Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

Caesura

  A year, those taxes remained high. A year, while Greek merchants struggled under the burden and granaries ran low – or else treasuries did, as kings spent their wealth on wheat to feed the people.

  Prices rose. Farmers liked the extra coin, but then spent it on other goods as everything began to cost more. The bulk of the populace suffered poverty from the start. There were stories of wagons standing abandoned on the Trojan Road, left by owners who couldn’t afford the new duties at the toll posts. Some were still laden with merchandise. Ships that had once plied the Aegean back and forth to Troy now lay at rest on the beaches of Euboea, or Pieria, drawn up out of the waves they were built to ride.

  I travelled from town to town in that time, as a storyteller must. Sometimes I told my tales to small audiences, crowded into what passed for a meeting hall; once it was just a large andron in a private home. Other evenings I was in a city, even a capital, and I recited and played for kings. Menestheus in Athens, then Leitus in Boeotia; later Schedius in Phocis and Agamemnon himself, glowering from his throne in Mycenae. In the summer I took a ship to Crete and played there for Idomeneus, at his request. Bards and storytellers didn’t often make the journey to the Hundred Towns without an invitation, and the promise of enough silver to make it worthwhile.

  Everywhere I went, there were grumblings about the new taxes. But nobody blamed Telamon: that struck me even then, listening. The Greeks muttered and cursed, but their curses were for Priam and Troy. Once I recited a tale I’d written myself, of a foreign princess pining for her home in Greek captivity, and I thought my audience would tear me apart. I switched to an old favourite about Perseus before that could happen, and never dared again. The people had seen their ease taken away by taxes on the Trojan Road, and it was Troy they accused, and Priam. What had been meant to divide the Greek princes instead united the common men, against the city which grew fat as their own bellies grew emptier.

  Priam intended the hardship to put pressure on Telamon in Salamis. He envisioned princes going to the island to plead with Hesione’s captor. It worked, in a way. More than one king sent requests for Telamon to consider their difficulties. What could one woman matter, they asked, against the welfare of all Greece?

  Telamon never answered, as far as I know. When Menestheus went to visit him, and later Agapenor, he made sure to be out hunting in the hills, though by then he was so monstrous fat that running was impossible and there was no chariot that could hold him.

  Early the next summer, a Magnesian galley tried to pass the Hellespont going east, to Propontis and the Euxine Sea beyond. It was caught in the Meltemi and driven onto the waiting reefs, its crew killed or left far from home and helpless. Three more ships tried a few weeks later, after their captains worked out the cycles of the Moon and took several auguries, seeking the blessing of the gods before they set their sails.

  All were wrecked before they reached the midpoint of the Strait. The Trojans sent a few survivors back to Greece, full of terrible tales of the crashing rocks, and currents that snapped vessels like old bones. No one else tried, after that. Jason had taken the Argo through, but he’d had Hera on his side, and Heracles pulling at an oar. There was no Heracles today.

  I remember the agora in Athens that summer, full of angry citizens and shouting merchants. Every day it was the same. Every day soldiers were sent to restore order, while Menestheus fumed in his palace and his treasury shrank. Such times are made for the fall of kings. And they know it; a lord who cannot read the mood of his people doesn’t last long.

  Then the message came from Troy.