‘A drink! A toast! To those who must die.’

‘On my land, before my sons,

Do you accept this womb, my daughter, Helen, as your wife?’

‘I do.’

‘Her young shall be your own?’

‘They shall.’

‘You will assume her gold?’

‘I will.’

‘Go. You are his. Obey him. And farewell.’

Troy.

The Acropolis.

The morning light behind the Temple’s colonnade.

Then through that colonnade, Hector of Troy,

Towards his mass of plate-faced warriors.

And your heart leaps up at the sight of him,

And wonders of courage are secretly sworn,

As he says:

‘Torches and Towers of Troy, the Greeks are lost.

They dare not wait, but are ashamed to go

Home in their ships to their belovèd land

Without our city stowed. Therefore for them:

This desperate advance. Therefore for us:

Trumpets at sunrise from the mountain tops!

Our gods are out! Apollo! Aphrodite! so close,

You taste the air, you taste their breath, a loving breath

That shall inspire such violence in us,

Dear hearts, full hearts, strong hearts, courageous hearts,

Relaxing on our spears among their dead,

“Heaven fought for us, 100 bulls to Heaven,”

Will be our pledge.

I put my hands in yours.

Prepare to be in constant touch with death

Until the Lord our God crowns me with victory.’

These were his words,

And knowing what you do you might have said: ‘Poor fool …’

Oh, but a chilly mortal it would be

Whose heart did not beat faster in his breast

As Quibuph set the cloche-faced gull-winged gold

Helmet with vulture feather plumes on Hector’s head,

And Hector’s trumpeter, T’lesspiax,

Set the long instrument against his lips

And sent:

‘Reach for your oars!’

‘Reach for your oars!’

In silver out across the plain:

And then, as Hector shook his shoulders out, again,

Again, as Hector’s throng gave a great shout of rage

As down from the Acropolis they flowed

And through the streets they pressed.

Breakfast in Heaven.

Ambrosia alba wreathed with whispering beads.

‘In the beginning there was no Beginning,

And in the end, no End,’ sing the Nine to the Lord,

As Hera’s eyebrows posit: ‘Now?’

And now Athene goes.

Think of those fields of light that sometimes sheet

Low-tide sands, and of the panes of such a tide

When, carrying the sky, they start to flow

Everywhere, and then across themselves.

Likewise the Greek bronze streaming out at speed,

Glinting among the orchards and the groves,

And then across the plain – dust, grass, no grass,

Its long low swells and falls – all warwear pearl,

Blue Heaven above, Mount Ida’s snow behind, Troy in between.

And what pleasure it was to be there! To be one of that host!

Greek, and as naked as God! naked as bride and groom!

Exulting for battle! lords shouting the beat out:

‘One –’

Keen for a kill:

‘Two – three’

As our glittering width and our masks that glittered

Came up the last low rise of the plain, onto the ridge, and

‘Now’

(As your heart skips a beat)

‘See the Wall.’

And you do.

It is immense.

So high

So still

It fills your sight.

And not a soul to be seen, or a sound to be heard,

Except, as on our thousands silence fell,

The splash of Laomedon’s sacred springs,

One hot, one cold, whose fountains rise or die

Within a still day’s earshot of the Wall,

And in between whose ponds the Skean road

Runs downslope from the ridge, beneath the zigzags of God’s oak,

Across the strip and up, until, under the Skean Gate,

It enters Troy, majestic on its eminence.

Within: Prince Hector’s mass.

Without: a pause, until

Paramount Agamemnon, King of kings,

The Lord of Mainland and of Island Greece,

Autarch of Tiryns and Mycenae, looked

Now right, now left, along the ridge

Then at the Wall, then into Heaven, and drew his sword.

And as he drew, Greece drew.

And this dis-scabbarding was heard in Troy

Much like a shire-sized dust-sheet torn in half.

A second pause. And then,

At Agamemnon’s word the Greeks moved on

Down the long slope towards Troy

As silently as if they walked on wool.

The gates swing up:

The Skean, the Dardanian, the South.

Hector: ‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet.’

Then:

‘Now.’

Think of the noise that fills the air

When autumn takes the Dnieper by the arm

And skein on skein of honking geese fly south

To give the stateless rains a miss.

So Hector’s moon-horned, shouting dukes

Burst from the tunnels, down the counterslope,

And shout, shout, shout, smashed shouted shout

Backward and forth across the sky; while pace on pace

The Greeks descended from the ridge towards the strip

With blank, unyielding imperturbability.

100 yards between them.

50 …

Then,

As a beam before its source,

Hector sprang out and T’d his spear; halted his lines;

Then lowered it; and stood alone before the Greeks.

King Agamemnon calls:

‘Silent and still for Hector of the soaring war-cry,

The irreplaceable Trojan.’

Then hands removed his shield, his spear,

And all Greece saw his massive frame, historical

In his own time, a giant on the sand. Who said:

‘Greek King: I speak for Ilium.

We have not burned you in your ships.

You have not taken Troy. Ten years have passed.

Therefore I say that we declare a truce,

And, having sworn before the depths of Heaven to keep our word,

Here, on the strip, between our multitudes,

I will fight any one of you to death.

And if I die’ (this said within an inch of where he will)

‘My corpse belongs to Troy and to Andromache;

My body-bronze to him who takes my life;

And to you all, Helen, your property, who was no prisoner, with her gold.

And if I live: my victim’s plate shall hang

Between the columns of Apollo’s porch on our Acropolis,

But you may bear his body to the coast

And crown it with a shaft before you sail

Home in your ships to your belovèd land

With nothing more than what you brought to mine.

Pick your best man. Commit yourselves to him.

Be sure that I am big enough to kill him,

And that I cannot wait to see him die.

Then in their turn, faring from world to world across our sea,

Passengers who come after us will remark:

“That shaft was raised for one as brave and strong

As any man who came to fight at Troy,

Saving its Prince, Hector,

Superb on earth until our earth grows cold,

Who slaughtered him.” Now who will that Greek be?’

Answer him, Greece!

But Greece has lost its voice.

Thoal is studying the sun-dried heads

And chariot chassis fastened to the Wall.

Titters from Troy.

Then cannon off lord Menelaos’: ‘Me.’

‘No. Hector will kill you,’ from his brother.

Yet he has gone – how could he not? – out

Onto the strip. Alone.

But someone is already there.

Odysseus. The king of Ithaca.

History says,

Before Odysseus spoke he seemed to be,

Well … shy – shuffling his feet, eyes down – the usual things.

However, once it passed his teeth, his voice possessed

Two powers: to charm, to change –

Though if it were the change that made the charm

Or charm the change, no one was sure.

The sun gains strength.

Thoal has taken Menelaos’ hand.

Odysseus:

‘Continuing and comprehensive glory to you both,

Hector, the son of Priam, King of Troy,

Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, my King.

And to us all.

‘I dare not speak for Heaven,

But as our Lord, the Shepherd of the Clouds,

Has honoured us by following our war,

Now, through Prince Hector’s lips, He seems to say:

Let the world flow through Priam’s gates again

And Greece return to Greece with all debts paid.

Lords of the earth,

We are God’s own. Our law is His. Is force.

What better way to end this generous war

Than through the use of force – but force in small:

Not, all to die for one, but one for all.

The proverb says:

The host requires the guest to make himself at...