Gears of Troy 3

by Daniel Pierce

  “Ah, I am glad to hear that the supply line from the Hittite empire is still going strong,” the King said. “I will always stand behind the idea that it is better to turn an enemy into a friend—if it is possible in a given circumstance.”

  “I couldn’t agree with that more.”

  Soon, it was time to allow the people in. Most things they brought to us were what I had come to expect: this man stole from this other man; these two guys have a dispute over where one man’s plot of land ends and the other’s begins, and one of them does not appreciate the other’s sheep or cows grazing on his property; this man owes this woman money; this women says she was impregnated by a man who denies the claim; this man patched another’s roof which was still leaking; some guy thinks a road should be added in some such place; and it just went on and on. Several times I had to keep my head from tilting back and finding solace in the cushion of my regal seat. I knew to allow such a thing would invite sleep, and although it would surely be excusable, it would be embarrassing nonetheless.

  There were several travelers from other lands coming to seek new trade agreements. Troy had seen an influx of these people since the port of Dardanelles was beginning to prosper once again after its assault by the Greeks over two years ago. Some of these proposed deals were of mild interest to me because Port Superior was on the other side of the Strait of Dardanelles, and any trade brought to the seaside city’s ports would likely be trade I could get in on as well.

  About halfway into the day, around the time my stomach began grumbling for lunch, we were approached by a well-dressed man that had curly black hair, streaked with lines of gray. He appeared to be in or around his 50’s and walked with a pride not seen in the typical flatterer. His beard was well-kempt and colored in a similar fashion to the hair on his head. He wore a fine purple tunic free of scuffs, tears, and stains and walked with a shepherd’s rod in his hand.

  The man stepped forward and spoke with confidence, saying, “Your Honors”—he paused to bow to each of us—“I am Teucer, a simple Trojan shepherd. I live with my wife and children in our seaside home several hours’ horseback travel to the north of the city of Dardanelles. As you can tell by my attire, I make a reasonable living selling fleece and other farm goods to the traders that dock at that city. Business has been good for many years, all the way back to when my grandfather decided to focus on growing sheep over other livestock. It is my main source of income, and I have come to you today in sudden anguish because I fear that my livelihood has been irreparably damaged.”

  “Explain,” said the King.

  “I am afraid that there is little else to explain,” he continued slowly, almost wistfully. “It must have happened in the night, but there was no evidence to go by. The majority of my flock simply . . . disappeared. It just vanished in the night. My first thought was that more sheep somehow wandered from their enclosures, but I sent my farmhands searching for them, and they found nothing. One of them suggested that wolves may be to blame, and we have had our fair share of wolf attacks, but they are never so tidy and rarely carry off more than one or two of my livestock. I believe it is impossible for wolves to hunt without leaving a bloody mess behind. So, I come to your now in my time of confusion and need. If my sheep cannot be returned to me, I beg you, Your Highnesses, to please help me find who did this terrible thing to me and my family.”

  The Queen must have noticed my sudden engagement in this man’s tale. It was the most interesting story I had heard during all of my sit-ins in the royal court. She asked, “Troy, do you have any thoughts on this matter?”

  I was surprised as all eyes turned to me. “Oh—I, uh, yeah, I doubt it was wolves. I mean, you, sir, have more experience than I do with the animals, but they are certainly not known for their tidiness. Though, I am curious to know why you do not seem to suspect any of your hired help? That seems like the most logical assumption to me. Could they not quietly open the gates at night and carry them off somewhere?”

  “The thought crossed my mind, Sire, but I find it doubtful,” Teucer said. “The help I hire to work with me come from several smaller farming families in the surrounding areas. I have known those young men all their lives, and our families’ bonds to one another go back for generations. I doubt even one of those clans would turn against mine in such a way, but even if they did, the others would know and tell me, and they would have nothing to gain by peddling the distinct fleece of my sheep to any buyers within a reasonable distance. The traders would recognize it and know it was stolen. They would be found out one way or another. Also, I never leave my flock unattended with a man from any single family as a sort of safety measure. They are always watching each other. The same goes for the night guards—they are all young men from the other families, and often my own sons take shifts with them, as had one of them during the night my sheep disappeared.”

  “It sounds like you have a solid system in place to prevent theft. What did your night watch see that night?”

  Teucer shrugged. “My son was with the other boy all night. They do not only watch the flocks but patrol the rest of the estate as well, looking for any signs of danger beyond the fences. It was after one of these patrols that they returned to find about four-fifths of my sheep vanished. That is all I know. There was no sign of a struggle and no break in the fence.” He shrugged again, punctuating his confusion.

  “Well, you have my interest, Teucer,” I said, getting to my feet. “If it is permissible to the royal couple, I will accompany you to your estate immediately.”

  “Best of luck to you,” Hecuba consented.

  “Aye,” said the King.

  “Please, tell Helen to put her task to aide Master Erion on hold when she returns to port with my ship and instead take it to Dardanelles and meet me there.”

  “I’ll send a messenger to the docks momentarily, my son,” said Priam.

  I borrowed a horse from the royal stockade and headed north with my new companion. We spoke relatively little during our journey, but when we did exchange words, it was usually the shepherd asking about me, where I had come from, what my current goals were, who I held close to my heart. He struck me as an oddly thoughtful man for his position. Most shepherds I had met in the land were quick to speak and slow to think, often having hard opinions on issues of which they understood little. When they spoke, they spoke only of themselves and cared nothing to hear the interests and habits of another man. They were simple folk, taken in by simple pleasures and simple lives. Their lives often followed a linear path, inheriting the profession of their parents and in turn passing their farming ways down to their children. In the affairs of state, most farmers single-mindedly thought only of how policies would affect them, but no matter what path the political climate took, no matter how they felt about it, they were always herded blindly into acceptance with the way of things, much like how they herded their own livestock.

  Teucer was not one of these narrow-minded individuals. His family, he mentioned, had been in the profession of farming for the entirety of their narrative history passed down through the generations. Anything before that was unknown to him. There was a time, it seemed, when they were among the ranks of the common small-time ranchers and planters, back before his grandparents changed their family’s destiny.

  He was told that they used to keep cows as well as sheep and alternated several crops over the years to sell at the market at Dardanelles and feed the family. They still kept a few crops on hand because Teucer was always taught that it was a poor choice for a man to put all of his faith in a single thing, especially when it came to his livelihood. He told me that he was beginning to understand the sentiment all the more now that his main source of revenue had abruptly vanished in the night.

  I asked him to explain what his grandparents did that made their family decide to put such a heavy focus on sheep, but he simply said that it would be a better thing to show me instead of telling. He left me wondering with a comment that his grandmother was a student of a certain
order of magic. Before I could inquire further, he was asking me questions about Port Superior, and then the conversation lulled to silence as we became aware of the chirping of crickets ushering in the evening.

  We reached the estate a little after nightfall. There were two teenage boys standing at the waist-high wooden gate as we trotted up to the fence. The enclosure ran far off out of sight on either side of us. I was impressed at the thought of how much land Teucer owned. Fate had been good to this man—up until recently.

  On the inside of the fence was a seemingly endless grassy meadow with several trees scattered here and there. A still pond glimmered in the light of the crescent moon off to the right of the hoof-packed dirt path which thinned off into the horizon, presumably leading to the farmer’s dwelling somewhere on the other side.

  “Hello, boys!” Teucer greeted his young watchmen.

  “Hello, sir!” they called in unison.

  “This is Milo,” Teucer introduced the boy to the right. “His family lives a bit past yon lands there.” He pointed to the horizon line at our right. His phrasing was humorous to me then, as it was the first time that I heard him speak like the other farmers I had met, but he still spoke with his proper well-bred inflection. That brought to light another mystery of this land: the farmers spoke in a similar fashion to the stereotypical southerner back home in the United States, with minor differences. “And this is Hayne, my boy. Neither of them were on duty the other night when the incident took place. Anything noteworthy happen while I was gone, boys?”

  Both boys shook their heads, and Hayne said, “No, sir.”

  “No news is better than bad news. You make your rounds yet?”

  “We were about to,” said his son.

  “Good boy.”

  They let us in, and I followed Teucer to the other side of the pond. We stopped on a sizeable patch of dirt. There was a large tree nearby, surely good for shade in the summer heat, and several torches lining the perimeter.

  “They were here when they went missing,” Teucer explained. “This is one of their favorite places to spend the night because of the pond, so I have a few torches setup to help my boys keep an eye on them. A lot of good that did me the other night.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “I have been keeping them in the shelter near the house since the incident. The boys have been letting them out to graze twice a day. I have two of my sons keeping them under constant watch now, in addition to the two patrols I always have wandering the estate at night.”

  “You’re not taking any risks now, are you?”

  Teucer shook his head. “Truer words have never been spoken.”

  I dismounted my horse and looked around, taking one of the torches from its post to help me look for any suspicious marks on the ground.

  “Did you look for tracks?”

  “That was the first thing I did. It had been done three times over, but feel free to investigate for yourself. It never hurts to have an extra set of eyes.”

  I thought it was lucky the abduction happened in this grassless clearing. If any tracks were to be found, this was surely the best place on the estate to find them. There were hundreds if not thousands of little cloven hoofprints collaged over one another. If there was some sort of predator there the previous night, it stood to reason that it would be on or near the topmost layer of prints.

  I spent a solid twenty minutes scouring the barren patch but found nothing out of the ordinary. Teucer watched patiently as I conducted my inexperienced investigation. I wanted to help him, but it seemed like there were little leads to go on.

  The grass began to grow again a few feet out on the far side of the tree. I walked around its trunk, not expecting to find much of anything by then, but was surprised to discover several faint imprints of horse hooves.

  “Does this belong to one of yours?” I asked.

  The shepherd’s brow wrinkled and he walked over to join me. He stooped closer to the print, hand on chin, and said, “No . . . my horses usually either graze closer to the stables or they are being ridden on the path from my house to the gate. They never come here.” He bent close still and thought for a moment. “You know, these prints are . . . strange. They do not seem real, if that makes sense.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean. Do you have a shovel and a box or something I can scoop one of these into? I know someone who might have more insight, but she’s back at Port Superior.”

  “That is a good idea, Troy. I’ll fetch some equipment at once.”

  While he was gone, I analyzed the prints as best I could without disturbing them. They seemed little more substantial than shadows, but I covered the air around them with my hands to make sure that it was not some trick of perception and simply a cluster of shadows cast from elsewhere. To the best of my ability to perceive, they seemed real. The dirt beneath them did not appear to have been displaced by the footfalls, which is what one would expect to happen for a footprint to occur at all. I had the odd sensation that I was looking at a set of prints straight out of some old detective cartoon from my time period. By all accounts, they were paper-thin, and I felt as if I could take a pencil or some other small implement and peel it from the ground like a sticker.

  I thought it might not be too bad to tamper with a single print, so I found a twig nearby that had fallen from the tree and gently poked the solid black hoof shape closest to me. It tore against the faint prick of the wood in my hand, like one would expect of the thin film at the top of a bowl of soup or dipping cheese that had been sitting out in the open air. I lifted the print where it had ripped and saw nothing different in its underside. Teucer returned on foot soon after, presumably having stopped to stable his horse along the way. He was carrying a shovel and three wooden boxes.

  “Did you discover anything new?” he asked.

  “It’s strange . . . It almost seems as if the prints have been painted on the dirt or something like that.”

  “That is strange,” the older man agreed. “Well, I brought several boxes for you to take back. It might be good to have multiple samples.”

  “Smart idea.” I took the boxes and shovel from him and set to work gently lifting the dirt and the prints atop it from the ground and placing each scoop into the containers. “It will be an ordeal carrying these back to town without jostling them.”

  “I will come with you and carry one or two,” Teucer offered.

  “I would appreciate that a lot.”

  “Of course. We will store them here for the night and head over to Dardanelles to meet your wife in the morning. I suspect she will not arrive too long before then?”

  “It’s highly unlikely,” I said. “We may still end up having to wait on her if we get there at dawn.”

  “Either way, all is well. Follow me and come see the remaining sheep that I have been bragging about to you so much on the way here.”

  He led me and my horse to a large wooden barn next to his seaside house, which itself was a sight to see. The man’s residence was more at place in a large town as the home of a wealthy aristocrat, with its three stories and four-pillared overhang. The walls were not made of simple stone or clay like those of the other farmers I had encountered. Instead, they were laid with massive bricks cut from a solid grey stone which was polished and shining in the light of the torches lining the path to the front steps. Each window was made of glass, too, which was highly unusual for a common person to have in their dwelling. Capping the manor off were red clay shingles, ostensibly curved in an ornate pattern simply for the sake of decoration. I noticed Teucer smirking when he caught my jaw-gaping stare as we passed.

  “Welcome to my home, Troy,” he said. “I will show you inside soon enough, but first the sheep.”

  I followed speechlessly to the barn. His sons regarded me with confusion as I approached behind their father. One stepped forward and made as if to put his hand in my path, but his father placed a palm on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Come, Thadeus. Use a little sense. Troy here
is accompanying your old man. He’s from Illium, looking into the disappearance of our flock.”

  Thadeus and his brother stepped aside as the older man led me in. There were only eight sheep waiting for us within the walls of the barn. I instantly understood their value.

  Their fleece was so fine—perhaps “fine” was not the best word to describe it, but it was the only word I could think of—that my eyes could not look at it directly. Every time I tried to focus on one of the creatures, I found myself compelled to look away. The fleece was like nothing I had ever seen. It was as if my mind could not comprehend what I was looking at. In a way, it reminded me of a mysterious perfect-black box I had discovered during my bout with the Hittites, a box colored with a black so intense that no amount of light could outline any definition on its surface. While this fleece reminded me of that box, it was different in many ways. The box was a source of endless curiosity to me, and it was hard to tear myself away from trying to decode its secrets. These animals had the opposite effect, forcing me to ignore them. I suspected that if I had randomly spotted one grazing in the field, I would have overlooked it and thought nothing of it.

  Now the shepherd’s smile grew even wider. This flock was clearly his biggest point of pride. He turned to me and said, with a hint of irony, “Do you see?”

  “Kind of,” I laughed. “Why are they like . . . this?” I had not yet thought of a way to describe what “this” was.

  He laughed with me. “My grandmother was skilled in a certain kind of nature-based magic. There is a spring near my estate that has been sacred to my family as long as we have been passing our history down from one generation to the next. It is there that she drew the base for a potion that she administered to the ancestors of these sheep, and they and their offspring have been this way ever since.”