Cassandra’s prophecy, the tales that got old Poletes blinded — they were true. Clytemnestra and her lover had murdered the High King.
“We have nowhere to turn,” Menalaos said, his voice low and heavy with misery. “Argos is upside-down. Barbarians from the north are pushing toward Athens and will be in Argos after that. Agamemnon is dead. Odysseus has been lost at sea. The other Achaian lords who are coming here to join me are coming out of desperation. We’ve been told that the Egyptians will welcome us. And now you tell me that it’s all a trap.”
I sat on the stool and watched the King of Sparta weep. His world was collapsing on his shoulders and he had no idea of where to turn.
But I did.
“How would you like to turn this trap into a triumph?” I asked him.
Menalaos turned his tear-filled eyes up toward me, and I began to explain. It would mean giving Helen back to him, and deep inside me I hated myself for doing that. She was a living, breathing woman, warm and vibrantly alive. Yet I bartered her like a piece of furniture or a gaudy ornament. The anger I felt within me I directed against the Golden One; this is his doing, I told myself. His manipulations have tangled all our lives; I’m merely trying to put things right. But I knew that what I did I did for myself, to thwart the Golden One, to bring me one step closer to the moment when I could destroy him — and revive Athene. Love and hate were fused inside me, intermingled into a single white-hot force boiling and churning in my mind, too powerful for me to resist. I could barter away a queen who loved me, I could sack cities and slay nations to gain what I wanted: Athene’s life and Apollo’s death.
So I went ahead and told Menalaos how to regain his wife and win a secure place in the Kingdom of the Two Lands.
Nekoptah’s scheme was a good one. Practically foolproof. He had thought of almost everything. All I had to do was turn it against him.
Chapter 41
I moved through the next several weeks like a machine, speaking and acting automatically, my inner mind frozen so that the bitter voices deep within me could not catch my conscious attention. I ate, I slept without dreams, and I brought my plans closer to fruition, day by day.
There was a measure of bitter satisfaction in turning Nekoptah’s treacherous scheme against its creator. The fat priest had taken one step too far, as most schemers ultimately do. By sending Prince Aramset on this expedition, he had hoped to eliminate his only possible rival for kingly power. But Aramset was the key to my counter scheme. I followed Nekoptah’s plan to the letter except for one detaiclass="underline" Menalaos and the other Achaians would offer their loyalty to the crown prince, not the king’s chief minister. And Aramset would treat the Achaians honestly.
Vengeance against the chief minister gave me a taste of gratification. But only the ultimate vengeance, triumph against the Golden One, would bring me true pleasure. And I was moving toward that final moment when I would crush him utterly.
It was strange, I reflected. I had entered this world as a thes, less than a slave. I had become a warrior, then a leader of soldiers, then the guardian and lover of a queen. Now I was preparing to create a king, to decide who would rule the richest and most powerful land in this world. I, Orion, would tear the power of rulership from the bejeweled fingers of scheming Nekoptah and place it where it belonged: in the hands of the crown prince.
Aramset at first listened to my plan coolly when I brought Menalaos to his boat, moored a day’s march upriver from the coast. But once its implications became clear to him, once he realized that I was offering him not only a solution to the problem of the Sea Peoples, but a way to remove Nekoptah, he warmed to my ideas quickly enough.
Nekoptah’s spies still infested the army and the prince’s retinue, but with Lukka’s Hittites protecting him, Aramset was safe enough from assassination. And gruff old General Raseth was loyal to the prince, in his blustering way. The overwhelming majority of the army would follow him if a crisis arose. Nekoptah’s spies were few in number and powerless against the loyalty of the army. The king’s chief minister depended on stealth and cunning to achieve his ends; his weapons were lies and assassins, not troops who fought face-to-face in the sunshine.
The young prince received the King of Sparta with solemn dignity. None of his usual laughter or youthful nervousness. He sat on a royal throne set up on the afterdeck of his royal boat, under a brightly striped awning, dressed in splendid robes and wearing the strange double crown of the Two Lands, his face set in an expression as stonily unchanging as the statues of his grandfather.
For his part, Menalaos gave a splendid show, his gold-filagreed armor polished until it blazed like the sun itself, his dark beard and curled hair gleaming with oil. Fourteen other Achaian lords were ranked behind him. With their glittering armor and plumed helmets, their dark beards and scarred arms, they looked savage and fierce alongside the Egyptians.
The boat was crammed with men: the prince’s retinue, soldiers, dignitaries from the coastal towns, government functionaries. Most of them wore long skirts and were bare to the waist, except for their medallions of office. Some of them were spies for Nekoptah, I knew, but let them report back to their fat master that the crown prince had solved the problem of the Sea Peoples without bloodshed. My only regret was that I could not see the chief minister’s painted face twist in anger at the news.
Official scribes sat at the prince’s feet, recording every word spoken. Artists perched atop the boat’s cabins, sketching madly on sheets of papyrus with sticks of charcoal. Many other boats were ringed around us, also thronged with people to witness this momentous occasion. The shore was crowded, too, with men and women and even children from many towns.
Lukka stood behind the prince’s throne, slightly to one side, his lips pressed firmly together to keep himself from grinning. He enjoyed standing higher than Menalaos.
I stood to one side of the assembly and listened to Menalaos faithfully repeat the lines I had told him to speak. The other Achaian lords, newly arrived from their troubled lands with their wives and families, shuffled uncomfortably in the growing heat of the rising sun. The converse between the Egyptian prince and the dispossessed King of Sparta took most of a long morning. What it amounted to was simply this:
Menalaos pledged the loyalty of all the Achaians present to Prince Aramset and, through him, to King Merneptah. In return, Aramset promised the Achaians land and homes of their own — in the name of the king, of course. Their land would be along the coast, and their special duty would be to protect the coast from incursions by raiders. The Peoples of the Sea had been absorbed by the Land of the Two Kingdoms. The thieves had been turned into policemen.
“Do you think they will do an honest job of protecting the coast?” Aramset asked me, as servants removed his ceremonial robes.
We were in his cabin, small and low and stuffy in the midday heat. I felt sweat trickling down my jaw and legs. Somehow the young prince seemed perfectly comfortable in the sweltering oven.
“By giving them homes in the kingdom,” I said, repeating the argument I had made many times before, “you remove the reason for their raids. They have nowhere else to go, and they fear the barbarians invading their land from the north.”
“My father will be pleased with me, I think.”
I knew he was expressing a hope more than a certainty.
“Nekoptah will not,” I said.
He laughed as the last windings were taken off his torso and he stood naked except for the loincloth around his groin.