by Kate Quinn
When I am through the pass, Diomedes reaches for my prize, but I shake my head, and we sprint for the side of the broad fighting plain, as planned.
“By the gods, how much time you took,” Diomedes complains as we run back to our camp. “I was about to go in after you.”
Dressed as you are, you wouldn’t have lasted a hare’s heartbeat, I think. The folk at the citadel’s bottom would’ve torn him apart for his metal clasps and fine sandals alone before a guard or warrior would have even got near. But I say nothing.
The low rumble of men’s waking voices and the hiss of torches being lit signal the nearness of our encampment, and we slow. Fatigue makes my limbs heavy and my breath short.
“Let me see the prize,” Diomedes says, stopping and turning to me, his eyes overbright in the rosy light.
Without thinking, I extend the child’s gift to him. He slaps it away, and it crashes to the ground at my feet. “Not that! The Palladion. Let me see the goddess!”
In the crook of my arm, I gently move the cloak off her face, holding my breath like a mother revealing her babe to the world for the first time.
Diomedes stares down into the painted face of the goddess, and his eyes fill. He blinks the tears away, presses his fingertips to his forehead and then his heart in a gesture of obeisance.
I am moved as well, for I had not properly looked upon the face of our goddess-savior. Holding her in my arms, I become exquisitely aware of the power of Hellenus’ prophecy, of the pull of Athena’s ability to lead us to victory, for I am now as convinced as anyone that this is what we all need—that surge of hope and strength that comes of knowing our future is gods-blessed.
“Let me carry her aloft. The men will see her better and be uplifted if I bear her into camp,” he says, reaching out to take the statuette, but I snatch her away.
Rage rumbles up my chest, and I lower my head like a bull over it. Of course he wants all the glory for my hard work, for my victory. Once again he will set himself up as the valiant hero and paint me as a lowly trickster.
No. I am the one who took all the risks, who found my way through the city’s stinking serpentine streets and stole gray-eyed Athena from under their very noses. I will bear her aloft into the camp to the praise of all.
But before I can get the words out, he asks, “How did you kill the priests?”
I blink in surprise. “What?”
“Did you cut their throats? Spill their blood on her altar? That’s how I would’ve done it!” His eyes gleam with a warrior’s excitement. “Did you have to fight and kill any others, too?”
“No, I—“ And then I remember I’d refused to tell him my plan of the poppy-wine because I knew he would hate it. Second only to Achilles in valor, he would demand besting by blood and brawn. In the face of his rules of “honor,” how do I begin to explain that I used simple trickery?
How do I explain that I would not dare shed blood—especially the blood of the goddess’s servants—lest she curse me and my family for generations for the sacrilege? His approach would only beget an endless cycle of bloodshed. And yet because I shed no blood, I should be ashamed?
My own blood goes thick and cold as I understand exactly how this will play out. Even as I tell my tale, he will reshape it to sound more and more heroic to the hooting, excited men who seek blood like thirsty savages. His violent version will be more thrilling, and so that will be the story that is told. And remembered.
My gaze moves to the sand, and I spot the child’s now-broken toy at my feet, and I am suddenly too tired to fight the weight of his heroic aspirations. No matter how I explain my careful planning and bloodless victory, my version will look cheap and unworthy in the face of his story of danger and daring. While I’d been studying the Scaean Gate for a way into the city to end this war, he was busy spinning a tale aimed at enhancing his arete, his personal glory.
Another wave of heaviness fills my bones as I face the truth: I am but a farmer-king of a rocky, harsh land who only wants to go home to my humble palace and my beloved family. Who am I to think my name will be remembered when I am measured against the glory of godlike Diomedes?
“Take it!” I say, thrusting the statuette at him. “Let all know of my victory.”
His fine brows crinkle for a minute at my words—because already in his mind it is his victory—but then he snatches the goddess and, with one hand, carries her aloft like a torch of victory as he races through the gates and into the camp, bellowing, “Here comes the bearer of the goddess, the fulfiller of the prophecy, the deliverer of triumph.”
The air fills with the swishing slap of countless bare feet running toward the hero of the day, accompanied by the whooping and crying of joy that comes with promised victory.
Below me, they boy’s toy horse lies forlornly on its side, the stained wrapping tied around its middle partly unraveled.
The treasure is all there, the boy had said.
Treasure.
I’d thought it was the child’s dream-talking, but there before me, I see it: he’d tied a tiny toy soldier to the horse with the linen strips. The soldier had fallen head down—in such a way—that it looked like he was being born straight out the horse’s belly. The child’s heart and hopes became instantly clear—his father must have loved horses, must have driven a chariot. The little boy wanted to comfort his dead father in the afterworld with his own beloved toy horse.
I swallow hard, staring and staring at this broken child’s thing on this foreign soil.
And then, to my own dismay, begin to laugh.
At first it comes out like a bark, but then it rolls off of me like a hard rain coming in off the sea, needle-sharp, strong, and cleansing. My busted lip cracks, my swollen eyes ache, but still the strange joy pours forth.
Borne from a boy’s love for his father. This is the gift from the goddess, I think, not the statuette. The goddess who does, after all, love me better than Diomedes. The goddess of wisdom who does not spurn cunning, as I have always feared. She let me take her statue, and she gave me this small boy’s horse.
The gift that will ensure I get home.
To Penelope. To my son. To my land.
Scooping up the toy, I saunter back into camp wearing a grin, no longer caring about Diomedes’ claims to fame and honor. Let them sing about his shield strength all they want. My song will be more interesting.
For I have an idea.
A most excellent idea.
THE SEVENTH SONG
The Fall
by SJA Turney
Endure, and save yourselves for a better fate.
Virgil, the Aeneid
1 - HUBRIS
Rosy-fingered dawn is but a dream of a day yet to come, though the darkness has been pushed back by a golden glow the likes of which I have never seen. The wine-dark waters of the strait, usually so turbulent with deep currents flowing in both directions, this night seem to be silent and flat, as though in mourning for a world now lost. And in the glassy depths: dancing flames twisting and writhing like a priestess with her serpents, golden and red, mocking me for my failure to save that which could not be saved. It is an eerie sight, for the world should not glow golden from below, yet I cannot bring myself to turn my head and look upon the source of that fire that dances, reflected upon the waters.
Hubris has brought us to this point—that damning pride in oneself that blinds us to love and justice and even piety. I am prideful, like all men, though perhaps I am less tainted in that I am at least aware of the fact. Hubris is all too often the downfall of men, and since cities and empires are built of such men, so, too, is this all-consuming pride often the downfall of worlds.
I am Aeneas, son of Anchises, who was cousin to King Priam of Troy, and of Ishara in the old tongue, who men of the new world call Aphrodite. I almost spit at the Achaean tongue fouling the name of my divine mother, but it has for many years now been the impious habit of my people to succumb to Achaean fashions even while sneering at them and calling them wolves of the
sea. I am Aeneas, prideful prince of Troy. Last prince of Troy. And it is my sad song to sing of the end of a world.
It began with a fitful, thrashing dream. Not for the first time, I felt the pressure of the city weighing down upon me and wished that I could return to my own family’s rural palace on the shore of the straits half a day’s walk northeast, where I had never known nightmares. For nearly a decade now, though, all there had been was a succession of nightmares.
The prideful idiocy of my fool cousin Prince Paris, stealing away that dreadful woman, Helen from Sparta, and bringing her and the entire Achaean world to our doorstep was the first such disaster. Then the loss of our king’s heir, brave Prince Hector, to that deadly Prince Achilles of Phthia, who was the very embodiment of hubris. The theft of the Palladion by one of the few Achaeans I might have considered noble—a man at whose wedding I had unexpectedly befriended—Odysseus, king of Ithaca. And countless lesser tragedies, all the way to this night of awful visions: Troy had become a city of nightmares.
But there was no going back to my former home, and I knew that. The palace there was little but a ruin now, deserted for years, overgrown and ravaged by Achaean raiders in their desperation for supplies, like so many other once-thriving Trojan settlements. Attention centers on Troy itself, and people forget that a world of lesser allies and subjects came to help us against the Achaeans only to have their own settlements ruined and looted by the enemy. I myself had brought the men of Dardania to the cause, after all. And as the years of horror wore on, I begged Priam to send to Hattusa for aid in driving the enemy from our shores, though I knew in my heart that the days of Hittite power were past, and they would likely be of little help even if they came. Yet Priam—arrogant, stupid Priam—would not even send to ask, for he was king of proud Troy and would no more bend a knee to Hattusa than he would to Sparta, for all that we owed the troubled Hittites fealty.
Sickening.
I digress.
It began with a bad dream. I thrashed and sweated through images of burning ships and chariots and torn, ragged bodies and of stinking, bloody death, and suddenly found myself sitting alone in a dark place in my dream-world, looking upon a war-ravaged and bloodied figure. My cousin Hector seemed as noble in death as ever he had in life, for all that his ruined form was a thing of nightmare. I was not afraid, though, as this was not the first time I had communed with those long gone. For the god-born and all truly pious men, the gods and lost heroes are never far away, if we but know how to look. Hector’s flesh was torn and dusty, and my rage at Achilles’ triumph once more surfaced, though I quickly pushed it aside, for such spirits as this one do not visit us lightly.
“Mighty Hector,” I greeted him, somehow hoping that he was come to deliver us from the dreadful depredations that so many years of war had heaped upon us. But I could see an expression of saddened acceptance past those rents in his once-handsome face. Hector was urging me to do something, or perhaps warning me of something. His voice was inaudible due to the irreparable damage his throat had suffered as his corpse was dragged behind Achilles’ chariot. A warning, I believed, and was suddenly awake, drenched in sweat and shivering at the clinging aura of the otherworld that remained from my dream.
I could hear my father, Anchises, snoring in the next room and the sounds of revelry, muted through the walls, filling the houses and high places of Troy. For you see, the war was over. Two days ago, as the weather began to change slightly, heralding the last flourish of our warm Trojan summer, the Achaeans had begun to take down their camp. A near decade of war, some said, had been enough even for the greatest Achaean warriors. We knew that food was becoming ever scarcer for the besiegers, and other essential supplies were just as lacking. In the end, the invading army had returned to their fleet and sailed away, leaving a vast field of debris where their great fortified camp had been. Necessity had forced them to take only that which would fit upon their ships, and so huge piles of detritus remained.
As soon as their sails had disappeared over the horizon, the people of the city had opened the Scaean Gate cautiously, emerging like a man from a long sojourn in a cave, blinking and slow, and had begun to loot the remains of the Achaean camp. Most of what they had left was useless or worthless, but there were weapons in there and expensive oils and even gilded furnishings that the poorer of Troy’s citizens would take home as a prize.
And there was the horse.
By some sort of shrine to one of their odd Achaean gods at the heart of their camp, they had constructed a wooden stallion of crude work but impressive dimensions that was adorned with garlands and offerings. Our own nobles and priests had gleefully claimed the Achaean offering-horse as our own and planned to bring it to Troy’s highest places—to the temple of the glorious goddess the cursed Achaeans call Athena. I had watched from the walls all that day as our people swarmed across the abandoned camp like ants, ferrying goods back into the city. I had no wish to own what the Achaeans did not want nor, in truth, even what they did want, those impious shadows of men. No, I watched from the walls as they looted, and I had been there for some time before I realized that my dark-skinned cousin, the Princess Cassandra, had silently glided to a halt beside me and was watching with a sour face. I had enquired of her the reason for her mood.
“No good will come from taking that monstrous horse into our bosom,” she had said, her wild eyes strangely vacant, as if she were wedged tight between this world and that of some dark prophecy. Then she pushed past me and was gone. Priam in earlier years had kept her confined to a cell, but since Hector’s death, he no longer cared about the actions of his mad daughter, and she was regularly to be found flitting hither and thither in the city, often gone swiftly with a parting of doom-laden words.
But Troy did claim the massive horse. In the midst of the mass looting, that enormous creature had been brought through the Scaean Gate with great difficulty. It continually stuck on the threshold, and parts of the decorative mane were scraped off by the gate top as it was heaved and forced inside behind the carts of discarded armor and weaponry.
It was then that I saw Cassandra again.
She had stood in the Scaean Square, swaying slightly on unsteady legs, a polished axe in one hand and a burning torch in the other.
Something in her had snapped when the horse passed our city’s threshold, and she’d lurched forward, screeching a blood-curdling scream that would have scattered the shades of our fallen warriors, the axe held aloft.
She’d hacked at the horse, shrieking obscenities that no one could understand. When the crowd surged toward her, she had just snarled like a rabid dog, “Keep away!” shaking the axe and jabbing with the torch. “This horse means our end, you worthless fools!”
I had moved to help her, but it was too late. Before my feet touched the flagstones of the square, they had overpowered her, knocked the axe from her hands, and thrown her to the ground. The torch lay guttering at her side.
“Take the slack-wit away!” one spectator had ordered. “Kill her if you have to keep her from touching the horse again!”
I had been too late to assist Cassandra, but I would die before I let a gleeful mob touch a hair on her head.
“Step away,” I’d said in my most commanding voice. “No one touches the daughter of Priam.”
At that, the worst of the crowd had fallen away. I’d helped Cassandra rise, and together we left the square, her shaking like a leaf in the face of an impending storm.
“We are doomed, Aeneas,” she had whispered. “Troy will soon be nothing more than a funeral dirge for an era long since passed.”
The looting went on all day, and for much of that time they tried to take the horse up to the citadel, but the difficulties of maneuvering it through narrow streets and steep slopes proved too much, and in the end the priests and their men gave up, leaving the great offering in the square behind the gate to deal with another time. For as the sun set upon the first day of Troy’s freedom, the city had other things on its mind. Wine flo
wed like never before. Men and women feasted and drank and fornicated and laughed. We had little in the way of supplies, of course. So many years of siege had ruined us, and even though outlying colonies had still managed to slip us food from the hinterlands, the city was starving. No one cared that night. The war was over, and soon food would be plentiful again, so the people gorged on the last of our supplies and sent themselves into a stupor.
I was never a man given to such behavior. My wife, Creusa, was of a similarly sober disposition, though my father was given to nights of affection for the grape. In truth, though, I probably would have indulged in the celebrations had it not been for Cassandra’s dour attitude that had passed to me.
I rubbed weary hands through my unruly hair and stretched. The slightly warped bronze mirror by our bed displayed an older man than I remembered. Handsome enough in my way—a gift from my divine mother, clearly, given my father’s knobbly features—but now running to gray and care-lined in places. I sighed. My father snored thunderously, sleeping off more wine than he had drunk in years, and Creusa and my strong, proud son were still abed and peaceful, but Hector’s shade had woken me for a reason. I crossed to the door of the chamber, throwing on a light kilt for modesty, and swung open the portal, stepping out onto the balcony and shutting the door behind me. The night air was cool after the hot thrashing of my dream, and I could feel the sweat cooling on my back and beneath the rich linen kilt. Many of the upper city’s windows glowed golden with welcoming light as the celebrations waged on through the night, but even as I watched, those lights were beginning to go out as the revelers succumbed to weariness and drink. The streets of the lower city were empty and dark. The chill of the night air had driven them all indoors, though on the citadel large communal fires burned in squares, and there would be dancing and music for hours yet. Down below, in the dark...
My eyes were drawn automatically to the horse. Our house—given to us by the king when we came to the city so long ago with our small force of Dardanian warriors—was in the lower city, yet high up and close to the walls of the citadel. From my balcony, I could see the horse looming in the square—a great, dark thing of dread like something Lelwani, whom the Achaeans call Hades, might send to the living world.
