The Bow Read online

  “I’m sorry,” said Odysseus. “I was thinking about Stenelos.”

  “Stenelos?” said Eurybates. “Haven’t you better things to worry about than that glum-faced troglodyte?”

  Odysseus fumbled an arm out of the bedclothes and threw the first thing that came to hand.

  “Ouch,” cried Eurybates. “Keep your boots to yourself.”

  “Serves you right.” Was it time, yet? No, probably too early still. Odysseus pulled the blankets up to his chin and shut his eyes.

  Odysseus jolted awake. How long had he been asleep, since that conversation with Eury? Only a few moments? Or hours and hours? He could hear Eurybates breathing steadily, asleep at last. Through the window Ares stared back at him like an angry eye, the red planet hovering just above the darker blur of the mountains on the far side of the plain. Time to leave.

  He felt under the bed and pulled out the coiled rope. Despite their constant fear of discovery, he left his disguise behind, for he had no intention of being seen and the paunch would only get in his way.

  Once he reached the parapet wall, he found a crack between two stone blocks just above the step in the wall, wide enough to take the thickness of the rope. He eased the coils from his shoulder and worked one end into the crevice, with a stout knot to stop it pulling through. Arm-span by arm-span, he lowered the tail of the rope silently down the sloping outer face of the wall. Then, gripping hard with his hands and fending himself off the wall with his feet, he began his descent.

  Chapter Ten

  “Don’t move.” Stenelos’s voice cut the darkness like a knife.

  Odysseus froze, his feet a man’s height from the ground and his pulse battering against his eardrums. A faint creak – that must be the bow being drawn. Was Stenelos going to shoot him? Odysseus braced himself, the gap between his shoulderblades aching in anticipation and the sweat pouring down his face.

  Footsteps approached. They stopped below him, so close he thought he could feel the heat from Stenelos’s body.

  “Get down.”

  Odysseus dropped to the ground and turned, his back hard to the wall. An arrow tip pricked his chest. His skin crawled as he pictured Stenelos releasing the bowstring and the arrow punching through him to smash into the stones.

  The arrow point scraped up to rest on the hollow of his throat. “So the son of Laertes is a spy who slinks about in the night,” Stenelos said. In the dim lamplight Odysseus could see Stenelos had the arrow fully drawn, the fletching touching his jaw.

  Keep calm, Odysseus thought. Pretend death isn’t one finger slip away. “I want you to teach me,” he replied, keeping his voice steady.

  “I don’t take pupils.”

  “But you’re the best archer I’ve ever seen, worthy of Eurytos himself.”

  The arrow tip pricked harder and Odysseus’s heart lurched. Why hadn’t he compared Stenelos to Herakles? This was Tiryns, founded by Herakles – every man in the fortress had his name on his lips. What stupidity had possessed him?

  “Keep your flattery to yourself.” The arrow tip scratched a circle round Odysseus’s larynx.

  Was Stenelos being sarcastic? “It’s not flattery,” said Odysseus. “I want to learn from you.”

  The arrow tip pressed harder into his skin. “Learn? Or merely pry, like all the other lazy fools who think the sacred art of Eurytos, the skill Herakles killed him for, is no more than simple cleverness, easily acquired?”

  So Stenelos was a follower of Eurytos. Miracle of miracles. Odysseus felt his breath turn almost to laughter in his throat. “I know it’s not. I’ve dreamed of Eurytos since I was a boy.”

  “Any timewaster can dream,” scoffed Stenelos.

  “I’m strong. I can work hard.”

  “So can a donkey.”

  “Let me prove myself.”

  “Prove? A big word for a small mind,” Stenelos sneered. “You’ve been spying on me for three nights now. Don’t think I haven’t heard you scuffling about up there. So tell me, sneak thief, what you’ve learned so far.”

  Nothing, he was about to say. And then he remembered. He’d heard Stenelos breathe as he drew and released, but there was something strange about it. What was it, though?

  “Come, boy. Speak.” The arrow tip jabbed his throat again.

  “I think,” he began, “I think you use your breath like a flame.” He stopped, his confusion clearing. Stenelos drew the bow on the outbreath, not the in. That was why it had sounded odd.

  “Flame? And where does this flame come from?” said Stenelos.

  “From …” The merest scrap of a memory was trying to surface – something he’d seen or heard, a long time ago. “From the gut,” he said. Stenelos was bound to shoot him now. Every fool knew breath came from the lungs.

  Instead the archer stepped back a pace. “You say you’re strong,” he growled. “Very well. Climb that rope of yours. Not too far. There. Face inwards and bend your knees so your feet don’t touch the wall. Pull up with your arms till your chin touches your thumbs. No, higher. Now do that fifty times. And if you use your feet, I’ll shoot you.”

  A pull-up, part of his daily routine. Every morning he and Eurybates competed, on this very rope, to see how many they could do. They’d both aimed at a hundred and yesterday he’d managed it for the first time.

  But the wall was in the way – it sloped out just far enough for the rough blocks to snag his clothes and tear his skin, and he couldn’t use his feet to push himself off.

  Odysseus set himself ten at a time, gasping for air between each group, feeling the pain in his arms and shoulders grow to screaming point, tasting blood in the saliva on his tongue. At forty-five he could barely hold onto the rope, his muscles deaf to the urgency of his will.

  On the last but one, he slithered a handspan down the rope, the strands biting into his palms. Somehow he managed to hold on, pull himself up that last time. His chin barely touched his thumbs as his arms convulsed with the effort.

  He fell rather than jumped to the ground and stood exhausted before Stenelos, his arms scraped and bloodied and his knees skinned. But he’d completed the task. “Now will you teach me?” he begged.

  Stenelos ignored his question. “Close your eyes,” he said. “What do you see?”

  Puzzled, Odysseus did as the archer ordered; what he saw made him jerk back in shock. “Red,” he whispered, “as though the inside of my head is on fire.”

  “Fire?” There was a long silence. “Come to my room at dawn tomorrow,” Stenelos said at last, “and I’ll test you properly.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Odysseus stood outside Stenelos’s door, his stomach seared with nerves. Would he pass the test? Or fail?

  Why had he said “gut” last night?

  He clenched his fist to knock and it brought the memory back in full: a clearing on a hillside, a sunlit day, a lean, long-muscled man. Years and years ago it was; he could only have been six or seven.

  He’d dodged his nurse, gone exploring and happened upon a visiting acrobat, famous for his leaps and contortions. Hiding behind a tree, he’d watched the acrobat teach a new routine to his apprentice. It was a balancing trick and time after time the boy failed. “Use your gut, damn you,” the master had bellowed, following his words with a punch so hard the child went sprawling into the bushes.

  Use your gut? It had meant nothing then. And now? Odysseus gave the door two hard raps. Light footsteps approached, the door opened and Stenelos beckoned him in.

  The room was simply furnished. A bare stone floor, a plain wall-hanging and a narrow bed. Weapons were hung or stacked in a corner and wooden bars had been bolted to the far wall. A ball the size of a man’s head lay in the middle of the floor. More of a gymnasium than a bedroom.

  “Good morning, sir,” Odysseus said. “May the gods give you health.”

  Stenelos grunted. “Strip,” he ordered.

  Odysseus removed the oily wig, the tunic, the paunch. He tightened his loincloth.

  “Kneel down
,” said Stenelos. “Place your hands on the ball. Keep your shoulders directly above. Then lift both knees off the mat, like the start of a push-up.”

  The ball was made from thin strips of leather wound tightly over each other, hard and unyielding under his fingers. It wanted to roll about, but with two hands it was easy to control.

  “Now take your right hand off the ball.”

  No. Impossible. Unless … Odysseus shuffled his feet apart and twisted his body sideways, rolling the ball to bring his left hand on top. Thank the gods he’d inherited his father’s hands – the breadth of his palms and the length and strength of his fingers might just make this possible.

  “Tuck your backside in,” barked Stenelos.

  Odysseus’s arms started to quiver. The ball lurched and his belly muscles clamped tight. He gasped for air. Idiot. Breathe.

  Ah. That was better.

  He edged the ball over another finger breadth and slowly lifted off his right hand. He found he was sucking his belly muscles in till he felt they were touching his backbone. And if he breathed into his back, then really hard out through his mouth, his belly tightened even further.

  “Bend your elbow,” Stenelos said. “Lower yourself down. Further. And up again.”

  Odysseus blinked in shock. It was a push-up, that was all, a one-armed push-up. He’d done thousands of them. But never like this.

  Sweat bathed his whole body. Stenelos, the door, the walls, the weapons all disappeared. There was nothing left but the ball and his straining body, fingers clutching, ribs heaving, air rasping in and out of his mouth, belly knotted against his spine. At last he forced his elbow straight. The ball lurched under his hand and he just managed to control it.

  “Nine more,” Stenelos ordered.

  No! He wanted to cry out in protest but his lips had clamped over his teeth and his tongue had glued itself to the roof of his mouth. He’d managed one. He should try another at least. He sucked air in, felt his whole ribcage swell, and exhaled, his strength flowing into his arms like fire roaring through a furnace.

  Two.

  Then another. And another after that.

  As long as he kept his focus, it was possible, just possible to keep going. At six, the pain nearly defeated his courage, at seven his whole body was shaking uncontrollably, and halfway up from the eighth his sweat-sodden hand slipped off the ball and he slumped onto the floor, so exhausted he gagged.

  Once more his head was filled with that strange red fire, but this time he knew he had failed.

  He heard footsteps approach, stop. He turned his head. Stenelos was holding out a hand to help him up.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “Sorry?” Stenelos gave him a strange look. “By Eurytos,” the archer demanded, “who taught you that?”

  “No one.”

  Stenelos held Odysseus’s gaze for a long moment. Then he smiled and shook his head. “It took me months of hard work after my initiation before I managed what you have just done. And I was no weakling.” He walked over to the wall-hanging and drew it back. Behind, in a recess, a bronze statuette holding a spear stood on a small stone altar smeared with soot. “Name her,” he said.

  In the flickering lamplight the figure seemed to sway like a dark flame.

  Odysseus shivered. “Athena,” he whispered. His own warrior goddess, whom he’d learned to follow on Ithaka.

  Stenelos scraped a finger through the soot on the edge of the altar fire and with it drew strange shapes on Odysseus’s forehead and chest, singing as he worked. The hymn was to Athena, to blood and courage, to wit and skill, to purity of purpose, but in a dialect so ancient and wild Odysseus could barely follow the words.

  Then the archer picked up a sponge and wiped the signs away. “You have shown you have the hands of an archer,” he said. “Next you must learn to be worthy of the goddess. Go back to your room and rest. We’ll start your training tomorrow, and by the great bow of Eurytos, I will work you hard.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Every morning at first light Odysseus went to Stenelos’s room with a bundle of spears or a bronze-leaved breastplate, apparently to clean or repair them under Stenelos’s unforgiving eye – a servant under-utilised by the Egyptian priest, the lie went, to keep tongues from wagging. And every day, after bolting the door fast, they prayed to Athena before they began the morning’s training.

  Slowly, Odysseus pieced together something of his teacher’s past. Stenelos’s father had grown up in Argos; fought and died shoulder to shoulder with Diomedes’s father before the walls of Thebes. But Stenelos’s mother had come from the island of Euboea and it was from her brothers that Stenelos had learned the austere mysteries of Eurytos.

  In contrast, it didn’t take Odysseus long at all to find out that Stenelos’s prayers mirrored the way he lived. Self-denial, purity and hard work were his rules and he followed them with cold ferocity. Odysseus, as his pupil, had to live the same way. It was hard to leave the table hungry, to stack his mattress against the wall and sleep on a thin mat, the stones of the floor bruising his hips. But another part of him loved the rigour of it, the hardening of his body and his will.

  The exercises Stenelos set him varied, focusing on the legs, on the back or the abdomen or the arms, working each part of his body with a new subtlety of control that made Odysseus aware of the purpose of every joint and muscle. At first it had frustrated him – when would Stenelos let him touch a bow? He wanted to be an archer, not an acrobat.

  Soon he came to understand that all parts of his body responded to each movement he made. When he thrust with his arm, which muscles in his legs should he tense, and which should he relax? If he raised his knee, was he clenching his toes? Or his fingers? Or his jaw? If he pushed his leg back, did he use his thigh muscles? Or his buttocks? Or both? Was he tensing his shoulders? Or thrusting his head forwards?

  Often Stenelos talked of the great bow Eurytos had wielded; how Eurytos had dared to rival his fellow archer Herakles and been murdered for it. His bow, the strongest ever made, had never been strung again. Iphitos, the latest of Eurytos’s line, was an old man with no sons, Stenelos had said, regret etching his voice, and someday soon the bow would end up in Iphitos’s tomb.

  The weeks strode relentlessly on. Diomedes had still to finish smelting the gold, and neither Thyestes nor Alkmaion showed signs of tiring of their hostilities, despite Diomedes’s initial optimism. It was far too dangerous to think of leaving the fortress. But the delay, disheartening as it was, gave its own rewards.

  Odysseus’s waking hours were consumed with Stenelos’s teaching – the lessons fed into the long hours afterwards when he strove to perfect what he’d learned. Gradually he became aware of the growing strength and freedom he was developing around his hardening gut and pelvis, fuelled by the intensity of his breath. There were even times when physical exhaustion numbed his constant fear and frustration over the war; moments when the cacophony of unanswerable questions in his mind dulled to a murmur.

  At last, almost two months since their wild escape from the mouth of the tomb, Stenelos handed him the great goat horn bow that had hung untouched on the wall. At first, Odysseus dared do no more than pass his hands over the polished surface, feeling its cool silkiness. Was it a bow like this that Eurytos had held and strung? How far short of that great hero’s strength was he still?

  “Come,” Stenelos said at last. “This is not a toy to be fussed with. Take the string and see how you manage.”

  Odysseus looped the string over the lower nock and swung his weight down on the tip as others had taught him to do on lesser weapons. The effort was almost beyond him, but when the bow yielded and the top loop was secured, he felt like Eurytos himself.

  Every evening Odysseus stood, a perfect imitation of a well-trained servant, behind Eurybates’s chair as the meal was carried in. Mostly they ate in the main hall with Diomedes’s officers. On those nights Odysseus remained standing through the whole meal, helping Eurybates to food and wine and mak
ing his own meal from the leftovers.

  But tonight the four of them – Diomedes, Stenelos and the two Ithakans – were dining, as they sometimes did, in Diomedes’s private office. Odysseus should have been eager for the kitchen slaves to finish bringing in the food, for it was only then that he could shed his hot, heavy disguise and sit to eat with the other three.

  It had all started quite innocently. There was a girl who’d caught his interest, one who sometimes carried in the platters. She was thin and black-haired, with great oval eyes dark as night, and though she wore a shapeless tunic and the roughly cropped haircut of a household slave, these features failed to disguise a strange and touching beauty.

  He watched her surreptitiously as she slid the bowls from the tray and walked to the door. The longer she lingered, the better, he thought, enjoying the angular way she moved. And he was intrigued by her silence, not the dull sullenness of the other slaves but a detachment that hinted at a private world he longed to share. If only he could sit and talk with her, tease out her thoughts.

  But his disguise was disgusting – the fat belly, bulging cheeks and greasy hair, and the oily, plummy voice he’d adopted. Not even the ugliest of slave girls – and she was far from that – would wish to sit with him. She’d never looked in his direction, saving her few glances for Diomedes alone.

  Diomedes rose to bolt the door as she left. “You like her, Olli?” he said, resuming his seat.

  Odysseus scooped the cheek pads out of his mouth. “I don’t even know her,” he said with apparent indifference.

  Stenelos snorted. “Diomedes means ‘lust’, not ‘like’.” He made a crude gesture with one finger.

  “Ah.” Odysseus prised off his wig and paused, his hands on the straps that held the paunch in place. “You’re suggesting my tongue’s hanging over the neck of my tunic,” he said, his temper on edge, “while something else strains at the cloth further down?” Like that squat porter who’d leered at her from the doorway earlier.