Troy: A Brand of Fire
Page 5
Chapter Two
In Blue and Gold
The city stands on the flat top of a ridge, a hundred feet above the surrounding plain.
To the north lies the Hellespont, the treacherous water that leads to all the riches of the Euxine Sea, and wrecks the ships which try to reach them. It is only a mile wide, but currents swirl under the choppy surface, and rocks lurk well out from each shore. Beyond lies Thrace, and a different continent. Thrace is a land of top-knotted warriors in savage clans, endlessly fighting over arcane matters of honour only they understand.
Westward is the Greensea, thick with the sails of trading ships. Many of them come to the Bay of Troy. Some were built in Egypt, some in Cyprus or Phoenicia; most, however, are Greek. They may carry goods from far-off lands, but their timbers grew in groves in Salamis or northern Magnesia, and their captains learned the sea in the gulfs around the Greek coast.
South, and the river Scamander flows through a gorge that leads back to Mount Ida and the woods and meadows of the hills. Grass grows all year round there and the sheep grow fat, their wool the finest in Anatolia. Towns have sprung up along the valley, filled with Trojans and others; the greatest of them is Zeleia, on a crag high above the water.
East are hills thickly carpeted with shrubs and thorns, and offspring trees that curve their branches to the ground and plant seeds where they touch. Deer multiply there, hunted by wolves slinking through the screens of branches. There are a thousand paths and none is ever the same from one year to the next. Men who travel there return speaking of shadows half-seen, figures moving behind a veil of leaves, or voices that murmur in empty glades. The spirits of trees and streams are fewer now, harder to find, but they have not left the land entirely.
And in the middle a wide, grassy plain, fed by three rivers: Scamander, Chiblak and Simois. Between the mouths of the latter two lies the city’s ridge, the mound of Hissarlik, an outcrop of rock surrounded by marshy grassland. Atop it the city sits, a place of towers and turrets, walls and concealed gates. From the outside, to a sailor as his ship noses into the great bay, the tops of those towers seem to hold up the sky.
The Greeks say the walls of mighty Mycenae were built by Cyclops, an army of artisan giants in the long-ago. If true then the walls of Troy must have been built by gods – perhaps by Pallas Athena, the patron deity of the city; or by Ipirru, god of the sun and of horses.
Horses.
They are the wealth of Troy, the pride of Troy, the source of the city’s influence and fame. Trade along the Trojan Road brings coin by the bucket, and textiles bring more, but horses outshine them both. The plain teems with them, hundreds of untamed tarpans roaming in herds, sustained by the lush grass that grows in earth kept fertile and black by the shifting, reed-lined Scamander. The Trojans let them breed wild and then rope and corral them, harnessing their wildness until they make the finest chariot horses in the world. The kings of Hattusa and Egypt send for Trojan animals when their own herds are depleted, and the price paid for them is higher even than the topless towers.
Today the northern wind is blowing, the Meltemi that turns the Hellespont into chop and pins merchant ships to the beaches of the Bay of Troy, unable to move north to open water. The horses have taken shelter south-west of the Scamander, behind the double lines of willows and tamarisk that line the low banks. They know the wind might blow like this for days, perhaps weeks, and are resigned. They are used to it.
They are used to people passing by too, and they only flick their ears when a line of chariots runs by on the other side of the river, wheels rattling on the packed-earth road.