Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

Chapter Thirteen

  An Emerald in Silver

  “Three days,” Nestor said, “and not a sign of Priam since the day we got here.”

  He liked this trip less with every hour that passed. Troy was a fabulous city, colourful and exciting, filled with people dressed in strange clothes and speaking strange tongues. There seemed to be a stall selling exotic food on every second street corner – when there were corners. The sinuous streets meant that often there weren’t. But alluring scents still wafted through the air: roasting meats, boiling vegetables, or just spices and perfumes even Nestor had never smelled before. He thought he could spend a happy week just hunting those scents down and sampling them, whatever they were.

  “They say Priam’s ill,” Menestheus said.

  Nestor snorted. “Then why haven’t I seen a physician enter his palace? I have watched for one, you know. But not a sign. When a king is ill you either send for the priests or for the doctor. Priam has seen neither.”

  “Maybe it’s a kidney stone, or something it doesn’t take a doctor to diagnose. Especially if he’s suffered it before.”

  “Possible,” Nestor conceded. “What do you think, Thersites?”

  The skinny man looked up from his lyre. “Me? Yes, it’s possible. But the coincidence is very large.”

  “Exactly. Something else is going on here.”

  He’d learned to trust his instincts, and right now they were telling him that something was wrong.

  They had been from the start, in truth. Nothing had changed since. On the first evening the three kings had been invited to a banquet hosted by Hector. The food had been excellent, and there were tumblers and dancers the equal of any Nestor had ever seen. Especially one of the women, who danced with lithe grace to a single eastern pipe and reduced the conversation to a trickle, and then to silence. If Nestor had been twenty years younger – Hades, ten – he might have asked her to join him on his divan, so he could feed her grapes and maybe talk her into something more intimate later on.

  The next day Pandarus took them hunting in the Simois valley, sending his men into the reeds beside the river to scare up ducks and geese. It was an enjoyable way to spend the day, especially since the north wind had eased off and the afternoon was pleasantly warm. Then Aeneas had hosted a banquet that night, with different entertainers. Not quite as good as Hector’s, perhaps, though Aeneas did ask Thersites to perform. The storyteller had recited a poem of the dawn of the Olympians, his own composition but done in the epic style, his lyre thrumming in tempo with the cadences of his voice.

  Doves and Sparrows fly

  Between water and land

  Where the sea foams

  On the shore of Cythera

  Aphrodite rises, skin

  Pure and glowing in the sun.

  Doves represented gods, and immortality. Sparrows stood for the death of mortal men, and so for mortality itself. Aphrodite was shown rising from the latter state to the former, becoming a goddess just as she crossed the boundary between water and land. It was very subtly done, so much so that it took Nestor some moments to catch the nuances. When he did he studied Thersites over the rim of his wine cup, trying to gauge him.

  You may, he thought in the privacy of his mind, be too clever to be a storyteller. So what else might you be, crippled man? An agent for another king? Perhaps even a killer?

  “Wonderful,” Aeneas had said, when lyre and voice fell silent at last. “Truly wonderful. I’ve never heard an Argive aoidos perform in Troy before, but I shall have to hear one again.”

  Thersites bowed, a peculiar-looking motion from a man so strangely formed. “You’re most kind, my lord Aeneas.”

  He was most kind, everyone in Troy was most kind… but they were not helpful. The Greek kings were meant to be distracted by all this pomp and pleasure, and Nestor couldn’t help wondering what it was their attention was being diverted from.

  Menelaus didn’t seem to have noticed anything. In fact Nestor was almost sure he hadn’t. He was the most important of the three visiting lords, brother to the High King and ruler of fertile Laconia, but also the least perceptive, and the least interested in puzzles. He preferred to glower at the Trojans and say very little, or else nothing. Both Atreus’ sons hated Troy, and that was all right. They weren’t the only ones. But when the loathing became so strong that Menelaus spent most of his time in the house he’d been given, drinking too much and brooding, it turned into a problem.

  Well, the Atreides were not known for their conciliation, or their patience. Best to work around it, if you could.

  This third day, Nestor had spent tracking down the principal figures of Troy, without being too obvious about it. Priam was shut in his palace, Hector training with the regiments: Aeneas was often there too, and sometimes Pandarus. That was all the main battle leaders accounted for. Ucalegon was running the palaces and Antenor was busy with a dozen things, hurrying from task to task from sunup to dusk without a sign of weariness. One thing that had piqued Nestor’s interest was a man Antenor visited, a Hittite he thought, ensconced in a converted house near the wall that seemed to be some kind of forge. He’d have to look into that, once he could speak to the merchants who visited here, and who would be willing to ask a few questions. For a small fee.

  But what mattered now was that Antenor was in Troy, all the movers and shakers of the city were here, even the younger princes Lycaon and Troilus. Nobody had slipped away to conduct some clandestine business out of sight of the kings. Nestor simply could not understand what it was that he and his comrades were being kept from seeing.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” he growled, half to himself.

  “I did hear a story,” Thersites said. He was still bent over his lyre, tuning it Nestor thought. “Someone at the palace told me there’s an emissary from Egypt in Troy. Urgent business regarding Phoenicia, he said.”

  Nestor frowned. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “People talk to ordinary folk,” Thersites said, “when they wouldn’t talk to a king. I hear things.”

  “I expect you do,” Nestor said. And if you count as ‘ordinary folk’, my hollow-chested friend, I’ll eat my boots with a spoon. “That doesn’t add up, though. Troy is an ally of Hattusa, they fight against the Egyptians, not for them. If the pharaoh has something to discuss he’d send to Hattusa, surely? Unless,” he added, struck by a thought, “the Hittites are weaker than we thought, since the Battle of Emar. Maybe Egypt thinks they’re finished.”

  “If that was true, Troy wouldn’t be… playing us like this,” Menestheus said, in his patient way. He fingered his short goatee beard. “You don’t risk angering enemies when your strongest friend is failing.”

  “Are we Troy’s enemies?” Nestor asked.

  The king of Athens shrugged. “Perhaps they think we are. Or why treat us this way?”

  That did make sense, unfortunately. And Troy’s behaviour over the past year had been that of a city which no longer cared very much for the consequences of its actions. The punitive new taxes on the Trojan Road had ruined a lot of Greek merchants, emptied a lot of royal treasuries, and left a lot of empty bellies. Priam must have known that would create widespread anti-Trojan sentiment, but he’d gone ahead anyway. Now Greece was full of angry men, shouting in the streets for their kings to do something, which was the sort of thing that made kings angry too. Troy didn’t seem to notice.

  “I asked around,” Thersites put in. “Subtly, while I was juggling balls for some of the servants, and at a tavern down in the town. Everyone I spoke to agreed. No Egyptian emissary has been in Troy for at least two years.”

  Nestor nodded. “Then someone is lying to us.”

  “And if they lie about that,” Menestheus agreed, still fingering his beard, “what else do they lie about?”

  The three men looked at each other in silence.