Vengeance of Orion o-2

by Ben Bova

  Most of the chariots were overturned or empty of their warriors by now. Men were fighting on foot with long spears or swords. I saw armored noblemen pick up stones and throw them, to good effect. Archers — many of them charioteers who fired from the protection of their cars’ leather-covered side paneling — began picking off unprotected infantry. I saw an armored warrior suddenly drop his spear and paw, howling, at an arrow sticking in his beefy shoulder. A chariot raced by and the warrior in it spitted an archer on his spear, lifting him completely out of his chariot and dragging him in the dust until his dead body wrenched free of the spear’s barbed point.

  All this took only a few minutes. There seemed to be no order to the battle, no plan, no tactics. The noble contestants seemed more interested in looting the bodies of the slain than defeating the enemy forces. It was more like a game than a war. A game that soaked the ground with blood and filled the air with screams of pain and terror.

  The one thing that stood out above all others was that to turn and attempt to flee was much more dangerous than facing the enemy and fighting. I saw a charioteer wheel his team about to get away from two chariots converging on him. Someone threw a spear that caught him between the shoulder blades. His team ran wild, and while the warrior in the chariot attempted to take the reins from the dead hands of his companion and get the horses under control, another spearman drove up and killed him with a thrust in the back.

  Foot soldiers who turned away from the fighting took arrows in the back or were cut down by chariot-mounted warriors who swung their swords like scythes.

  It was getting difficult to see, the dust was swirling so thickly. But I heard a fresh trumpet blast and the roar of many men shouting in unison. Then the thunder of horses’ hooves shook the ground.

  Through the dust came three dozen chariots, heading straight toward the place where we stood atop the earthworks rampart.

  “Prince Hector!” said Poletes, with awe in his voice. “Look how he slices through the Achaians.”

  Hector had either regrouped his main chariot force or had held them back from the opening melee of the battle. Whichever, he was now driving them like shock troops through the Achaian forces, slaughtering left and right. Hector’s massive long spear was stained with blood halfway up its fourteen-foot length. He carried it as lightly as a wand, spitting armored noblemen and leather-jerkined foot soldiers alike, driving relentlessly toward the rampart that protected the beach, the camp, and the ships.

  For a few minutes the Achaians fought back, but when Hector’s chariot broke past the ragged line of Greek chariots and headed for the gate in the rampart, the Achaian resistance crumbled. Noblemen and foot soldiers alike, chariots and infantry, they all ran screaming for the safety of the earthworks.

  Hector and his Trojan chariots wreaked bloody havoc among the panicked Achaians. With spears and swords and arrows they killed and killed and killed. Men ran hobbling, limping, bleeding toward us. Screams and groans filled the air.

  An Achaian chariot rushed bumping and rattling to the gate, riding past and even over the fleeing footmen. I recognized the splendid armor of the squat, broad-shouldered warrior in it: Agamemnon the High King.

  He did not look so splendid now. His plumed helmet was gone. His armor was coated with dust. An arrow protruded from his right shoulder and blood streaked the arm.

  “We’re doomed!” he shrieked in a high girlish voice. “Doomed!”

  Chapter 4

  THE Achaians were racing for the safety of the rampart, with the Trojan chariots in hot pursuit, closely followed by the Trojan infantry brandishing swords and axes. Here and there a foot soldier would stop for a moment to sling a stone at the retreating Achaians or drop to one knee to fire an arrow.

  An arrow whizzed past me. I turned and saw that Poletes and I were alone on the crest of the rampart. The other thetes, even the whipmaster, had gone down into the camp.

  A noisy struggle was taking place at the gate. It was a ramshackle wooden affair, made of planks taken from some of the ships. It was not a hinged door but simply a wooden barricade that could be lifted and wedged into the opening in the earthworks.

  Some men were frantically trying to put the gate in place, while others were trying to hold them back until the remainder of the fleeing Achaians could get through. I saw that Hector and his chariots would reach the gate in another minute or less. Once past that gate, I knew, the Trojans would slaughter everyone in the camp.

  “Stay here,” I said to Poletes. Without looking to see if he obeyed, I dodged among the stakes planted in the rampart’s crest, heading toward the gate.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a light spear hurtling toward me. My senses seemed to be heightened, sharpened. The world around me went into slow-motion as my body surged into hyperdrive. The javelin came floating lazily through the air, flexing slightly as it flew. I skipped back a step and it struck the ground at my feet, quivering. I yanked it loose and raced toward the gate.

  Hector’s chariot was already pounding up the sandy ramp that cut across the trench in front of the rampart. There was no time for anything else, so I leaped from the rampart’s crest onto the ramp, right in front of Hector’s charging horses. I yelled and threw up both arms, and the startled horses reared up, neighing.

  For an instant the world stopped, frozen as in a painting on a vase. Behind me the Achaians were struggling to put up the barricade that would hold the Trojans out of the camp. Before me Hector’s team of horses reared high, the unshod hooves of their forelegs flashing inches from my face. I stood crouched slightly, holding the light javelin in both my hands at chest level, ready to move in any direction.

  The horses shied away from me, their eyes bulging white with fear, twisting the chariot almost sideways along the pounded-earth ramp. I saw the warrior in the chariot still standing, one hand on the rail, the other raised over his head, holding a monstrously long blood-soaked spear.

  Aimed at my chest.

  I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among hordes of adrenaline-soaked brutes. I noticed that he wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. On it was painted a flying heron, almost in a style that would be called Japanese in millennia to come.

  He jabbed the spear at me. I sidestepped and, dropping the javelin I had been carrying, grabbed the hefty ash wood shaft and pulled Hector clear over the railing of his chariot. Wrenching the spear from his one-handed grasp, I swung it against the charioteer’s head, knocking him over the other side of the car.

  The horses panicked and stumbled over each other in the narrow passage of the ramp. One of them started sliding along the steep edge of the trench. Whinnying with fear, they backed away and turned, trampling the poor charioteer as they bolted off back down the ramp and toward the distant city, dragging the empty chariot with them.

  Hector scrambled to his feet and came at me with his sword. I parried with the spear, holding it like an elongated quarterstaff, and knocked his feet out from under him again.

  By this time more Trojans were rushing up the ramp on foot, their chariots useless because Hector’s panicked team had scattered the others.

  I glanced behind me. The barricade was up now, and Achaian archers were firing through the slits between its planks. Others were atop the rampart, hurling stones and spears. Hector held his shield up to protect himself against the missiles and backed away. A few Trojan arrows came my way, but I avoided them easily.

  The Trojans retreated, but only beyond the distance of a bowshot. There Hector told them to stand their ground.

  And just like that the morning’s battle was ended. The Achaians were penned up in their camp, behind the trench and rampart, the sea at their backs. The Trojans held the corpse-strewn plain.

  I clambered up the barricade and threw a leg over its top. Hesitating for a second, I gl
anced back at the battlefield. How many of those youthful lords who had come on our boat were now lying out there, stripped of their splendid armor, their jeweled swords, their young lives? I saw birds circling high above in the clean blue sky. Not gulls: vultures.

  Poletes called to me. “Orion, you must be a son of Ares! A mighty warrior to best Prince Hector!”

  Other voices joined the praise as I let myself over the rickety barricade and dropped lightly to the ground. They surrounded me, clapping my back and shoulders, smiling, shouting. Someone offered me a wooden cup of wine.

  “You saved the camp!”

  “You stopped those horses as if you were Poseidon himself!”

  Even the whipmaster looked on me fondly. “That was not the action of a thes,” he said, looking me over carefully, perhaps for the first time, out of his bulging frog’s eyes. “Why is a warrior working as a paid man?”

  Without even thinking about it, I replied, “A duty I must perform. A duty to a god.”

  They edged away from me. Their smiles turned to awe. Only the whipmaster had the courage to stand his ground before me. He nodded and said quietly, “I understand. Well, the god must be pleased with you this morning.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  Poletes came to my side. “Come, I’ll find you a good fire and hot food.”

  I let the old storyteller lead me away.

  “I knew you were no ordinary man,” he said as we made our way through the scattered huts and tents. “Not someone with your shoulders. Why, you’re almost as tall as Great Ajax. A nobleman, I told myself. A nobleman, at the very least.”

  He chattered and yammered, telling me how my deeds looked to his eyes, reciting the day’s carnage as if he were trying to set it firmly in his memory for future recall. Every group of men we passed offered us a share of their midday meal. The women in the camp smiled at me. Some were bold enough to come up to us and offer me freshly cooked meats and onions on skewers.

  Poletes shooed them all away. “Tend to your masters’ hungers,” he snapped. “Bind their wounds and pour healing ointments over them. Feed them and give them wine and bat your cow-eyes at them.”

  To me he said, “Women cause all the trouble in the world, Orion. Be careful of them.”

  “Are these women slaves or thetes ?” I asked.

  “There are no women thetes. It’s unheard of. A woman, working for wages? Unheard of!”

  “Not even prostitutes?”

  “Ah! In the cities, yes, of course. Temple prostitutes. But they are not thetes. It’s not the same thing at all.”

  “Then the women here…”

  “Slaves. Captives. Daughters and wives of slain enemies, captured in the sack of towns and farms.”

  We came to a group of men sitting around one of the larger cook fires, down close beside the black-tarred boats. They looked up and made room for us. Up on the boat nearest us a large canvas had been draped to form a tent. A helmeted guard stood before it, with a well-groomed dog by his side. I stared at the carved and painted figurehead of the boat, a grinning dolphin’s face against a deep blue background.

  “Odysseus’s camp,” Poletes explained, in a low voice, as we sat and were offered generous bowls of roasted meat and goblets of honeyed wine. “These are Ithacans.”

  He poured a few drops of wine on the ground before drinking, and made me do the same. “Reverence the gods,” Poletes instructed me, surprised that I did not know the custom.

  The men praised me for my performance at the barricade, then fell to wondering which particular god had inspired me to such heroic action. The favorites were Poseidon and Ares, although Athene was a close runner and Zeus himself was mentioned now and then. Being Greeks, they soon fell to arguing passionately among themselves without bothering to ask me about it.

  I was happy to let them speculate. I listened, and as they argued I learned much about the war.

  They had not been camped here at Troy for ten years, although they had been campaigning in the region each summer for nearly that long. Achilles, Menalaos, Agamemnon, and the other warrior kings had been ravaging the eastern Aegean coast, burning towns and taking captives, until finally they had worked up the nerve — and the forces — to besiege Troy itself.

  But without Achilles, their fiercest fighter, the men thought that their prospects were dim. Apparently Agamemnon had awarded Achilles a young woman captive and then taken her back for himself, and this insult was more than the haughty warrior could endure, even from the High King.

  “The joke of it all,” said one of the men, tossing a well-gnawed lamb bone to the dogs hovering beyond our circle, “is that Achilles prefers his friend Patrokles to any woman.”

  They all nodded and murmured agreement. The strain between Achilles and Agamemnon was not over a sexual partner; it was a matter of honor and stubborn pride. On both sides, as far as I could see.

  As we ate and talked the skies darkened and thunder rumbled from inland.

  “Father Zeus speaks from Mt. Ida,” said Poletes.

  One of the foot soldiers, his leather jerkin stained with spatters of grease and blood, grinned up at the cloudy sky. “Maybe Zeus will give us the afternoon off.”

  “Can’t fight in the rain,” someone else agreed.

  Sure enough, within minutes it began pelting down. We scattered for whatever shelter we could find. Poletes and I hunkered down in the lee of Odysseus’s boat.

  “Now the great lords will meet and arrange a truce, so that the women and slaves can go out and recover the bodies of the dead. Tonight their bodies will be burned and a barrow raised over their bones.” He sighed. “That’s how the rampart began, as a barrow to cover the remains of the slain heroes.”

  I sat and watched the rain pouring down, turning the beach into a quagmire, dotting the sea with splashes. The gusting wind drove gray sheets of rain across the bay, and it got so dark and misty that I could not see the headland. It was chill and miserable and there was nothing to do except wait like dumb animals until the sun returned.

  I crouched as close to the boat’s hull as I could, feeling cold and utterly alone. I knew I did not belong in this time and place. I had been exiled here by the same power that had killed my love.

  I serve a god, I had told these gullible Achaians. Yes, but not willingly. Like a poor witless creature blundering through a fathomless forest, I am reacting to forces beyond my comprehension.

  Who did inspire my heroics? I wondered. The golden figure in my dream called himself Apollo. But from what the men around the campfire had said, Apollo supported the Trojans in this war, not the Achaians. I found myself dreading sleep. I knew that once I fell asleep I would again have to face that… god. I had no other word for him.

  Suddenly I realized a man was standing in front of me. I looked up and saw a sturdy, thick-torsoed man with a grizzled dark beard and a surly look on his face. He wore a wolf’s skin draped over his head and shoulders. The rain pounded on it. Knee-length tunic, with a sword buckled to his hip. Shins and calves muddied. Ham-sized fists planted on his hips.

  “You’re the one called Orion?” he shouted over the driving rain.

  I scrambled to my feet and saw that I stood several inches taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.

  “I am Orion.”

  “Come with me,” he snapped, and started to turn away.

  “To where?”

  Over his shoulder he answered, “My lord Odysseus wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!”

  Poletes came with me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, and up a rope ladder to its deck.

  “I knew Odysseus was the only one here wise enough to make use of you,” he cackled. “I knew it!”

  Chapter 5

  WHICH god do you serve?” Odysseus asked. I stood in the presence of the King of Ithaca, who was sitting on a wooden stool, flanked on either side by other noblemen. He did not appear to be
a very tall man; his legs seemed stumpy, but heavily muscled. His chest was enormous, broad and deep like that of a man who had swum every day since boyhood. Thick strong arms, circled by leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli even in the gloom inside his shipboard tent. White scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest.

  There was a fresh gash on his right forearm, as well, red and still oozing blood slightly.

  The rain drummed against the canvas, scant inches above my head. The tent smelled of dogs, musty and damp. And cold. Odysseus wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had a sheep’s fleece thrown across his wide shoulders.

  His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair. Only a trace of gray in that beard. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as gray as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.

  He had asked his question the instant Poletes and I were ushered into his tent, without any preliminaries or formal greetings.

  “Which god do you serve?”

  Hastily I replied, “Athene.” I was not sure why I picked the warrior goddess, except that Poletes had said she favored the Achaians against the Trojans.

  Odysseus grunted and motioned for me to sit on the only unoccupied stool in the tent. The two other men sitting on either side of him were dressed much as he was. One of them seemed about Odysseus’s age, the other much older: His hair and beard were entirely white and his limbs seemed withered to bones and tendons. He had wrapped a blue cloak around himself. They all looked weary and drained by the morning’s battle even though neither of them bore fresh wounds as Odysseus did.

  Odysseus seemed to notice Poletes for the first time. “Who is he?” he asked, pointing.