by Kate Quinn
“She lives?” I said, sitting up straight, astonished.
“As a queen once more. I swear that woman will outlive the gods to the end of the world. Ten years of war started by one woman’s shapely form and she leaves your world a smoking ruin as queen of Sparta once more, by that same token. Foul woman.”
I wanted to nod, though I worried I might be sick if I did, with the faint ringing still going on in my ears.
“Besides,” the sly Ithacan added with an unexpected smirk, “I know you to be a man who appreciates the jokes the gods play on the cruel. Neoptolemus is promised to the daughter of Menelaus on their return to Sparta. The young animal is facing long years with Helen as a mother-in-law.”
Despite everything, I could not help but let a smile cross the bars of my teeth at that.
A scream ripped through the night somewhere close by, carrying across the general hum of Achaean victory and the gentle rumble of a dying city. ‘I would curse Menelaus and his brother for what they have done to my world, though it is in truth more the fault of my own cousin’s hubris than either of those monsters. Regardless, the gods will curse the house of Atreus for their many impieties, for the murder of children and the desecration of sacred places. It is not my place to curse, it is theirs.”
“Go home, Aeneas—I will not stop you. We are near the east gate. Run back to your pretty little coastal Dardania and live out your life there. Your home can be rebuilt, and now that Troy is fallen, the Achaean kings will care nothing for small tributaries. I will soon return to my own quiet and rural Ithaca. Men like you and I, Aeneas, we are meant for higher things than killing. And these great cities do not suit us. We are country folk.”
I smiled again. It was easy to smile at Odysseus. He was that kind of man. He had been my enemy for nearly ten years, and yet I would rather break bread and share wine with him than many of my countrymen.
“Dardania is as lost as Troy,” I sighed, the smile sliding away once more. “The whole peninsula now will be a land of ghosts—haunted by the memory of what it was and of the vengeance of the Achaeans. My people are gone. My family is gone. Almost all the line of Ilus is crossing the final river or penned among the slaves of your allies for who knows what fate. Cassandra, my cousin, she... Ajax, the mighty Achaean hero, dishonored her.”
The wily Ithacan’s expression darkened for a moment. “But she lives, Aeneas. Cassandra was taken by Agamemnon.”
I snarled my anguish at this news, and Odysseus sighed.
“She is alive, Aeneas, and she seems resigned to her fate. Others have had it worse. Hellenus and Andromache have been taken by Neoptolemus.”
Cassandra was alive, yes, but my strange cousin had foretold her own end to me before the first flames licked at our world. The Fates have decreed a lonely end for me, she had said. I have seen the path of my life laid out before me like a banquet table of rotting food. No safe life awaited Cassandra in the court of our enemy, and I doubted that even brave Hellenus could protect Andromache from the vicious son of Achilles, though even in my despair, I knew that the Ithacan king was doing his best to spare me the worst. He was a good man.
“You are alone among the Achaeans, Odysseus. An island of sense in a sea of the sick.”
Again he flashed me a sad little smile. “Soon I will be home with my wife and my son, and all this will be a bad dream. The world will move on. It does that.”
“For some. For others, it remains an empty shell. My wife... ”
“I know, Aeneas. I am sorry. It happens in war. The innocent are never spared the horror. Just remember that she is beyond pain now. You will always miss her, I know. I have not seen my Penelope for nearly ten years, and never does a day go by but I think of her embrace. You have a son, yes?”
I gave a gentle nod and blessedly did not throw up.
“Then flee for him. Flee with him. Go and be safe, Aeneas. Your wife is now the past. Your son is the future.”
I found standing difficult, but the king of Ithaca helped me and supported me until my legs regained some of their strength. I looked down at Priam’s ravaged helmet, sporting my old soot-stained, sea-hued plumes. They were no longer of importance. Sea-colored, white, black, who cared? It was only a color worn to reflect the pride or sorrow of a man. And now, as Odysseus had said, it was time to concentrate not on my own being, but on my son.
And Troy, I thought silently to myself as I picked up the sword and, staggering, emerged onto the dark street with the eternal stench of smoke. This was no longer Troy. It was a shell and nothing more, shed in a dreadful night to allow Troy to grow and change, to perhaps become greater—more noble and less prideful than our fallen home.
I thanked Odysseus and bade him good-bye, wishing him a speedy return to his wife and child. He did the same to me, though he stayed with me until we reached the city gate. There, about to depart, I suddenly realized he had that flea-bitten lion skin over his shoulder, and I frowned, gesturing at it. He laughed raucously. “My friend Diomedes has been kicking stones around angrily all night wondering where this went. I think I shall tell him just to irritate him. Good travels, Aeneas, prince of Troy.”
“And to you, Odysseus, king of Ithaca.”
It was the last I saw of him or his people, and the last time I passed through the walls of the city. My resolve had been built anew by a man who should have been my enemy. A man who spoke the most sense I have ever heard from god-born lips. I made my way past the ruined farms and olive groves to the old temple, then past that as the moon slid slowly across the sky, and on to my former home—to Dardania, where I did not spare a glance for the ruins of my old home, only for the ships waiting with my son. My father and our friends had raised a swift, small, dark vessel with only minor difficulties and made it ready to leave.
And so we put out to sea, pushing off from the shore into the strait, silently relying on the faint wind and the current to carry us away from the burning city. A huddled band of exiled warriors carrying a hope for a greater future, the small boy Katu hugging himself tight against the pregnant belly of Chryses’ daughter, the sacred relics of Troy nestled in our grasp. We would build a new Troy somewhere safe, somewhere green. Somewhere with a high place for a powerful citadel, good land for crops, and far from the shores where prideful Achaeans can beach their ships.
A new Troy.
And so my song has come full cycle.
Rosy-fingered dawn is but a dream of a day yet to come.
But at least now we know there will be a day yet to come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank our friends, families, and beta readers, including Michael Alvear, Stephanie Dray, Annalori Ferrell, Maria Janecek, Kelly Quinn, and Jenny Turney. We’d like to thank our cover designer, Kim Killion; also, our copyeditor, Jennifer Quinlan.
For resources, we owe much to Homer, Virgil, and Euripides. Also, Peter Connolly’s The Ancient Greece of Odysseus, Barry Strauss’ The Trojan War: A New History, Silvia Montiglio’s From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought, Jeffrey Barnouw’s Odysseus, Hero of Practical Intelligence, and to Gordon Doherty for various academic works to which he pointed us.
NOTES FROM THE AUTHORS
The Apple by Kate Quinn
The trouble with writing any novel-in-parts is that whatever historical moment you decide to cover, there is inevitably one “big moment” in the historical narrative—the eruption of Vesuvius in A Day of Fire or the defeat of Boudica in A Year of Ravens—and only one author in the group gets to cover it. But the Trojan War was different from the start because it’s a span of time covering many, many big moments. From the beginning, we were each fascinated with different high points and different personalities in the vast cast of characters that makes up the Iliad. More than any other historical epoch we’ve covered so far, the Trojan War is ideally suited to multiple writers.
The first tale of any novel-in-parts has the challenge of setting the scene and then wrapping up before any real conflict has had a chance to kick
off. But from the start, I wanted to tell the story of Helen and Paris’ fatal meeting—and the team all agreed that since we weren’t showing the Greek gods scheming away on Olympus to kick off events, the most famous elopement of the ancient world needed rougher, more political motivations behind it than simple passion or magic apples. I quite liked Helen as she turned out: tough as well as beautiful, and any ruthless survivor like Helen would have to be because, once Homer’s mythic gloss is stripped away, this epoch of Greek history is proved to be a bleak time to be a woman. As the wife of the Iliad’s greatest hero was to find out.
Andromache has always been my favorite figure of the Trojan War: the tragic, heroic wife of the tragic, heroic Hector; a woman who sees the entire conflict from start to finish, endures tremendous loss, but survives everything. I have always wished I could write her a happier ending than the one she endures, and here, in a way, I had my chance. Enter Hellenus, a character I adored writing—a humble, lovable Everyman in the middle of all these larger-than-life heroes.
Traditionally, Hellenus is a son of Priam and Hecuba, not the offspring of a concubine as I have changed his tale here. But when Stephanie Thornton decided to write Cassandra, and we realized our narrators were twins, we explored the reasons why Cassandra, as a priestess and a princess, would have been so thoroughly ignored by her family. She was somehow different, we decided, and so was Hellenus. Definitely unwanted. Perhaps other. By making them biracial outsiders to the royal family, we could provide some explanation for Cassandra’s tragic exclusion, as well as show the rich cultural mix of the historical geography where Anatolian, Greek, Egyptian, African, Hittite, and many other cultures intermingled. Hollywood loves to whitewash the ancient world, but the reality would have seen many different kinds of faces. We wanted to reflect that.
Hellenus is another survivor of the Trojan War that killed so many of his royal brothers. Andromache, too, survived, though the fate of her infant son is not as certain: according to most myths, he was killed after the sack of Troy (the Greeks were nervous about letting a son of Hector grow up to seek revenge), but some later stories posit his survival thanks to a trick played by Andromache or Odysseus. Either way, Andromache lost her son and became the slave of Neoptolemus, but she was destined to end her long life as the wife of Hellenus. He took Andromache away, some say before and some say after the death of Neoptolemus (Achilles’ son did not long survive his marriage to Helen’s daughter). Andromache and Hellenus went on to raise more children together in Epirus, which was founded in Troy’s name, and Aeneas later visited them in his travels. So Andromache does end her life a queen... and I like to think she found some happiness despite her many losses. It was my pleasure to seed the roots of that happiness at the very beginning of Troy’s tale, when Helen and Paris have yet to set their fatal elopement in motion, when a young bride has yet to become a tragic heroine, and her silent admirer nurtures a love destined to be fulfilled fifteen years or so down the line.
Ancient Greece is completely new territory for me, so thank the gods for my co-authors. Chris Cameron, as our resident expert, corrected the worst of my mistakes before they ever got out to the reading public, Stephanie Thornton went down the rabbit hole with me over many profane Facebook messages trying to parse through a plot tangle that became known as “that ****ing Trojan fleet problem”; Libbie Hawker and Vicky Alvear Shecter video-chatted with me for an hour trying to figure out why Hellenus got himself captured on Mount Ida; and Si Turney and Russ Whitfield could be counted on to pour the (virtual) whiskey and keep us all laughing across nine time zones with jokes about Agamemnon’s midlife-crisis chariot, why the whole project should be subtitled “The Commando Sex Raid,” and how The Commando Sex Raiders would be a great name for a rock band. There’s no one else I’d rather sack a city with!
— Kate Quinn
The Prophecy by Stephanie Thornton
The Trojan War is one of the most oft-told stories from human history, passed down through the ages first by bards, then written into books, and now even performed on screens and stages around the world. Yet most retellings tend to center around a handful of major players: Paris, Helen, Achilles, and Hector, to name a few. When I was asked to contribute to this project, it seemed natural that I do as I’d done in my novels The Secret History and Daughter of the Gods, to breathe new life into the story of one of history’s forgotten women.
When I saw the character list for Song of War, there was one woman who grabbed me by the ear and demanded in no uncertain terms that her tale be told.
Cassandra.
There are two long-held views on Priam’s doomed seer of a daughter: either she was mad or merely misunderstood. Why, I asked myself, couldn’t she be both? There is no arguing that Cassandra’s tale is a true tragedy, as she foresaw the destruction of Troy yet was powerless to stop her city’s inexorable—and sometimes even gleeful—march toward war. It seemed entirely plausible to me that her knowing such a future and being unable to stop it could drive her to madness.
Knowing that Cassandra’s tale gets only more bleak during and after the fall of Troy, I needed to give her some sort of bright spot, if not a lasting legacy. Most ancient sources are fairly quiet about Cassandra until centuries after the Trojan War, which allowed me a fair bit of leverage in regards to her personality and family relations. Thus it’s no coincidence that Cassandra’s closest connections were with her twin brother, Hellenus, and also the black sheep of Priam’s family, Aeneas. Both men managed to escape Troy’s smoking ruins and found new civilizations, Hellenus at Epirus and Aeneas in Rome. So even if Cassandra was doomed from the beginning (and likely knew it), I think she’d have found some solace knowing that at least two of her loved ones would survive and eventually prosper.
I was actually relieved to be able to leave Cassandra’s ending off these pages as I’d become quite attached to the poor girl. After her rape by Ajax of Locris in the temple of Athena, Cassandra was claimed by Agamemnon and taken back to Mycenae. (As a side note, in a book with an already lengthy cast list, we combined the characters of Ajax of Salamis and Ajax of Locris for reader ease.) Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon is our best source for Cassandra’s life after the Trojan War, as both she and Agamemnon are murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover. It was a tragic end for a tragic life.
I’d like to thank my fellow Song of War authors for inviting me to take part in this truly epic project. I was nervous at first about joining a group of such high-caliber writers, but I’ve enjoyed every moment of it, especially bemoaning the cursed ship problem and brainstorming possible band names. (For what it’s worth, I’m still partial to Bats of Astyra.) Of course, no book is complete without me thanking my husband and daughter for keeping me sane while I juggled multiple writing projects at once. Thank you, Stephen and Isabella, and keep those slices of midnight chocolate cake coming!
— Stephanie Thornton
The Sacrifice by Russell Whitfield
When I was given the task (and I should add, honor) of writing the Agamemnon section for A Song of War, I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite movies:
“... And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow.”
Why? Well, because Conan the Barbarian is an epic movie, but more to the point, Agamemnon was my protagonist and not the villain—a role he plays in most stories written about the Trojan War. To make a character like that someone a reader could sympathize—or at least empathize—with was a challenge, and only you reading this can decide if I in any way succeeded.
For me, being forced (as Agamemnon sees it) to sacrifice his beloved daughter, Iphigenia, on the altar of the war was the moment that broke him—forever. How anyone could recover from such a deed—no matter what the justification—is simply unthinkable to me. In A Song of War, Agamemnon certainly never gets over it. It drives him to drink, causes him to sink into a bitter depression wherein he comes to hate everything about the war, down to and including the men that fight a
nd die on the battlefield, and makes him turn away from the gods—after all, it was to appease Artemis that he struck the fatal blow at Aulis.
Imagine, then, that when he finds some semblance of happiness in the arms of the sexy (and utterly self-serving and manipulative) Chryseis, another Olympian pronouncement forces him to give her up. Couple this with the fact that the “oh so perfect” Achilles is constantly berating him about running the army—akin to a Special Forces operative telling a five-star general how to run a war—and Agamemnon is a bitter man.
On top of this, he’s the high king—the one that carries the weight of the entire campaign on his shoulders—fail, and history will remember his name above all. To me, it is no wonder that such a person is driven to acts of petty vengeance and cruelty. It is no wonder that, at the end of it all, Agamemnon is nothing but a burned-out husk of a man.
So—if you didn’t feel sorry for the guy, I hope that at least Agamemnon’s Song gave you a look inside his head and a steer on what makes him tick.
As I wrote in my notes for our last project, A Year of Ravens (available from all good online retailers and some rubbish ones, too), if this kind of thing appeals to you: do it. If you want to, for example, write a Persian soldier’s eye view of the Spartans’ last stand at Thermopylae, please put your fingers to the keyboard. The Internet age has given all of us an opportunity to get our stories—whatever they may be—out there. It might not make you rich, it might not make you famous, but it will, ultimately, entertain people (though not all of the people, it’s fair to say!). If you don’t fancy traditional publishing, self-publish your work—get it out there and put a smile on some faces. For me, one of the most rewarding things in writing is when someone takes time to drop me a line to say that they enjoyed something I wrote—there’s no feeling quite like it. There’s a saying that everyone has a novel in them—and it’s a saying I believe wholeheartedly.
