by Ben Bova
Long after dawn had turned the sky a delicate pink, Poletes’s breathing suddenly quickened and he made a grab for the cloth covering his face. I was faster, and gripped his wrists before he could hurt himself.
“My lord Orion?” His voice was cracked and dry.
“Yes,” I said. “Put your hands down at your sides. Don’t reach for your eyes.”
“Then it’s true? It wasn’t a nightmare?”
I held his head up slightly and gave him a sip of wine. “It is true,” I said. “You are blind.”
The moan he uttered would have wrenched the heart out of a marble statue.
“Agamemnon,” he said, many moments later. “The mighty king took his vengeance on an old storyteller. As if that will make his wife faithful to him.”
“Try to sleep,” I said. “Rest is what you need.”
He shook his head, and the cloth slid off, revealing the two raw burns where his eyes had been. I went to replace the cloth, saw that it was getting dry, and smeared more poultice on it from the bowl at my side.
“You might as well slit my throat, Orion. I’ll be of no use to you now. No use to anyone.”
“There’s been enough blood spilled here,” I said.
“No use,” he muttered as I put the soothing cloth over the place where his eyes had been. Then I propped his head up again and gave him more wine. Soon he fell asleep again.
Lukka stuck his head into the tent. “My lord, King Odysseus wants to see you.”
I ducked out into the morning sunshine. Commanding Lukka to have a man stand watch over the sleeping Poletes, I walked over to Odysseus’s boat and clambered up the rope ladder that dangled over its curving hull.
The deck was heaped with treasure looted from Troy. I turned from the dazzling display to look back at the city. Hundreds of tiny figures were up on the battlements, pulling down its blackened stones, working under the hot sun to level the walls that had defied the Achaians for so long.
I had to step carefully along the gunwale to avoid tripping over the piles of treasure covering the deck. Odysseus was at his usual place on the afterdeck, standing in the bright sunshine, his broad chest bare, his hair and beard still wet from his morning swim, a pleased smile on his thickly bearded face.
Yet his eyes searched mine as he said, “The victory is complete, thanks to you, Orion.” Pointing at the demolition work going on in the distance, “Troy will never rise again.”
I nodded grimly. “Priam, Hector, Aleksandros — the entire House of Ilios has been wiped out.”
“All but Aeneas the Dardanian. Rumor had it that he was a bastard of Priam’s. We haven’t found his body.”
“He might have been burned in the fire.”
“It’s possible,” said Odysseus. “But I don’t think he’s terribly important. If he lives, he’s hiding somewhere nearby. We’ll find him. Even if we don’t, there won’t be anything left here for him to return to.”
As I watched, one of the massive stones of the parapet by the Scaean gate was pulled loose by a horde of men straining with levers and ropes. It tumbled down to the ground with a heavy cloud of dust. Moments later I heard the thump.
“Apollo and Poseidon won’t be pleased at what’s being done to their walls.”
Odysseus laughed. “Sometimes the gods have to bow to the will of men, Orion, whether they like it or not.”
“You’re not afraid of their anger?”
“If they didn’t want us to pull down the walls, we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
I wondered. The gods are subtler than men, and have longer memories. I knew that Apollo was angry with me. How would his anger display itself?
“It’s your turn to select your treasure from the spoils of the city,” Odysseus said. He gestured toward a large pile of loot at the stern of the boat. “Take one-fifth of everything you see.”
I thanked him, and spent an hour or so picking through the stuff. I selected blankets, armor, clothing, weapons, helmets, and jewels that could be traded for food and shelter.
“The captives are down there, between the boats. Take one-fifth of them, also.”
I shook my head. “I’d rather have horses and donkeys,” I told Odysseus. “The children will be useless to us, and the women will merely cause fighting among my men.”
Odysseus eyed me carefully. “You speak like a man who has no intention of sailing to Ithaca with me.”
“My lord,” I said, “you have been more than generous to me. But no man in this camp raised a hand to help my servant last night. Agamemnon is a cruel and vicious animal. If I returned to your land, I would soon be itching to start a war against him.”
Odysseus muttered, “That would be foolish.”
“Perhaps so. Better that our paths separate here and now. Let me take my men, and my blinded servant, and go my own way.”
The King of Ithaca stroked his beard for several silent moments, thinking it over. Finally he agreed. “Very well, Orion. Go your own way. And may the gods smile upon you.”
“And on you, noblest of all the Achaians.”
I never saw Odysseus again. When I returned to my tent, I told Lukka to send the men to pick up the loot I had chosen, and to find horses and donkeys to carry it — and us: I saw questions in his eyes, but he did not ask them. Instead he went to carry out my orders.
As the sun began to sink behind the islands on the western horizon, and we gathered around the cook fire for the final meal of the day, a young messenger came running up to me, breathless.
“My lord Orion, a noble visitor wishes words with you.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
The teenager spread both hands. “I don’t know. I was instructed to tell you that a noble of the royal house will visit you before the sun goes down. You should be prepared.”
I thanked him and invited him to share our meal. He seemed extraordinarily pleased to sit side by side with the Hatti soldiers. His eyes studied their iron swords admiringly.
A noble visitor from the royal house. One of Agamemnon’s people? I wondered who was coming, and why.
As the long shadows of sundown began to merge into the purple of twilight, a contingent of six Achaian warriors marched toward our campfire, with a small, slim warrior in their midst. Either a very important person or a prisoner, from the look of it, I thought. The man in the middle seemed too small for any of the Achaian nobles I had met. He wore armor buckled over a long robe, and had pulled the cheek flaps of his helmet across his face, as if going into battle. I could not see his face.
I stood and made a little bow. The mini-procession marched right up to my tent before stopping. I went to the tent and pulled open the flap.
“A representative of the High King?” I asked. “Come to make certain that the old storyteller is truly blind?”
The visitor said nothing, but ducked inside the tent. I went in after him, feeling a seething anger rising in me. I had not slept in two days, but my smoldering fury at Agamemnon kept me awake and alert.
The visitor looked down at Poletes, lying on the straw pallet asleep, a greasy cloth across his eyes, the slits where his ears had been caked with dried blood. I heard the visitor gasp. And then I noticed that his hands were tiny, delicate, much too smooth to have ever held a sword or spear.
I grasped the visitor by the shoulders, swung him around to face me, and pulled off the helmet. Helen’s long golden hair tumbled past her shoulders.
“I had to see…” she whispered, her eyes wide with fright.
I spun her around to face the prostrate old storyteller. “Then see,” I said gruffly. “Take a good look.”
“Agamemnon did this.”
“With his own hand. Your brother-in-law blinded him out of sheer spite. Drunk with power and glory, he celebrated his victory over Troy by mutilating an old man.”
“And Menalaos?”
“Your husband stood by and watched. His men held me at spear point while his brother did his noble deed.”
“Orion, I
wish I could… when I heard what had happened, I was so sick and angry…”
But there were no tears in her eyes. Her voice did not shake. The words she spoke had nothing to do with what she actually felt, or why she was here.
“What do you want?” I asked her.
She turned toward me. “You see how cruel they are. What barbarians they can be.”
“You’re safe now,” I said. “Menalaos will make you his queen once more. Sparta may not be as civilized as Troy, but there is no Troy any longer. Be happy with what you have.”
She stared at me, as if trying to decide if she could dare to say what was in her mind.
I felt my anger melting away under the level gaze of those exquisite sky-blue eyes.
“I don’t want to be Sparta’s queen or Menalaos’s wife,” Helen blurted. “Just one day in this miserable camp has made me sick.”
“You’ll be sailing back to Mycenae soon, and then to…”
“No!” she said, in a desperate whisper. “I won’t go back with them! Take me with you, Orion! Take me to Egypt.”
Chapter 24
IT was my turn to stand there in the tent gawking with surprise. “To Egypt?”
“It’s the only really civilized land in the whole world, Orion. They will receive me as the queen I am, and treat me and my entourage properly. Royally.”
I should have refused her point-blank. But my mind was weaving a mad tapestry of revenge. I pictured the face of Agamemnon when he learned that his sister-in-law, for whom he had ostensibly fought this long and bloody war, had spurned his brother and run off with a stranger. Not a prince of Troy who abducted her unwillingly, but a lowly warrior, recently nothing but a thes, with whom she ran off at her own insistence.
I had nothing much against Menalaos, except that he was Agamemnon’s brother — and he did nothing to prevent Poletes’s blinding.
Let them eat the dirt of humiliation and helpless anger, I said to myself. Let the world laugh at them as Helen runs away from them once again. They deserve it.
They would search for us, I knew. They would try to find us. And if they did, they would kill me and perhaps Helen also.
What of it? I thought. What do I have to live for, except to wreak vengeance against those who have wronged me? Apollo seeks to destroy me, now that I have helped to bring down Troy. What do I have to fear from two mortal kings?
I looked down at Helen’s beautiful face, so perfect, her skin as smooth and unblemished as a baby’s, her eyes filled with hope and expectation, innocent and yet knowing. She was maneuvering me, I realized, using me to make her escape from these Achaian clods. She was offering herself as my reward for defying Agamemnon and Menalaos.
“Very well,” I said. “Poletes should be able to travel in two more days. We will leave on the second night from tonight.”
Helen’s eyes sparkled and a smile touched the corners of her lips. I took her tiny hand in mine and kissed it, and she understood fully what I did not need to say.
“The second night from tonight,” she whispered to me. Then she stepped lightly to me and stood on tiptoes to kiss me swiftly on the lips.
She fastened the oversized helmet back on her head, tucking her hair well inside it, and left with her escorts. I watched them march back toward Menalaos’s boats, then sent one of Lukka’s men to fetch the healer. His women came and dressed Poletes’s wounds before he himself arrived.
“Will he be able to travel in two days,” I asked, “if he doesn’t have to walk?”
The healer gave me a stern look. “If he must. He is an old man, and death will claim him anyway in a few years.”
“Would traveling in a wagon harm him?”
“Not enough to make much difference,” he said.
After they left, I stretched out on the pallet that had been freshly laid beside Poletes’s. The old man tossed in his sleep and muttered something. I leaned on one elbow to hear his words.
“Beware of a woman’s gifts,” Poletes mumbled.
I sighed. “Now you utter prophecies instead of stories, old man,” I whispered.
Poletes did not reply.
I fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the straw. I willed myself to remain here, on the plain of Ilios, and not allow myself to be drawn to the realm of the Creators. I knew that danger beyond my powers awaited me there.
Whether my willpower was strong enough to keep me from being summoned to the Creators’ domain, or whether Apollo, Zeus, and their company simply did not bother trying to reach me, I cannot say. All I know is that I met no gods, angry or otherwise, in my sleep that night.
But I did dream. I dreamed of Egypt, of a hot land stretching along a wide river, flanked on either side by burning desert. A land of palm trees and crocodiles, so ancient that time itself seemed meaningless there. A land of massive pyramids standing like strange, alien monuments amid the puny towns of men, dwarfing all human scale, all human knowledge.
And inside the greatest of those pyramids, I saw my own beloved, waiting for me, as silent and still as a statue, waiting for me to bring her back to life.
The next morning I told Lukka that we would be leaving the camp and heading for Egypt.
“That’s a far distance,” he said. “Across hostile lands.”
“That is where we’re going,” I insisted. “Will the men follow me?”
Lukka’s brown eyes flicked up at mine, then looked away. “We’ve won three wagonloads of loot for a few days’ work and a couple of hours of hard fighting. They’ll follow you, never fear.”
“All the way to Egypt?”
He made a humorless grin. “If we make it. The Egyptians hire soldiers for their army, from what I hear. They no longer fight their own wars. If we get to their borders, we will find employment.”
“Good,” I said, happy to have an excuse that would urge them onward toward my goal.
“I’ll start the men gathering wagons for our supplies,” Lukka said.
I took his shoulder in my hand. “I may bring a woman with me.”
He actually smiled. “I was wondering when you’d unbend.”
“But I don’t want the men dragging along camp followers. Will they resent my bringing a woman? Will it cause trouble?”
Scratching at his beard, Lukka replied, “There’ve been plenty of women here in the camp. The men are satisfied, for now. We can move faster without camp followers, that’s certain. And we’ll probably find women here and there as we march.”
I understood what he meant. “Yes, I doubt that our passage to Egypt will be entirely peaceful.”
This time his eyes locked on mine. “I only hope that our leaving the camp is entirely peaceful.”
I smiled grimly. He was no fool, this Hatti soldier.
Two nights later I bribed a teenaged boy to come with me to the camp of Menalaos. The area was not really guarded: the few armed men who stood watch knew that there were no enemies present. They were more intent on protecting their king’s loot and slaves from thievery than anything else.
The youth and I found Helen’s tent. Serving women loitered outside, eyeing me askance, as if they knew what was about to happen. One of them ushered me into her mistress’s tent. It was large, and Helen was pacing in it nervously when we entered it.
Helen dismissed her servant, and with hardly a word between us, I knocked the startled youth unconscious, stripped him, and watched Helen pull his rags over her own short-skirted chemise. She pointed to a plain wooden chest, half as wide as the span of my arms, and as I hefted it she took up a smaller box.
Still wordless, we walked out of the tent, past the women, past the careless guards, and toward the riverbank, where Lukka and his men waited for us with horses, donkeys, and oxcarts.
We left the Achaian camp on the plain of Ilios in the dark of night, like a band of robbers. Riding on a thickly folded blanket that passed among these people for a saddle, I turned and looked for one last time at the ruin of Troy, its once-proud walls already crumbling and
ghostlike in the cold silvery light of the rising moon.
The ground rumbled. Our horses snorted and neighed, prancing nervously.
“Poseidon speaks,” said Poletes from the oxcart, his voice weak but discernible. “The earth will shake soon from his wrath. He will finish the task of bringing down the walls of Troy.”
The old man was predicting an earthquake. A big one. All the more reason for us to get as far away as possible.
We forded the river and headed southward. Toward Egypt.
BOOK II: JERICHO
Chapter 25
AS Lukka had predicted, our journey was neither easy nor peaceful. The whole world seemed in conflict. We trekked slowly down the hilly coastline, through regions that the Hatti soldiers called Assuwa and Seha. It seemed that every city, every village, every farmhouse was in arms. Bands of marauders prowled the countryside, some of them former Hatti army units just as Lukka’s contingent was, most of them merely gangs of brigands.
We fought almost every day. Men died over a brace of chickens or even an egg. We lost a few of our men in these skirmishes, and gained a few from bands that offered to join us. I never accepted anyone that Lukka would not accept, and he took in only other Hatti professionals. Our group remained at about thirty men, a few more or less, from one month to the next.
I kept searching anxiously to our rear, every day, half expecting to see Menalaos leading his forces in pursuit of his wayward queen. But if the Achaians were following after us, I saw no sign. And I slept at nights without being visited by Apollo or Zeus or any of their kind. Perhaps they were busy elsewhere. Or perhaps whatever fate they had prepared for me was waiting in Egypt, inside the tomb of a king.
The rainy season began, and although it turned roads into quagmires of slick, sticky mud and made us miserable and cold, it also stopped most of the bands of brigands from their murderous marauding. Most of them. We still had to fight our way through a trap in the hills just above a city that Lukka called Ti-Smurna.
And Lukka himself was nearly killed by a farmer who thought we were after his wife and daughters. Stinking and filthy, the farmer had hidden himself in his miserable hovel of a barn — nothing more than a low cave that he had put a gate to — and rammed a pitchfork at Lukka’s back when he went in to pick out a pair of lambs. It was food we were after, not women. We had paid the farmer’s wife with a bauble from the loot of Troy, but the man had concealed himself when he had first caught sight of us, expecting us to rape his women and burn what we could not carry off.
