'It's not my latrine.' The booming voice of Ajax filled the tent. He was staring at Achilles with furious hostility. 'Good grief,' he said. 'Do you think I use it myself? It's for the men, not the officers.'

Achilles showed no sign of having heard this. 'By Zeus,' he said, 'it's hot in here. I fancy a dip. Not in Ajax's latrine, though.'

Calchas watched his movements and listened to his words with the usual mingling of dislike and fear. Achilles was a natural killer. These Mycenaeans were all warlike and brutal, but Achilles was a special case, he enjoyed homicide as a leisure activity. These last words of his had been a deliberate provocation. Nothing ever led anywhere, with Achilles, except back to his own pride and perfection, to the gestures with which he endlessly celebrated his own marvellous existence. He was dressed this morning in one of the outfits he had had made for him at home before leaving, a short-skirted, sleeveless linen tunic with gold-tasselled epaulettes and a matching cap. His splendid legs were enhanced by shin-guards of polished bronze. Conscious of the eyes upon him, he took out an ivory and papyrus fan from a tuck at his waist, flicked it open and began to fan himself, very slowly.

'There's a man there with faulty hearing,' Ajax shouted. His huge face had flushed to a shade of dark crimson.

Achilles continued with his fanning. 'Better deaf than daft.'

The wind at Aulis, continuing so long, had sensitized men's hearing in some ways, as if it were necessary, to avoid going crazy, to distinguish sounds not caused by it, or even to invent such sounds; there were those who swore afterwards that they had heard Ajax's teeth grinding in the massive jaws. But his mind worked slowly, even when not clouded by rage, and Croton took the opportunity to intervene.

'The justice of Zeus–' he began loudly, but Agamemnon silenced him with a slight movement of the arm. 'Calchas will give us the meaning.'

'My lord, fountain of benefits, I will do my poor best.' The meaning was obvious of course – suspiciously so to Calchas' mind: the hare was Troy, by its death and devouring victory was established in advance for the Greek alliance; not only was the cause approved and the favour of Zeus confirmed, but the total destruction of the enemy was guaranteed. However, no diviner worth his salt would blurt out the obvious, there had always to be the ceremony of interrogation, the spending of words.

'How often did the birds wheel in the sky?' he asked Leucides. 'Once only or more than once?'

'Once only.'

'Did they cry out?'

'No, they were silent.'

'The eagles came in the days just after the full moon, when the face of the moon was crumbling. At the hour you saw the hare the moon would still be clearly visible in the sky?'

'Yes, the moon was still to be seen.'

'The eagles, in their flight, did they cross the face of the moon?'

For the first time Leucides hesitated, but not, it seemed to Calchas, in the way of one striving to remember. 'No,' he said, 'no, they flew lower.'

'Did they fall on the hare with folded wings or wings extended?'

Leucides was hesitating again, but it was a question destined never to be answered. The man whose excitable face Calchas had noticed earlier now broke into stumbling speech. 'The hare was fat with young, the eagles swooped on her and ripped her open, the young ones came spilling out, they were fully formed...'

The voice seemed not his own, it was thick, with a strange bubbling in it, as if struggling up from somewhere lower in the body. Calchas felt fear at the voice, at the staring face, at the convulsive movements at the throat.

'And then?'

'Mother and young were torn to pieces and devoured.'

The silence inside the tent was so loud now that it smothered the crying of the wind. Yet they heard the sound of the man's swallowing, the click of his tongue in the dry mouth. His eyes had opened wide as if he could still see the ravenous descent, the ripped flesh, the gorging. Calchas felt the clutch of fear grow tighter. The man was possessed, a god was speaking through him, pronouncing the one and only truth to be found in this whole account, though not belonging to that dawn at Mycenae, but happening now, here in the tent. He knew it from the stillness of the man's companions as they stood there, stillness of shock, knew it even as he saw Phylakos, readier than the others, raise his chin as at a call to battle, and heard him say, 'Yes, this killing of the young was also in the report they gave me, the hare was pregnant, the eagles ate the mother and the young.'

But it came too late and the knowledge of this was on the face of Phylakos as he spoke. The hush was broken now. As if a quilt had been lifted they heard again the clamour of the wind in the world outside the tent. The brain-soft Nestor, again growing restive – and perhaps jogged by these details of the gutted hare – raised his lamenting voice again, sought to return to that ancient disembowelling of Itymoneus or Iphitomenos, only to be silenced again by the pigeon notes of his dutiful sons on either side.

Taking advantage of this diversion and the breathing space it brought with it, Calchas moved forward and turned to the King and bowed low. On behalf of all, he asked for time to interpret the meaning of what they had heard, a day and a night for reflection. He heard the request granted and uttered thanks, struggling to control his voice, betray nothing of the trembling he felt within him at his first dim perception of who it might be that had spoken to them through the belly and throat of this staring man.

Poimenos was waiting for him outside and supported him back to his own tent. Once there, however, he could not rest. He sent the boy away and covered his face and head with a dark cloth and sat in the close heat of his body, seeking through this warmth and enclosure to find again a time before he knew a difference between his body and the space surrounding it. He felt the run of the sweat on his brow and chest. In the darkness under the head-cloth the tranced face of the man took form again, uttering the words that had been forced from his mouth, the lie that had changed from lie to truth as it was uttered, truth for everyone present in that tent, but most of all for him, servant of the Divine Companion, who united male and female in one being and blended them like water and the light on water. It could only be she, the Lady, whom the Greeks knew as Artemis, one of her many names, protectress of the young, mistress of wild things, goddess of childbirth. Always alert for opportunity, she had found the slack mind and the slack mouth, and used them to warn of a price to be paid. The eagles were from Zeus, yes, but the pregnant hare was hers.

In a day and a night he would have to announce this to the King. The reader of omens takes the omen for himself, takes it over, makes it his own, together with the danger of it. Calchas felt fear in the darkness, felt it in all the pulses of his body, customary fever, companion of all his travels. With it came the need for a time apart, in which to consider. He would have to get away from the camp for a while and for that he would require the King's permission – there was no leaving without it. Agamemnon needed, demanded, to know where he was at all times of the day and night; in the hours of his insomnia he would send a summons, or at the moment of waking, the sweat of his dreams still on him. And he was sudden now and terrible in his rages. Poimenos had brought back from the gossip of the camp the story of the slave-boy who for spilling water had been struck so heavily by the King that he had lain lost to the world for most of a day and now did not put words together in a connected way. Even when Agamemnon was not enraged, Calchas sensed a malignancy that was new, felt it in the glances he received, even when his understanding was being asked for. It was as if the King, hating his own misery, had begun also to hate those who were witness to it.