'Opilmenos is the stronger and has more battle experience, but they say this Locrian is very quick.'

Something in the tone of this suggested that the scribe might have a stake in the outcome. Calchas had heard from Poimenos, who came and went about the camp on various kinds of foraging expeditions, gathering gossip on the way, that the men were wagering on the result. Though what they could have to wager it was hard to see – they possessed nothing but their weapons.

Chasimenos was lingering still. 'I thought that the god might have made it known to you,' he said.

Calchas shook his head. 'What does Lord Apollo care for the quarrels of men? Live or die, what concern is it of his? The gods will view the proceedings with complete and serene indifference unless there is some offence we know nothing of, something done or left undone, said or left unsaid, which might weigh against the one or the other man when it comes to the meeting. It is dangerous to neglect a god, even when not knowing. Punishment can arrive before knowledge.'

He spoke carefully, knowing the other for an enemy who would destroy him if he had the power. He had been given a sign as to who would be the victor, but it would have been unwise to talk to Chasimenos about this, as it had been of an unusual kind and he had mentioned it to no one. The outcome of the fight was of course the only thing Chasimenos couldn't organize. He was a gifted and devoted administrator, meticulous to the point of obsession, which was why he held his senior position in the palace hierarchy. He had been busy with this fight from the moment Agamemnon had given his approval for it, working out in close detail the order of assembly, the precise positions to be occupied by the allied forces when they lined up for the spectacle. A real headache that, Calchas thought, to remember all the quarrels, some of them ancient, keep feuding tribes at a safe distance from one another. But the outcome couldn't be fixed. No one is bribed to lose in a fight to the death... 'This wind that plagues us is an example,' he said. 'The punishment has come before the knowledge of the fault.'

As if in support of him, the wind rose again now in a long gust that scattered the smoke and rattled the canvas of the tents throughout the camp like a fury of drums. One of the guards clutched at his helmet.

Disappointed at not getting the hot tip he had obviously been hoping for, Chasimenos reverted to his former aloof and slightly sneering manner. 'Croton wouldn't agree with you. He maintains that Zeus cares what happens to every single one of us.'

'Yes, I know Croton says that, he says we are the children of Zeus.' Calchas paused, again conscious of the need for caution. Zeus was the father-god of the Greeks and Croton was the priest of Zeus, with a large following in the army. He and his two disciples paraded frequently through the camp, proclaiming the power of their god. 'Zeus is lord of all,' he said. 'But how can we be children of the gods when we are made of different stuff, when we are perishable and they are not? It isn't logical. We have one season only but the gods live for ever. Of course, there is shelter in the thought of a father, and shelter is needed.'

He was beginning to enlarge on this theme, which he had suddenly found interesting, the relation between the need and the thing needed, which thing existed at first only because of that need, but then, because of that need, took on true existence. 'Perhaps it works the other way, too,' he said. 'Perhaps we humans only exist because the gods need us.'

But Chasimenos said nothing to this and did not stay to listen to more, turning abruptly on his heel and disappearing round the side of the tent. However, there was comedy in this that made up for the rudeness; the guards were taken quite by surprise and had to go lumbering after him, hoisting their spears awkwardly. Measured movement, a certain stateliness, were necessary for a person under escort; but Chasimenos, used to scuttling down palace corridors with no company but his own intriguing mind, had yet to learn this. A mistake in any case to talk much at all to him. Themes commonly discussed in Apasas, city of his birth, and the lands of the Hatti from Kadesh to Sardis, were too abstract for these gross Mycenaean minds. Even a scribe, he thought, a representative of their intellectual class. Chasimenos was hostile enough, without having claims made on his intelligence that his intelligence was not able to meet.

He stayed where he was while the light strengthened. After a while Poimenos brought his drink and a wheat cake to go with it. They were in wheat country here, with fertile land to the south; and now, at the end of August, the harvest was in, though the troops had to go farther afield every day in search of full granaries – it was known now that the local people were hiding their grain. Unpatriotic scum, in the words of Menelaus. Since losing his beautiful Helen to Paris – that swine of an Asian, as he called him – Menelaus spoke often of patriotism and solidarity.

As Calchas ate and drank, the first darts of the sun struck through the canvas of the tent behind him, warming the odours of night still caught there in that narrow space – oxhide, crushed grass, the faint scent of bodies in the folds of the wool. Before his face was the radiant sky, a few bright curls of cloud low on the horizon, moving slowly, barely perceptibly – this wind did not change the sky, did not bring storms. He watched the clouds drift together, looked for a shape in them. A fleece, a swan's neck, the forepart of a chariot. He strove to empty his mind for the message, but he could read nothing there, they were random shapes; and he felt a constriction of the heart at this further failure, knowing that nothing in the world was random. There had been no sign for him in clouds or embers or the flight of birds, not one, in all these days at Aulis, when signs were so desperately needed, when Agamemnon waited for his words, when all the camp waited to know who was sending this wind that kept them huddled here along the shore, a thousand men, the greatest army ever assembled by the Greeks in alliance, trapped here while the useless ships rocked at anchor and the waves mocked them and slapped their hulls. In these sheltered waters, with the hills of Euboea making a barrier, the wind had a varying breath, sometimes deep-voiced, sometimes screaming, sometimes, as now, derisively gentle, hardly more than a breeze; but once, round the promontories, when you were facing the open sea, the wind was a flail of terrible power, beating ships back, smashing them on the rocks.

He could see the masts from the rise where he was sitting. That August sky was so fiercely bright, they glowed as they swayed as if stirred in their own fire. Smoke was rising everywhere now, swirled by the wind, shot through with sunshine. There were voices and movements of men lower down towards the shore, where the main body of the army was encamped.

With the warmth, the pervasive smell of human excrement grew stronger. On the third day, Ajax of Salamis, called Ajax the Larger, who thought of himself as a practical fellow, had organized his people to dig a long trench for a latrine – a heavy job in the hard ground of the hillside. The whole force from Salamis had been employed on this, labouring in shifts. It kept them busy, an added advantage, as Ajax remarked to his small friend and namesake, Ajax the Locrian, called Ajax the Lesser. Mischief was bred by idleness; working together for a common purpose was good for morale. You form them into squads, appoint a few overseers, tell them you'll tan their hides if there is any slacking, and there you are. Unfortunately, however, in his enthusiasm for the project, Ajax had temporarily forgotten why they had all been obliged to wait there in the first place, and sited the latrine to windward of the camp. Being obstinate in the extreme, he would not admit his mistake, and now forced all the contingent from Salamis to continue using the latrine on pain of his severe displeasure – and all knew what that meant – if found defecating anywhere else. It was generally agreed that the people of Salamis had not been the luckiest contingent so far. Meanwhile the smell was getting worse. People grumbled, but in the general apathy that had fallen over the camp no one was ready yet to face the violent encounter with the enormous Ajax that any direct protest was certain to bring about.