'What amends?' Chasimenos said, still playing his part as questioner. 'What steps should the King take to recover the god's favour?'

The question hung in the air for some moments, heavily, oppressively. The King's face was expressionless; but his left hand was pressed against the ribs on that side, as if to contain the violence of his heart. 'I have neglected nothing,' he said. 'I have always honoured the god.'

'Amends must be made through the two persons who have offended. When was a bull last sacrificed on the altar of Zeus at Mycenae? It is only the goat whose blood they offer, the animal sacred to Artemis. The girl has offended by her practices and the father by permitting them.'

A sudden, fearful intimation came to Calchas of where this might be tending. If they had rehearsed the questions they must have rehearsed the answers... 'It has no sense, it is madness,' he said. 'Are we to judge on doubtful reports and unreliable memories, idle talk about the position of the images on one shelf or another? The wind is something that touches us all. How can the fault lie only in one, when the wind affects a thousand? Where is the justice of Zeus in that?'

But no murmur came to support him. They had found the offence that was needed. Croton's strength lay in the narrowness of his vision, the simplicity of his message. Simplicity, when it was passionate, would always win, something Calchas had known and forgotten a thousand times and would forget again, helpless to avoid the anguish of doubt, forever adrift among divided counsels. It was no comfort to him to know that the simplicity came from darkness, that Croton confused the justice of Zeus with the power of the priesthood, and his own personal need to suppress the fecund female divinities, worshipped of old, who disgusted and frightened him as did women uncontrolled by men. Knowledge which another enemy might have known how to turn to account. Useless to him now, in any case, as he stood there and saw the King's face turned away from him.

'What amends?' Chasimenos said again, and there was an eagerness in this repeating of the question.

Croton drew himself up with a visible effort. 'Iphigeneia must be brought here and sacrificed on the altar of Zeus before the people. Only when that is done will–'

At a bound the King was out of his chair. A hoarse, panting breath came from him, strangely like an echo of the wind, a sound within a sound. He took two steps towards Croton and the knife was in his hand. Then Odysseus and Diomedes were on either side of him, speaking low. He stood still for a moment between them, then raised his face and gave a single cry, deep in his throat. There were some seconds of irresolution as the wind rattled the canvas as if in answer, and the chiefs looked at each other's faces, not knowing what to say or do. Then Odysseus said, 'We must all leave, our Commander-in-Chief will want to be alone in order to consider what he has been told.'

As they filed out in silence, too occupied with what had happened to quarrel over precedence, it came to Calchas in the midst of his shock that even at that terrible moment, with the scream of the King still seeming to sound in the tent, Odysseus had made a point of giving Agamemnon his military title.

He found Poimenos waiting for him, but seeing his face the boy asked no questions, remaining silent with the tact that seemed part of his innocence, while he saw to the fire and cooked the barley porridge and the fish for their evening meal. After they had eaten, Calchas motioned the boy to come and sit beside him. 'The chiefs are persuaded that this wind is sent by Zeus because of the King's offence,' he said.

'This is what everyone thinks. It's all over the camp.'

Calchas glanced sideways at the boy's calm face. 'Is it so?'

'While you were there, at the meeting, I went round. They talk of nothing else. While we were away on the island, Croton and his people were going among the men with pipe and drum and the banners of Zeus.'

'I see, yes.'

'Even the Singer...'

'You have been listening to the Singer?'

Poimenos lowered his eyes, in what seemed some confusion. 'I was passing by,' he said.

'They want the King to turn away the wrath of the god by offering his daughter as a sacrifice.'

The boy's eyes widened. 'Will he do it?'

Such immediate faith in his judgement would normally have touched and amused Calchas, but now it served only to intensify the pain of his defeat. 'No one can know yet,' he said. 'Much depends on how it is presented to him. There will be people ready to present it in certain ways.'

'Not you?'

'No, not me. The King will not listen to me now.' He at once regretted this admission of lost ground, which might diminish his importance in the boy's eyes. 'He can listen to no one for the moment,' he said.

'Did you tell him about the sign the goddess gave you, the river of metal and all the Greeks and Trojans carried away in it?' It was clear Poimenos knew the answer to this in advance. 'They would have listened,' he said. 'They would have listened to a story like that.' His face wore a look that Calchas could not remember seeing there before, hurt and disappointed. 'And the river empty in the distance, all silver,' he said.

'How do you know what sign I had from the goddess? We do not speak together about such things.'

The boy looked at him in silence for some moments with a deliberateness of regard unusual with him. 'No,' he said, 'it is true you do not tell me things. But you said things as you drew back from the fire, before the vomiting came. And then again, during the night.'

'It was not the moment to speak of it.' A lie, as he knew in the cold depths of his heart, a lie to join the many he had told to this boy and others to disguise his faintness of purpose. The moment had been then, he had drawn back from it and it had gone. And he had lost favour even so. Self-contempt brought a wave of anger with it, anger against the boy before him, who showed his disappointment too obviously, too childishly. And with the anger there came again the desire to instruct, which is also the desire to destroy.

'A story,' he said. 'Do you think we have been telling stories back there?' He paused on this, however, his anger disappearing as abruptly as it had come. A kind of story it had been, not a contest of priests, nor even of gods, but a struggle for possession of the King's mind. Who had the King's mind would have the conduct of the war.

Poimenos had cast his eyes down in awareness of being rebuked, but he made no answer. Calchas felt nothing now but weariness and the premonition of loss. 'Will you leave me to myself for a while?' he said. 'Go about the camp a little, try to learn the feelings of the people.'

The boy obeyed, still in silence. Alone in the tent, Calchas strove to close his mind against the bitterness of defeat and the fear he felt for the future. He prayed in whispers to Pollein, god of blended natures, to act as peacemaker in this quarrel, reconcile the goddess and the god and restore the King's favour to his diviner. For only answer there was the beat of his heart and the grieving of the wind as it searched among the scrub of the hillsides. And he was visited with an anguish worse than all his fear. In that voice of the wind there was no urgent will, no intention, no message of god or goddess, only a desolation as old as the hills themselves.