A Prince of Troy. Lindsay Clarke

with a simple, wilderness life such as he and his people led, he saw only dark omens for the future.

      The years passed and things did not go well with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. However uneasily, the couple had tried to laugh off the dismal fiasco of their wedding day, but it wasn’t long before Peleus woke up to the fact that he knew almost nothing about his wife.

      For a time, out there on the mountain, he had come to believe he might be happy once again. Exhilarated by his passionate encounter with Thetis, he began to be sure of it. They would make a good life together, raising children in the clear air of the mountains, far away from the ambitions and duplicity of the courtly world. But Thetis was a creature of the shore. She loved the salt-wind off the sea, the surge of a dolphin’s back beneath her, the moonlit rush of surf, the smell of sea-wrack, the way the shingle tugged between her toes, and the marble world of rock pools. Up there in the mountains, she felt stranded. She pined for the long strands of sand and the sound of the sea, or raged with disgust and frustration at the horsy smell of the Centaur people and their stubborn, earth-bound ways. Having quarrelled with her father, and offended his chief tribesmen, she made it clear to Peleus that though they had been consigned to each other by Zeus himself, if he kept her in that gloomy mountain gorge against her will she would, quite simply, die.

      Peleus already had a dead brother and a dead bride on his conscience. The first had been named for a seal and had also loved the sea. The second had hanged herself because instead of staying at her side, he had gone chasing a wild boar in the Calydonian hills and killed her brother. The thought of another such death was more than he could bear. So he had already made up his mind that they would have to leave the mountain by the end of the summer, when a rider came looking for him out of Thessaly.

      He brought the news that King Actor, who had never recovered from the loss of his son and his daughter, was now dead. The Myrmidons – those implacable soldier-ants of Thessaly – were now leaderless, and the messenger had been sent to ask Peleus to return and take up his rightful heritage as Actor’s heir. He could be sure of a warm welcome, for some of the Myrmidons had been on the Calydonian boar-hunt and knew that Eurytion’s death was an accident. Moreover the wife of Acastus had gone mad and had been heard boasting crazily that she was responsible for Polymela’s suicide. In these circumstances, Peleus’s right to rule would go unquestioned.

      Here was a god-given answer to his problems. Both duty to his people and concern for his wife required him to leave the mountain. He would move the royal court from Athena’s sanctuary in the inland city of Itonus down to one of the coastal strongholds. His wife would soon have the sound of the sea in her ears again. Thetis would be happy there.

      Immediately Peleus set about making preparations for his return. Solemnly he said his farewells to the friends he had made among the Centaur people, promising that he would not forget them and that they would be welcomed as guests in his house should they ever want to come. Then he spent a long time alone with Cheiron, up on a windy shelf of rock high above the gorge, from where they could look out across all the summits of Thessaly and Magnesia to the eastern sea beyond. An eagle scaled the blue spaces about their heads. Everything else felt still and ancient round them. They were almost outside time up there, and watching the wind blow among the white locks of the old king’s hair, Peleus knew that Cheiron was looking deeper into the heart of things than words could reach. And his own heart too was lost for speech – not because there was nothing to say but because there was too much. Yet in the silence of the mountain it felt as though it went understood.

      After a time, Cheiron turned to look at him. ‘You will do what you can for my people when I am gone?’

      ‘It goes without saying. But you Centaurs live long. I think you have many years in you yet.’

      ‘Perhaps.’ Cheiron turned his face back to the wind. ‘But my daughter,’ he sighed. ‘When I first spoke of her, I did not understand that she has immortal longings. A man will find it hard to live with that.’

      Peleus frowned at the thought, and then made light of it. ‘I’m not easy to live with myself. And Thetis will be content when we are by the sea.’

      Again the Centaur said, ‘Perhaps.’

      The eagle glided high above them now, its pinions bent like a bow against the wind. Cheiron stared up at the way that strong span gleamed in flawless sunlight. Quietly he said, ‘Remember that your son will be greater than you. Try not to resent him for it.’

      ‘I shan’t – because it will be your blood that makes him so. When he is of age I will send him to you.’

      Cheiron nodded his old head. ‘Then I shall live for that.’

      Yet Thetis fell pregnant six times in the following years and each time she came to term, but not one of the infants lived for more than a week or two.

      At each small death, Peleus found the sadness harder to bear, and all the more so because it was his wife’s custom to withdraw to a sanctuary of the shore people between the start of her labour and the day when she hoped to present a living child to the world. When Peleus asked the reason for this practice, she told him it was a woman’s mystery and not to be questioned.

      Yet she returned each time, pallid and drawn, as if hollowed out by failure.

      But she would say nothing more, so Peleus harboured his grief and returned to giving judgement in the world of men, and they lived a life that became ever more fraught with the silence that was left between them.

      After the loss of the third child, he argued more strongly that it would be wise for them to consult her father who was more renowned for his medical knowledge than almost any man alive. But Thetis would not hear of it. She was a woman, she said, not a sick mare, and she wanted no truck with his mountain magic. Her trust was in her own understanding of these things as a seapriestess to the moon-mother. In any case, had it not been prophesied that her son would be a stronger man than his father? Any child of hers that was not strong enough to survive the trials of birth had no place on the earth. He should not mourn them so.

      Her ferocity astounded him, but he put it down in part to an effort to mask her own sorrow, and in part to the influence of the Dolopian priestess who was his wife’s constant companion. A small, intense woman with deep-set eyes and a strawberry-birth mark shaped like a sea-horse on her neck, her name was Harpale. Thetis honoured her as a kinswoman, one of her mother’s people, and she had begged Harpale to stay with her at the court of Peleus rather than joining her clan’s recent migration to the island of Skyros.

      The Dolopians were a restless people who had travelled from the far west a generation or two ago and settled about the shores of Thessaly. Now, under their king Lycomedes, some of them had felt the urge to move out to the Scattered Islands in the eastern sea and they had established a stronghold of their own on the windy island of Skyros. The move happened not long after Peleus had established his kingship over the Myrmidons, and feeling the strong call of island life, Thetis had wanted to go with them.

      For a time it had been a struggle between them. Born on an island himself, Peleus knew the nature of the call, but he was king over a mainland people now and it was his wife’s duty to remain with him and provide him with an heir. Was it not enough that he had already shifted the court to the coast for her sake? He had understood her need for the sea. He was content for her to hold to cult practices which he did not share, and which – though he did not say it – he did not greatly trust. But she must respect the constraints imposed by royal duty on their life. They would remain where they were in Thessaly.

      Meanwhile Peleus had been kept busy enough. Once he was secure on his throne he had harnessed the power of the Myrmidons to settle his score with Acastus. A swift, brutal campaign took them through Magnesia into Iolcus. Acastus was killed in the fight and his mad wife was quickly put to death. Giving thanks to Zeus and Artemis, who had a powerful cult centre in Iolcus, Peleus was declared king there and made Iolcus his new coastal capital.

      Having learned the laws and customs of the Myrmidons, he set now about harmonizing them with those of Magnesia, trying to run a peaceable kingdom, and giving judgement in the quarrels with which his warlike men filled the boredom of their peaceful days. Also