It was by far the longest speech Calchas had ever heard the boy utter. He hesitated a moment, then nodded. 'Very well. We can hope for a brace of quail to roast on the fire when dark comes.'

As he made his way towards the compound where the smith had his forge, he thought how strange it was that Poimenos should be so casually aware of animal and human rapine in the matter of quails, and yet take the songs of kings and heroes with what seemed no smallest degree of question.

The smith had taken over the ruins of a building on the edge of the camp, originally a house of some kind, now no more than a shelter for goatherds, with broken-down stone walls and the remnants of a thatch. This last he had torn down to prevent fire, and he had set his shallow, clay-lined furnace in an angle made by the walls.

As he came forward now, Calchas noticed for the first time that he was slightly lame – his right foot dragged a little. He was dressed in his usual leather apron, but his thick arms were uncovered and his hands were bare. 'So,' he said, and grinned, revealing a mouth with not many teeth remaining and these not promising to remain long. 'The diviner has been sent to make sure that Palernus the smith is doing his work properly.'

'It is not that,' Calchas said. 'The King does not doubt you are a master of your trade.' He felt always an uneasiness bordering on dread in the presence of the smith, with his shaven head and fire-scars and the concentric rings of his guild mark set on his forehead like a staring third eye. One who could distil metal from stone, cast aside the dross, separate the elements of nature that had been joined since the creation of the world. This was magic, it set him apart. 'No, it is not that,' he said again. 'Agamemnon takes close interest in the progress of this knife.'

The smith nodded, still grinning. 'And so he sends you, his diviner. Come round this way.'

He led his visitor to the angle in the walls where the furnace had been set. Two slaves were crouched there, on either side of the brick hearth, shaven-headed like their master, naked save for loincloths. One was armed with pigskin bellows. The mouth of the bowl-shaped hearth roared with heat.

'It has taken me this time to set up the forge,' the smith said. 'The bricks, the sand, the clay for the lining, all had to be taken from the ship. We have got a good place for it, sheltered enough from the wind, not too much.' He winked briefly with a bloodshot eye and made a slight movement of the head. 'This wind serves us well, we will hardly need the bellows. You would say the wind wanted it.'

'Wanted it?'

'Her death. First it maddens us, so she is summoned. Then it blows on the fire to make a good heat for the knife.'

Calchas made no immediate reply. He heard the seething of the draught at the bottom of the hearth and saw the red pulse of the charcoal. The heat came against his face. He thought for a moment of what it might be like for the two naked men crouched so near it. 'So the work has not properly begun yet?' he said.

'Brother, the work began when I heard the King's words and understood what was wanted. You can report that the fire is ready and the mould made and the copper and tin chosen. Come, see here.'

He turned to a rough platform that had been made by pushing broken stones together, and bent down to feel under a square of cloth that was lying there. After a moment he straightened and held out in both hands a short, reddish-coloured bar with a soft shine to it. 'I keep it well covered,' he said. 'Copper is soon corrupted, the damp of night puts a green coat on it. Tell the King how tender I am with his copper, even before it goes to the fire. This ingot came with us from Crete, it was smelted from weathered copper-stone, as pure as ever you could find in a natural state, washed and washed again by the rain since first it pushed up from the womb of earth. Tell the King this.'

'I will, you can rely on it.'

The smith grinned again. 'And he can rely on the knife. A special knife for the King's daughter, and also for his diviner, Calchas. Here is the tin.' He moved aside, took from the base of the wall, against which it was leaning, a square sheet of metal. It gleamed in the light as he raised it and Calchas saw a brief, rippling image of his own face in the surface. 'Tin has a voice,' the smith said. He twisted the sheet a little in his scarred, thick-fingered hands, and it emitted a high, squeaking sound like some small mammal in fear. 'This tin has never been mixed or alloyed, I swear by Hephaestus. We could not bring the ore with us, it is too heavy. And there is none to be found here. Besides, tin-stone would be the devil to smelt on a makeshift furnace like this one. Has Calchas the diviner ever seen melting tin?'

'No, not that I can remember.'

'Your tin is a timorous metal. It runs everywhere, it finds every thinnest crack to hide in, it flees away down slopes that look dead level to your eyes.'

He tilted the sheet as if inviting Calchas again to seek his reflection; but the diviner looked sharply away. 'I will come tomorrow at this same time,' he said.

'Stay and see the work. You will see me smelt these two metals together and cast the bronze. Tell the King I will bond eight parts of copper with one of tin.'

He twisted the sheet again, and again it made the sound of a small creature in some extreme distress. It seemed to Calchas that the heat was intensifying. The air above the furnace was blurred with it. His vision was momentarily affected, so that the rings of the tattooed eye in the centre of the smith's forehead appeared to turn slowly on their red centre. Dread of the smith and what the smith seemed to know clutched at him. He thought of the half-eaten face and the slashed throat, the Boeotian, squirming on the shingle as the dancer stepped round him, of his terrible failure to understand who must win that fight. It was then, he thought, while the life ebbed from Opilmenos, then that the gods withdrew their favour from me. He felt the beginnings of nausea.

'The best mix,' the smith said. 'Less tin than that and the bronze will not hammer well, Calchas the diviner will not get a keen blade.'

The feeling of nausea grew stronger. 'I will make this known to the King,' Calchas said and he turned and went half-blindly out from the enclosure of the walls.

The threshing of the wheat, which Calchas had seen as a haze of gold over the plain, continued in the days that followed, the days of waiting for Iphigeneia. Squads were sent out to seize the grain wherever it could be found; and the country people, faced with the prospect of starvation in the winter, grew cunning in concealment, leaving their granaries bare, carting off the grain in sacks during the night, hiding it in gullies and thickets. A man was beaten to death by his neighbours for taking a bronze incense-burner, a thing he had no earthly use for and could not easily dispose of, to lead the soldiers to one such cache.

The straw was left, as always, in soft conical heaps, taller than a man, bright gold in the sunshine at first, soon bleaching to pale yellow. The wind swept across the open space, loosened the binding of the heaps, threw up the straw in clouds which rose and fell, drifting over a wide area, getting caught in ruts and hollows and in the short, sun-scorched grass of the plain. There was a period when the land seemed textured with it, as if this pale glinting yellow was the natural colour of the earth. At this time too the foothills that lay beyond the plain had exactly this same shade of faded gold, so that the eye was carried on a single tide of colour to the horizon. From the sparse settlements scattered over this great expanse the only sounds that could be heard above the wind were those of pain: the tormented braying of an ass, the squealing outcries of gelded hogs.