A Song of War: a novel of Troy

by Kate Quinn

  There was little we could do, I decided, but join in. Wherever we fought, we would make little difference to the outcome, and wherever we fought, we would kill Achaeans. As my companions busied themselves pushing away ladders, I prised a stone the size of a goat loose from the parapet, bloodying my knuckles, and pushed it outward. The stone hurtled through the air, smashing into a climbing man and sending him falling from his perch, then snapped the ladder as though it were naught but dry reeds before striking a hapless Achaean below. His head disappeared, the helm crushed flat along with the skull, the whole mass driven down into the man’s torso where, even there, shoulders and bones shattered and pulped beneath the falling weight. I stared, fascinated and horrified as the squashed man fell to the ground, mush spilling from him as the piece of parapet clunked to a halt.

  Iphitus had seen me at the battlements, and he nudged his fellow Dardanian. Moments later, the three of us were repeating the procedure, loosening the old, brittle mortar and heaving the stones out into the air to pulverize the Achaeans below. It was hard work, and grisly, too, but it was having an effect on the morale of the attackers, and for precious moments the tide seemed to draw back from the walls.

  Then their tactics changed. Some among their numbers found firebrands and began to hurl them up onto the roof. We tried to move them, kicking them away once more, picking them up by the cooler ends and hurling them back. But their numbers were impressive, and many of the roof tiles had been used as missiles, leaving a great deal of dry timber exposed. Within fifty heartbeats, the roof was aflame, and there was nothing we could do, there being no source of water nearby. Helpless, we tried to peer over the edge, repeatedly ducking back as flaming torches hissed past us to land among the rafters.

  Down below, the palace gates were under pressure. Two Achaeans with long bronze shields were covering the lattices, preventing the hidden phalanx from jabbing with their spears, while that monstrous son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, hewed at the gate again and again with a stolen Trojan axe. Even above the roar of the flames and the din of people, we could hear the timbers of the gate beginning to give. Then others joined in; I saw Odysseus and Menelaus among them, each with an axe, hacking at the timbers. Had not dancing flames sent me back away from the edge, I would gleefully have dropped a rock on Neoptolemus or the Spartan king. Perhaps even the noble Ithacan king with whom I had once broken bread.

  The palace was on the brink of falling, as the rest of the city had. I had retreated through Troy with the Achaean tide, rising higher and higher into the citadel as it fell, then past the temple and now to this highest point of Troy, and this would be the last. From the roof, across the dancing flames, I could see the Achaean fleet. I fancied that if I strained hard enough, I could see my ruined home on the north coast. I put that from my mind. It was too late for such things now. The roof was no longer safe. Soon the flames would be all consuming. Even the Achaeans had taken away their ladders, giving up on it. With the help of a few warriors, I ushered everyone back to the entrance and down into the staircase, its walls painted with bright reds and whites, murals of processions and ceremonies. For generations, my family had ruled the richest city in the peninsula from this building. Even the dreaded Hittites saw more use in us as allies than as an impediment to their empire. And now it was falling because of a bunch of hairy sea-wolves, a young, lustful prince, and a woman with the mark of monsters upon her heart.

  I led everyone back down into the palace and told my companions to take them all back through the slave passage and out of the burning building. Then, if the gods were kind, they might make it to the overlooked eastern walls and flee to impoverished, ruined, desolate safety.

  As they all trooped off, I turned away. My fate would be different. Hector and Cassandra and the priest, Chryses, had all urged me to run from this city, but duty held me here. Here, in this building, were my father’s cousin, King Priam, and his wife, Hecuba, as well, no doubt, and many of their lesser children. My duty was clear. Save the king and queen or die trying. A nagging little voice in the back of my head reminded me of Cassandra’s warning: that I would not be able to save anyone I sought to. But it was my duty to try, nonetheless.

  I could now hear brutal action at the front of the palace. I needed no line of sight to tell me what was happening, for I heard little but screams, splintering wood, and repeated shouts of the name Neoptolemus. Achilles’ daemon son was leading a brutal assault on the palace. I found my way via several lesser rooms to the king’s megaron, but it was empty. Then I heard Hecuba’s voice from the temple to the ancestors, which lay adjacent. I passed through the door into that room and almost snorted at what met my eye. Hecuba, regal and cold, stood berating her husband with a wagging finger. Priam, old and worn as he was, was busy trying to fasten a bronze corselet around himself, an ill-fitting helmet formed of perfect boar tusks with high feathers of pure white perched on his crown. This was his old panoply, from when he had been a true warrior. As he finally succeeded with the corselet, he angrily tore the helmet from his head, accepting that it would no longer fit, and cast it away. The fine helmet rolled to a halt at my feet and I stooped, collecting it.

  “My king.”

  Priam turned a suffering look upon me, and once more the humor of the situation insisted itself upon me despite everything. Priam had lost a city, almost an empire, this night. His many sons had nearly all met their deaths in the war, and now the enemy burned and invaded his house. And yet the thing that had raised ire in him and had him spitting feathers was a wife who berated him for trying to act like a young man when he so clearly was not.

  Priam tilted his head slightly with widening eyes in the age-old gesture that means “help me.”

  I could not.

  “Tell him he cannot fight,” Hecuba snorted. “He oozes from his panoply like cheese from a press.”

  “I will die a Trojan warrior, not a cowering king,” snapped Priam, and for a moment there was something of that young hero within him, and my respect for my king was unbreakable. I would fight and die alongside him. But Hecuba had other ideas.

  “Aeneas, you are the last, apart from this old fool and our Polites, now the last of Troy’s princes. The others are just children and daughters. You are the last true blood of Troy. You must run, while you still can.”

  I stared. Even my queen? Surely not. How could I run now?

  “Andromache has the children in hiding,” the queen said with a hint of resignation. “You must take the ancestors,” she hissed, and I realized then that she was clutching the ancient revered likenesses of the founders, the most sacred relics in all of Troy. She held these symbols of Troy, ancient wooden figurines, as if they were the most precious of newborns. I felt again that faint frisson that spoke of the closeness of gods. Chryses had been right, of course. There was no saving the city now. Troy would burn, and the royal line would be extinguished. But I carried that same blood. I and my father and my son. And while we were the blood of Troy, these simple figurines and the prizes that Chryses carried were its spirit. Together we still had Troy. The walls may fall and the towers burn, but wherever we went, we could carry Troy with us.

  Before I realized what I was doing, Hecuba had thrust the sacred symbols into my arms, and I struggled, clutching them and the king’s helmet with its ghostly white feathers. I unfastened my own chinstrap and let the fire-blackened bronze of my helm with its ashen plumes fall away with a clang, pulling Priam’s own helmet down over my pate and finding it a surprisingly comfortable fit. The king had been considerably smaller when this was his new panoply.

  Hecuba shooed me away with delicate hands. “Go. Save what you can.”

  I retreated into the deepest shadows at the back of the temple of the ancestors, but before I could leave, my attention was grabbed by a commotion, and I lurked in the shadow of a great pillar and watched the last dreadful scenes of the fall of Troy unfold.

  The king’s young son Polites burst into the room from the corridor. He was armored for war in a
n ill-fitting borrowed adult panoply but had lost his weapons and shield. The blood coating him told a tale of courage and violence, and he shouted his father’s name as he entered the temple, but another figure appeared silhouetted in the doorway behind. This was a figure of nightmare far more than the shade of Hector who had visited me in my dreams. This leering monster, slippery with gore and with eyes of flame, stepped into the room, a spear held raised in his hand. Neoptolemus bore the martial skill of his father, Achilles, and the gods-given rage, and even some of the looks, but he carried none of the grace and nobility of the Achaeans’ greatest hero. He was his father’s shadow at best, dark and lifeless.

  That sickly grin turned to a sneer as he cast his spear, which hit young Polites in the back, bursting through his scale corselet near the breastbone, the spearhead glistening red with the life of the prince. I could hear the gasp of his father from the shadows and wondered how I would feel were that my own son there, collapsing to the floor as gobbets of blood burst from his mouth, unable to lie flat as the spear point held him up like some sort of flesh tent. Neoptolemus strode into the room, grabbed the shaft, and jerked it this way and that, agonizing the dying young man, and I could see Priam shaking.

  “Is it not enough that your father killed my Hector? And now you must torture my last children before my eyes?”

  “I will see your line extinguished this night, old fool,” the son of Achilles barked, leaving the expiring boy and marching over to the king, who struggled in his shock to draw his sword. Now another figure appeared in the doorway, and I recognized the shorter, barrel-chested figure of Odysseus. Not far behind them would be the other Achaean leaders, I realized. I felt myself begin to rise, to run to the assistance of my king in his last desperate moments, but somehow the weight of the sacred objects in my grasp held me down. To fight in the defense of my king was to offer up Troy’s most sacred relics to mere chance.

  “If you seek to kill,” Odysseus shouted at Neoptolemus, advancing angrily on the younger man, “then kill. Quickly and with good grace. A warrior is not a torturer.” He turned melancholy eyes to Priam. “Greetings, king of Troy. I am saddened that what might have been resolved by words has come to this.”

  Priam tried to reply, but Achilles’ son was on him like a starving wolf on a lone goat. He grasped the king’s hand, yanking it away from his sword, drew that blade, and threw it across the room. As the old king struggled, Neoptolemus, snarling like a feral animal, grasped Priam by his graying hair and dragged him to the altar, now devoid of sacred figures. Priam cried out and tried to fight, but Neoptolemus was strong, his grip unbreakable.

  “Quickly,” reminded Odysseus, “and with good grace.”

  Neoptolemus was deaf to his companion as he drew his short stabbing blade and jammed it beneath the lower rim of Priam’s bronze cuirass, into the king’s gut. Priam hissed in pain, but that only served to excite his attacker. He withdrew the blade and stabbed again and again, ripping it out with sprays of blood. Then, shaking and with an otherworldly grin, the son of Achilles let the agonized king go. Priam clung to the altar, heaving ragged breaths, and then Neoptolemus returned, gripping his axe. I could hardly believe what I was watching, and neither could Odysseus, who shouted at the maniac to stop. But the son of Achilles had the Rage of Ares within him, and the axe rose and fell three times until the cords and tendons in the king’s neck gave way and the head came loose.

  Once again, as my gorge rose, I made to do so myself, unable to bear witnessing such dreadful vile dishonor. And once again I felt that vague frisson crawl across my flesh, reminding me that what I held were worth more than any man, be he hero or king.

  Neoptolemus held aloft the head triumphantly as the kings and captains of the Achaean horde burst into the room. I could see Odysseus’ calculating face as his speedy mind sought the best of a terrible moment. Rushing over to the queen, he grasped Hecuba by the arm. They were close to me, in my shadowed corner, and I could see the sympathetic concern in the eyes of the Ithacan king.

  “I claim the queen!” he shouted above Neoptolemus’ hungry yelping.

  Hecuba rounded on her captor, haughty defiance in her expression. “I am not chattel,” she snapped. Odysseus lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned close. I barely made out his words, which were the wisest I heard from an Achaean all that day.

  “Be quiet, queen of Troy. Would you prefer to be his?” he hissed, pointing at Neoptolemus. “Or raped by Ajax, like your dark-skinned daughter?”

  I felt another piece of my heart die at his words, verification of what my own eyes had seen.

  “No,” Odysseus said in a hiss. “I thought not. Now keep quiet so I can keep you safe.”

  A tear crawling down my cheek, I silently padded backward, deeper into the shadows.

  Duty.

  I had done my duty, and more besides. Now I had a new duty, though. Troy the city had fallen. Troy the world was in my arms. I reached the megaron and broke into a run, hoping they had not yet found the slave passage.

  3 - FATE

  We are almost across the strait now, drifting with slow current and sagging sails. The dancing fires in the dark waters are more scattered and fainter. The tense silence has relented a little. Men breathe heavily, sigh, cough. The boys are crying, as much with relief as with sadness. I will not cry, for if I weep over my lost world, I will become a dry husk of a man, such is my grief. But I know now that, despite struggling to do my duty to my king and my city, I was always meant to do this, and I carry Troy with me now. Like a snake shedding its skin, we have left a brittle, hollow shell behind and carried the meat, bone, muscle, and heart of Troy in search of a new place to build a life.

  Only those who can claim to truly fear the gods can hope to know the joy and horror of seeing them or of seeing those friends and heroes long gone. I can see them even now, for the dead occupy the empty oar seats between the living. Their spirits will not stay in that place of destruction, for they wish to be part of a new Troy and not part of the cenotaph of the old. I can see them: those I have loved and lost. And while those who live are unaware of the spirits traveling beside them, we all know that we are children of Fate and that the gods set us on this course.

  I burst from the palace’s ancillary building, my armor dulled with smoke and grime, Priam’s brilliant while plumes the only clean part of me, my arms cradling the sacred likenesses of the ancestors, and my sword clattering at my side in its scabbard.

  Miraculously, the enemy that has been so busy looting the palace, killing, and raping, had not yet found this plain, nondescript structure, and I emerged into an empty alley. The buildings of the citadel were, through a combination of defense and respect, largely constructed some distance from the walls, and to cross to one of the now undefended and overlooked eastern gates, I would have to rush across a wide space, which was dangerous with victorious Achaeans now running along the wall. I resolved to sneak back past the temple of Arynna, which was by happy accident the closest to the walls, and use that shortest jump to reach safety.

  And then as I approached the temple, despite everything I had resolved, my heart lurched at the memory of my poor cousin Cassandra lying there, wounded, abused, ravaged, and desperate. I dithered for a moment. What if vile Ajax had shut her back in there? He had been dragging her on a leash when last I saw her, but the citadel was filled with thrashing, mad warriors butchering one another, after all, and how could he hope to lead her through that carnage untouched, especially if he meant to claim more prizes? In my heightened state of urgency, I resolved to be certain. What harm could one small detour do?

  The Achaeans were flooding the main area of the citadel, out by the front of the palace and across at the other grand buildings. I crept along the side of the temple and, biting down on my fear, slipped around the exposed front and to the great temple. Past the serene stone lions, I ducked in the portico with its tall brightly painted columns, blinking to adjust my eyesight to the darkness within. It may have been night outside, bu
t the burning of the city made it disturbingly bright in places, and lights danced in my eyes as I strained at the darkness. The antechamber, its walls painted with images of divine offerings and scenes of the kings of old, was empty. I had half expected a small force of Achaeans to be holding the place. All was silent within. It was eerie after the town outside.

  I nodded to the line of carvings of the gods all along the far wall and slipped through the threshold into the main room of the temple. My heart was in my throat. This was dangerous. I had been tasked with saving the most sacred items of the city, and instead I was selfishly trying to find someone I felt I had failed. Would Cassandra be here? Would Ajax?

  My eyesight resolved in the even dimmer inner sanctuary, where the goddess the Achaeans had claimed as theirs once rose in great painted glory, twice the height of a man and an almost perfect copy of the Palladion that had been kept in this selfsame temple until wily Odysseus had taken it. The great statue lay defiled upon the temple floor, a sight that saddened me to my very soul. But there was no shape of a ravaged woman lying on the floor and, in a mixture of sadness and relief, I made to turn away when there was a tiny shuffling sound at the back of the room. I stopped and snapped back to the fallen statue. A shadow moved behind it, barely visible in the gloom. Then a face appeared. It took me a moment, in that shadowed place, but I knew that face well. Everyone in Troy knew it. Gods, everyone in the world knew that face after this war.