He stopped short of saying what he knew the King wanted to hear, must already be assuming, that a burst heart was the fate that awaited Troy. The fewer the words, the better; it might be possible yet to leave the bird to its song. 'Your power goes before you,' he said.

'In that case,' Agamemnon said, 'why was I left alone in total darkness?'

The exercise of his profession had taught Calchas that the memory of dreams and portents was generally subject to the embroidery of hope, and always the more so when it concerned the ambitious. 'Great King,' he said, 'pardon me, but are you certain there was no lessening of the dark after the bird fell silent? Think carefully. Was there not a faint light that grew among the trees?'

It had worked with others and he saw from the King's face that it would work now with him. 'Well, now I come to think of it,' Agamemnon said after some moments, 'I believe there was a change in the light. I seem to remember that I could just begin to make out the shapes of the trees.'

'The dawn of the new day,' Calchas said. 'Extremely auspicious, a fortunate dream indeed.'

Luckily he was not required to say more, because Menelaus entered at this moment, the first to arrive. 'Ye gods, what next?' he said. 'It's all over the camp that Zeus has visited this wind on us because of some offence in the high command. I don't think it's me. We all make mistakes of course, but I can't think of anything I've left out, and in any case Zeus is squarely on my side because I'm the one whose hospitality was violated. No, the only thing I can accuse myself of, and even then it's the result of my generous and trusting nature, is letting that shitty Asian get anywhere near my Helen. I'm pretty certain now that he slipped something into her drink, otherwise how can you explain it? I have it on good authority that all Asian males hang weights on their pricks from early childhood to make them bigger, not that my Helen would have been interested in that. She rises above it.'

Absorbed as usual in his wrongs, he had not immediately registered the presence of Calchas. 'Present company excepted,' he said now, with false joviality. 'No evidence of weight-hanging there. Besides, you are an honorary Mycenaean by now.' Calchas was still trying to express his appreciation of this compliment, when Odysseus and Chasimenos entered together, followed shortly afterwards by Achilles and his lover Patroclus. Then the aged Nestor came shambling in, flanked by his cooing sons.

When all were present, the King turned to his diviner. 'Let Calchas speak first,' he said. 'Calchas will give us his interpretation of the omen of the eagles and the hare and the hare's young.'

'Lord of men, it is not a simple matter.' His throat had gone dry. Fear, from which he had been briefly rescued, returned now in full force. He had no plan, no policy, only what his cowardice prompted: to delay, to seek the refuge of a few more hours, the cover of another night. 'There are things still not quite clear to me', he said. 'I need to speak again to the man who first told us that the hare was pregnant. I have some further questions for him.'

He saw the King frown. Croton raised his staff as if claiming the right to speak, but Phylakos forestalled him, stepping forward and coming to attention before the seated Agamemnon, exactly as he had done on the previous day, when he had made himself spokesman for the men on watch. Again Calchas had the feeling that time was circling back on itself, that intervals were being cancelled.

'It's not possible to produce this man for questioning,' Phylakos said. 'He does not answer the call.'

'He must be somewhere,' the priest said.

Across the short space that separated them Phylakos regarded him without expression. 'He cannot be found,' he said. 'It is thought that he has deserted.'

There was a brief pause, then Calchas saw the King turn his head and knew he could delay no longer. As he spoke, he kept his eyes on the face of Odysseus, whom he knew for his greatest enemy. And Odysseus returned the gaze steadily, with an expression that seemed close to a smile.

'Zeus sent the eagles to bless our expedition. So much we know to be true. But our mistake has been to believe that this blessing was binding on us or that it was a guarantee of victory.' The dangerous words, once uttered, brought a sense of release almost reckless, he felt an easing of the heart, saliva gathered again in his mouth. 'It was neither,' he said.

There came voices at this from different parts of the tent, but they were silenced by Odysseus, who had the gift of gaining attention without raising his voice. 'Calchas is right,' he said, 'as far as concerns the eagles. By the eagles we know we have a just cause, but cause and outcome are separate things. However, there is also the hare. The hare is the outcome, the hare is Troy devoured. That is our guarantee.' The suggestion of a smile disappeared from his face as he glanced at those round him, enlisting support. 'As to what is binding,' he said, 'the oaths of loyalty that unite us are binding, our national honour is binding, but perhaps a Hittite priest would not appreciate that.'

'Excuse me, I am not Hittite, I am Carian, we were there before they came, as were our gods.' He was tasting already the bitterness of defeat. He was too alone and too afraid. He knew that in argument it was fatal to have the premises of the adversary placed beyond question; but he could not question the story of the hare, could not say it was a fabrication, that the only truth in it was the word of Artemis gulped from that chosen throat, because the King clung to the story as he would cling to that dawn of promise in his dream. 'The eagles fall on the hare and devour her,' he said. 'But they also devour her young, ripping them from the womb. These are the innocent, this is the blood of the innocent, it must reflect on the justice of the cause, I mean in the sense that it obliges us to enquire into the true will of the gods in this matter.'

Chasimenos now stepped forward to speak, casting his usual quick glances from side to side. 'I'd like to make one simple point,' he said, and ask one simple question. If the cause of the war is just, nothing that happens in the pursuit of the war can make the war less just. The slaughter of the innocent cannot detract from the justice of the cause, though we may possibly call it an unjust effect of a just cause. If this were not so, there would no such thing as a just war, only a necessary war, which is clearly absurd. Can Calchas be saying that Lord Zeus, in embarking us on a just cause whose inherent nature was that it could subsequently become less just, was in fact embarking us on an unjust cause from the very beginning? Let him answer that one.'

The scribe paused here and smiled in the manner of one who knows he has made a devastating point. Calchas was saved from the need to answer by Ajax the Larger, who now raised a voice hoarse from much shouting. 'An end to this riddling,' he said. 'Good grief, how can a fellow make head or tail of all this bullshit?' He glared at Chasimenos, whose smile disappeared abruptly. 'Some people are too clever by half, they don't get enough fresh air, they need to do a few press-ups. A bit of healthy competition on the sports field wouldn't come amiss either. How about enrolling for one of the more light-hearted events which my small friend here has been organizing, the egg-and-shield race, for example?'

How Chasimenos might have responded to this invitation was never to be known, because it was at this moment that the senile Nestor, who had been preternaturally silent until now, raised the wavering song of his voice. 'Who would carry javelins on a cattle raid? You need to make a quick getaway on a cattle raid, it was a sword, they knew how to make swords in those days, we crossed over into Elis in the dead of night, we rounded up their cattle, we got away with fifty cows. Iphiclomenos tried to stop me, I think that was the name, they were his father's cows. I went down on one knee, I stuck him in the belly, he wasn't expecting that, no...'