Chapter Seventeen
The Gathering of Kings
There was a square-cut gateway, overlooked on both sides by flanking walls made of huge, irregular stones, and cut through another just the same. The builders had used none of the Naxos white marble, no porphyry from the distant east. Every stone was grey and unpolished, seeming coated in dull dust. It was a wall designed not for beauty, not for style, but to overawe.
Two lions were carved above the gateway, facing each other with their paws on the base of a fluted pillar. In grey, of course. Anyone raised near the Greensea would know what that meant, even if they’d somehow been brought to the gate without the first idea where they were.
This was Mycenae.
Inside the city teemed, a crowded mass of people thrust together in a collision of huddled houses. Many of them looked as though one of the Cyclops said to have built the wall had picked them up and smashed them back down, so they stayed upright only by leaning together. Other buildings were mostly wood and cheap clay bricks, patched and lashed together in the gaps between stone dwellings. In places whole streets had been swamped by the rising flood of people, and the shacks they built.
But the main avenues were was still clear. The king’s men kept them so, sweeping away any detritus which spilled out from the alleys. Shacks were tolerated if they were out of sight, but build near the main roads, and the walls would soon be broken by axes and the hafts of soldiers’ spears. Up the slope the avenue ran, once passing through a gate set into a smaller wall, this one made of rammed earth faced with stones. That was the old city wall, back when Mycenae was just a small town with a warlord dreaming of greater power. Well, all the warlords had wanted greater power, in those days. The kings of Greece today owed their lineages to the warriors who had seized it first and held it tightest.
Up the road went, through a more affluent city now, until a mile from the first gate it reached the Citadel.
The lions appeared again here, at least twice as large as before. It was this portal that was famous, the Lion Gate of Mycenae, entrance to the fortress of the inner city. Towers overlooked the road on both sides, and spikes protruded from between the stones so attackers couldn’t flatten themselves against the walls. Only welcome visitors could pass under the lintel and into the Citadel beyond.
There the road ran on to the crown of the hill, with guard houses on one side and a circular tomb structure on the other. Further along, the right hand side was lined with residences for visiting nobles. For kings, in effect, and the buildings were small palaces, each a miniature copy of a ruler’s hall. Across the roadway from them trees grew in neatly trimmed stands, on a steeper hillside cut by flights of stone steps. Beyond that, looming over the whole site, was the Palace. It was designed to mimic an Egyptian pyramid, though with many different buildings: small ones around the outside, then higher, and the tallest at the centre. Right in the middle a square tower rose, supported by black pillars, from which the king could look out over his city and the lands around it, like a god atop his mountain.
There were those who said Agamemnon thought of himself that way, a deity peering down from his eyrie at mortal men. But he was High King, and dislike or no, at his summons the lesser rulers had come. They filled up the guest residences built by Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, to accommodate them, billeting their servants and entourages where they could. Even then there were too few guest halls, and that caused problems.
Pheidippus of Calymne flew into a rage within minutes of his arrival, when he was told he would have to camp among the trees. He took it as a personal insult: other kings are housed, so why should he not be? Finally Talthybius, the High King’s herald and advisor, ejected some priests from quarters on the far side of the Palace, which gave Pheidippus a proper house – though it was rather small, and isolated from the others.
Later that day two of the other kings arrived at the same time. Schedius and Ialmenus had never been friends, as their predecessors as kings of Phocis and Locris had never got on. Even the High King’s authority was hardly enough to keep them from clawing at one another every summer, sending their armies to battle over some minor transgression or imagined slight. Beetle-eyed Schedius was a warrior of the old sort, tough and uncompromising: Ialmenus was even grimmer, if anything, since his son had been killed hunting lions early in the year. Which made it inexplicable that Talthybius had placed them in residences side by side, like two strange and hostile dogs sharing a single small yard.
It was Carystus who sorted it out, the king of Euboea giving up his own guest palace close to the wall so Schedius could take it, and instead accepting the offer of a marquee from a harried-looking Talthybius. It meant he had to camp among the trees, but he had hardly less room than his fellow kings, and they already knew he’d made a sacrifice. If another was needed during the discussion he would not be expected to offer again.
The full moon passed. The last kings trickled in, and it was time for the Gathering.