Diomedes resumed the march towards the Blue Mountains with a heavy heart. Victory had given him no joy, and the land they were passing offered no place suitable for founding a city. They saw more square villages surrounded by moats and cultivated fields, but they were naught but islands in a sea of wild nature that had taken possession of all the territory. Many of the villages appeared to be deserted, as if the inhabitants had left, taking their things with them.

Boundless cane groves marked the slow snaking of the water over the earth. It seemed that a number of frightful floods had devastated the work of men, and that immense, prolonged fatigue had finally crushed the will of the village communities to withstand the constant onslaught of the elements. Everywhere they found signs of work begun and abandoned half-way: embankments, dams, canals. .

The weather had begun to change and the high sun warmed the air and the earth. At first this brought welcome relief, but then the heat became intolerable because the water that flowed on the ground mixed with the air and produced a sense of suffocation and oppression. Only towards evening was there any respite. The land seemed to change; the sun setting behind the Blue Mountains enflamed the clouds in the sky and set alight the marshy expanses at their feet. The water glittered between the canes like molten gold and the wind rose to bend the grass on the plains and rustle the green foliage of the oak and ash trees. The poplars shivered silver at every breath of the wind and the new leaves of the beeches shone like polished copper. At the edges of the forests grazed great horned deer and does with their newly born young. Packs of boars snuffled under aged oaks, and the sows called to their striped-back little ones with soft, continuous grunts. Sometimes, in the thick of the wood, they would glimpse the shiny pelt of a huge bear.

When darkness fell, an incessant choir of frogs would rise from the waters, joined by the chirping of crickets in the meadows and the solitary warbling of the nightingale in the forest. At that hour, the king would go down towards a nearby river or stream to bathe; he would throw his chlamys over his shoulders and remain in silence to contemplate the evening. Memories would overwhelm him then, of the furious battles fought under the walls of the city of Priam. His companions: Achilles, Sthenelus, Ulysses, Ajax. . all dead. . or lost. How he would have liked to sit with them and speak of the toils of the day, drinking wine and eating roasted meat. .

For many years he had desired to return to the peace of his home and the love of his bride and now, incredibly, he regretted that the war had ever finished. Not the blind clashes he’d had in this land, but the loyal combat of the past, where two phalanxes would draw up in broad daylight on the open field, front to front. And where the gods could clearly choose whose side they were on, where a man could show what he was worth. He remembered the blinding glare of bronze, the din of the combat chariots launched in unrestrained attack against the barrier of the enemy infantry. He recalled deep sleep under his tent, and endless torpor. And he remembered how continuous familiarity with death made him appreciate enormously every aspect of life, no matter how humble or poor.

Now, for the first time in all his life, he was afraid. He was afraid of seeing his men die one by one, snared like animals in traps, betrayed at night, surprised in the shadows. He was afraid that he was marching, at the cost of great sacrifice and exhausting strain, towards nothing. This uninhabited wasteland was no land at all; it was a limitless, boundless magma that had already annihilated the people who had tried to settle it.

The bride who had come from the Mountains of Ice began to understand the language of the Achaeans, because Telephus and the Chnanspoke to her often and dedicated great attention to her, but she never spoke, never asked for anything and never even smiled, for she knew in her heart that she would never again see her land or her family.

One evening they camped along the river, which had become much more lovely and clear. The water ran sparkling over smooth pebbles and gravel of myriad colours. Long tongues of fine sand stretched into the bends, edged by little tufts of wicker which bowed in the evening breeze until they touched the current.

The girl descended towards a grove of willow trees, took off her clothing and walked into the water. It was still cold with the melting snow of the Blue Mountains, but very pleasant because it reminded her of the rivers in her native land. She let herself be carried by the current, she rolled and dipped, diving in where it was deepest until she could touch the sands at the bottom. She would turn on to her back and then on to her stomach, letting the water caress her hair.

When she got to her feet to return to the shore where she had left her clothing she found King Diomedes before her, sitting alone on a boulder.

The low sun struck him in full, setting his hair ablaze around his bronzed cheeks, mixing it with the curls of his beard like the waves of the river amid the willow bushes. He was wearing only his chlamys over his nude body, and his leg was propped up on a stone. She realized that he had been watching her for some time, without her knowing. She did not run away, because there was nowhere she could go. She was drawn towards him by the melancholy look in his eyes; the same that she had seen in Nemro’s black eyes, but without his gleam of hope. In those few steps that separated her from the king she realized that he was sadder, more alone, more desperate; she understood that Nemro’s death for him had been nothing more, nothing less than an unavoidable turn of fate.

She looked at his awesome hands, the hands of an annihilator. The strong fingers, the turgid veins under his skin. Hands that gave death or a caress without much difference. She looked into his eyes and laid her hands on his shoulders; they felt hard, and strong. She ran her fingers through his soft, smooth hair. She pressed his head to her bosom and he put his hands around her waist and kissed her breasts and her smooth stomach still dripping with river water. Without standing, he pulled her against him, pulled her into his lap and penetrated within her holding her in his arms like a child, letting her rest her head on his shoulder, as though she were sleeping. One drop of her virgin’s blood stained the white chlamys of the king and she pressed her lips together without a moan. She clasped the hard body of the king with her tender arms and with her long, slender legs. She thought of Nemro’s black eyes, dead, forever, she thought of her distant land, beyond the immaculate peaks of the Mountains of Ice, and she wept. She wept while the king laid her on the sand and unleashed all the power of his loins within her, gripping her by the shoulders, by her hair. . She wept because she felt the whole world stifled by sadness, in the murmur of the river and the woods, in the slow, opaque dusk, in the remote screeching of the scops owl, in the whisper of the wind.

The king cried out in the moment of supreme delirium, a cry as hoarse as the growl of a beast, then collapsed, exhausted, his fists clutching the river sand. The girl slipped away from under his heavy body and immersed herself again in the river to purify herself in its gelid waters. When she emerged, Diomedes had disappeared; there was nothing left of him but the footprints in the damp sand and his feral odour in the air, but as she was gathering up her clothing she found a flower resting on her gown, a wild melilot. She picked it up and brought it to her face, inhaling its scent. The moon was just rising between the boughs of the poplars and the day past was nothing but a thin vermilion strip on the mountain crest. She felt that the king had left her a kiss and a caress.