towards the edge of the steps. ‘The responsibility for the war was mine,’ he said, ‘and I will pronounce the names of my comrades fallen in a strange land, buried far away from their homes, so that their parents can raise a mound to them, with a stone remembering their name, should they so wish.’
‘It’s your fault that they’re dead!’ shouted another voice. ‘Just so you could have Helen back in your bed! And you are alive!’
The king opened his robe and bared the scars on his chest. ‘It is only fate that has spared me,’ he shouted. ‘A thousand times I heard arrows whistling next to my temples, many times did the bronze cut my skin. I never hid myself. Strike this heart if you believe that I trembled with fear, that I used the lives of the comrades you entrusted me with as a shield.’ He lowered his head. ‘I wept over them. Bitterly. Each one. And I remember every one of them.’
The crowd’s shouts lowered to a diffused murmur. The king held his hand out to the scribe sitting on the ground near him, who handed him a tablet. He began to read the names of the fallen, one by one, with a firm, sharp voice, and the silence in the courtyard became so deep that the sputtering of the torches could be heard in the still air. Until late that night, the king pronounced the names of the fallen before their mothers and their fathers, before their tearful brides.