Heroes by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Author:Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2010-10-01T06:00:00+00:00

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,

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