When Agamemnon woke up the next morning and called to Briseis to bring him breakfast in bed, he wasn't at all pleased to discover that she'd vanished. He shouted, 'You stupid guards! Didn't I tell you to keep close watch on the girl?' and then realised Talthybius and Eurybates weren't there either. At this point he realized what had happened, and got dressed in about three seconds flat, grabbed his sword, and got ready to run down to where Achilles' tent had been, to demand them all back before the Myrmidons set sail.
He might have made it, if there hadn't been a crowd of virtually the entire Greek army outside his own tent, with Thersites at the front with a smirk all over his face. 'Hey, Agamemnon,' he said, 'you know you always said we'd got Fate on our side? Said Calchas had promised you the way the birds flew proved it? Well, he's just decided you can go to the crows. He's leaving with Achilles now. And me and my comrades here are going to do the same. We've spent the last nine years getting hacked to pieces because you want to get your brother's shop-soiled tart back, and we're sick of it. The only birds that were telling you to go ahead were the vultures!'
The soldiers cheered, because, while nobody really liked Thersites much, they didn't like being at war either. But by now the other kings were making their way through the crowd, with Odysseus snarling, 'One more word out of you, Thersites, and you're dead!'
'Oh, come on, the poor chap's making a fair point,' said Menelaus. 'We were wrong to declare war on Troy, and today Paris and I are going to settle the matter in single combat, like decent chaps. Agamemnon, have you got the heralds ready?'
'They've deserted, too,' muttered Agamemnon. 'And Briseis has gone…'
Thersites sniggered. 'Funny how that always happens to your family, isn't it?' he said. 'Wonder what Clytemnaestra's been up to all these years? Hey, did you know Iphigenia wasn't Agamemnon's daughter? She…'
But at that point, Odysseus hit him in the stomach so hard that it knocked the breath out of him, ripped off Thersites' tunic while he was still doubled up in pain, and began thrashing him with Agamemnon's spiked sceptre. And now the crowds were laughing at Thersites instead of at Agamemnon, and shouting, 'Tosser!' When Thersites managed to struggle to his feet and limp away to the ships, nobody wanted to desert with him, but nobody bothered to try and catch him either.
'Well, he's no loss to us!' said Odysseus, with a shrug. 'Now, who wants to watch Menelaus beat Paris?'
By the time Thersites reached the ships, the Myrmidons were on the point of setting sail. When Achilles saw him coming, he glared at him and snapped, 'What do you want?'
On any other day, Thersites would have come back with a sarcastic taunt, but right now, he was too tired and miserable to say anything except, 'Please – take me with you – they all hate me!'
On any other day, Achilles would have cursed Thersites or even killed him, but just now he felt so happy to be leaving Troy that he felt he could be magnanimous to absolutely anyone. He said, 'Okay, but you're coming in my ship, where I can keep an eye on you. I'm not having you stirring up sedition behind my back. And if you make one crack about being gay, or cross-dressing, or lumberjacks, or the Young Men's Pagan Association, you'll disappear into the wine-dark sea before you can say, "Only joking," understand?'
'Yeah, okay,' mumbled Thersites, as he staggered up the ladder onto the foredeck of the lead ship, where Patroclus cleaned his cuts and bruises and bandaged the worst of them, and found a spare tunic and cloak for him to wear. When everyone was on board, the ships set sail, with Achilles and his household, plus the new arrivals he wasn't sure he could trust – Thersites, Calchas, and Talthybius and Eurybates – all in the first ship.
But meanwhile, the Greeks and the Trojans were all assembled to watch the duel between Menelaus and Paris. They sacrificed three lambs to seal the truce – a white lamb for Helios the sun-god, a black one for Gaia the Earth-Mother, and a spotted one for Zeus – and then Hector tossed a coin to see who should begin the duel. Paris won the toss, and opened by hurling his spear, but it stuck bang in the centre of Menelaus's shield, and the point broke off it. Then it was Menelaus's turn to throw his spear, which went straight through Paris's shield, pierced his breastplate (which he'd borrowed from Deiphobus, as his own was being repaired that day) and tore his favourite purple silk shirt with the gold embroidery, but didn't manage to inflict much of a wound. Next, Menelaus brought his sword down on Paris's helmet – it was a horned helmet, rather like the ones that Viking warriors were buried in – but the blade shattered.
Menelaus swore under his breath, and lunged in to grab Paris by the helmet and throttle him with the embroidered chin-strap, but the strap broke and the helmet went flying, and by the time Menelaus had picked himself up off the ground and retrieved his spear to try again to attack, Paris seemed to have vanished into thin air. Some say he ran away, but others say that the goddess Aphrodite, seeing that he was losing, picked him up and transported him instantly back to his bedroom. The second explanation might sound fairly improbable, but nobody could explain how he could have run away in front of a hundred thousand Greeks and the same number of Trojans and their allies, without anyone seeing him go – and the Trojans certainly wouldn't have sheltered him if he'd tried to slip away among them, because they were sick of the war he'd dragged them into. Besides, if he had run, it's hard to explain how he found himself in his heavily-perfumed bedroom in his palace in the middle of Troy, a good three miles from the battlefield, just a split second after he'd been cowering under Menelaus's attack, and why he wasn't even out of breath, but had somehow got rid of his armour and changed into a fresh shirt.
At any rate, Helen, who had been sitting up by the city gate watching the duel, wasn't very pleased when Aphrodite suddenly appeared to her, took her by the arm and said, 'Come on, dearie; your boyfriend's back in his bed with the pretty patterned quilt, waiting for you, and he's looking oh so gorgeous! He looks as if he's just getting ready to go to a party, not at all as if he's been in a war.' Helen muttered that Paris was a coward, and that she was an idiot to love him, and that Aphrodite was the cruellest of all the gods to make her love him. But, all the same, she went up to the bedroom, and she had to admit that Paris was fairly gorgeous.
Meanwhile, back on the battlefield, people were standing around and wondering what was going on, and what to do next, and whether this meant Menelaus had won or not. And they might have declared peace there and then, but at that moment Pandarus decided to make up for the years when he had spent more time interfering in his friends' love lives than riding out to fight. He knew he wasn't all that great with a spear, but he was very proud of his skill in archery, and, he thought, if he could shoot Menelaus from the middle of the Trojan ranks, who would know where the arrow had come from? They couldn't track it down to one person – for all they knew, it might have been one of the gods who had miraculously intervened to bring this hateful war to an end – and maybe the gods were working through him, Pandarus, anyway. Maybe assassinating Menelaus was what the gods had wanted him to do all along, which was why they had put it into the minds of Paris and Menelaus to arrange a truce and a duel, and then whisked Paris away. At any rate, it would make Paris and Helen happy, and Pandarus liked them both and wanted them to be happy together. All right, he had sworn to Zeus and the other gods to respect the truce, but, as they said in Troy, 'Zeus laughs at lovers' perjuries,' so probably Zeus would also laugh it off if someone else committed perjury on behalf of two such lovers as Paris and Helen.
Pandarus knew that most people would probably think assassinating Menelaus wasn't a very nice thing to do. But then, that was because most people didn't realise that discretion was the better part of valour, and cowardice was the better part of discretion, and treachery was the better part of cowardice, so that only he was able to be valiantly treacherous. He felt rather glad that Troilus wasn't there to see what he was doing. Troilus was a dear lad, but he really didn't understand this sort of thing. So, whispering a hasty prayer to Apollo the god of archery, Pandarus son of Lycaon stretched the ox-hide bow-string between the golden string-hooks of his bow, took out a sharp new arrow, pulled back the string until the bow made a circle, took careful aim, and fired…
…And the arrow sang through the air, glanced off the metal belt round Menelaus's middle, missed his vital organs by several inches, and landed in his thigh.
When Agamemnon saw what had happened, he cried out, 'Oi moi, Menelaus, my brother, why did I bring you here, to die at the hands of these treacherous dogs of Trojans? May Zeus crush their city into rubble for their foul murder of you…'
('I'm not actually dead,' muttered Menelaus.)
'For their foul murder of you, and the shame they've brought me, when I return to Greece, defeated, and leave your poor bones to rot in some foreign field, and probably be turned up by some ploughman…'
('I'm not even badly hurt,' Menelaus pointed out.)
'And when that ploughman jumps up and down on your grave and laughs and says, "Let's hope all the Greeks' enterprises fall as flat as that one!" I'll wish the ground would open and swallow me up. Oh, Menelaus, if only I were dead like you, instead of limping home in disgrace without you!'
Menelaus said, more loudly, 'For the last time, Agamemnon, I'm OKAY! It's barely even a scratch!'
Agamemnon said, 'Oh. Are you? Uh – that's good, then. Still, arrow-wounds can turn nasty. We'd better get a surgeon to have a look at it.'
So, while Helen was in bed with Paris, and Menelaus's chariot was carrying him back to his tent for a surgeon to remove the arrow and bandage his wound, the rest of the Greeks and Trojans were charging into battle on their behalf. Pandarus fought hard that day, to make up for lost time. With Menelaus out of action and Achilles nowhere to be seen, he tried to shoot Diomedes, who he guessed had been trying to seduce Cressida; and when he ran out of arrows without having hit him once, he asked Aeneas to let him share his chariot, so that he could fight in the front line. So Aeneas drove while Pandarus fought, until, as Homer tells us in his usual gruesome style:
He raised and cast his shadowing spear and struck
Diomed's shield. 'A hit! Clean on the flank!'
Cried Pandarus, 'The gods have given me luck;
You won't last long, but first I'll have to thank
You for the glory.' 'No, I wouldn't bank
On that,' replied Diomedes, 'but one
Of you must glut the war-god, ere we've done.'
'I owe my skill in warfare to Apollo,'
Said Pandarus, 'and if we have to wreath
Aeneas here, your death will quickly follow...'
The spear bit through his nose, flew past his teeth,
Cut off his tongue, and sprouted forth beneath.
He fell; his armour crashed; the horses shied;
His soul and strength dissolved; and thus he died.
The armies fought on until evening fell, when the Greeks returned to their camp and the Trojans returned to the city. And just as the gates were about to close, a man came running up, shouting, 'Urgent news! News for Hector! News for Paris! News for King Priam!' The guards recognised him as a farmer called Polybetes, who lived about twenty miles from Troy, and quite often used to come to the city, perhaps driving a herd of bullocks to sell, or with a cart full of butter, cheeses and bottles of milk. But now he wasn't bringing anything to sell, and he wouldn't rest until he was in King Priam's palace, with the old king and queen, and with Hector, Deiphobus and Paris. Then he told them the terrible news:
'Your Majesty, your son Troilus is ensorcelled! A terrible witch who can turn herself from a woman into a wolf and back again has cast a spell on him to make him fall in love with her, so much that he's run away with her! While I was going out yesterday evening to fetch my cows and drive them in for milking, I saw his Highness out walking, with a wolf beside him, and I might have said, "Good evening, your Highness," to him, but he looked as if he didn't want to be recognised, so I walked on as if I hadn't noticed him. But then, when I was a goodish way off and they must have thought I didn't see, the wolf, with a dress in its mouth, went into a thicket of furze-bushes, and a few minutes later a young lassie came out! Now, I didn't say anything, because who knows what a witch like that could do, and anyway I had the cows to milk, but I got a good look at her face, and then I knew who she was, too! I'd know those joined eyebrows anywhere! She was that lass – I can't remember her name – the daughter of that priest of Apollo who defected to the Greeks, and on her dam's side I'd reckon she was some kin to the old king of Zeleia, the one that was killed nine years ago, and his son fled, like the flea-bitten dog he was. All that family are a bad lot, but the ones with joined eyebrows are the worst. They're witches, and the joined eyebrows are the mark of it.'
When Polybetes finished his story, there was a silence, and then King Priam said, 'Are you trying to tell me the bravest son I ever lost is alive, and a cowardly deserter?'
Polybetes shook his head hard. 'No, no, it's not his fault at all. I'm sure he's possessed by the witch, and doesn't know what he's doing. But if one of you was to take a fast horse and a bow with a silver arrow, or else a silver-headed spear, and chase after them and kill the witch – it has to be silver, you see, for nothing else will kill her kind – then her spell's going to break, and he'll come back to his senses. That's why I've run all day to tell you. They could be forty miles away by now, but they're on foot, and with a fast horse you might overtake them in a few days – if the witch doesn't kill him first.'
'I don't know what you're playing at, Polybetes,' said Hector, 'but the lady Cressida was a good friend of all our family. We've protected her ever since her father ran away, because Pandarus, her uncle, wasn't exactly dependable, and she didn't have any other family. So, yes, Troilus was her friend, and if he'd been in love with her, he'd have asked her to be his wife, just as I've married the woman I love. He'd never have dishonoured her by making her his mistress. I don't know why you've come here to blacken both their names, but I can't forgive this insult.'
'Hang on!' interrupted Deiphobus. 'Didn't Pandarus tell us, years ago, that someone called Polyphetes was plotting against Cressida? We vowed then that he deserved to be hanged, but he slipped through our hands, and now, when Cressida has been taken to the Greek camp, and poor Pandarus has been killed in battle, you've come crawling back with some fairy-tale about werewolves, and you expect us to believe it!'
'No, my name's Polybetes,' repeated the farmer. 'And I never wished Calchas's daughter any harm until I saw what I saw yesterday.'
All this time, King Priam had been wondering what to do. He had promised Argive that he would never betray her secret, but he didn't want to see Argive's daughter killed as her mother had been, nor an honest man hanged for telling the truth. And he didn't like to believe that Troilus had run away, but, if the story was true, then at least Troilus was alive. So, with all the hopes and fears swirling around in his head, all he could think of to say was, 'Well, nothing's impossible, but if the lady Cressida is a werewolf, then she can't help what she is, any more than you could help seeing her. And, really, Deiphobus, I know you and Troilus were very fond of Pandarus, but he wasn't exactly trustworthy, was he? So maybe we should just...'
'You're worse than your sons!' shouted Polybetes. 'You know I'm telling the truth, but you won't do anything about it! Well, I'll be off, and I hope the gods crush your family and your whole evil city to dust! May Hera, the queen of the gods, curse your city, and may Athene the goddess of wisdom give the Greeks the cunning to conquer it, and Hephaestus the fire-god burn it, and Poseidon the sea-god drown it...'
And Polybetes might have gone on invoking every single god, but suddenly, before Hector or Priam could stop him, Deiphobus drew his sword and chopped the farmer's head off. For a moment they all stood, too horrified to speak, and then Hector said, 'You – you've killed a guest – an unarmed man...'
But Deiphobus just shook his head impatiently. 'He wasn't a guest,' he said. 'He'd come here to curse our city and slander our friends when they weren't here to defend themselves. I'm only sorry I used my sword instead of hanging him.'
