The figure, tall, spare, wearing a white robe without decoration, is old. The loose flesh under the chin hangs in wrinkled folds, the eyes deep-set under knotty brows.
Father?
It is half a question this time. Slowly he rises from his seat.
Alcimus glances at Automedon, then back across his shoulder to see what is there. He sees, and he and Automedon start up both and reach for their swords. Achilles, half-risen, continues to stare.
It is nine years since Achilles last saw his father. When he sailed from Phthia he was little more than a boy, already fully grown and well-made but with few signs upon him of the man he has become — a warrior, deep-chested, thick in the shoulders and neck, his features roughened by long months of bivouacking on the open plain. It is what time has done to him. And it strikes him now, in a great wave of sadness, how much his father too is changed.
The Peleus he left, who had clasped him so strongly to his breast, reluctant to the point of tears to let him go, had been in the prime of life, strong-thewed and warrior-like, a man to be feared. The figure who comes to him now is still noble-looking and tall, but all his muscles are slack. The hair, once thick and iron-grey, is thin and of a fleecy whiteness.
‘Father,’ he says again, aloud this time, overcome with tenderness for this old man and his trembling frailty. ‘Peleus! Father!’
The great Achilles, eyes aswarm, is weeping. With a cry he falls on one knee, and leans out to clasp his father’s robe. Automedon and Alcimus, their swords now drawn and gleaming, leap to his side.
‘Sir!’
Achilles, startled, looks again.
The man is a stranger. Noble, yes, even in his plain robe, but not at all like Peleus. What tricks the heart can play! The man is clearly not his father, but for half a hundred beats of his heart his father had been truly present to him, and he continues now to feel tenderly vulnerable to all those emotions in him that belong to the sacred bond.
Which is why, to the puzzlement of his two attendants, he does not immediately take the interloper by the throat but enquires, almost mildly, ‘But who are you? How did you get into this hut?’ As if, whoever he might be, there was something uncanny in this stranger’s appearing so suddenly, and unnoticed, in a place thick with his followers.
The old man totters and looks as if he might fall. He glances apprehensively at the younger of the two men who face him with drawn swords. Alcimus, lionlike, can barely restrain himself from springing.
Achilles, seeing what it is that has alarmed the man, makes a sign, and Alcimus, after a quick look to Automedon for confirmation, sheathes his sword.
Priam steadies himself. The occasion has moved too quickly, and in a way he is not prepared for. He has come here to kneel to Achilles. Instead the great Achilles is kneeling to him. Still, the moment has arrived. He must go on.
‘I am Priam, King of Troy,’ he says simply. ‘I have come to you, Achilles, just as you see me, just as I am, to ask you, man to man, as a father, for the body of my son. To ransom and bring him home.’
Priam closes his eyes. Now, he thinks. Now, they will strike.
The two attendants continue to stand alert, Automedon still hand on sword. Achilles rises to his feet. But nothing happens.
‘But how did you get here?’ he asks. ‘Into the camp? Into this hut?’
‘I was guided,’ Priam answers. And in recalling the god who has led him here, Hermes the giant-killer, he takes heart.
Achilles, he sees, is impressed by this. He does not repeat the word but it is registered in the line that appears between his brows, the slight parting of his lips. He understands immediately, Priam sees, that more than ordinary forces have brought him here. Despite the vast bulk of the man, the span of the shoulders, the ropelike muscles of the neck, the warrior in him has, for the moment at least, been subdued.
‘I came in a wagon,’ he explains. ‘With my herald, Idaeus. He is out there in the yard with the treasure I have brought you.’
He does not kneel. The occasion for that has passed. So the whole scene, as he had imagined and acted it out in his mind, does not take place.
Instead, he stands quietly in the stillness that surrounds them, despite the noise that Achilles’ Myrmidons are making, and waits.
Achilles narrows his eyes, examines the man before him. He makes a sign, almost invisible, to Automedon, who removes his hand from his weapon and goes out.
All this has happened so quickly and so quietly in this darkened corner of the hut that the men at the big mess table remain unaware of the extraordinary happening in their midst. They continue to shout one another down in boisterous argument and raise their cups in drunken toasts. Under the din they make, the notes of the lyre continue to colour the air. All of which gives the moment, as Achilles experiences it, a dreamlike quality.
The tenderness of his earlier mood is still strong upon him. Beyond this old man who claims — can it be true? — to be Priam, King of Troy, hovers the figure of his father, which is too immediate in Achilles’ mind, too disturbing, to be pushed aside. Impatient to know what it is exactly that he has to deal with, he makes a sign to Alcimus to go after Automedon and bring back news of what he has found.
But Alcimus, reluctant to leave his master alone, hesitates, and before he can make the move, Automedon is back. He is bundling in a second old man, sturdier than the first. Shock-headed and dressed in a garment of coarse homespun, he bears no resemblance at all to the Trojan herald, whom Achilles has seen on at least three previous occasions in the camp.
‘It’s true,’ Automedon reports in a whisper, ‘there is a wagon loaded with treasure. In fact, sir,’ and he lowers his voice even further, ‘it’s just an ordinary hay-wain. This fellow is the driver of it. Rather odd, I’d say, and argumentative. He did not want to leave his mules.’
‘You are Idaeus, the king’s herald?’ Achilles asks the man. He is puzzled. Not simply by the claim that this rough-looking fellow should be Priam’s herald but by a situation that has already passed beyond anything he has a precedent for. What surprises him is how easy he feels, despite Automedon’s warning.
The carter, who is rather alarmed in fact at being brought into this business, and by the smoky darkness of the place, and the noise, which is more like what you would expect of a tavern than of a hero’s camp, rubs his nose, a gesture that serves to settle him, and scratches his head. He is playing for time. Now that the question has been put, so directly and with Priam looking on, he does not see how he can answer.
‘Well, old fellow,’ Achilles asks again, ‘you are the famous Idaeus?’
Idaeus?
He isn’t — of course he isn’t, he’s Somax. A simple workman, who this morning, as on every other morning of his life, just happened to be standing in the marketplace waiting to be hired when two strangers appeared who just happened to be the king’s sons, Trojan princes. One of whom came to a halt, and with a nod in his direction tugged lightly at the other’s sleeve, instantly attracted, as people often were, to the little offside mule, his famous Beauty — all of which, though true enough and relevant, at least to himself, does not even begin to account for the unlikeliness of all this. The words to cover it are there in his head but would get turned about and jumbled if he tried to get them out. And how can he explain, with Priam there to hear it, that this king who is in his care, for all his grave authority, is as innocent of the world as a naked newborn babe, and just as helpless?
What he does say is: ‘If you please, sir, Idaeus is the name they have given me. Because the king’s helper is always called that. Idaeus. And the king’s … helper, today’ (he had almost forgotten himself and said ‘companion’) ‘happens to be me. The cart and the mules, sir, are mine. The treasure I was guarding …’