Doctor Who_ The Myth Makers - Donald Cotton [2]
Leaning over backwards to find excuses for Paris, I suppose one should admit that Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world. Or so people said; although how one can possibly know without conducting the most exhausting research, I cannot imagine. Possibly, Paris had – but even so! And then, having abducted her, to bring her home to meet his parents! The mind reels!
Anyway – while Menelaus himself was pardonably upset, his big brother, Agamemnon, was secretly delighted! Just the thing he’d been waiting for! Summoning a hasty conference of kings, at which he boiled with well-simulated apoplectic fury – the Honour of Greece at stake, et cetera – he roused their indignation to the pitch of a battle fleet; and they set sail for Troy on a just wave of retribution.
But if Agamemnon had done his homework properly, he’d have known that Troy was a very tough nut to crack – by no means the little mud-walled city-state he was used to.
Impregnable is the word – although you might not think it now.
And the Greeks seemed to have left their nut-crackers at home.
So for ten long years – if you believe me – the Greek Heroes sat outside those enormous walls, quarrelling amongst themselves and feeling rather silly; while any virtuous anger they may once have felt evaporated in the heat of home-thoughts and of the girls they’d left behind them.
And this was the stalemate situation when some trifling, forgotten business of a literary nature first brought me to the Plain of Scamander, where Troy’s topless towers sat like the very symbol of permanence, and the Greek camp faded and festered in the summer haze.
Well, it had been a long journey: and, since nobody seemed to mind, I lay down on the river bank and went to sleep.
2
Zeus Ex Machina
Two men were fighting in a field, and the sound of it woke me.
The noise was excessive! There was, of course, the clash of sword on armour, and mace on helm – you will have read about such things – and these I might have tolerated, merely pulling my cloak over my head with a muttered groan, or a stifled sigh – it matters little which.
But, for some reason, they had chosen to accompany their combat with an ear-splitting stream of bellowed imprecations and rhetorical insult, the like of which I had seldom heard outside that theatre – what’s its name? – in Athens. You know the one: big place – all right if it isn’t raining, and if you care for such things. Which I must say, I rather do! But not, thank you, in the middle of a summer siesta, on a baking hot Asiatic afternoon, when my feet hurt and my head aches! The dust, too
– they were kicking up clouds of it, as they snarled and capered and gyrated! Made me sneeze...
‘In another moment,’ I thought, ‘somone will get hurt – and I hope it isn’t me.’
Because they don’t care, these sort of people, who they involve, once they get going. Blind anger, I think it’s called. So I got up cautiously, well-hidden behind a clump of papyrus, or something – you can be sure of that. And having nothing to do and being thoroughly awake now – damn it! – I watched and listened, as is my professional habit...
They were both big men; but one was enormous with muscles queuing up behind each other, begging to be given a chance. This whole, boiling-over physique was restrained, somewhat inadequately, by bronze-studded, sweat-stained leather armour, which, no doubt, smelled abominable, and which creaked and groaned with his every action-packed movement. One could hardly blame it! To confine, even partially, such bursting physical extravagance, was – the leather probably felt – far beyond the call of duty, or of what the tanners had led it to expect.
Seams stretched and gussets gaped. On his head was a towering, beplumed horse’s head helmet, which he wore as casually as if it were a shepherd’s sheepskin cap: and this, of course, meant that he was a horse-worshipping Trojan, not a Greek. Furthermore, in view of everything else about him, he could only be the renowned Hector, King Priam’s eldest son, and war-lord