Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

Chapter Fourteen

  What Happens in Miletos

  He found Andromache deep in discussion with two priests of Athena, in her temple right at the back of the Pergamos.

  It was a surprise, actually, how fast Hecuba had begun to transfer her power to Hector’s wife. Or at the least to share it with her, equal to equal. Andromache was clever and capable, and she’d shown a deft touch in dealing with the sensitivities of the various priesthoods. That had impressed Hecuba and the priests. Thebe-under-Plakos was a small city, with none of Troy’s urban sophistication; for Andromache to prove so capable so soon was a surprise.

  Which was all Hector knew, even as the husband of one woman and son of the other. It wasn’t done for a man to inquire into the dealings of a queen and the clerics. Perhaps when he was king. His parents shared their duties, so he and Andromache might too.

  But he wasn’t king yet, so Hector didn’t ask what his wife and the two white-robes were debating, or even approach close enough to hear. He simply stood by the doorway and waited for them to notice him.

  At the far end of the long hall, half in shadow now, stood the Palladium. It was a wooden image of Athena herself, carved twelve feet tall in the midst of a stride, with a spear in one hand and her aegis, a hide-bound shield, in the other. Legend claimed the goddess herself had given it to Ilos, mighty son of the founder of Troy, as recognition of his warrior prowess. It was said Troy could never fall while the statue stood inside her walls.

  Her wooden face was hidden in darkness, but Hector stared at it anyway. Was it a true representation of how Athena looked? He didn’t know. Nymphs seemed to appear almost daily, surprising a shepherd or traveller at the side of the road, often with no cairn or altar to mark their presence. But the gods and goddesses of the world, whether Greek or Anatolian, didn’t show themselves to just anyone. They appeared rarely, and in isolated places, seen by only one or two mortals in a generation. The most worthy, the finest of their times.

  Athena had shown herself to Ilos, at a time when the Trojans worshipped no Argive deities, and made herself preeminent in the city. Now the people cried that Hector was Ilos reborn, the great warrior clothed once more in flesh… yet she had not shown herself to him. He had to wonder why. What was missing in him, that she hid herself from his eyes?

  And did she hide from Achilles?

  It was a name the artisan from Teos had spoken, and one Hector had heard before. Everyone close to the Greensea knew it, just as they knew the word Myrmidon. The Ants of Thessaly had been raiding coasts for a century, men in black carapaces swarming ashore from black-hulled boats. But they’d become something more under Achilles, a deadly force that eschewed the easy targets of villages and farms and struck instead at towns, and then overwhelmed them. Settlements all along the coast had begun building higher walls, wider moats, anything to keep the terror of the Myrmidons at bay.

  Achilles himself wore golden armour in battle, shining amidst the black armour of his men. There were stories of arrows sent at him that never seemed to hit, spears that simply bounced off the cuirass. The man seemed invulnerable, and he swatted warriors like leaves in the wind.

  Even so, the raid at Teos was the first time the Myrmidons had attacked the Anatolian coast for years. Fifteen at least, Hector thought, since the Argive catastrophe at Miletos. They’d contented themselves with attacks on the Aegean islands, or in the south against Egypt; even against their own people, in Cyprus and Crete. That they had come to Anatolia again was more than unsettling. It was a threat, clouds in a sky that had been clear before.

  And now came this lunacy, this utter insanity of Paris, taking Helen not as a bargaining piece but as a prize.

  “Husband?” Andromache said by his elbow, and Hector blinked in surprise. He’d been so deep in contemplation that he hadn’t even noticed her there. “I thought you were with the king.”

  “I was,” he said. “Can you spare a moment?”

  “Of course,” she said. She held up a hand to the priests, one finger raised to indicate she’d only be a minute. They bowed politely and retreated. “What is it, Hector?”

  “Not here,” he said. He was struggling to hold in his anger. “Upstairs. I need wind in my hair.”

  A narrow flight of steps was hidden behind one wall of the temple, reached by a door set in the corner. It was so small that Hector could only pass through by turning sideways with his head and shoulder bowed. But at the top was the roof, all but hanging over the northern wall of the Pergamos and then the city wall below, and the almost-sheer fall under that down to the Plain of Troy. If you lifted your eyes a little you could see the Bay to the north and the Hellespont beyond, and the Simois River, with Bunarbi town sitting beyond it at the edge of the sea. Horses grazed everywhere you looked, forming small clumps according to some unknown bonds of friendship or dislike that not even the wranglers had ever been able to work out. Sheep grazed on the pastures of the hillsides, on poorer grass than the horses. Between the two, on the slopes, was a narrow strip of cropland, yellow now with ripening wheat. Men moved there and in the fields, tending this and nurturing that, tiny specks at this distance.

  Andromache took his hand. “Now, then. Tell me what’s got you so frustrated. Or have you tired of me already, and you brought me up here to throw me over the wall so you could marry another outland wench?”

  “What?” he said, startled. “No, I’m not –”

  He stopped then, because Andromache was laughing at him. Hector began to tell her it wasn’t funny, there was some real trouble here, and then realised that his rage was gone. Well, not gone entirely, but it had faded away to a hot whine somewhere deep inside him, rather than the rampaging red thing he’d hardly been able to bottle up. He grinned at her, a little sheepishly.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Tell me, then.”

  He did so, pouring the words out like Myrmidons flooding across a helpless village. Antenor’s plan, though she knew about that of course, because he’d told her when it was first proposed. The arrival of the Argive kings, and the amusement of seeing Nestor grow more and more suspicious, sure he was being tricked but unable to see how, or why. And then the sudden, devastating news from Paris, brought only hours earlier by the ship beached on the bank of the Simois below them – if she looked, Andromache would be able to see it. That part she didn’t know, because there hadn’t been time.

  “Paris swore to marry her,” Hector finished. “By every god he could remember to name, it seems. His message says that he intends to keep that vow, whether my father supports him or not.”

  She’d folded his hand into both of hers. “You don’t think he should?”

  “Support him? No. We should keep to the original plan. Treat Helen with all courtesy, and give her no reason for complaint. Don’t abuse her or ravish her. And then exchange her for Hesione and remove the higher tolls Argives face on the Trojan Road. Some of the Greeks might still argue for revenge against us, but most won’t. They need the goods of the Euxine Sea too badly.”

  “You’d abandon Paris,” she said, nodding. “Have you suggested this to your father?”

  “He knows what I think,” Hector said. “Paris is a wastrel, a man whose interests stop with his own desires. He doesn’t care about anything but his own gratification, and when it’s satisfied he moves on to the next thing, and the next, and he never spares a thought for the consequences. But this time there will be consequences, and he should be the one to face them. Not Troy.”

  “I see,” she said. “Paris has taken the choice away, hasn’t he? By not returning to Troy at once he’s made the decision his own. Priam can’t promise that Helen will be left unmolested.”

  “This is Paris,” he said. “Of course she won’t be unmolested. His lust has got the better of him, and now he’ll take her in ten different ways before he even comes home. And the Argives know what he’s like anyway. Even if he does leave her untouched, by some miracle, they will never believe it.”

  “And what do you fear the A
rgives will do?”

  “Something,” he said darkly. He wasn’t sure exactly, but he knew the Argives would never let this insult go by without riposte. Even Antenor’s plan had been a huge risk, taken only because all else had failed and Priam so badly wanted to see his sister home in Troy again, before one of them died. But an exchange of women was one thing: the outright abduction of a queen was quite another. That wasn’t a risk, it was madness.

  “Something,” he said again, and felt Andromache’s fingers tighten about his own.