A Song of War: a novel of Troy

by Kate Quinn

  Somewhere to our right, we could hear fighting in the mist where one of the Achaean heroes was leading his men, and an odd, ruddy light fell on us.

  “Ares walks,” Achilles said. “And there, too, is Strife.”

  Almost I could see the gods with his eyes. Surely, the light was unnatural, and surely, too, the mist lingered too long.

  “All the gods are here,” he said. “Save only your Lady.” He smiled without mirth. “Halt.”

  I reined in.

  He stood on his toes and looked, and then he listened.

  “The Gods have handed us the Trojans,” he said. “Forward.”

  I had a little riding whip, a gift from Automedon, and I used it. It had an ivory handle shaped like a horse’s head and ten long thongs of knotted leather with bronze beads at the ends that made a superb crack when snapped or a soft rattle when merely toyed with. The horses knew these noises and responded as a man does to speech, so that with a single rattle I could move them to a walk, and a crack made them run.

  We moved slowly for another half hour, feeling our way over the wet plain. The sun was rising; sometimes we would have a hint of blue sky and glory, and then the swirling mist would come down again.

  Then the Fates fed us our first Trojans. They were a glimpse of bronze and light, and then Achilles roared a command and put a hand on my shoulder. “Hold!” he told me.

  We rolled slowly forward with the other chariots; Phoenix was just off to my left, and Antiphos of Trachis on my right, and we had with us a number of other heroes and their warbands, men wise enough to follow Achilles on the day of battle: Idomeneus of Crete was by us, a killer of men with ten chariots, and Leitus of Plataea, a very different man, calm, disciplined, dedicated to keeping his own spearmen alive, a rare kind of hero.

  The Myrmidons went into the Trojans, and the Rage of Ares rose like a wicked hymn, the bestial sounds and the screams. I held the horses, and Idomeneus, at a nod from Achilles, led his chariots off into the mist to our right, probing.

  Achilles stood listening. When Phoenix tried to speak, Achilles raised his hand for silence.

  I heard a war cry, a long shout of a name.

  “Idomeneus is under attack,” Achilles said. “Action is to the right. Forward.” He pointed his great ash spear, I turned us, and we moved.

  “Slowly,” he said to me, very quietly. “When I say charge, simply crack the whip and hang on.”

  A horse screamed in the mist, and a chariot, car empty, flashed by us.

  “More to the right,” he said.

  He was reading the sounds of battle the way a priest reads the marks on a tablet.

  I was avoiding a set of gravestones when he tapped me on the helmet. “Look up!” he said.

  There, in a patch of sunlight, was a wheeling dogfight of chariots, thirty or forty Trojan chariots engaging Idomeneus and his few.

  Achilles pointed with his spear at the figure in the lead, a warrior in a helmet with tall sea-green plumes. “That’s Aeneas. Get him.”

  I aimed us like an arrow, and when Achilles said “charge,” I snapped the whip.

  Crack.

  I have never known speed like that day and those horses, and I confess I almost fell out of the open back of the car when they leaped forward. But Achilles braced me with his hip, and he laughed.

  We hit a shallow puddle of water, and it sprayed from under the wheels and hung in the air, a rainbow cloud marking our passage as if we were truly in the hands of gods—or were gods ourselves.

  The Trojans saw us burst out of the wall of mist, and they broke like whitefish when the tuna strike them, running in every direction.

  I followed the brilliant sea-foam plume that Achilles said was Aeneas.

  He saw us, shouted, and the Trojan prince’s chariot turned and raced at us. “Don't flinch,” Achilles said.

  In truth, I lacked the skill to flinch. So we went at them, horse to horse, car to car.

  Aeneas’ charioteer flinched; he turned their car from collision, and they went by us on our right, at an angle. Aeneas had to turn; he threw a spear at us.

  At me.

  It was not a lob, like the spears men threw when I was ten years old, driving for my father on the Field of Ares.

  He rifled it with a throwing cord on his fingers, and it came at me like one of the Storm Bringer’s bolts.

  Achilles reached out with his shield, exposing his arm, and caught it. But instead of hurting him, the spear bounced away without penetrating even one layer of the magnificent shield and glanced away harmlessly.

  Achilles turned. I felt his hips shift, and his spear shot forward, but he didn't release it; the head caught Aeneas in his outflung arm, drawing blood, and then we were past, hub to hub at a gallop, and Achilles roared “turn” at me and leaned hard so that my hips dragged at the reins, pulling on Xanthus, and I added pressure from my hands to the turn, and both horses cut hard to the right—so hard and so fast that the chariot tipped onto one wheel for one desperate breath and then came down, and we were still turning, and I had a smile as broad as a ship’s sail on my face, a grin so wide it tore at the corners of my mouth.

  But Aeneas wasn’t turning. He was kneeling on the floor of his chariot, and there was blood; even fifty paces behind him, I could see his wound.

  “Follow him!” Achilles said.

  Another chariot shot past us, right to left; I hit a patch of water, and it sprayed. An arrow sailed out of the mist, passed between us, and only just missed Balius.

  I reined in to avoid a patch of thorns, and Aeneas vanished into the mist.

  “Sorry... ” I began.

  “Silence,” he commanded.

  I had learned in one hour that in the chariot car I was not his lover, but his driver; he issued orders and expected to be obeyed. I have never been especially good at taking orders, but his were absolute, and I reined in my words as well as my horses.

  “That way,” he said, and I turned into the mist behind us. Horses are easy to turn at low speeds, and ours were still very fresh.

  I gave them a little rein, and Achilles tapped my helmet. “Slow down,” he said. “I don't want to fight the whole Trojan army.” He grunted. “Yet.”

  For what seemed a very long time, we were alone on the Plain of Troy, riding in the mist, wheels bumping over the ground or splashing through puddles.

  Then we could hear the deep chorus of war, and Achilles quivered like a cat watching a mouse.

  “There,” he said.

  I drove to the left, my horses at a trot, and suddenly Achilles leaned beside me.

  “If I dismount to fight,” he said, “stay close. Very close. I want to know where you are; cry out if I call your name.”

  I didn’t ask what name he was going to cry.

  He glanced at me, and for a moment we were bronze forehead to golden forehead. “You are doing very well,” he said.

  We came out of a wall of mist, and there was the battle. In front of us, the Myrmidons were pushing away at the Trojans—except that we were behind the Trojans.

  “Stay close,” Achilles said. I had not even reined in when he jumped, and Trojans were dying before the horses raised their heads. I had time to watch him; even as his feet struck the ground, his great spear flicked into a man’s throat, and then he pivoted on his hips and toes and the spear licked out again, reaping another life, this a thrust right through the ear-bole of a man in a bronze bowl-helmet. The first Trojan was just toppling forward when the third received his death blow; the heavy spear crashed through his poor shield-parry and his linen breastplate and his ribs, too.

  For all I know, he killed a fourth and a fifth, too.

  I had no time to watch. I turned the team so that Achilles could mount.

  When I turned my head, the back of the Trojan taxeis was leaking men like an old bronze pot on a too-hot fire, and they began to run past Achilles and thus past me, and one coward, perhaps to salve his courage, thrust at me with a javelin.

  I batted it dow
n with my little shield, as Automedon had taught.

  And I thought, Lady, he’s trying to kill me.

  He had a sword. He drew it.

  It caught in the scabbard.

  I didn’t command my limbs, but my riding whip shot out and flayed his face, and he fell into the dust, clawing with his empty hands at his now-empty eye sockets, and blood ran between his fingers. I stood like a fool, appalled by the work of my hands, and Achilles ran up behind him, stabbed him through the back, ripped his spear clear, and leaped up into the chariot car. I cracked my whip, and blood flew into the air with the crack.

  “I killed him,” I said in shock.

  “No, I killed him,” Achilles said. “You blinded him.” He raised his spear as if it were weightless. “That way.”

  My hands were shaking, and Achilles’ hand on the shaft of the great spear was red to the elbow.

  “We need some javelins. Do you have water?” he asked.

  “Water?” I asked stupidly, but I had four canteens, good gourds that kept water cool, hanging on the car.

  “Drive clear and stop,” he said. “There's Phoenix.”

  I drove our chariot alongside Idomeneus and Phoenix. The captain of the Myrmidons was having water poured over his gray head, and Leitus, the Plataean, was helping his charioteer tighten something loose on their chariot, but every man present raised his head and roared when we drew up.

  “Did you kill Aeneas?” Idomeneus called. “Beautiful strike.”

  Achilles shrugged. “He was alive when I left him,” he said. “Running for his mother’s arms.”

  I dismounted. My knees were shaking, but I knew what I had to do; I got a canteen, and Achilles held out his bloody spear-hand. “Pour it on,” he said. I poured water over it until his fingers flexed.

  He picked up sand and began to rub the spear shaft.

  “See to the horses,” he snapped.

  I had a little linen bucket; I got water into it from Scamander and gave it to the horses while the courteous Leitus held them, then drank some. The Boeotian gave me a wicker basket of sharp javelins.

  “The Trojan who owned these doesn’t need them anymore,” he said with a bow.

  The Myrmidons were forming off to our left, and there was no sign of the Trojans.

  “Have we won?” I asked Achilles.

  “I don't care one way or another,” he said. “I am only here to kill Hector.” He looked out into the warm mist. “Don’t tire the horses if you can help it, Briseis. Hector has superb horses. And he won’t be fighting. He’ll be waiting.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “That’s what I’d do,” he said. “If he challenged me.”

  As the day wore on, the mist grew paler, and the water seemed to rise from the plain, but the fighting didn’t slacken. We hunted Trojans along the wild waters of Scamander, and Achilles killed.

  He was brilliant. It was impossible not to watch him; at least twice, I almost died watching him fight. He killed Dryops with a blow to the neck, leaning out from our chariot as I matched the Trojan’s speed; Laoganus and Dardanus, famous men, were in the same chariot, and he killed them both, his spear in one hand, and his sword in the other, and he hadn’t left our car; and then, right on the very banks of the river, with our wheels awash, he dismounted to break a block of their spearmen who were pinned in the water, and Tros, a hero, tried to surrender. He threw his shield down in the swirling water and begged for his life.

  He knelt in the bloody water and put his arms around Achilles’ knees.

  Achilles stabbed down once with his long bronze sword, a terrible blow low on the man’s back where he knelt, his bronze riding up; black blood blew into the air, and his liver, whole, came out of the gaping wound.

  “What mercy did you show Patrocles, I wonder?” he asked, as if the dead man was there for conversation.

  But the death I remember best was Lycaon, who fled us, and I drove after him. His chariot was in the water of Scamander, and so was ours, but his horses were far, far more tired, and then he found a ford, a shallow spot, and he urged his horses across. We followed him into the ford at Achilles’ urging; he had no care for his horses now that his killing lust was on him.

  Lycaon was cursed, or unlucky, and his near-side stallion went deep in a hole carved by the night’s flooding, and his chariot overturned. And in the next moment, my wheels were locked in mud, and the horses were straining.

  Achilles ignored our plight, leaped from the car into the water—which seemed to be rising suddenly, a flash flood from somewhere upstream—and he trapped Lycaon under the far bank and killed him. Lycaon was one of Priam’s sons, and he begged for life; Achilles spoke to him a moment and then beheaded him.

  I was out of the chariot by then. My horses were desperate, the river was rising, and I was afraid. But chariots themselves are very light; I got a shoulder under the rail and pushed, and my wheels came free of the mud, and the whole thing tried to sail away on the current. But my horses were game and well-bred, and with a shake of their great manes, they put their shoulders down and pulled; I got their bridles in my hands, almost swimming, and my scale shirt threatened me with an ugly death by drowning if I let go, pulling my shoulders deeper into Scamander’s grip, and then my horses were free, and I threw my arms around Xanthus’ neck, and he pulled me up onto the bank with him, and in a moment the chariot was out, on hard, dry ground.

  Achilles was in the middle of the current, threatening the river with his spear. It occurred to me that he was quite mad; but then, I had seen some of the things he had seen, and I began to doubt which of us was sane.

  He continued to fight the river, or so it seemed to me, his great spear splashing, his sword tearing pointless holes in the fabric of the water. I would have no help from him, so I used a discarded spear to find the true ford, and then I led the team and car back across to the right side of Scamander, and by then the waters had subsided. Achilles came out of the river slowly, as if exhausted.

  I had a skin of honey and sesame seeds, and I gave him some with a cup of red wine. The sun above us was almost blinding in its white, pouring through the mist, but to the left and right the strange mist held.

  He looked around like a man waking from sleep. His hand clawed at his face; he took the canteen of wine from me and drank more and then pressed its neck to my lips.

  “Where did you learn to drive?” he asked me, as if we were lying in his bed.

  “My father taught me,” I said, lowering the canteen.

  He nodded. “You drive well,” he said. “Apollo, the god of cowards, is trying to hide Hector from me with this mist.”

  I said nothing.

  “You think I am quite mad,” he said.

  “I do not know what to believe,” I said with honesty.

  He smiled. “That is a fine answer,” he said. “What did my mother tell you?”

  I looked away. I am a poor liar. “Nothing,” I said.

  “My mother never tells anyone ‘nothing.’ She once told Patrocles he would die before me. So what did she tell you?”

  I looked at him. “That you would live through today.”

  He nodded. “You already said that.” But he let the matter drop. “Let’s go find the poor Trojans,” he said, getting to his feet like an old man. “So I can kill more of them.”

  “How many have you killed so far?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I, and not he, was mad.

  “Who counts?” he asked.

  It was evening, and the Trojans were broken, and we were tired; the horses were tired, and the men were tired, and I will even guess that great Achilles was tired. I was so tired that I could scarcely keep my shoulders up; the weight of my shirt of scales seemed like the weight of the world on my narrow shoulders, and even my small breasts seemed like sacks of gold to pull my shoulders down.

  We rolled across the last of the plain, and there was great Troy. The fortress-city towered over the plain on its own low hill, and i
t was almost five stades around the walls. Outside the massive double gates, so like the gates of my home and yet twice as high, there was a single olive tree standing alone. The Trojans had lost the day so badly that their whole army, or at least all of the survivors, had fled into the city, and yet the double gates were open, and on the smooth ground under the olive tree, in the shade, there was a single chariot.

  I knew it must be Hector and his charioteer when we were still hundreds of paces away. So did Achilles.

  “Halt,” he said.

  He turned to Phoenix. “Halt here, and don’t let any of the so-called Achaean heroes come any farther,” he said.

  Indeed, the mist was finally lifting, and its passing was as unnatural as its existence. Everywhere, the Achaeans were advancing, but never during the day had their superior numbers been able to find the Trojans and slaughter them—except where Achilles was—and now, at dusk, they could see that they owned the plain, but the city was untouched, and all their work to be done again.

  To Idomeneus, Achilles said, “That’s Hector. In the unlikely event that he kills me, I recommend that you abandon the siege and leave, all of you; and I order you, Phoenix, to take the Myrmidons and go.”

  “I will obey,” Phoenix said.

  Idomeneus laughed. “I’ve had enough of Agamemnon’s shit,” he said.

  Leitus, the hero of Plataea, didn’t laugh. “Just kill him,” he said.

  Achilles smiled at the Boeotian. “Very well,” he said.

  He looked at me. “Drive on.”

  Hector was waiting under the tree. He stood by his chariot with his driver. He didn’t look like Patrocles’ killer, nor did he look well-rested. Indeed, he looked hag-ridden; there were lines on his face, and his eyes had that look men wear when sleep has not caressed them. I looked for Kabriones, Hector’s charioteer, but he was not there, and the man standing by the chariot looked smaller than me and truly terrified. And I was reminded how great a man Hector was, how noble.