Vengeance of Orion

Chapter 1

THE slash of a whip across my bare back brought me to full awareness. “Pull, you big ox! Stop your daydreaming or you’ll think Zeus’s thunderbolts are landing on your shoulders!”

I was sitting on a rough wooden bench along the gunwale of a long, wallowing boat, a heavy oar in my hands. No, not an oar. A paddle. We were rowing hard, under a hot high sun. I could see the sweat streaming down the emaciated ribs and spine of the man in front of me. There were welts across his nut-brown skin.

“Pull!” the man with the whip roared. “Stay with the beat.”

I wore nothing but a stained leather loincloth. Sweat stung my eyes. My back and arms ached. My hands were callused and dirty.

The boat was like a Hawaiian war canoe. The prow rose high into a grotesquely carved figurehead; some fierce demonic spirit, I guessed, to protect the boat and its crew. I glanced swiftly around as I dug my paddle into the heaving dark sea and counted forty rowers. Amidships there were bales of goods, tethered sheep and pigs that squealed with every roll of the deck.

The sun blazed overhead. The wind was fitful and light. The boat’s only sail was furled against its mast. I could smell the stench of the animals’ droppings. Toward the stern a brawny bald man was beating a single large mallet on a well-worn drum, as steady as a metronome. We drove our paddles into the water in time with his beat — or took a sting from the rowing master’s whip.

Other men were gathered down by the stern, standing, shading their eyes with one hand and pointing with the other as they spoke with one another. They wore clean knee-length linen tunics and cloaks of red or blue that went down to midcalf. Small daggers at their belts, more for ornamentation than combat, I judged. Silver inlaid hilts. Gold clasps on their cloaks. They were young men, lean, their beards light. But their faces were grave, not jaunty. They were looking toward something that sobered their youthful spirits. I followed their gaze and saw a headland not far off, a low treeless rocky rise at the end of a sandy stretch of beach. Obviously our destination was beyond that promontory.

Where was I? How did I get here? Frantically I ransacked my mind. The last firm memory I could find was of a beautiful, tall, gray-eyed woman who loved me and whom I loved. We were… a shudder of blackest grief surged through me. She was dead.

My mind went spinning, as if a whirlpool had opened in the dark sea and dragged me down into it. Dead. Yes. There was a ship, a very different ship. One that traveled not through the water but through the vast emptiness between stars. I had been on that ship with her. And it exploded. She died. She was killed. We were both killed.

Yet I lived, sweaty, dirty, my back stinging with welts, on this strangely primitive oversized canoe heading for an unknown land under a brazen cloudless sky.

Who am I? With a sudden shock of fright I realized that I could remember nothing about myself except my name. I am Orion, I told myself. But more than that I could not recall. My memory was a blank, as if it had been wiped clean, like a classroom chalkboard being prepared for a new lesson.

I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to think about that woman I had loved and that fantastic star-leaping ship. I could not even remember her name. I saw flames, heard screams. I held her in my arms as the heat blistered our skins and made the metal walls around us glow hell-red.

“He’s beaten us, Orion,” she said to me. “We’ll die together. That’s the only consolation we will have, my love.”

I remembered pain. Not merely the agony of flesh searing and splitting open, steaming and cooking even as our eyes were burned away, but the torture of being torn apart forever from the one woman in all the universes whom I loved.

The whip cracked against my bare back again.

“Harder! Pull harder, you whoreson, or by the gods I’ll sacrifice you instead of a bullock once we make landfall!”

He leaned over me, his scarred face red with anger, and slashed at me again with the whip. The pain of the lash was nothing. I closed it off without another thought. I always could control my body completely. Had I wanted to, I could have snapped this hefty paddle in two and driven the ragged end of it through the whipmaster’s thick skull. But what was the sting of his whip compared to the agony of death, the hopelessness of loss?

We rowed around the rocky headland and saw a calm sheltered inlet. Spread along the curving beach were dozens of ships like our own, pulled far up on the sand. Huts and tents huddled among their black hulls like shreds of paper littering a city street after a parade. Thin gray smoke issued from cook fires here and there. A pall of thicker, blacker smoke billowed off in the distance.

A mile or so inland, up on a bluff that commanded the beach, stood a city or citadel of some sort. High stone walls with square towers rising above the battlements. Far in the distance, dark wooded hills rose and gradually gave way to mountains that floated shimmering in the blue heat haze.

The young men at the stern seemed to get tenser at the sight of the walled city. Their voices were low, but I heard them easily enough.

“There is it,” one of them said to his companions. His voice was grim.

The youth next to him nodded and spoke a single word.

“Troy.”

Chapter 2

WE landed, literally, driving the boat up onto the beach until its bottom grated against the sand and we could go no farther. Then the whipmaster bellowed at us as we piled over the gunwales, took up ropes, and — straining, cursing, wrenching the tendons in our arms and shoulders — we hauled the pitch-blackened hull up onto the beach until only its stern and rudder paddle touched the water.

Hardly any tide to speak of, I knew. When they finally sail past the Pillars of Herakles and out into the Atlantic, that’s when they’ll encounter real tides.

Then I wondered how I knew that.

I did not have time to wonder for long. The whipmaster allowed us a scant few moments to get our breath back, then he started us unloading the boat. He roared and threatened, shaking his many-thonged whip at us, his cinnamon-red beard ragged and tangled, the scar on his left cheek standing out white against his florid frog’s-eyed face. I carried bales and bleating sheep and squirming, foul-smelling pigs while the gentlemen in their cloaks and linen tunics and their fine sandals walked down a gangplank, each followed by two or more slaves who carried their goods, mostly arms and armor, from what I could see.

“Fresh blood for the war,” grunted the man next to me, with a nod toward the young noblemen. He looked as grimy as I felt, a stringy old fellow with skin as tanned and creased as weather-beaten leather. His hair was sparse, gray, matted with perspiration; his beard, mangy and unkempt. Like me, he wore nothing but a loincloth; his skinny legs and knobby knees barely seemed strong enough to tote the burdens he carried.

There were plenty of other men, just as ragged and filthy as we, to take the bales and livestock from us. They seemed delighted to do so. As I went back and forth from the boat I saw that this stretch of beach was protected by an earthenwork rampart studded here and there with sharpened stakes.

We finished our task at last, unloading a hundred or so massive double-handled jugs of wine, as the sun touched the headland we had rounded earlier in the day. Aching, exhausted, we sprawled around a cook fire and accepted steaming wooden bowls of boiled lentils and greens.

A cold wind blew in from the north as the sun slipped below the horizon, sending sparks from our little fire glittering toward the darkening sky.

“I never thought I’d be here on the plain of Ilios,” said the old man who had worked next to me. He put the bowl to his lips and gobbled the stew hungrily.

“Where are you from?” I asked him.

“Argos. My name is Poletes. And you?”

“Orion.”

“Ah! Named after the Hunter.”

I nodded, a faint echo of memory tingling the hairs at the back of my neck. The Hunter. Yes, I was a hunter. Once. Long ago. Or — was it a long time from now? Future and past were all mixed together in my mind. I remembered…

“And where are you from, Orion?” asked Poletes, shattering the fragile images half-forming in my mind.

“Oh,” I gestured vaguely, “west of Argos. Far west.”

“Farther than Ithaca?”

“Beyond the sea,” I answered, not knowing why, but feeling instinctively that it was as honest a reply as I could give.

“And how came you here?”

I shrugged. “I’m a wanderer. And you?”

Edging closer to me, Poletes wrinkled his brow and scratched at his thinning pate. “No wanderer I. I’m a storyteller, and happy was I to spend my days in the agora, spinning tales and watching the faces of the people as I talked. Especially the children, with their big eyes. But this war put an end to my storytelling.”

“How so?”

He wiped at his mouth with the back of his grimy hand. “My lord Agamemnon may need more warriors, but his faithless wife wants thetes.”

“Slaves?”

“Hah! Worse off than a slave. Far worse,” Poletes grumbled. He gestured to the exhausted men sprawled around the dying fire. “Look at us! Homeless and hopeless. At least a slave has a master to depend on. A slave belongs to someone; he is a member of a household. A thes belongs to no one and nothing; he is landless, homeless, cut off from everything except sorrow and hunger.”

“But you were a member of a household in Argos, weren’t you?”

He bowed his head and squeezed his eyes shut, as if to block out a painful memory.

“A household, yes,” he said, his voice low. “Until Queen Clytemnestra’s men booted me out of the city for repeating what every stray dog and alley cat in Argos was saying — that the queen has taken a lover while her royal husband is here fighting at Troy’s walls.”

I took a sip of the rapidly cooling stew, trying to think of something to say.

“At least they didn’t kill you,” was all I could come up with.

“Better if they had!” Poletes replied bitterly. “I would be dead and in Hades and that would be the end of it. Instead, I’m here, toiling like a jackass, working for wages.”

“That’s something, anyway,” I said.

His eyes snapped at me. “You are eating your wages, Orion.”

“This… this is our payment?”

“For the day’s work. Exactly. Show me a thes with coin in his purse and I’ll show you a sneak thief.”

I took a deep breath.

“Lower than slaves, that’s what we are, Orion,” said Poletes, in a whisper that was heavy with overdue sleep. “Vermin under their feet. Dogs. That’s how they treat us. They’ll work us to death and let our bones rot where we fall.”

With a heavy sigh Poletes put his empty bowl down and stretched out on the sandy ground. It was getting so dark that I could barely see his face. The pitiful little fire had gone down to nothing but embers. The wind blowing in from the water was cold and sharp. I automatically adjusted my blood flow to keep as warm as possible. There were no blankets or even canvas tarpaulins among the sprawled bodies of the exhausted thetes. They slept in their loincloths and nothing else.

I lay down beside the old man, then found myself wondering how old he could truly be. Forty, perhaps. I doubted that anyone lived much past fifty in this primitive time. A pair of mangy dogs snarled at each other over some bones by the fire, then settled down side by side, better protected against the night than we were.

Just before I closed my eyes to sleep, I caught sight of the beetling towers of Troy bulking dark against the deepening violet sky.

Agamemnon. Troy. How did I get here? How long could I survive as something lower than a slave?

Falling asleep was like entering another world. My dream was as real as life. I thought perhaps it was life, a different life on a different plane of existence.

I stood in a place that had neither time nor dimension. No land, no sea, no sky. Not even a horizon. A great golden glow surrounded me, stretching away to infinity on every side, warm and so bright that it dazzled my eyes. I could see nothing except its radiance.

Without knowing why, I began to walk. Slowly at first, but soon my pace quickened, as if I knew where I was heading and why. Time was meaningless here, but I walked endlessly, my bare feet striking something firm beneath me, though when I looked down all I could see was the gleaming golden light.

And then, far, far off, I saw a brilliance that outshone everything else. A speck, a spot, a source of radiance that blazed pure gold and drew me forward like a magnet draws a sliver of iron, like the fiery sun draws a falling comet.

I ran, I flew toward that burning golden glow. Breathlessly I raced to it, my eyes painfully dazzled, my heart thundering wildly, the breath rasping in my throat.

I stopped. As if an invisible wall had risen before me. As if my body had suddenly become paralyzed.

I stopped and slumped to my knees.

A human form sat before me, elevated above my level, resting on nothing more substantial than golden light. He was the source of all the radiance. He shone so beautifully that it hurt my eyes to look upon him. Yet I could not look away.

He was splendid. Thick mane of golden hair, gold-flecked eyes. Skin that glowed with life-giving radiance. Utterly handsome face, masculine yet beautiful, calm and self-assured, the hint of a smile curling his lips. Broad shoulders and wide hairless chest. Bare to the waist, where draperies of gleaming gold enfolded him.

“My poor Orion.” His smile turned almost mocking. “You are certainly in a sorry state.”

I did not know what to reply. I could not reply. My voice froze in my throat.

“Do you remember your Creator?” he asked, tauntingly.

I nodded dumbly.

“Of course you do. That memory is built so deeply into you that nothing but final destruction can erase it.”

I knelt before my Creator, my mind whirling with faint half memories, struggling to find my voice, to speak, to ask him…

“Do you remember my name?” he asked.

Almost, I did.

“No matter. For the present you may call me Apollo. Your companions on the plain of Ilios refer to me by that name.”

Apollo. The Greek god of light and beauty. Of course. The god of music and medicine — or is it biotechnology, I wondered. But I seemed to recall that he had another name, another time. And there were other gods, as well. And a goddess, the one whom I loved.

“I am being harsh with you, Orion, because you disobeyed me in the matter of Ahriman. You deliberately twisted the course of the continuum, out of sentiment.”

“Out of love,” I replied. My voice was weak, gasping. But I spoke.

“You are a creature, Orion,” he sneered. “What can you know of love?”

“The woman,” I pleaded. “The goddess…”

“She is dead.”

His voice was as coldly implacable as fate. I felt ice freezing my veins.

“You killed her,” I said dully.

His sneering smile faded into grim solemnity. “In a sense, Orion, it was you who killed her. By daring to love a goddess, by tempting her to assume a human form, you sealed her doom.”

“You blame me…”

“Blame? A god does not blame, Orion. A god punishes. Or rewards. You are being punished — for the while. Accept your fate and your punishment will cease.”

“And then?”

His smile returned. “I have other tasks for you, my creature, after the Trojans have beaten off these Greek barbarians. Don’t be afraid, I don’t plan on letting you die again, not for a while. There is much work for you to do in this era.”

I began to ask him what he meant, but a sandaled foot prodded my ribs and I opened my eyes to see that I was on the beach among the Greeks who were besieging Troy, a thes, the lowest of the low.

“On your feet! There’s work to be done!” shouted the whipmaster.

I looked up at him but saw instead the blinding radiance of the morning sun. I winced and bowed my head.

Chapter 3

WE were given a bowl of thin barley gruel and then set to work with wooden shovels on the earthworks defending the beach.

While the warriors ate a leisurely breakfast of mutton and flat bread, and their men-at-arms yoked horses to chariots and sharpened swords and spears, we lumbered out through one of the makeshift gates in the low rampart that had been heaped up along the beach. Our task this fine, windy morning was to deepen the trench in front of the mound and pile the diggings atop it. This would make it even harder for Trojan troops or chariots to reach the ships.

We worked a good part of the morning. The sky was a sparkling bowl of wondrously clear, cloudless blue, dotted by screeching white gulls soaring above us. The sea was an even deeper blue, restless with flecks of white-foamed waves. Grayish brown humps of islands rose above the distant horizon. In the other direction, Troy’s towers and beetling walls seemed to glower down at us from across the plain. Beyond it the distant hills were dark with trees and beyond them rose the hazy mountains.

The wind strengthened into a brisk gusting breeze as the sun rose higher, helping to keep us cool as we dug and emptied our shovels of sandy soil into woven baskets that were carried to the top of the mound by other thetes.

As I dug and sweated, I thought about my memories of the night. It was no dream, I was certain of that. The Golden One really existed, whether he called himself Apollo or some other name from an earlier existence. I dimly remembered knowing him from another time, another era — him, and a dark, brooding hulking presence. The one he called Ahriman, I thought. And the goddess, the woman I loved. The woman who was dead. The Golden One said I was responsible for her death. Yet I knew that he had set in motion the train of events that ended with our starship exploding. He had killed her, killed us both. Yet somehow he had revived me, placed me here in this time and place, alone and bereft of memory.

But I did remember. A little, anyway. Enough to know I hated the Golden One for what he had done to me. And to her. I tightened my callused hands on the shovel, anger and the hollow empty feeling of heartsickness driving me. None of the other thetes were pushing themselves and the work went slowly, mainly because the whipmaster and the other overseers ignored us, spending their time at the top of the mound where they could ogle the camp and the noblemen in their splendid bronze armor.

Achaians, they called themselves. I heard it from the men laboring around me. It would be another thousand years before they began to think of themselves as Greeks. They were here besieging Troy, yet they seemed worried that the Trojans would break through these defenses and attack the camp. There is trouble among the Achaians, I thought.

And the Golden One said that the Trojans were going to beat off their besiegers.

Poletes had been picked to carry baskets of dirt from down where we were digging up to the top of the rampart. At first I thought this was too much of a burden for his skinny old legs, but the baskets were small and carried only a light load, and the overseers were lax enough to let the load-carriers meander up the slope slowly.

The old man spotted me among the diggers and came to me.

“All is not well among the high and mighty this morning,” he whispered to me, delighted. “There’s some argument between my lord Agamemnon and Achilles, the great slayer of men. They say that Achilles will not leave his tent today.”

“Not even to help us dig?” I joked.

Poletes cackled with laughter. “The High King Agamemnon has sent a delegation to Achilles to beseech him to join the battle. I don’t think it’s going to work. Achilles is young and arrogant. He thinks his shit smells like roses.”

I laughed back at the old man.

“You there!” The whipmaster pointed at us from the top of the mound. “If you don’t get back to work I’ll give you something to laugh about!”

Poletes hoisted his half-filled basket up to his frail shoulders and started climbing the slope. I turned back to my shovel.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky when the wooden gate nearest me creaked open and the chariots started streaming out, the horses’ hooves thudding on the packed-earth ramp that cut across the trench. All work stopped. The overseers shouted for us to come up out of the trench and we scrambled eagerly up the slope of the rampart, happy to watch the impending battle.

Bronze armor glittered in the sun as the chariots arrayed themselves in line abreast. Most were pulled by two horses, though a few had teams of four. The horses neighed and stamped their hooves nervously, as if they sensed the mayhem that was in store. There were seventy-nine chariots, by my count. Quite a bit short of the thousands that the poets sang about.

Each chariot bore two men, one handling the horses, the other armed with several spears of different weights and length. The longest were more than twice the height of a warrior, even in his bronze helmet with its horse-hair plume.

Both men in each chariot wore bronze breastplates, helmets, and arm guards. I could not see their legs but I guessed that they were sheathed in greaves, as well. Most charioteers carried small round targes strapped to their left forearms. Each warrior held a figure-eight shield that was nearly as tall as he was, covering him from chin to ankles. Every man bore a sword on a baldric that looped over his shoulder. I caught the glitter of gold and silver on the handles of the swords. Many of the charioteers had bows slung across their backs or hooked against the chariot rail.

A shout went up as the last chariot passed through the gate and along the trodden-smooth rampway that crossed our trench. The four horses pulling it were magnificent matched blacks, glossy and sleek. The warrior in it seemed stockier than most of the others, his armor filigreed with gold inlays.

“That’s the High King,” said Poletes, over the roar of the shouting men. “That’s Agamemnon.”

“Is Achilles with them?” I asked.

“No. But that giant there is Great Ajax,” he pointed, excited despite himself. “There’s Odysseus, and…”

An echoing roar reached us from the battlements of Troy. A cloud of dust showed us that a contingent of chariots was filing out of a gate to the right side of the city, winding its way down an incline that led to the plain before us.

Ground troops were hurrying out of our gates now, men-at-arms bearing bows, slings, axes, cudgels. A few of them wore armor or chain mail, but most of them had nothing more protective than leather jerkins, some studded with bronze pieces.

The two armies assembled themselves facing each other on the windswept plain. A fair-sized river formed a natural boundary to the battlefield on our right, while a smaller stream defined the left flank. Beyond their banks on both sides the sandy ground was green with tussocks of long-bladed grass, but the battlefield had been worn bare by chariot wheels and the tramping feet of soldiery.

For nearly a half hour, nothing much happened. Heralds went out and spoke with each other while the dust drifted away on the wind.

“None of the heroes are challenging each other to single combat today,” explained Poletes. “The heralds are exchanging offers of peace, which each side will disdainfully refuse.”

“They do this every day?”

“So I’m told. Unless it rains.”

“Did the war really start over Helen?” I asked.

Poletes shrugged elaborately. “That’s the excuse. And it’s true that Prince Aleksandros abducted her from Sparta while her husband’s back was turned. Whether she came along with him willingly or not, only the gods know.”

“Aleksandros? I thought his name was Paris.”

“He is sometimes called Paris. But his name is Aleksandros. One of Priam’s sons.” Poletes laughed. “I hear that he and Menalaos, the lawful husband of Helen, fought in single combat a few days ago and Aleksandros ran away. He hid behind his foot soldiers! Can you believe that?”

I nodded.

“Menalaos is Agamemnon’s brother,” Poletes went on, his voice dropping lower, as if he did not want others to overhear. “The High King would love to smash Troy flat. That would give him clear sailing through the Hellespont into the Sea of Black Waters.”

“Is that important?”

“Gold, my boy,” Poletes whispered. “Not merely the metal that kings adorn themselves with, but golden grain grows by the far shores of that sea. A land awash in grain. And no one can pass through the straits to get at it unless they pay a tribute to Troy.”

“Ahhh.” I was beginning to see the real forces behind this war.

“Aleksandros was on a mission of peace to Mycenae, to arrange a new trade agreement between his father Priam and High King Agamemnon. He stopped off at Sparta and wound up abducting Helen instead. That was all the excuse Agamemnon needed. If he can conquer Troy he can have free access to the riches of the regions beyond the straits.”

I was about to ask why the Trojans would not simply return Helen to her rightful husband, when a series of bugle blasts ended the quiet on the plain below us.

“Now it begins,” Poletes said, grimly. “The fools rush to the slaughter once again.”

We watched as the charioteers cracked their whips and the horses bolted forward, carrying Achaians and Trojans madly toward each other.

I focused my vision on the chariot nearest us and saw the warrior in it setting his sandaled feet in a pair of raised sockets, to give him a firm base for using his spears. He held his body-length shield before him and plucked one of the lighter, shorter spears from the handful rattling in their holder on his right.

“Diomedes,” said Poletes, before I asked. “The prince of Argos. A fine young man.”

The chariot approaching his swerved suddenly and the warrior in it hurled a spear. It sailed past harmlessly.

Diomedes threw his spear and hit the rump of the farthest of his opponent’s four horses. The horse whickered and reared, throwing the other three so off stride that the chariot skewed wildly, tumbling the warrior onto the dusty ground. The charioteer either fell or ducked behind the chariot’s siding.

Other combats were turning the worn-bare field into a vast cloud of dust, chariots wheeling, spears hurtling through the air, shrill battle cries and shouted curses ringing everywhere. The foot soldiers seemed to be holding back, letting the noblemen fight their single encounters for the first few moments of the battle.

One voice pierced all the other noises, a weird screaming cry like a seagull gone mad.

“The battle cry of Odysseus,” Poletes said. “You can always hear the King of Ithaca above all others.”

But I was still concentrating on Diomedes. His charioteer reined in his team and the warrior hopped down to the ground, two spears gripped in his left hand, his massive figure-eight shield bumping against his helmet and greaves.

“Ah, a lesser man would have speared his foe from the chariot,” Poletes said admiringly. “Diomedes is a true nobleman. Would that he had been in Argos when Clytemnestra’s men put me out!”

Diomedes approached the fallen warrior, who clambered back to his feet and held his shield before him, drawing his long sword from its scabbard. The prince of Argos took his longest and heaviest spear in his right hand and shook it menacingly. I could not hear what the two men were saying to each other, but they shouted something back and forth.

Suddenly both men dropped their weapons, rushed to each other, and embraced like a couple of long-lost brothers. I was stunned.

“They must have relatives in common,” Poletes explained. “Or one of them might have been a guest in the other’s household sometime in the past.”

“But the battle…”

He shook his gray head. “What has that to do with it? There are plenty of others to kill.”

The two warriors exchanged swords, then they both got back onto their chariots and drove in opposite directions.

“No wonder this war has lasted ten years,” I muttered.

But although Diomedes and his first encounter of the day ended nonviolently, that was the only bit of peace I saw amid the carnage of the battle. Chariots hurtled at each other, spearmen driving their fourteen-foot weapons into their enemies like medieval knights would use their lances nearly two thousand years later. The bronze spear points were themselves the length of a man’s arm. When all the energy generated by a team of four galloping horses was focused on the gleaming tip of that sharp spear point, it was if a high-velocity cannon shell tore into its target. Armored men were lifted off their feet, out of their chariots, when those spears found them. Bronze armor was no protection against that tremendous force.

The warriors preferred to fight from the chariots, I saw, although here and there men had alighted and faced their opponents afoot. Still the infantry soldiers hung back, skulking and squinting in the swirling clouds of dust, while the noblemen faced each other singly. Were they waiting for a signal? Was there some tactic in this bewildering melee of individual combats? Or was it that the foot soldiers knew that they could never face an armored nobleman and those deadly spears?

Here two chariots clashed together, the spearman of one driving his point through the head of the other’s charioteer. There a pair of armored noblemen faced each other on foot, dueling and parrying with their long spears. One of them whirled suddenly and rammed the butt of his spear into the side of his opponent’s helmet. The man dropped to the ground and his enemy drove his spear through his unprotected neck. Blood gushed onto the thirsty ground.

Instead of getting back into his chariot, or stalking another enemy, the victorious warrior dropped to his knees and began unbuckling the slain man’s armor.

“A rich prize,” Poletes explained. “The sword alone should buy food and wine for a month, at least.”

Now the foot soldiers came forward, on both sides, some to help strip the carcass, others to defend it. A comical tug-of-war started briefly, but quickly turned into a serious fight with knives, axes, cudgels, and hatchets. The armored nobleman made all the difference, though. He cut through the enemy foot soldiers with his long sword, hacking limbs and lives until the few who could ran for their lives. Then his men resumed stripping the corpse while the warrior stood guard over them, as effectively out of the battle for the time being as if he himself had been killed.

Most of the chariots were overturned or empty of their warriors by now. Men were fighting on foot with long spears or swords. I saw armored noblemen pick up stones and throw them, to good effect. Archers — many of them charioteers who fired from the protection of their cars’ leather-covered side paneling — began picking off unprotected infantry. I saw an armored warrior suddenly drop his spear and paw, howling, at an arrow sticking in his beefy shoulder. A chariot raced by and the warrior in it spitted an archer on his spear, lifting him completely out of his chariot and dragging him in the dust until his dead body wrenched free of the spear’s barbed point.

All this took only a few minutes. There seemed to be no order to the battle, no plan, no tactics. The noble contestants seemed more interested in looting the bodies of the slain than defeating the enemy forces. It was more like a game than a war. A game that soaked the ground with blood and filled the air with screams of pain and terror.

The one thing that stood out above all others was that to turn and attempt to flee was much more dangerous than facing the enemy and fighting. I saw a charioteer wheel his team about to get away from two chariots converging on him. Someone threw a spear that caught him between the shoulder blades. His team ran wild, and while the warrior in the chariot attempted to take the reins from the dead hands of his companion and get the horses under control, another spearman drove up and killed him with a thrust in the back.

Foot soldiers who turned away from the fighting took arrows in the back or were cut down by chariot-mounted warriors who swung their swords like scythes.

It was getting difficult to see, the dust was swirling so thickly. But I heard a fresh trumpet blast and the roar of many men shouting in unison. Then the thunder of horses’ hooves shook the ground.

Through the dust came three dozen chariots, heading straight toward the place where we stood atop the earthworks rampart.

“Prince Hector!” said Poletes, with awe in his voice. “Look how he slices through the Achaians.”

Hector had either regrouped his main chariot force or had held them back from the opening melee of the battle. Whichever, he was now driving them like shock troops through the Achaian forces, slaughtering left and right. Hector’s massive long spear was stained with blood halfway up its fourteen-foot length. He carried it as lightly as a wand, spitting armored noblemen and leather-jerkined foot soldiers alike, driving relentlessly toward the rampart that protected the beach, the camp, and the ships.

For a few minutes the Achaians fought back, but when Hector’s chariot broke past the ragged line of Greek chariots and headed for the gate in the rampart, the Achaian resistance crumbled. Noblemen and foot soldiers alike, chariots and infantry, they all ran screaming for the safety of the earthworks.

Hector and his Trojan chariots wreaked bloody havoc among the panicked Achaians. With spears and swords and arrows they killed and killed and killed. Men ran hobbling, limping, bleeding toward us. Screams and groans filled the air.

An Achaian chariot rushed bumping and rattling to the gate, riding past and even over the fleeing footmen. I recognized the splendid armor of the squat, broad-shouldered warrior in it: Agamemnon the High King.

He did not look so splendid now. His plumed helmet was gone. His armor was coated with dust. An arrow protruded from his right shoulder and blood streaked the arm.

“We’re doomed!” he shrieked in a high girlish voice. “Doomed!”

Chapter 4

THE Achaians were racing for the safety of the rampart, with the Trojan chariots in hot pursuit, closely followed by the Trojan infantry brandishing swords and axes. Here and there a foot soldier would stop for a moment to sling a stone at the retreating Achaians or drop to one knee to fire an arrow.

An arrow whizzed past me. I turned and saw that Poletes and I were alone on the crest of the rampart. The other thetes, even the whipmaster, had gone down into the camp.

A noisy struggle was taking place at the gate. It was a ramshackle wooden affair, made of planks taken from some of the ships. It was not a hinged door but simply a wooden barricade that could be lifted and wedged into the opening in the earthworks.

Some men were frantically trying to put the gate in place, while others were trying to hold them back until the remainder of the fleeing Achaians could get through. I saw that Hector and his chariots would reach the gate in another minute or less. Once past that gate, I knew, the Trojans would slaughter everyone in the camp.

“Stay here,” I said to Poletes. Without looking to see if he obeyed, I dodged among the stakes planted in the rampart’s crest, heading toward the gate.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a light spear hurtling toward me. My senses seemed to be heightened, sharpened. The world around me went into slow-motion as my body surged into hyperdrive. The javelin came floating lazily through the air, flexing slightly as it flew. I skipped back a step and it struck the ground at my feet, quivering. I yanked it loose and raced toward the gate.

Hector’s chariot was already pounding up the sandy ramp that cut across the trench in front of the rampart. There was no time for anything else, so I leaped from the rampart’s crest onto the ramp, right in front of Hector’s charging horses. I yelled and threw up both arms, and the startled horses reared up, neighing.

For an instant the world stopped, frozen as in a painting on a vase. Behind me the Achaians were struggling to put up the barricade that would hold the Trojans out of the camp. Before me Hector’s team of horses reared high, the unshod hooves of their forelegs flashing inches from my face. I stood crouched slightly, holding the light javelin in both my hands at chest level, ready to move in any direction.

The horses shied away from me, their eyes bulging white with fear, twisting the chariot almost sideways along the pounded-earth ramp. I saw the warrior in the chariot still standing, one hand on the rail, the other raised over his head, holding a monstrously long blood-soaked spear.

Aimed at my chest.

I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among hordes of adrenaline-soaked brutes. I noticed that he wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. On it was painted a flying heron, almost in a style that would be called Japanese in millennia to come.

He jabbed the spear at me. I sidestepped and, dropping the javelin I had been carrying, grabbed the hefty ash wood shaft and pulled Hector clear over the railing of his chariot. Wrenching the spear from his one-handed grasp, I swung it against the charioteer’s head, knocking him over the other side of the car.

The horses panicked and stumbled over each other in the narrow passage of the ramp. One of them started sliding along the steep edge of the trench. Whinnying with fear, they backed away and turned, trampling the poor charioteer as they bolted off back down the ramp and toward the distant city, dragging the empty chariot with them.

Hector scrambled to his feet and came at me with his sword. I parried with the spear, holding it like an elongated quarterstaff, and knocked his feet out from under him again.

By this time more Trojans were rushing up the ramp on foot, their chariots useless because Hector’s panicked team had scattered the others.

I glanced behind me. The barricade was up now, and Achaian archers were firing through the slits between its planks. Others were atop the rampart, hurling stones and spears. Hector held his shield up to protect himself against the missiles and backed away. A few Trojan arrows came my way, but I avoided them easily.

The Trojans retreated, but only beyond the distance of a bowshot. There Hector told them to stand their ground.

And just like that the morning’s battle was ended. The Achaians were penned up in their camp, behind the trench and rampart, the sea at their backs. The Trojans held the corpse-strewn plain.

I clambered up the barricade and threw a leg over its top. Hesitating for a second, I glanced back at the battlefield. How many of those youthful lords who had come on our boat were now lying out there, stripped of their splendid armor, their jeweled swords, their young lives? I saw birds circling high above in the clean blue sky. Not gulls: vultures.

Poletes called to me. “Orion, you must be a son of Ares! A mighty warrior to best Prince Hector!”

Other voices joined the praise as I let myself over the rickety barricade and dropped lightly to the ground. They surrounded me, clapping my back and shoulders, smiling, shouting. Someone offered me a wooden cup of wine.

“You saved the camp!”

“You stopped those horses as if you were Poseidon himself!”

Even the whipmaster looked on me fondly. “That was not the action of a thes,” he said, looking me over carefully, perhaps for the first time, out of his bulging frog’s eyes. “Why is a warrior working as a paid man?”

Without even thinking about it, I replied, “A duty I must perform. A duty to a god.”

They edged away from me. Their smiles turned to awe. Only the whipmaster had the courage to stand his ground before me. He nodded and said quietly, “I understand. Well, the god must be pleased with you this morning.”

I shrugged. “We’ll know soon enough.”

Poletes came to my side. “Come, I’ll find you a good fire and hot food.”

I let the old storyteller lead me away.

“I knew you were no ordinary man,” he said as we made our way through the scattered huts and tents. “Not someone with your shoulders. Why, you’re almost as tall as Great Ajax. A nobleman, I told myself. A nobleman, at the very least.”

He chattered and yammered, telling me how my deeds looked to his eyes, reciting the day’s carnage as if he were trying to set it firmly in his memory for future recall. Every group of men we passed offered us a share of their midday meal. The women in the camp smiled at me. Some were bold enough to come up to us and offer me freshly cooked meats and onions on skewers.

Poletes shooed them all away. “Tend to your masters’ hungers,” he snapped. “Bind their wounds and pour healing ointments over them. Feed them and give them wine and bat your cow-eyes at them.”

To me he said, “Women cause all the trouble in the world, Orion. Be careful of them.”

“Are these women slaves or thetes ?” I asked.

“There are no women thetes. It’s unheard of. A woman, working for wages? Unheard of!”

“Not even prostitutes?”

“Ah! In the cities, yes, of course. Temple prostitutes. But they are not thetes. It’s not the same thing at all.”

“Then the women here…”

“Slaves. Captives. Daughters and wives of slain enemies, captured in the sack of towns and farms.”

We came to a group of men sitting around one of the larger cook fires, down close beside the black-tarred boats. They looked up and made room for us. Up on the boat nearest us a large canvas had been draped to form a tent. A helmeted guard stood before it, with a well-groomed dog by his side. I stared at the carved and painted figurehead of the boat, a grinning dolphin’s face against a deep blue background.

“Odysseus’s camp,” Poletes explained, in a low voice, as we sat and were offered generous bowls of roasted meat and goblets of honeyed wine. “These are Ithacans.”

He poured a few drops of wine on the ground before drinking, and made me do the same. “Reverence the gods,” Poletes instructed me, surprised that I did not know the custom.

The men praised me for my performance at the barricade, then fell to wondering which particular god had inspired me to such heroic action. The favorites were Poseidon and Ares, although Athene was a close runner and Zeus himself was mentioned now and then. Being Greeks, they soon fell to arguing passionately among themselves without bothering to ask me about it.

I was happy to let them speculate. I listened, and as they argued I learned much about the war.

They had not been camped here at Troy for ten years, although they had been campaigning in the region each summer for nearly that long. Achilles, Menalaos, Agamemnon, and the other warrior kings had been ravaging the eastern Aegean coast, burning towns and taking captives, until finally they had worked up the nerve — and the forces — to besiege Troy itself.

But without Achilles, their fiercest fighter, the men thought that their prospects were dim. Apparently Agamemnon had awarded Achilles a young woman captive and then taken her back for himself, and this insult was more than the haughty warrior could endure, even from the High King.

“The joke of it all,” said one of the men, tossing a well-gnawed lamb bone to the dogs hovering beyond our circle, “is that Achilles prefers his friend Patrokles to any woman.”

They all nodded and murmured agreement. The strain between Achilles and Agamemnon was not over a sexual partner; it was a matter of honor and stubborn pride. On both sides, as far as I could see.

As we ate and talked the skies darkened and thunder rumbled from inland.

“Father Zeus speaks from Mt. Ida,” said Poletes.

One of the foot soldiers, his leather jerkin stained with spatters of grease and blood, grinned up at the cloudy sky. “Maybe Zeus will give us the afternoon off.”

“Can’t fight in the rain,” someone else agreed.

Sure enough, within minutes it began pelting down. We scattered for whatever shelter we could find. Poletes and I hunkered down in the lee of Odysseus’s boat.

“Now the great lords will meet and arrange a truce, so that the women and slaves can go out and recover the bodies of the dead. Tonight their bodies will be burned and a barrow raised over their bones.” He sighed. “That’s how the rampart began, as a barrow to cover the remains of the slain heroes.”

I sat and watched the rain pouring down, turning the beach into a quagmire, dotting the sea with splashes. The gusting wind drove gray sheets of rain across the bay, and it got so dark and misty that I could not see the headland. It was chill and miserable and there was nothing to do except wait like dumb animals until the sun returned.

I crouched as close to the boat’s hull as I could, feeling cold and utterly alone. I knew I did not belong in this time and place. I had been exiled here by the same power that had killed my love.

I serve a god, I had told these gullible Achaians. Yes, but not willingly. Like a poor witless creature blundering through a fathomless forest, I am reacting to forces beyond my comprehension.

Who did inspire my heroics? I wondered. The golden figure in my dream called himself Apollo. But from what the men around the campfire had said, Apollo supported the Trojans in this war, not the Achaians. I found myself dreading sleep. I knew that once I fell asleep I would again have to face that… god. I had no other word for him.

Suddenly I realized a man was standing in front of me. I looked up and saw a sturdy, thick-torsoed man with a grizzled dark beard and a surly look on his face. He wore a wolf’s skin draped over his head and shoulders. The rain pounded on it. Knee-length tunic, with a sword buckled to his hip. Shins and calves muddied. Ham-sized fists planted on his hips.

“You’re the one called Orion?” he shouted over the driving rain.

I scrambled to my feet and saw that I stood several inches taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.

“I am Orion.”

“Come with me,” he snapped, and started to turn away.

“To where?”

Over his shoulder he answered, “My lord Odysseus wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!”

Poletes came with me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, and up a rope ladder to its deck.

“I knew Odysseus was the only one here wise enough to make use of you,” he cackled. “I knew it!”

Chapter 5

WHICH god do you serve?” Odysseus asked. I stood in the presence of the King of Ithaca, who was sitting on a wooden stool, flanked on either side by other noblemen. He did not appear to be a very tall man; his legs seemed stumpy, but heavily muscled. His chest was enormous, broad and deep like that of a man who had swum every day since boyhood. Thick strong arms, circled by leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli even in the gloom inside his shipboard tent. White scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest.

There was a fresh gash on his right forearm, as well, red and still oozing blood slightly.

The rain drummed against the canvas, scant inches above my head. The tent smelled of dogs, musty and damp. And cold. Odysseus wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had a sheep’s fleece thrown across his wide shoulders.

His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair. Only a trace of gray in that beard. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as gray as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.

He had asked his question the instant Poletes and I were ushered into his tent, without any preliminaries or formal greetings.

“Which god do you serve?”

Hastily I replied, “Athene.” I was not sure why I picked the warrior goddess, except that Poletes had said she favored the Achaians against the Trojans.

Odysseus grunted and motioned for me to sit on the only unoccupied stool in the tent. The two other men sitting on either side of him were dressed much as he was. One of them seemed about Odysseus’s age, the other much older: His hair and beard were entirely white and his limbs seemed withered to bones and tendons. He had wrapped a blue cloak around himself. They all looked weary and drained by the morning’s battle even though neither of them bore fresh wounds as Odysseus did.

Odysseus seemed to notice Poletes for the first time. “Who is he?” he asked, pointing.

“My friend,” I said. “My companion and helper.”

He nodded, accepting the storyteller. Behind Poletes, barely inside the tent and out of the pelting rain, stood the officer who had summoned us to this audience with the King of Ithaca.

“You did us a great service this morning,” said Odysseus. “Such service should be rewarded.”

The frail old man at Odysseus’s right spoke up in a surprisingly deep, strong voice. “We are told that you arrived as a thes aboard the boat that came in last night. Yet you fought this morning like a warrior born and bred. By the gods! You reminded me of myself when I was your age. I was absolutely fearless then! As far away as Mycenae and even Thebes I was known! Let me tell you…”

Odysseus raised his right hand. “Please, Nestor, I pray you forego your reminiscences for the moment.”

The old man looked displeased, but sank back in silence.

“What reward would you ask?” Odysseus said to me. “If it is in my power I will gladly grant it.”

I thought for half a moment only, then replied, “I ask to be made a warrior in the service of the King of Ithaca.” Then, sensing a slight shuffling of bare feet behind me, I added, “And to have my friend here as my servant.”

For several seconds Odysseus said nothing, although Nestor bobbed his white-bearded head vigorously and the younger warrior on the king’s left smiled at me.

“You are both thetes, without a household?” Odysseus asked.

“Yes.”

He stroked his beard. Then a slow smile spread across his face. “Then welcome to the household of the King of Ithaca. Your wish is granted.”

I was not certain of what I should do, until I saw Nestor frown slightly and prompt me by motioning with both hands, palms down. I knelt before Odysseus.

“Thank you, great king,” I said, hoping it was the right degree of humility. “I shall serve you to the best of my abilities.”

Odysseus took the armlet from his biceps and clasped it on my arm. “Rise, Orion. Your courage and strength will be a welcome addition to our forces.” To the officer at the tent’s entrance he commanded, “Antilokos, see that he gets some decent clothing — and weapons.”

Then he nodded a dismissal at me. I turned. Poletes was beaming at me. Antilokos, his wolfskin cape still dripping, looked at me as if measuring me, not for clothing, but as a fighter.

As we left the tent and went back into the pouring rain, I could hear King Nestor’s vibrant voice. “Very crafty of you, Odysseus! By bringing him into your household you gain the favor of Athene, whom he serves. I couldn’t have made a wiser move myself, although in my years I’ve made some very delicate decisions, let me tell you. Why, I remember the time when Dardanian pirates were raiding the coast of my kingdom and nobody seemed to be able to stop them, since King Minos’s fleet had been destroyed in the great tidal wave. Well then, the pirates captured a merchant ship bearing a load of copper from Kypros. Worth a fortune it was, because you know that you can’t make bronze without copper. No one knew what to do! The copper was…”

His voice, strong as it was, was finally drowned out by the heavy rain and moaning wind.

Antilokos led us past several Ithacan boats to a lean-to made of logs lashed together and then daubed with the same black pitch that caulked the boats. It was the largest structure I had seen in the camp, big enough to hold a couple of dozen men, I estimated. There was only one doorway, a low one with a sheet of canvas tacked over it to keep out the rain and wind.

Inside, the shed was a combination of warehouse and armory that made Poletes whistle with astonishment. Chariots were stored there, tilted up with their yoke poles pointing into the air. Stacks of helmets and armor were neatly piled along one wall, while racks of spears, swords, and bows lined the other, with chests full of clothes and blankets along the back wall between them.

“So much!” Poletes gasped.

Antilokos, who was not a man given to humor, made a grim smile. “Spoils from the slain.”

Poletes nodded and whispered, “So many.”

A wizened old man stepped across the sand floor from his hideaway behind a table piled with clay tablets.

“What now? Haven’t I enough to do without you dragging in strangers?” he whined. He was a lean and sour-faced old grump, his hands gnarled and twisted into claws, his back stooped.

“A new one for you, scribe. My lord Odysseus wants him outfitted properly.” And with that, Antilokos turned and ducked through the shed’s low doorway.

The scribe shuffled over close enough almost to touch me and peered up at me with squinted eyes. “Big as a Cretan bull! How does he expect me to find proper clothing for someone your size?”

He grumbled and muttered as he led Poletes and me past tables laden with bronze cuirasses, arm protectors, greaves, and plumed helmets. I stopped and reached for a helmet.

“Not that!” the scribe screeched. “Those are not for the likes of you!”

He sank one of those clawlike hands into my forearm and tugged me to a pile of clothes on the ground, close by the entrance to the shed.

“Here,” he said. “See what you can find among those.”

It took a while, but I eventually dressed myself in a stained linen tunic, a leather skirt that reached my knees, and a sleeveless leather jerkin that did not feel so tight across the shoulders that it would hamper my movements. While the scribe scowled and grumbled, I made certain that Poletes found a tunic and a wool shirt. For weapons I took a plain short sword and strapped a dagger to my right thigh, beneath the skirt. Neither one of them had precious metals or jewels in their hilts, although the sword’s crosspiece bore an intricate design engraved in its bronze.

The scribe could not find any kind of helmet that would fit me, so we finally settled on a hooded mantle of bronze chain mail. Sandals and bronze-studded leather greaves completed my array, although my toes hung out over the edges of the sandals noticeably.

The scribe resisted fiercely, but I insisted on taking two blankets apiece. He screeched and argued and threatened that he would call the king himself to tell what a spendthrift I was. It was not until I lifted him off his feet with a one-fisted grab at his tunic that he shut up and let me take the blankets. But his scowl would have curdled milk.

By the time we left the shed the rain had stopped and the westering sun was rapidly drying off the beach. Poletes led the way back to the fire and the men with whom we had shared our midday meal. We ate again, drank wine, and laid out our newly acquired blankets in preparation for sleeping.

Then Poletes fell to his bony knees and grasped my right hand in both of his, tightly, with a strength I would not have guessed was in him.

“Orion, my master, you have saved my life two times this day.”

I wanted to pull my hand loose.

“You have saved the whole camp from Hector’s spear and his vengeful Trojans, but in addition you have lifted me out of a life of misery and shame. I will serve you always, Orion. I will always be grateful to you for showing such mercy to a poor old storyteller.”

He kissed my hand.

I reached down and lifted him by his frail shoulders to his feet.

“Poor old windbag,” I said lightly, “you’re the first man I’ve ever seen grateful to become a slave.”

“Your slave, Orion,” he corrected. “I am happy to be that.”

I shook my head, uncertain of what to do or say. Finally I groused, “Well, get some sleep.”

“Yes. Certainly. May Phantasos send you happy dreams.”

I did not want to close my eyes. I did not want to dream of the Creator who called himself Apollo — if my encounter with him could be called a dream.

I lay on my back staring at the star-studded blackness, wondering which star our ship had been traveling to, and whether the light of its explosion would ever be seen in Earth’s night skies. I saw her face again, lovely beyond belief, dark hair gleaming in the starlight, gray eyes sparkling with desire.

He had killed her, I knew. The Golden One. Apollo. Killed her and blamed it on me. Killed her and exiled me to this primitive time. Killed her, but saved me for his own amusement.

“Orion?” a voice whispered.

I sat up and automatically put out a hand for the sword resting on the ground beside me.

“The king wants you.” It was Antilokos kneeling beside me.

I scrambled to my feet, gripping the sword. It was black night, with just enough light from the dying fire for me to recognize the man’s face.

“Better bring your helmet, if you have one,” Antilokos said.

I reached down and took my chain-mail mantle. Poletes’s eyes opened.

“The king wants to speak to me,” I told the old man. “Go back to sleep.”

He smiled and snuggled happily into his blankets.

I followed Antilokos past the sleeping bodies of our comrades to the prow of Odysseus’s boat.

As I had suspected, the king was much shorter than I. The plume of his helmet barely reached my chin. He nodded a greeting to me and said simply, “Follow me, Orion.”

The three of us walked silently through the sleeping camp and up to the crest of the rampart, not far from the gate where I had gained their respect earlier that day. Soldiers stood on guard up there, gripping long spears and eyeing the darkness nervously. Beyond the inky shadow of the trench the plain was dotted with Trojan campfires.

Odysseus gave a sigh that seemed to wrench his mighty chest. “Prince Hector holds the plain, as you can see. Tomorrow his forces will storm the rampart and try to break into our camp and burn our ships.”

“Can we hold them?” I asked.

“The gods will decide, once the sun comes up.”

I said nothing. I suspected that Odysseus was trying to come up with a plan that might influence the gods his way.

A strong tenor voice called from the darkness below us. “Odysseus, son of Laertes, are you counting the Trojan campfires?”

Odysseus smiled grimly. “No, Big Ajax. They are too many for any man to count.”

He motioned to me and we went back down into the camp. Ajax was indeed something of a giant among these men: He towered over them and even topped me by an inch or two. He was big across the shoulders, as well, and his arms were as thick as young tree trunks. He stood bareheaded under the stars, dressed only in a tunic and leather vest. His face was broad, with high cheekbones and a little pug of a nose. His beard was thin, new-looking, not like the thick curly growth of Odysseus and the other chieftains. With a bit of a shock, I realized that Big Ajax was very young, probably no more than nineteen or twenty.

A much older man stood beside him, hair and beard white, wrapped in a dark cloak.

“I brought Phoenix along,” said Big Ajax. “Maybe he can appeal to Achilles better than we can.”

Odysseus nodded his approval.

“I was his tutor when Achilles was a lad,” said Phoenix in a slightly quavering voice. “He was proud and touchy even then.”

Ajax shrugged his massive shoulders. Odysseus said, “Well, let us try to convince Achilles to rejoin the army.”

We started off for the far end of the camp, where Achilles’s boats were beached. Half a dozen armed men trailed behind the three nobles, and I fell in with them.

The wind was blowing in off the water, cold and sharp as a knife. I almost envied Poletes the blankets he had wrapped around himself, and began to wonder why I had not taken cloaks for the two of us from the tight-fisted old scribe.

Once we entered Achilles’s portion of the camp, we passed several sentries on duty, fully armed and armored, with helmets strapped on tightly and spears in their hands. They wore cloaks, which the wind plucked at and whipped around their suits of bronze armor. They recognized the giant Ajax and the squat but powerful King of Ithaca, of course, and let the rest of us pass unchallenged.

Finally we were stopped by a pair of guards whose armor glittered even in the faint starlight, within a few yards of a large cabin, built of planks.

“We are a deputation from the High King,” said Odysseus, his voice deep and grave with formality, “sent to see Achilles, prince of the Myrmidones.”

The guard saluted by clasping his fist to his heart and said, “Prince Achilles has been expecting you and bids you welcome.”

He stepped aside and gestured us to the door of the cabin.

Chapter 6

MIGHTY warrior though he was, Achilles apparently enjoyed his creature comforts. The cabin’s interior was draped with rich tapestries, and the floor was covered with more carpets. Couches and pillows were scattered across the spacious room. In one corner a hearth fire smoldered red, keeping out the cold and damp. I could hear the wind moaning through the hole in the roof, but inside it was reasonably snug and warm.

Three women sat by the fire staring at us with great dark eyes. They were slim and young, dressed modestly in sleeveless gray chemises. Iron and copper pots stood on tripods at the hearth, faint wisps of steam issuing from them. I smelled spiced meat and garlic.

Achilles himself sat on a wide couch against the far wall of the cabin, his back to a magnificent arras that depicted a gory battle scene. The couch was up on a dais, raised above the floor of the cabin like a king’s throne.

My first sight of the great warrior was a surprise. He was not a mighty-thewed giant, as Ajax. His body was not broad and powerful, as Odysseus’s. He seemed small, almost boyish, his bare arms and legs slim and virtually hairless. His chin was shaved clean and the ringlets of his long black hair were tied up in a silver chain. He wore a splendid white silk tunic, bordered with a purple key design, cinched at the waist with a belt of interlocking gold crescents.

He wore no weapons, but behind him a half-dozen long spears rested against the arras, within easy reach.

His face was the greatest shock. Ugly, almost to the point of being grotesque. Narrow beady eyes, lips curled in a perpetual snarl, a sharp hook of a nose, skin pocked and cratered. In his right hand he gripped a jeweled wine cup; it seemed to me that he had already drained it more than once.

At his feet sat a young man who was absolutely beautiful, gazing not at us but up at Achilles. It was Patrokles, I knew without being told. His tightly curled hair was reddish brown, rather than the usual darker tones of the Greeks. I wondered if it was his natural color. Like Achilles, Patrokles was beardless. But he seemed young enough not to need to shave. A golden pitcher of wine stood on the carpet beside him.

I looked at Achilles again and understood the demons that drove him to be the greatest warrior of his age. A small ugly boy born to a king. A boy destined to rule, but always the object of taunts and derisive laughter behind his back. A young man possessed with fire to silence the laughter, to stifle the taunting. His slim arms and legs were iron-hard, knotted with muscle. His eyes were absolutely humorless. There was no doubt in my mind that he could outfight Odysseus or even powerful Ajax on sheer willpower alone.

“Greetings, Odysseus the Ever-Daring,” he said, in a calm, clear tenor voice that was close to mocking. “And to you, mighty Ajax, King of Salamis and champion of the Achaian host.” Then his voice softened. “And to you, Phoenix, my well-loved tutor.”

I glanced at the old man. He bowed toward Achilles, but his eyes were on the beautiful Patrokles.

“We bring you greetings, Prince Achilles,” said Odysseus, “from Agamemnon the High King.”

“The bargain-breaker, you mean,” Achilles snapped. “Agamemnon the gift-snatcher.”

“He is our High King,” Odysseus said, his tone barely suggesting that they were all stuck with Agamemnon and the best they could do was try to work with him.

“So he is,” admitted Achilles. “And well beloved by Father Zeus, I’m sure.”

It was going to be a difficult parley, I could see.

“Perhaps our guests are hungry,” Patrokles suggested in a soft voice.

Achilles tousled his curly mop of hair. “Always the thoughtful one.”

He bade us sit and told the serving women to feed us and bring wine cups. Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix took couches arranged near Achilles’s dais. Patrokles filled their cups from his pitcher of gold. We underlings sat on the floor, by the entrance. The women passed trays of broiled lamb with onions among us and filled our wooden cups with spiced wine mixed with honey.

After a round of toasts and polite banter, Achilles said, “I thought I heard the mighty Agamemnon bawling like a woman, earlier today. He breaks into tears quite easily, doesn’t he?”

Odysseus frowned slightly. “Our High King was wounded today. A cowardly Trojan archer hit him in the right shoulder.”

“Too bad,” said Achilles. “I see that you did not escape the day’s fighting without a wound, yourself. Did it bring you to tears?”

Ajax burst out, “Achilles, if Agamemnon cries, it’s not from pain or fright. It’s from shame! Shame that the Trojans have penned us up in our camp. Shame that our best fighter sits here on a soft couch while his comrades are being slaughtered by Hector and his troops.”

“Shame is what he should feel!” Achilles shouted back. “He’s robbed me! He’s treated me like a slave or even worse. He calls himself the High King but he behaves like a thieving whoremaster!”

And so it went, for hours. Achilles was furious with Agamemnon for taking back a prize he had been awarded, some captive girl. He claimed that he did all the fighting while Agamemnon was a coward, but after the battle was won the High King parceled out the spoils to suit himself and even then reneged on what Achilles felt was due him.

“I have sacked more towns and brought the Achaians more captives and loot than any man here, and none of you can say I haven’t,” he insisted hotly. “Yet that fat lard-ass can steal my proper rewards away from me and you — all of you! — just let him do it. Did any of you stick up for me in the council? Do you think I owe you anything? Why should I fight for you when you won’t even raise your voices on my behalf?”

Patrokles tried to soothe him, without much success. “Achilles, these men aren’t your enemies. They’ve come here on a mission of reconciliation. It isn’t proper for a host to bellow at his guests so.”

“I know,” Achilles replied, almost smiling down at the young man. “It’s not your fault,” he said to Odysseus and the others. “But I’ll see myself in Hades before I’ll help Agamemnon again. He’s not trustworthy. You should be thinking about appointing a new leader for yourselves.”

Odysseus tried tact, praising Achilles’s prowess in battle, downplaying Agamemnon’s failures and shortcomings. Ajax, as blunt and straightforward as a shovel, flatly told Achilles that he was helping the Trojans to murder the Achaians. Old Phoenix appealed to his former student’s sense of honor, and recited childhood homilies at him.

Achilles remained unmoved. “Honor?” he snapped at Phoenix. “What kind of honor would I have left if I put my spear back in the service of the man who robbed me?”

Odysseus said, “We can get the girl back for you, if that’s what you want. We can get a dozen girls for you.”

“Or boys,” Ajax added. “Whatever you want.”

Achilles got to his feet, and Patrokles scrambled to stand beside him. I was right, he was terribly small, although every inch of him was hard with sinew. Even the slender Patrokles topped him by a few inches.

“I will defend my boats when Hector breaks into the camp,” Achilles said. “Until Agamemnon comes to me personally and apologizes, and begs me to rejoin the fighting, that is all that I will do.”

Odysseus rose, realizing that we were being dismissed. Phoenix stood up and, after glancing around, Ajax finally understood and got up too.

“What will the poets say of Achilles in future generations?” Odysseus asked, firing his last arrow at the warrior’s pride. “That he sulked in his tent while the Trojans slaughtered his friends?”

The shot glanced off Achilles without penetrating. “They will never say that I humbled myself and threw away my honor by serving a man who has humiliated me.”

We went to the doorway, speaking polite formal farewells. Phoenix hung back and I heard Achilles invite his old mentor to remain the night.

Outside, Ajax shook his head wearily. “There’s nothing we can do. He just won’t listen to us.”

Odysseus clapped his broad shoulder. “We tried our best, my friend. Now we must prepare for tomorrow’s battle without Achilles.”

Ajax trudged off into the darkness, followed by his men. Odysseus turned to me, a thoughtful look on his face.

“I have a task for you to perform,” he said. “If you are successful you can end the war.”

“And if I am not?”

Odysseus smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. “No man lives forever, Orion.”

Chapter 7

IN less than an hour I found myself picking my way across the trench that fronted our rampart and heading into the Trojan camp. A white cloth knotted above my left elbow proclaimed that I was operating under a flag of truce. The slim willow wand in my right hand was the impromptu symbol of a herald.

“These should get you past the Trojan sentries without having your throat slit,” Odysseus had told me. He did not smile as he said those words, and I did not find his reassurances very reassuring.

“Get to Prince Hector and speak to no one else,” he had commanded me. “Tell him that Agamemnon offers a solution to this war: If the Trojans will return Helen to her rightful husband, the Achaians will return to their own lands, satisfied.”

“Hasn’t that offer been made before?” I asked.

Odysseus smiled at my naivetй. “Of course. But always with the demand for a huge ransom, plus all the fortune that Helen brought with her. And always when we were fighting under the walls of Troy. Priam and his sons never believed we would abandon the siege without breaking in and sacking the city. But now that Hector is besieging us, perhaps they will believe that we are ready to quit, and merely need a face-saving compromise to send us packing.”

“Returning Helen is nothing more than a face-saving compromise?” I blurted.

He looked at me curiously. “She is only a woman, Orion. Do you think Menalaos has been pining away in celibacy since the bitch ran off with Aleksandros?”

I blinked at him, so taken aback by his attitude that I had no reply. I wondered, though, if Odysseus felt the same way about his own wife, waiting for him back in Ithaca.

He made me repeat my instructions and then, satisfied, led me to the top of the rampart, not far from where I had gained my moment of glory earlier in the day. I gazed out into the darkness. In the silvery moonlight a mist had risen, turning the plain into a ghostly shivering vapor that rose and sank slowly like the breath of some living thing. Here and there I could make out the glow of Trojan campfires, like distant faint stars in the shrouding fog.

“Remember,” said Odysseus, “you are to speak to Prince Hector and no one else.”

“I understand,” I said.

I scrambled down the slope of the rampart, into the inky shadows of the trench, and finally made my way through the slowly drifting tendrils of mist toward the Trojan camp, guided by the fires that flickered and glowed through the fog. The mist was cold on my skin, like the touch of death.

Peering through the moon-silvered haze, I saw one campfire that seemed larger, brighter, than all the others. That must be where Hector’s tent is, I told myself. I headed toward it, tense with the expectation of being challenged by a sentry at any moment. I hoped I would be challenged, and not merely speared out of the darkness before any questions were asked. My senses were hyper-alert; I think I could have heard a dagger being drawn from its sheath, or seen a man stalking behind me out of the back of my head. But I heard and saw nothing. It was as if the fog had enveloped the whole camp, muffled every sound, mummified every man there except me.

The fire seemed to be growing, as if someone were feeding it, turning it from a dying campfire into a great welcoming beacon. But it no longer flickered like a fire. It was a steady bright glare, growing more brilliant by the moment. Soon it was so bright that I had to throw my arm across my brow to shield my eyes from its burning intensity. I felt no heat from it, but its brilliance exerted a force of its own. I felt myself pressed by that blinding glare, forced to my knees by its overpowering golden radiance.

Then I heard a man’s laughter, and knew at once who it was.

“On your feet, Orion!” said the Golden One. “Or do you enjoy crawling like a worm?”

Slowly I rose to my feet. The Golden One stood bathed in a warm glow that seemed to separate us from the mist-shrouded plain. It remained night beyond us. No one in the camp stirred. No sentries saw us or heard us.

“Orion,” he said, his smile mocking, “somehow you continually find ways to displease me. You saved the Achaian camp.”

“That displeases you?” I asked.

He scratched at his chin, a strangely human gesture in so godlike a person. “As Apollo, the sun god, the one who brings light and beauty to these people, I seek victory for the Trojans over these barbarians from Achaia.”

“And the other…” I groped for a word, settled on, “gods? Not all of them favor Troy, do they?”

His smile withered.

“There are others,” I said. “Godlike beings like yourself?”

“There are,” he admitted.

“Greater than you? Is there a Zeus, a Poseidon?”

“There are several… beings such as I, Orion,” he said, waving a hand vaguely. “The names that these primitive people call them are irrelevant.”

“But are they more powerful than you? Is there a Zeus? A king among you?”

He laughed. “You’re trying to find a way of fighting against me!”

“I’m trying to understand who and what you are,” I said. Which was truth, as far as it went.

The Golden One eyed me carefully, almost warily. “Very well,” he said at last, “if you want to see some of the others…”

And gradually, like a night fog slowly burning away under the morning sun, I saw images beginning to form all around me. Slowly they emerged, materialized, took on solidity and color. Living, breathing men and women surrounded me, peered down at me, inspected me as a scientist might examine some species of insect or bacterium.

“This is rash,” said one of them in a deep godly voice.

“He is my creature,” the Golden One retorted. “I can control him.”

Yes, I thought. You can control me. But one day your control will slip.

I could see dozens of faces peering at me: beautiful women with flawless skin and eyes that glowed like jewels; men who radiated youth and yet spoke with the gravity and knowledge of millennia, eons, eternity itself.

I felt like a little boy in the midst of vastly wiser adults, like a child confronted by giants.

“I brought him here from the plain of Ilios,” said the Golden One, almost as if daring them to complain.

“You grow bolder,” said the one who had spoken first. He was dark of hair and eye, as solemn as a high craggy mountain. I thought of him as Zeus, even though there were no lightning bolts in his grip and his beard was neatly trimmed and barely touched with gray.

The Golden One laughed carelessly.

Around that circle of vast unsmiling faces I searched, looking for one that would be familiar, the goddess I had loved, or even the dark Ahriman whom I had hunted. I saw neither.

One of the women spoke. “You still intend to allow the Trojans to win their war?”

The Golden One smiled at her. “Yes, even though that displeases you.”

“The Greeks have much to offer your creatures,” she said.

“Pah! Barbarians.”

“They will not always be so. In time they will build a beautiful civilization… if you let them.”

With a shake of his golden mane, “The civilization of Troy will be even more beautiful, I promise you.”

“I have studied the time-tracks,” said one of the males. “The Greeks should be allowed to win.”

“No!” shouted the Golden One. “Damn the time-tracks! I am creating a new track here, one that will please all of us, if you’d only stop interfering with my plans.”

“We have as much right to manipulate these creatures as you do,” said the woman. “I really have very little confidence in your plans.”

“Because you don’t understand,” the Golden One insisted. “I want Troy to win because Troy will then become the most important nexus in this phase of human history. The city will grow into a mighty empire that spans Europe and Asia. Think of it! The energy and vigor of the Europeans combined with the wisdom and patience of the East. The wealth of both worlds will be commingled into a single, unified Ilian empire that will span from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent!”

“What good will that do?” asked one of the other men. Like the others, he was as handsome as a human face can be, flawless in every detail. “Your creatures will still have to face the ultimate crisis. Unity among them may be less desirable than a healthy amount of competition.”

“Yes,” said the woman. “Remember the Neanderthal-dominated track that you sent this creature to destroy. You ended by nearly destroying all of us.”

The Golden One glared down at me. “That was a mistake that will not be repeated.”

“No, not with Ahriman and his tribes safely in their own continuum now.”

“That is done and we survived the crisis,” said the one I called Zeus. “The question at hand is what to do about the particular nexus at Troy.”

“Troy must win,” insisted the Golden One.

“No, the Greeks should…”

“The Trojans will win,” the Golden One stated flatly. “They will win because I will make them win.”

“So that you can create this Ilian empire that appears to be so dear to your heart,” said Zeus.

“Exactly.”

“Why is that so important?” asked the woman.

“It will unify all of Europe and much of Asia,” he replied. “There will be no separation of East and West, no dichotomy of the human spirit. No Alexander of Macedon with his semibarbaric lusts, no Roman Empire, no Constantinople to act as a barrier between Asia and Europe. No Christianity and no Islam to fight their twenty-century-long war against each other.”

They listened and began to nod. All but the skeptical woman and the one I called Zeus.

It is a game to them, I realized. They are manipulating human history the way a chess player moves pieces across his board. And if a civilization is utterly destroyed, it means as little to them as if a pawn or a rook is captured and removed from the board.

“Does it really make that much difference?” asked one of the dark-haired men.

“Of course it does!” the Golden One replied. “I seek to unite the human race, to bring all the many facets of my creatures into harmony and unity…”

“So that they can help us to face the ultimate crisis,” said Zeus, almost in a mutter.

The Golden One nodded. “That is my goal. We need all the help we can get.”

“I am not certain that your way is the best method,” Zeus said.

“I’m certain it’s not,” said the woman.

“I’m going ahead with it whether you approve or not,” the Golden One retorted. “These are my creatures and I will bring them to the point where they can be of true assistance to us.”

The others in the circle murmured and nodded or shook their heads. There was no unanimity among them. As I watched, they began to fade away, to blur and dissolve until only the Golden One and I stood facing each other against the all-pervasive glow of a place that had no location, no time, in any world that I knew.

“Well, Orion, you have met the others. Some of them, at least.”

“You spoke of us as your creatures,” I said. “Do the others have creatures of their own, as well?”

“Some do. Others seem more interested in meddling with my creatures than in creating their own.”

“Then… the men and women of Earth — you created them?”

“You were one of the first of them, Orion,” he answered. “And, in a sense, you then created us.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“How could you?”

“You created the human race so that we can help you,” I said, repeating what I had heard.

“Ultimately, yes.”

“But while the others think you will bring us humans to their aid, you actually plan to have us help you against them,” I realized.

He stared at me.

“And that will make you the mightiest of all the gods, won’t it?”

He hesitated for a moment before replying. “I am the mightiest of all the Creators, Orion. The others may not recognize that fact, but it is so.”

Now I felt my lips twisting into a sardonic smile.

He knew my thought. “You think I do this out of egomania? Out of lust for worship by creatures I myself created?” He shook his head sadly. “How little you understand. Do you have any great desire for your sandals to adore you, Orion? Is it necessary for your happiness to have your sword or the knife hidden under your kilt to proclaim you as the greatest master they have ever known?”

“I don’t understand…”

“How could you? How could you dream of the consequences that I am dealing with? Orion, I created the human race out of necessity, truly — but not the necessity to be adored! The universes are wide, Orion, and filled with dangers. I seek to protect the continuum, to keep it from being torn apart by forces that you could not even imagine. While the others dither and bicker, I act. I create. I command!”

“And to accomplish your goal it is necessary for Troy to win this war?”

“Yes!”

“And it was necessary to destroy the starship we were riding? Necessary to kill the woman I loved? The woman who loved me?”

For a moment he looked almost startled. “You recall that?”

“I remember the starship. The explosion. She died in my arms. We both died.”

“I revived you. I returned you to life.”

“And her?”

“She was a goddess, Orion. I can only revive creatures whom I myself have created.”

“If she was a goddess, how could she die?”

“Gods and goddesses can die, Orion. Tales of our immortality are rather exaggerated. As are the pious recitations of our goodness and mercy.”

I felt my heart thudding in my chest, the blood roaring in my ears. My head swam. I could barely breathe. I hated this man, this golden self-styled god, this murderer. Hated him with every fiber of my being. He claims to have created me, I told myself. Yet I will destroy him.

“I did not want to kill her, Orion,” he said, and it almost sounded sincere. “It was beyond my control. She chose to make herself human. For your sake, Orion. She knew the risks and she accepted them for your sake.”

“And died.” A murderous rage was burning inside me. Yet when I tried to take a step toward him, I found I could not move. I was frozen, immobilized, unable even to clench my fists at my sides.

“Orion,” said the object of my hatred, “you cannot blame me for what she did to herself.”

How wrong he was!

“You must serve me whether you like it or not,” he insisted. “There is no way for you to avoid your destiny, Orion.” Then he added, muttering, almost to himself, “No way for either of us to avoid our destinies.”

“I can refuse to serve you,” I said stubbornly.

He lifted one golden eyebrow and considered me, the haughty, mocking tone back in his voice. “While you live, my angry creature, you will play your part in my plans. You cannot refuse because you can never know which acts of yours serve me and which do not. You stagger along blindly in your time-bound linearity, going from day to day, while I perceive space-time on the scale of the continuum.”

“Grand talk,” I spat. “You sound almost as grandiloquent as old Nestor.”

His eyes narrowed. “But I speak the truth, Orion. You see time as past and present and future. I create time and manipulate it to keep the continuum from being torn asunder. And while you live, you will help me in this mighty task.”

“While I live,” I repeated. “Is that a threat?”

He smiled again. “I make no threats, Orion. I have no need to. I created you. I can destroy you. You have no memory of how many times you have died, do you? Yet I have revived you each time, so that you could serve me again. That is your destiny, Orion. To serve me. To be my Hunter.”

“I want to be free,” I shouted. “Not your puppet!”

“Pah! I waste my time trying to explain myself to you. No one is free, Orion. No creature can ever be free. Not as long as you live.”

He clasped his arms together across his chest and disappeared as abruptly as a candle snuffed out by a sharp gust of wind. Suddenly I was alone in the fog-wrapped darkness of the plain before Troy.

As long as I live, I thought silently, I will struggle to reach your throat. It was a mistake to tell me that you are not immortal. I am the Hunter, and now I know the prey I seek. I will kill you, golden Apollo, Creator, whatever your true name and shape may be. While I live I will seek your death and nothing less. Just as you killed her, I will kill you.

Chapter 8

“YOU there! Hold!”

I was standing in the Trojan camp again, a sudden sharp wind gusting in from the sea and shredding the mist that had covered the plain. Campfires dotted the darkness, and off in the distance the beetling towers of Troy bulked black and menacing against the moon-bright sky.

I tottered on unsteady feet, like a man who has drunk too much wine, like a man who has suddenly been pushed through a door that he had not seen. The Golden One and the other Creators were gone as completely as if they had been nothing more than a dream. But I knew they were real. They were out there in another plane of existence, toying with us, arguing over which side should win this wretched war. My hands clenched into fists as the memory of their faces and their words fueled the rage burning within me.

A pair of sentries approached me warily, heavy spears in their hands. I gulped down a deep breath of chill night air to calm myself.

“I am an emissary from the High King Agamemnon,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I have been sent to speak to Prince Hector.”

The sentries were an unlikely pair, one short and squat with a dirty, tangled black beard and a pot belly bulging his chain mail corselet, the other taller and painfully thin, either clean-shaven or too young to start a beard.

“Prince Hector the Tamer of Horses he wants to see,” said the pot-belly. He laughed harshly. “So would I!”

The younger one grinned and showed a gap where a front tooth was missing.

“An emissary, eh?” Pot-belly eyed me suspiciously. “With a sword at his side and a mantle of chain mail across his shoulders. More likely a spy. Or an assassin.”

I held up my herald’s wand. “I have been sent by the High King. I am not here to fight. Take my sword and mantle, if they frighten you.” I could have disabled them both before they knew what had happened, but that was not my mission.

“Be a lot safer to ram this spear through your guts and have done with it,” said Pot-belly.

The youngster put out a restraining hand. “Hermes protects messengers, you know. I wouldn’t want to draw down the anger of the Trickster.”

Pot-belly scowled and muttered, but finally satisfied himself by taking my sword and chain mail. He did not search me, and therefore did not take the dagger strapped to my right thigh. He was more interested in loot than security.

Once Pot-belly had slipped my baldric across his shoulder and fastened my mantle under his quivering chins, the two of them led me to their chief.

They were Dardanians, allies of the Trojans who had come from several miles up the coast to fight against the invading Achaians. Over the next hour or so I was escorted from the chief of the Dardanian contingent to a Trojan officer, from there to the tent of Hector’s chief lieutenants, and finally past the makeshift horse corral and the silently waiting chariots, tipped over with their long yoke poles poking into the air, to the small plain tent and guttering fire of Prince Hector.

At each stop I explained my mission again. Dardanians and Trojans alike spoke a dialect of the Greek spoken by the Achaians, different but not so distant as to be unintelligible. I realized that the city’s defenders included contingents from many areas up and down the coast. The Achaians had been raiding their towns for years, and now they had all banded together under Trojan leadership to resist the barbarian invaders.

That was the Golden One’s aim: to have the Trojans beat back the Achaians and gain supremacy over the Aegean. Eventually they would establish an empire that would span Europe, the Middle East, and India.

If that was his goal, then mine must be to prevent it from being achieved. If Odysseus was offering a compromise that would allow the Achaians to sail away without burning Troy to the ground, then I must sabotage the offer. I felt a momentary pang of conscience. Odysseus trusted me. Or, I asked myself, had he sent me on this diplomatic mission because he could better afford to lose me than one of his own people?

With those thoughts swirling in my head, I was brought before Hector.

His tent was barely large enough for himself and a servant. A pair of armored noblemen stood by the fire outside the tent’s entrance, their bronze breastplates gleaming against the night. Insects buzzed and darted in the firelight. No slaves or women in sight. Hector himself stood at the entrance flap to the tent. He was a big man for these people, nearly my own height.

Hector wore no armor, no badge of his rank. Merely a soft clean tunic belted at the waist, with an ornamental dagger hanging from the leather belt. He had no need to impress anyone with his grandeur. He possessed that calm inner strength that needs no outward decorations.

In the flickering light of his campfire he studied me silently for a moment. Those same grave brown eyes. His face was handsome, intelligent, though there were lines of weariness around his eyes, furrows across his broad brow. Despite the fullness of his rich brown beard I saw that his cheeks were becoming hollow. The strain of this war was taking its toll on him.

“You are the man at the gate,” he said finally. His words were measured, neither surprise nor anger in them.

I nodded.

He looked me over carefully. “Your name?”

“Orion.”

“From where?”

“Far to the west of here. Beyond the seas where the sun sets.”

“Beyond Okeanus?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He puzzled over that, brow knitted, for a few moments. Then he asked, “What brings you to the plain of Ilios? Why are you fighting for the Achaians?”

“A duty I owe to a god,” I said.

“Which god?”

“Athene.”

“Athene sent you here to fight for the Achaians?” He seemed concerned at that, almost worried.

With a shake of my head, I answered, “I arrived at the Achaian camp the night before yesterday. I had never seen Troy before. Suddenly, in the midst of the fighting, I acted on impulse. I don’t know what made me do what I did. It all happened in the flash of a moment.”

Hector smiled tightly. “Battle frenzy. A god took control of your spirit, my friend, and inspired you to deeds no mortal could achieve unaided. It has happened to me many times.”

I smiled back at him. “Yes, perhaps that is what happened to me.”

“Have no doubt of it. Ares or Athene seized your spirit and filled you with battle frenzy. You could have challenged Achilles himself in such a state.”

Slaves came out of the darkness to set up chairs of stretched hides and offer fruit and wine. Following Hector’s lead, I sat and took a little of each. The quality of the Trojan wine was far superior to that of the Achaians.

“You carry the wand of a herald and say that you are here as an emissary of Agamemnon,” Hector said, leaning back tiredly in his creaking chair.

“I bring an offer of peace.”

“We have heard such offers before. Is there anything new in what Agamemnon proposes?”

I noticed that his two aides stepped closer, eager to hear what I had to say. I thought briefly of Odysseus, who trusted me. But I said: “The High King repeats his earlier offer of peace. If you will restore Helen and the fortune she brought from Sparta with her, and pay an indemnity for the costs the Achaians have incurred, Agamemnon will lead his ships away from Ilios and Troy.”

Hector glanced up at his two standing lieutenants, who muttered grimly.

Then to me he said, “We did not accept these terms when the Achaians had us penned up inside our city walls, without allies. Now that we outnumber them and have them penned in their own camp, why should we even consider such insulting terms?”

I had to make it sound at least halfway convincing, I thought. “In the view of the Achaians, Prince Hector, your success today was helped greatly by the fact that Achilles did not enter the battle. He will not remain on the sidelines forever.”

“One man,” Hector countered.

“The best warrior in the Achaian host,” I pointed out. “And his Myrmidones are a formidable fighting unit, I am told.”

“True enough,” admitted Hector. “Still, this offer of peace is no different than all the others, even though we now hold the upper hand.”

“Then what am I to tell the High King?”

Hector got to his feet. “That is not my decision to make. I command the army, but my father is still king in Troy. He and his council must consider your offer.”

I rose too. “King Priam?”

“Polydamas,” he called, “conduct this herald to the king. Aeneas, spread the word to the chiefs that we will not attack until King Priam has considered the latest peace offering from Agamemnon.”

A surge of elation swept through me. The Trojans will not attack the Achaian camp as long as I am dickering with their king! I can give Odysseus and the others a day’s respite from battle, at least.

And then I realized that this is exactly what Odysseus had planned. The King of Ithaca had sent an expendable hero — one whom Hector would recognize, yet not someone important to the Achaian strength — into the Trojan camp in a crafty move to gain a day’s recuperation from this morning’s disaster.

I had thought that I was betraying Odysseus, but he had outsmarted both Hector and me.

Trying to look properly grave and not let my emotions show, I followed the Trojan nobleman called Polydamas through the camp on the plain and to the walls of Troy.

Chapter 9

I entered the fabled city of Troy in the dead of night. The moon was up, but still it was so dark that I could see practically nothing. The city walls loomed above like ominous shadows. I saw feeble lanterns lighting a gate as we passed a massive old oak tree, tossing and sighing in the night breeze, leaning heavily, bent by the incessant wind of Ilios.

To approach the gate we had to follow a road that led alongside the beetling walls. Just before the gate a second curtain wall extended on the other side of the road, so that anyone coming up to the gate was vulnerable to fire from both sides, as well as ahead.

The gate itself seemed only lightly defended. Virtually the entire Trojan force was camped down by the beach, I realized. A trio of teenagers were lounging in the open gateway, their inevitable long spears resting against the stone wall. A few more stood on the battlements above.

Inside, a broad packed-earth street led between buildings that seemed no more than two stories tall. The moon’s pale cold light only made the shadows of their shuttered fronts seem deeper and darker. It must have been well past midnight. Hardly anyone was stirring along this main street or in the black alleyways leading off it, not even a cat.

Polydamas was not a wordy fellow. In virtually total silence he led me to a low-roofed building and into a tiny room lit by the fluttering yellow-blue flame of a small copper oil lamp sitting on a three-legged wooden stool. There was a single narrow bed and a chest of cedarwood, nothing else. A rough woolen blanket covered the bed.

“You will be summoned to the king’s presence in the morning,” said Polydamas, his longest speech of the night. With not another word he left me, closing the wooden door softly behind him.

And bolting it.

With nothing better to do, I undressed, pulled back the scratchy blanket, and stretched out on the bed. It was springy; a thin mattress of feathers atop a webbing of ropes.

As I started to drowse off I suddenly realized that the Golden One might invade my dreams once again. For a while I tried to stave off sleep, but my body got the better of my will, and inevitably my eyes closed. My last waking thought was to wonder how I might make contact with some of the other Creators, with the Zeus who regarded the Golden One’s plans so questioningly, with the woman who openly opposed him.

But if I did dream, I had no memory of it when I was awakened by the door bolt snapping back. I sat up, immediately alert, and reached for the dagger that I had unstrapped, but left on the bed between my body and the wall.

A serving woman backed into the room, carrying a basin and a jug of water. When she turned and saw me sitting there naked, she smiled, made a little curtsy, and deposited the pottery atop the cedarwood chest. Then she backed out of the room and shut the door. Outside, I could hear the giggling of several women.

A Trojan man entered my room after a single sharp rap on the door. He seemed more a courtier than a warrior. He was fairly tall but round-shouldered, soft-looking, with a bulging middle. His beard was quite gray, his pate balding, his tunic richly embroidered and covered with a long sleeveless robe of deep green.

“I am to conduct you to King Priam’s audience chamber, once you have had your morning meal.”

Diplomacy moved at a polite pace; I was glad of it. The Trojan courtier led me to the urinals in the back of the house, then back to my room for a quick washup. Breakfast consisted of fruit, cheese, and flat bread, washed down with goat’s milk. We ate in the large kitchen that fronted the house. Half the room was taken up by a big circular hearth, under an opening in the roof. It was cold and empty except for a scattering of gray ashes that looked as if they had been there a long time.

Through the kitchen’s open window I could see men and women going about their morning chores. Serving women attended us, eyeing me curiously. The courtier ignored them, except to give orders for more figs and honey.

Finally we walked out along what seemed to be Troy’s only major street, sloping gently uphill toward a majestic building of graceful fluted columns and a steeply pitched roof. Priam’s palace, I guessed. Or the city’s main temple. Perhaps both. The sun was not high yet, but still it felt much warmer here in the street than out on the windy plain.

“Is that where we’re going?” I pointed.

The courtier bobbed his head. “Yes, of course. The king’s palace. A more splendid palace doesn’t exist anywhere in the world — except perhaps in Egypt, of course.”

I was surprised at how small the city actually was. And crowded. Houses and shops clustered together tightly. The street was unpaved, and sloped like a V so that water would run down its middle when it rained. Cart wheels had worn deep grooves in it. The men and women bustling about their morning’s work seemed curious yet courteous. I received bows and smiles as we strolled up toward the palace.

“The royal princes, such as Hector and Aleksandros and their brothers, live in the palace with the king.” My courtier was turning into a tour guide. He gestured back down the street. “Nearer the Scaean gate are the homes of the lesser princes and nobility. Fine homes they are, nevertheless, far finer than you will find in Mycenae or even Miletus.”

We were walking through the market area now. Awning-shaded stalls lined the two-story high brick homes here, although I saw precious little merchandise on sale: bread, dried vegetables, a skinny lamb that bleated mournfully.

Yet the merchants, men and women both, seemed smiling and happy.

“You bring a day of peace,” the courtier told me. “Farmers can bring their produce to market this morning. Wood-cutters can go out to the forest and bring back fuel before night falls. The people are grateful for that.”

“The siege has hurt you,” I murmured.

“To some extent, of course. But we are not going hungry. There is enough grain stored in the royal treasury to last for years! The city’s water comes from a spring that Apollo himself protects. And when we really need firewood or cattle or anything else, our troops escort the necessary people on a foray inland.” He lifted his gray-bearded chin a notch or two. “We will not starve.”

I said nothing.

He took my silence for an argument. “Look at those walls! The Achaians will never be able to scale them.”

I followed his admiring gaze down a crooked alley and saw the towered walls that rose above the houses. They did indeed look high and solid and strong.

“Apollo and Poseidon helped old King Laomedon build those walls, and they have withstood every assault made on them. Of course, Herakles once sacked the city, but he had divine help and even he didn’t dare try to breach those walls. He attacked over on the western side, where the oldest wall stands. But that was long ago.”

I perked up my ears. The western wall was weaker? But, as if sensing that he had said too much, my guide lapsed into a red-faced silence. We walked the rest of the way to the palace without further words.

Men-at-arms held their spears stiffly upright as we passed the crimson-painted columns at the front of the palace and entered its cool interior. I saw no marble, which somehow surprised me. The columns and the thick palace walls were made of a grayish, granitelike stone, polished to gleaming smoothness. Inside, the floors were covered with brightly colored polished tiles. The walls were plastered and painted in bright yellows and reds, with blue or green borders running along the ceilings.

The interior was cold. Despite the sun’s heat, those thick stone walls insulated the palace so well that I almost imagined I could see my breath frosting in the shaded air.

The hall beyond the entrance was beautifully decorated with painted landscapes on its plastered walls. Scenes of lovely ladies and handsome men in green fields rich with towering trees. No battles, no hunting scenes, no proclamations of imperial power or bloodthirstiness.

Statues lined this corridor, most of them life-size, some smaller, several so large that their heads or outstretched arms scraped the polished beams of the high ceiling.

“The city’s gods,” my courtier explained. “Most of these statues stood outside the city’s four main gates, before the war. Of course we brought them in here for safekeeping from the despoiling Achaians.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

The statues seemed to be marble. To my surprise, they were brightly painted. Hair and beards were deep black, with bluish highlights. Gowns and tunics were mostly gold, and real jewels adorned them. The flesh was delicately colored, and the eyes were painted so vividly that they almost seemed to be watching me.

I could not tell one from another. The gods all seemed broad-shouldered and bearded, the goddesses ethereally beautiful. Then I recognized Poseidon, a magnificently muscular figure with a deep curly beard who bore a trident in his right hand.

We stepped out of the chilly entrance hall and into the warming sunlight of a courtyard. A huge statue, much too large to fit indoors, stood just before us. I craned my neck to see its face against the crystal-blue morning sky.

And felt my knees give way.

It was the Golden One. Perfect in every detail, as if he had sat for a portrait. Every detail except one: The Trojan artist had painted his hair black, as all the other gods. But the face, the slight curl of the lip, the eyes — they stared down at me, slightly amused, slightly bored. I trembled. I fully expected the statue to move, to speak.

“Apollo,” said the courtier. “The protector of our city.” If he noticed how the statue affected me, he was too polite to mention it. Or perhaps it was reverence for the god.

I pulled my gaze away from the Golden One’s painted eyes. My insides fluttered with anger and the frustration that comes with hopelessness. How could I even think of working against his wishes, of defying him, of killing him? Yet I will do it, I told myself. With an effort of will that seemed to wrench at the soul within me, I promised myself afresh that I would bring the Golden One to dust.

We started across the sunny courtyard. It was decked with blossoms and flowering shrubs. Potted trees were arranged artfully around a square central pool. I saw fish swimming there lazily.

“We also have our statue of Athene,” the courtier said, pointing across the pool to a small wooden piece, scarcely three feet tall. “It is very ancient and very sacred.”

The statue was facing away from us as we crossed the courtyard and entered the other wing of the palace. Instantly, as we stepped into the shade of the wide entrance hall, the temperature dropped precipitously.

More soldiers stood guard in this hallway, although I got the feeling that their presence was a matter of pomp and formality, not security. The courtier led me to a small chamber comfortably furnished with chairs of stretched hide and gleaming polished tables inlaid with beautiful ivory and silver. There was one window, which looked out on another, smaller, courtyard, and a massive wooden door decorated with bronze strapping. Closed.

“The king will see you shortly,” he said, looking nervously toward the closed door.

I took a chair and willed my body to relax. I did not want to appear tense or apprehensive in front of the Trojan king. The courtier, whom I had assumed spent much of his life in this palace, seemed to be wound up tight. He paced the small chamber worriedly. I pictured him with a cigarette, puffing like an expectant father.

Finally he blurted, “Do you truly bring an offer of peace, or is this merely another Achaian bluff?”

So that was it. Beneath his confidence in the walls built by gods and the food and firewood gathered by their army and the eternal spring that Apollo himself protects — he was anxious to have the war ended and his city safe and at peace once more.

Before I could reply, though, that heavy door creaked open. Two men-at-arms pushed at it, and an old man in a green cloak similar to my courtier’s motioned me to come to him. He leaned heavily on a long wooden staff topped with a gold sunburst symbol. His beard was the color of ashes, his head almost totally bald. As I ducked through the doorway and approached him, he squinted at me nearsightedly.

“Your proper name, herald?”

“Orion.”

“Of?”

I blinked, wondering what he meant. Then I replied, “Of the House of Ithaca.”

He frowned at that, but turned and took a few steps into the audience chamber, then banged his staff on the floor three times. I saw that the stone floor was deeply worn at that spot.

He called out, in a voice that may have once been rich and deep but now sounded like a cat yowling, “Oh Great King — Son of Laomedon, Scion of Scamander, Servant of Apollo, Beloved of the Gods, Guardian of the Hellespont, Protector of the Troad, Western Bulwark of the Hatti, Defender of Ilios — an emissary from the Achaians, one Orion by name, of the House of Ithaca.”

The chamber was spacious, wide and high-ceilinged. Its middle was open to the sky, above a circular hearth that smoldered a dull red and sent up a faint spiral of gray smoke. Dozens of men and women stood among the painted columns on the far side of the hearth: the nobility of Troy, I supposed, or at least the noblemen who were too old to be with the army. And their ladies. Their robes were rich with vibrant colors and flashing jewels.

I stepped forward and beheld Priam, the King of Troy, sitting on a splendid throne of carved ebony inlaid with gold set upon a three-step-high dais. To my surprise, he was flanked on his right by Hector, who must have come up from the camp by the beach. On his left sat a younger man, and standing behind him -

She was truly beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships. Helen was blonde, golden curls falling past her shoulders. A small, almost delicate figure except for magnificent breasts covered only by the sheerest blouse. A girdle of gold cinched her waist, adding emphasis to the bosom. Even from across the wide audience chamber I could see that her face was incredible, sensuous yet wide-eyed with an appearance of innocence that no man could resist.

She leaned against the intricately carved back of Aleksandros’s chair, the young prince on Priam’s left had to be Aleksandros, I realized. Darker of hair and beard than Hector, almost prettily handsome. Helen rested one hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her and she smiled dazzlingly at him. Then they both turned their gaze toward me as I approached. Helen’s smile disappeared the instant Aleksandros looked away from her. She regarded me with cool, calculating eyes.

Priam was older than Nestor, and obviously failing. His white beard was thin and ragged, his long hair also, as if some wasting disease had hold of him. He seemed sunk into his robes of royal purple as he sat slumped on his gold-inlaid throne, too tired even this early in the morning to sit upright or lift his arms out of his lap.

The wall behind his throne was painted in a seascape of blues and aquamarines. Graceful boats glided among sporting dolphins. Fishermen spread their nets into waters teeming with every kind of fish.

“My lord king,” said Hector, dressed in a simple tunic, “this emissary from Agamemnon brings another offer of peace.”

“Let us hear it,” breathed Priam, as faintly as a sigh.

They all looked to me.

I glanced at the assembled nobility and saw an eagerness, a yearning, a clear hope that I carried an offer that would end the war. Especially among the women I could sense the desire for peace, although I realized that the old men were hardly firebrands.

I bowed deeply to the king, then nodded in turn to Hector and Aleksandros. I caught Helen’s eye as I did so, and she seemed to smile slightly at me.

“O Great King,” I began, “I bring you greeting from High King Agamemnon, leader of the Achaian host.”

Priam nodded and waggled the fingers of one hand, as if urging me to get through the preliminaries and down to business.

I did. I told them not of Odysseus’s offer to leave with Helen and nothing else, but of my elaboration: Helen, her fortune, and an indemnity for Agamemnon to distribute to his army.

I could feel the air in the chamber change. The eager expectation died. A somber reaction of gloom settled on them all.

“But this is nothing more than Agamemnon has offered in the past,” wheezed Priam.

“And which we have steadfastly refused,” Hector added.

Aleksandros laughed. “If we refused such insulting terms when the Achaians were pounding at our gates, why should we even consider them now, when we have the barbarians penned up at the beach? In a day or two we’ll be burning their ships and slaughtering them like the cattle they are.”

“I am a newcomer to this war,” I said. “I know nothing of your grievances and rights. I have been instructed to offer the terms for peace, which I have done. It is for you to consider them and make an answer.”

“I will never surrender my wife,” Aleksandros snapped. “Never!”

Helen smiled at him and he reached up to take her hand in his.

“A newcomer, you say?” Priam asked, his curiosity pricked enough to light his eyes. “Yet you claim to be of the House of Ithaca. When you first ducked your head past the lintel of our doorway I thought you might be the one they call Great Ajax.”

I replied, “Odysseus has taken me into his household, my lord king. I arrived on these shores only a few days ago…”

“And single-handedly stopped me from storming the Achaian camp,” Hector said, somewhat ruefully. “Too bad that Odysseus has adopted you. I wouldn’t mind having such a fearless man at my side.”

Surprised by his offer, and wondering what it might imply, I answered merely, “I fear that would be impossible, my lord.”

“Yes,” Hector agreed. “Too bad, though.”

Priam stirred on his throne, coughed painfully, then said, “We thank you for the message you bring, Orion of the House of Ithaca. Now we must consider before making answer.”

He gestured a feeble dismissal. I bowed again and went back to the anteroom. The guards closed the heavy door behind me.

I was alone in the small chamber; the courtier who had guided me earlier had disappeared. I went to the window and looked out at the lovely garden, so peaceful, so bright with flowers and humming bees intent on their morning’s work. No hint of war there: merely the endless cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.

I thought about the words the Golden One had spoken to me. How many times had I died and been reborn? To what purpose? He wanted Troy to win this war, or at least survive the Achaian siege. Therefore my desire was the same as Agamemnon’s: to crush Troy, to burn it to the ground, to slaughter its people and destroy it forever.

Destroy that garden? Burn this palace? Slaughter Hector and aged Priam and all the rest?

I clenched my fists and squeezed my eyes tight. Yes! I told myself. Just as the Golden One would slaughter Odysseus and old Poletes. Just as he burned my love to death.

“Orion of Ithaca.”

I wheeled from the window. A single soldier stood at the doorway, bareheaded, wearing a well-oiled leather harness rather than armor, a short sword at his hip.

“Follow me, please.”

I followed him down a long hallway and up a flight of stairs, then through several rooms that were empty of people, although richly furnished and decorated with gorgeous tapestries. They will burn nicely, I found myself thinking. Up another flight we went, and finally he ushered me into a comfortable sitting room, with undraped windows and an open doorway that looked out on a terrace and the distant sea. Lovely murals decorated the walls, scenes of peaceful men and women in a pastel world of flowers and gentle beasts.

The soldier closed the door and left me alone. But not for long. Through the door on the opposite side of the room, a scant few moments later, stepped the beautiful Helen.

Chapter 10

SHE was breathtaking, there is no denying it. She wore a flounced skirt of shimmering rainbow colors with golden tassels that tinkled as she walked toward me. Her corselet was now as blue as the Aegean sky, her white blouse so gauzy that I could see the dark circles of the areolae around her nipples. She wore a triple gold necklace and more gold at both wrists and earlobes. Jeweled rings glittered on her fingers.

She was tiny, almost delicate, despite her hour-glass figure. Her skin was like cream, unblemished and much lighter than the women I had seen in the Achaian camp. Her eyes were as deeply blue as the Aegean, her lips lush and full, her hair the color of golden honey, with ringlets falling well past her lovely shoulders. One stubborn curl hung down over her forehead. She wore a scent of flowers: light, clean, yet beguiling.

Helen smiled at me and gestured toward a chair. She took a cushioned couch, her back to the open windows. I sat and waited for her to speak. In truth, just looking at her against the background of the blue sky and bluer sea was a feast that seemed too good for mere words.

“You say you are a stranger to this land.” Her voice was low, melodious. I could understand how Aleksandros, or any other man, would dare anything to have her. And keep her.

I nodded and found that I had to swallow once before I could speak. “My lady, I arrived on a boat only a few days ago. Before then, all I knew of Troy was… stories told by wayfarers.”

“You are a sailor, then?”

“Not really,” I said. “I am a… traveler, a wanderer.”

She looked at me with a hint of suspicion in those clear blue eyes. “Not a warrior?”

“I have been a warrior, from time to time, but that is not my profession.”

“Yet it may be your destiny.”

I had no answer for that.

Helen said, “You serve the goddess Athene.” It was not a question. She had excellent intelligence sources, apparently.

Nodding, I replied, “That is true.”

She bit her lower lip. “Athene despises me. She is the enemy of Troy.”

“Yet her statue is honored…”

“You cannot fail to honor so powerful a goddess, Orion. No matter how Athene hates me, the people of this city must continue to placate her as best they can. Certain disaster will overtake them if they do not.”

“Apollo protects the city,” I said.

She nodded. “Yet I fear Athene.” Helen looked beyond me, looking into the past, perhaps. Or trying to see the future.

“My lady, is there some service you wish me to do for you?”

Her gaze focused on me once again. A faint smile dimpled her cheeks. “You wonder why I summoned you?”

“Yes.”

The smile turned impish. “Don’t you think that I might want a closer look at such a handsome stranger? A man so tall, with such broad shoulders? Who stood alone against Hector and his chariot team and turned them away?”

I bowed my head slightly. “May I ask you a question, my lady?”

“You may — although I don’t promise to answer.”

“All the world wonders: Did Aleksandros actually abduct you, or did you leave Sparta with him willingly?”

Her smile remained. It even grew wider, until she threw her head back and laughed a hearty, genuinely amused laugh.

“Orion,” she said at last, “you certainly don’t understand the ways of women.”

I may have blushed. “That’s true enough,” I admitted.

“Let me tell you this much,” Helen said. “No matter how or why I accompanied Aleksandros to this great city, I will not willingly return to Sparta.” Before I could reply she quickly added, “Not that I harbor ill feelings for Menalaos, my first husband. He was kind to me.”

“But Aleksandros is kinder?”

She spread her arms. “Look about you, Orion! You have eyes, use them. What woman would willingly live as the wife of an Achaian lord when she could be a princess of Troy?”

“But Menalaos is a king…”

“And an Achaian queen is still regarded less than her husband’s dogs and horses. A woman in Sparta is a slave, be she wife or concubine, there is no real difference. Do you think there would be women present in the great hall at Sparta when an emissary arrives with a message for the king? Or at Agamemnon’s Mycenae or Nestor’s Pylos or even in Odysseus’s Ithaca? No, Orion. Here in Troy women are regarded as human beings. Here there is civilization.”

“Then your preference for Aleksandros is really a preference for Troy,” I said.

She put a finger to her lips, as if thinking over the words she wished to use. Then, “When I was wed to Menalaos I had no say in the choice. The young lords of Achaia all wanted me — and my dowry. My father made the decision. If, the gods forbid, the Achaians should win this war and force me to return to Sparta with Menalaos, I will again be chattel.”

“Would you agree to return to Menalaos if it meant that Troy would be saved from destruction?”

“Don’t ask such a question! Do you think Agamemnon fights for his brother’s honor? The Achaians are intent on destroying this city. I am merely their excuse for attacking.”

“So I have heard from others, in the Achaian camp.”

“Priam is near death,” Helen said. “Hector will die in battle; that is foretold. But Troy itself need not fall, even if Hector does.”

And, I thought, if Hector dies Aleksandros will become king. Making Helen the queen of Troy.

She fixed me with her eyes and said, “Orion, you may say this to Menalaos: If he wants me to return to him, he will have to win me by feats of battle. I will not go willingly to a man as the consolation prize for losing this war.”

I took in a deep breath. She was far wiser than I had assumed. She unquestionably wants Troy to win this war, wants to remain in this city so that one day she can be its queen. Yet she wants to tell her former husband that she will come back to him — if he wins! She’s telling him, through me, that she will return to Sparta and be the docile Achaian wife — if and when Troy is burned to the ground.

Clever woman! No matter who wins, she will protect her own lovely skin.

We chatted for a few moments more, but it was clear that Helen had imparted the message she wanted me to bear back to the Achaians. Finally she rose, signaling that our meeting was ended. I got to my feet and went to the door by which I had entered the chamber. Sure enough, the guard was outside waiting to escort me back to the king’s audience hall.

No one was there except the courtier who had been with me earlier in the morning. The columned hall was empty, echoing.

“The king and royal princes are still deliberating on your message,” he whispered. “You are to wait.”

I waited. We strolled through several of the palace’s halls and chambers and finally out into the big courtyard we had come through that morning. The hot sun felt good on my bare arms.

Out of curiosity I walked across the garden to the small statue of Athene. It was barely the length of my arm, and obviously very old, weathered by many years of rain and wind. Unlike the other, grander statues, it was unpainted. Or, rather, the original paint had long since worn away and had never been replaced.

Athene. The warrior goddess was dressed in a long robe, yet carried a shield and spear. A plumed helmet rested on the back of her head, pushed up and away from her face.

I looked at that face and the breath gushed out of me. It was her face, the face of the woman I had loved. The face of the goddess that the Golden One had killed.

Chapter 11

SO it was true. The gods are not immortal. Just as the Golden One had told me. And I knew that he had not lied about the rest: The gods are neither merciful nor beneficent. They play their games and make up their own rules while we, their creatures, try to make sense of what they do to us.

The rage burned in me. They are not immortal. The gods can be killed. I can kill the Golden One. And I will, I promised myself anew. How, I did not know. When, I had no idea. But by the flames that burned inside me I swore that I would destroy him, no matter how long it took and no matter what the cost.

I swung my gaze around the graceful flowered courtyard of Priam’s palace. Yes, this is where I would start. He wants to save Troy, to make it the center of an empire that spans Europe and Asia. Then I will destroy it, crush it, slaughter its people, and burn its buildings to the ground.

“Orion.”

I blinked, as though waking from a dream. Hector stood before me. I had not seen him approaching.

“Prince Hector,” I said.

“Come with me. We have an answer for Agamemnon.

I followed him into another part of the palace. As before, Hector wore only a simple tunic, almost bare of adornment. No weapons. No jewelry. No proclamation of his rank. He carried his nobility in his person, and anyone who saw him knew instinctively that here was a man of merit and honor.

Yet, as I matched him stride for stride through the halls of the palace, I saw again that the war had taken its toll of him. His bearded face was deeply etched by lines around the mouth and eyes. His brow was creased and a permanent notch of worry had worn itself into the space between his eyebrows.

We walked to the far side of the palace and up steep narrow steps in murky darkness lit only by occasional slits of windows. Higher and higher we climbed the steep, circling stone steps, breathing hard, around and around the stairwell’s narrow confines until at last we squeezed through a low square doorway onto the platform at the top of Troy’s tallest tower.

“Aleksandros will join us shortly,” said Hector, walking over to the giant’s teeth of the battlements. It was almost noon, and hot in the glaring sun despite the stiff breeze from the sea that huffed at us and set Hector’s brown hair flowing.

From this high vantage I could see the Achaian camp, dozens of long black boats drawn up on the beach behind the sandy rampart and trench I had helped to dig barely forty-eight hours earlier. The Trojan army was camped on the plain, tents and chariots dotted across the worn-bare soil, cook fires sending thin tendrils of smoke into the crystalline sky. A fair-sized river flowed across the plain to the south and emptied into the bay. A smaller stream passed to the north. The Achaian camp’s flanks were anchored on the two riverbanks.

Beyond the gentle waves rolling up onto the beach I saw an island near the horizon, a brown hump of a worn mountain, and beyond that another hovering ghostlike in the blue hazy distance.

“Well, brother, have you told him?”

I turned and saw Aleksandros striding briskly toward us. Unlike Hector, his tunic looked as soft as silk and he wore a handsome royal-blue cloak over it. A jeweled sword was at his hip, and more jewels flashed on his fingers and at his throat. His hair and beard were carefully trimmed and gleamed with sweet-smelling oil. His face was unlined, though he was not that many years younger than his brother.

“I was waiting for you,” said Hector.

“Good! Then let me give him the news.” Smiling nastily, Aleksandros said to me, “You may tell fat Agamemnon that King Priam rejects his insulting offer. Moreover, by this time tomorrow our chariots will be riding through your camp, burning your boats and slaying your white-livered Achaians until nothing is left but ashes and bones. Our dogs will feast well tomorrow night.”

I kept my face immobile.

Hector made the tiniest shake of his head, then laid a restraining hand on his brother’s blue-cloaked shoulder. “Our father is not feeling well enough to see you again. And although my brother’s hot words may seem insulting, the answer that we have for Agamemnon is that we reject his offer of peace.”

“And any offer that includes returning my wife to the barbarian!” Aleksandros snapped.

“Then we will have war again tomorrow,” I said.

“Indeed we will,” said Aleksandros.

“Do you really think you are strong enough to break through the Achaian defenses and burn their fleet?”

“The gods will decide,” Hector replied.

“In our favor,” added Aleksandros.

I was beginning to dislike this boastful young man. “It is one thing to fight from chariots on this plain,” I gestured toward the battlefield bounded by the beach, the two rivers, and the bluff on which the city stood. “It is another to break into the Achaian camp and fight their entire host on foot. That will not be a battle of hero against hero. Every man in the Achaian camp will be fighting for his life.”

“Don’t you think we’re fighting for our lives?” Aleksandros retorted. “And the lives of our wives and children?”

“I don’t think you can wipe out the Achaians,” I insisted. “Not with the forces I see camped on the plain.”

Aleksandros laughed. “You are looking in the wrong direction, barbarian. Look there, instead!”

He pointed inland, toward the distant wooded hills and the mountains that bulked beyond them, “There lies the empire of the Hatti,” Aleksandros said. “It spreads from this shore far to the east and south. The Hatti High King has fought wars with the Egyptians, Orion. And won them! He is our ally.”

I drew the obvious conclusion. “You expect help from him.”

“It is already on the way. We put up with the Achaian raids on the farms and towns nearby, but when pompous Agamemnon landed his army here, we sent a delegation to the High King of the Hatti, in his capital at Hattusas.”

Hector said calmly, “I saw that city when I was a lad, Orion. It could swallow Troy ten times over. It is immense, and the power of the Hatti makes it so.”

I said nothing.

“So far we have fought the Achaians only with the help of our neighbors, the Dardanians and other peoples of the Troad,” Aleksandros resumed. “But when the Hatti send their troops to aid us, Agamemnon’s army will be utterly crushed.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

Before Aleksandros could answer, Hector said, “Because we have decided to make Agamemnon a counter offer, Orion. We did not seek this war. We prefer peace, and the gentler arts of commerce and trade, to the blood and fire of battle.”

“But we don’t fear battle!” Aleksandros insisted.

Silencing his brother with a stern glance, Hector continued, “King Priam offers a simple plan for peace. If Agamemnon will remove his army and return to Achaia, my father the king offers to negotiate a new treaty of friendship and trade that will allow Mycenae free passage of the Hellespont.”

“Mycenae?” I asked. “What about the other Achaian cities: Ithaca, Nestor’s Pylos, Tiryns…”

“Mycenae,” repeated Hector. “As High King, Agamemnon can make his own agreements with the other Achaian cities. As long as the trade is carried in Mycenaean boats, Troy will make no objection.”

A masterful stroke of diplomacy! Dangle the carrot of free passage through the straits to Agamemnon, and to him alone, so that he will have a commanding position among the other Achaian powers. At the very least, it should set up an argument among the various Achaian petty kings that will destroy their ability to make a united war against Troy. Masterful.

“I will take this message to Agamemnon,” I lied.

“Do that,” snapped Aleksandros. “And tell the greedy High King that if he does not accept our offer by dawn tomorrow, his body will be feeding kites and dogs by sunset.”

I stared at him. He tried to meet my gaze, but after a moment he looked away.

“We will expect an answer by sunrise tomorrow,” Hector said. “If our offer is not accepted, we will force the Achaian camp. Even if we are not successful in that, it is only a matter of a few days before the Hatti army reaches us.”

“We’ve had messages from smoke signals,” Aleksandros boasted. “Their army has been seen within a three-day march of our walls.”

I looked back to Hector. He nodded and I believed him.

“There has been enough killing,” Hector said. “It is time to make peace. Agamemnon can return to Mycenae with honor. We make him a generous offer.”

“But Helen stays with me!” Aleksandros added.

I had to smile at that. I could hardly blame him for wanting to keep her.

Hector gave me a four-man guard of honor that escorted me out the same Scaean gate I had entered the night before. Now I could see the massive walls of Troy close-up. Almost I could believe that gods had helped to build them. Immense blocks of stone were wedged and fitted together to a height of more than nine meters, with high square towers surmounting them at the major gates and corners. The walls sloped outward, so that they were thickest at ground level.

Since the city was built on the bluff overlooking the plain of Ilios, the attacking army would have to fight its way uphill before ever reaching the walls.

I returned to the Achaian camp to find old Poletes waiting at the makeshift gate for me.

“What news do you bring?” he asked me eagerly. I realized that his voice, though thin and grating, had none of the rasping and wheezing quality that had afflicted Priam.

“Nothing good,” I said. “There will be battle tomorrow.”

Poletes’s skinny shoulders slumped beneath his worn tunic. “The fools. The bloody fools.”

I knew better, but I did not reveal it. There would be battle tomorrow because I would not let the two sides know that each side was prepared to make peace.

I went straight to Odysseus, with Poletes skipping beside me, his knobby legs working overtime to keep pace with me. Soldiers and noblemen alike stared at me, reading in my grim face the news I brought from Troy. The women looked too, then turned away, knowing that tomorrow would bring blood and carnage and terror. Many of them were natives of this land, and hoped to be freed of bondage by the Trojan soldiery. But they knew, I think, that in the frenzy and bloodlust of battle, their chances of being raped and put to the sword were much more likely than their chances of being rescued and returned to their rightful households.

Odysseus’s quarters were on the deck of his boat. He received me alone, dismissing his aides and servants to hear my report. He was naked and wet from his morning swim, rubbing himself briskly with a rough towel. Sitting on a three-legged stool, he rested his back against the boat’s only mast. The musty canvas that had served as a tent when it had been raining was folded back now that the hot sun was shining, but his bearded face was as dark and foreboding as any storm cloud as I told him that Priam and his sons rejected the Achaian peace terms.

“They offered no counter terms?” he asked, once I had finished my report.

Without hesitating, I lied, “None. Aleksandros said he would never surrender Helen under any circumstances.”

“Nothing else?”

“He and Prince Hector told me that a Hatti army is marching to their assistance.”

Odysseus’s eyes widened. “What? How far are they from here?”

“A few days’ march, from what Aleksandros said.”

He tugged at his beard, real consternation in his face. “That cannot be,” he muttered. “It cannot be!”

I waited in silence, and looked out across the rows of beached boats. Each of them had its mast in place, as if the crews were making ready to sail. The masts had not been up the day before.

Finally Odysseus jumped to his feet. “Come with me,” he said urgently. “Agamemnon must hear of this.”

Chapter 12

“THE Hatti are marching here? To aid Priam?” Agamemnon piped in his high squeaking voice. “Impossible! It can’t be true!”

The High King looked startled, even frightened. He sat at the head of the council, his right shoulder swathed in strips of cloth smeared with blood and some oily poultice.

He was broad of shoulder and body, built like a squat turret, round and thick from neck to hips. He wore a coat of gilded mail over his tunic, and a harness of gleaming leather over that, with silver buckles and ornaments. A jeweled sword hung at his side. Even his legs were encased in elaborately decorated bronze greaves, buckled in silver. His sandals had gold tassels on their thongs.

All in all, Agamemnon looked as if he were dressed for battle rather than a council of his chief lieutenants, the kings and princes of the various Achaian tribes.

But, knowing the Achaians and their penchant for argument, perhaps he hoped to awe them with his panoply. Or perhaps he thought he was going into a battle.

Thirty-two men sat in a circle around the small hearth fire in Agamemnon’s hut, the leaders of the Achaian contingents. Every group allied to Agamemnon and his brother Menalaos was there, although the Myrmidones were represented by Patrokles, rather than Achilles. I sat behind Odysseus, who was placed two seats down on the High King’s right, so I had the opportunity to study Agamemnon closely.

There was precious little nobility in the features of the High King. Like his body, his face was broad and heavy, with a wide stub of a nose, a thick brow, and deep-set eyes that seemed to look out at the world with suspicion and resentment. His hair and beard were just beginning to turn gray, but they were well combed and glistening with fresh oil perfumed so heavily that it made my nostrils itch, even from where I sat.

He held a bronze scepter in his left hand; his right rested limply on his lap. The one rule of sanity and order in the council meeting, apparently, was that only the man holding the scepter was allowed to speak.

“I have the sworn word of Hattusilis himself, High King of the Hatti, that he will not interfere in our war against Troy,” Agamemnon said petulantly. “In writing!” he added.

“I have seen the agreement,” vouched Menalaos, his brother.

Several of the kings and princes nodded their heads in acceptance, but big, blunt Ajax, sitting halfway down the circle, spoke up.

“Many of us have never seen the document sent by the Hatti High King.”

Agamemnon sighed, almost girlishly, and turned to the servant hovering behind his chair. He immediately went to a far corner of the hut, where a table and several chests had been clustered together to form something like an office.

The High King’s hut was larger than Achilles’s, but not as luxurious. The log walls were bare, for the most part, although the king’s bed was hung with rich tapestries. For all his bluster, Agamemnon kept no dais. He sat at the same level with the rest of us. The loot of dozens of towns was scattered around the hut: armor, jeweled swords, long spears with gleaming bronze points, iron and bronze tripods, chests that must have contained much gold and jewelry. The High King had cleared the hut of women and other slaves. None were here except the council and a few scribes and servants.

The servant produced a baked clay tablet covered with cuneiform inscriptions. Agamemnon passed it around the full circle of councilmen. Each man inspected it carefully, although it seemed to me that hardly any of them could read it. As if to prove my suspicion, Agamemnon had the servant read it aloud once it had returned to his hands.

The document was a masterpiece of diplomatic phrasing. It greeted Agamemnon as a fellow High King, and I could see his chest swell pridefully as the words were spoken. The High King of the Hatti, ruler of all the lands from the shore of the Aegean to the ancient walls of Jericho (by his own humble admission), recognized the justice of the Achaian grievance against Troy and promised not to interfere in its settlement. Of course, the wording was much more roundabout than that, but the meaning seemed clear enough. Even a Trojan would have to agree that Hattusilis had promised Agamemnon that he would not help Troy.

“Yet the Trojans claim that a Hatti army is within a few days’ march, coming to their aid,” said Odysseus.

“Pardon me, King of Ithaca,” said old Nestor, sitting between Odysseus and Agamemnon, “but you do not have the scepter and therefore you are speaking out of turn.”

Odysseus smiled at the whitebeard. “Neither do you, King of Pylos,” he said mildly.

“What are they saying?” shouted one of the princes on the other side of the circle. “I can’t hear them!”

Agamemnon handed the scepter to Odysseus, who stood up and repeated his statement in a clear voice.

Ajax blurted, “How do we know this is true?”

They argued back and forth, then finally commanded me to tell them exactly what had been told to me. I got to my feet and repeated the words of Aleksandros and Hector.

“Aleksandros said it?” Menalaos spat on the sandy floor. “He is the prince of liars.”

“But Hector agreed with the story,” Nestor said, hastily taking the scepter from my hands. As I sat, he rose and said, “If this tale of a Hatti army had been told our herald merely by Aleksandros, I would agree with King Menalaos…” On and on Nestor rambled, secure in the possession of the scepter. The gist of his statement was that Hector was an honorable man: If he said that the Hatti army was approaching Troy, that meant it was true. Hector was a man who could be believed, unlike his brother.

“That means disaster for us!” Agamemnon cried, his narrow little eyes actually brimming with tears. “The Hatti army could annihilate us and the Trojans at the same time!”

Everyone seemed to agree.

“They have fought battles against the Egyptians!”

“They conquered Akkad.”

“And sacked Babylon!”

“Hattusilis marched on Miletus and the city opened its gates to him, rather than have his army batter down its walls.”

The fear that spread around the council circle was palpable, like a cold wind that snuffs out a candle and leaves you in darkness.

None of them seemed to know what to do. They dithered like a herd of antelope that sees a pride of lions approaching and cannot make up its mind which way to run.

Finally Odysseus asked for the scepter. Rising, he said calmly, “Perhaps Hector and his wicked brother are wrong in their belief that the Hatti are marching to their aid. Perhaps the Hatti troops are nearby for reasons of their own, reasons that have nothing to do with our war against Troy.”

Mumbles and mutters of dissent. “Too good to be true,” said one voice out of the grumbling background.

“I suggest we send a herald to meet the Hatti commander and ask what his intentions are. Let our herald carry with him some sign of the agreement between Hattusilis and our own High King, to remind the Hatti commander that his king has promised not to interfere in our war.”

“What good would that do?” Agamemnon wrung his hands, wincing and clutching his shoulder.

“If they mean to war on us, we might as well pack up now and sail back home.”

Everyone agreed with that.

But Odysseus held the scepter aloft until they fell silent. “If the Hatti are coming to Troy’s aid, would Hector be preparing to attack our camp tomorrow?” he asked.

Puzzled glances went around the circle. Much scratching of beards.

Odysseus continued, “He is making preparations to attack us, that we know. Why would he risk the lives of his own people — and his own neck — if there’s a Hatti army on its way to fight at his side?”

“For glory,” said Patrokles. “Hector is like my lord Achilles: his life means less to him than honor and glory.”

With a shake of head, Odysseus replied, “Perhaps that is true. But I am not convinced of it. I say we should at least send a herald to show the Hatti general his king’s sworn agreement with us, and to determine if the Hatti really will come to Troy’s relief.”

It took another hour or so of wrangling, but eventually they agreed to Odysseus’s plan. They really had no other option, except to sail away.

The herald they picked, of course, was me.

When at last the council meeting ended, I asked Odysseus for permission to approach Menalaos with a private message from his wife. The King of Ithaca looked at me solemnly, his mind playing out the possible consequences of such a message. Then, with a nod, he called out Menalaos’s name and caught up with the Spartan king as he turned at the door of Agamemnon’s hut.

“Orion has a message for you, from Helen,” he said simply, his voice low so that the other departing council members could not easily hear him.

“What is it?” he asked eagerly, clutching my arm as we stepped through the doorway and out onto the beach.

Odysseus stayed tactfully inside the hut. Menalaos and I walked a few paces along the sand before I spoke. He was a handsome man, with a full black beard and thick curly hair. Menalaos was many years younger than his brother, and where Agamemnon’s features were heavy and almost coarse, the same general structure gave Menalaos’s face a sort of strength and nobility. He was much slimmer than the High King, not given to feasting and drinking.

“Your wife sends you greetings,” I began, “and says that she will return willingly with you to Sparta…”

His face lit up anew.

I finished, “…but only if you succeed in conquering Troy. She said she will not leave Troy as a consolation prize for the loser of this war.”

Menalaos took a deep breath and threw his head back. “Then by the gods,” he murmured, “by Ares and Poseidon and mighty Zeus himself, I will climb Troy’s high walls and carry her back with me, no matter how much blood it takes!”

I understood how he felt, having seen Helen and spoken with her. And I felt inside myself a vicious sense of satisfaction. I had done everything I could to encourage the Achaians to press on with their war. There would be no peace with Troy. Not if I could help it.

Then I remembered that there was an army on the march to come to Troy’s aid, and I was supposed to find them and stop them, somehow.

Chapter 13

I brought Poletes with me. We waited until nightfall, then went to the southern end of the camp where the larger river, the Scamander, anchored both our right flank and the flank of the Trojan forces camped on the plain.

Odysseus saw to it that we obtained a flimsy reed boat, and I paddled across the river’s strong current while Poletes bailed. It was a race to see if the leaky reed vessel would sink before we could reach the far shore. We made it, but just barely.

The night was dark; the moon had not yet risen. Wisps of fog were drifting in from the sea.

“A night for ghosts and demons,” Poletes whispered.

But my eye was on the far bank of the river, where the Trojan campfires gleamed.

“Never mind ghosts and demons,” I whispered back to him. “Be on the lookout for Trojan scouts and foragers.”

I had a new sword at my side, and a dark blue cloak across my shoulders. Poletes carried only a small hunting knife; he was no good with weapons, he said. He too had a cloak for warmth against the night chill, and he bore a small knapsack of dried meat and bread and a leather sack of wine.

On my left wrist was a copper band that bore a copy of the Hatti High King’s agreement with Agamemnon. It looked like an ordinary wristband, but the cuneiform symbols were etched into it. Roll it across a slab of wet clay and the document would reproduce itself.

We spent the darkest hours of the night skirting along the riverbank, moving inland past the plain of Ilios and the city of Troy. In the darkness the thick bushes tangled against our feet, slowing us. We tried to move silently, but often we had to hack the leafy branches out of our way. By the time the moon came up over the distant mountains, we were climbing the steady slope of the first of the foothills. I could see the edge of the woods ahead, lofty oak and ash trees, beech and larch, silvery and silent in the moonlight. Farther uphill, dark pines and spruce rose straight and tall. The bushes were thinner here and we could make better time.

Poletes was puffing hard, but he did his best to keep up with me. As we plunged into the darker shadows of the trees an owl hooted, as if to challenge us.

“Athene welcomes us,” Poletes panted.

“What?”

He grabbed at my shoulder. I stopped and turned around. He bent over, hands on knobby knees, wheezing and gasping for breath.

“We don’t need… forest demons,” he panted. “You have… your own demon… inside you.”

I felt a pang of conscience. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize I was going too fast for you.”

“Can we… rest here?”

“Yes.”

He slung the knapsack off his shoulder and collapsed to the mossy ground. I took in a deep breath of clean mountain air, crisp with the tang of pine.

“What was that you said about Athene?” I asked, kneeling beside him.

Poletes waved a hand vaguely. “The owl… it is Athene’s symbol. Its hooting means that she welcomes us to the safety of these woods. We are under her protection.”

I felt my jaw clenching. “No, old man. She can’t protect anyone, not even herself. Athene is dead.”

Even in the darkness I could see his eyes go round. “What are you saying? That’s blasphemy!”

I shrugged and squatted on the ground beside him.

“Orion,” Poletes said earnestly, propping himself on one elbow, “the gods cannot die. They are immortal!”

“Athene is dead,” I repeated, feeling the hollow ache of it in my guts.

“But you serve her!”

“I serve her memory. And I live to avenge her murder.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “It is impossible, Orion. Gods and goddesses cannot die. Not as long as one mortal remembers them. As long as you revere Athene, and serve her, she is not dead.”

“Perhaps so,” I said, to placate him and calm his fear. “Perhaps you are right.”

We stretched out for a few hours’ sleep, wrapped in our cloaks. I was afraid to close my eyes so I lay there listening to the subtle night sounds of the forest, the soft rustling of the trees in the cool dark breeze, the chirrup of insects, the occasional hoot of an owl.

She is dead, I told myself. She died in my arms. And I will kill the Golden One someday.

The moon peeked down at me through the swaying branches of the trees. Artemis, sister of Apollo, I thought. Will you defend your brother against me? Or was that you arguing against him? Will the other gods fight against me or will I find allies among you in my vengeance against the Golden One?

I must have fallen asleep, for I dreamed that I saw her again: Athene, standing tall and radiant in gleaming silver, her long dark hair burnished like polished ebony, her beautiful gray eyes regarding me gravely.

“You are not alone, Orion,” she said to me. “There are allies all around you. You have only to find them. And lead them to your goal.”

I reached out to her, only to find myself sitting upright on the mossy forest floor, the fresh yellow light of sunrise slanting between the trees. Birds were singing a welcome to the new day.

Poletes stirred before I tried to wake him. We ate a cold breakfast washed down with warm wine, then resumed our march.

We cut northward now, toward the main road that led from Troy inland. Over two rows of wooded hills we climbed, and as we reached the crest of the third, we saw spread out below us a broad valley dotted with cultivated fields. A river meandered gently through the valley, and along its banks tiny villages huddled.

An ugly column of black smoke rose from one of the villages.

I pointed. “There’s the Hatti army.”

We hurried down the wooded slope and out across the fields of chest-high grain, wading through the golden crop like shipwrecked sailors staggering to the safety of an unknown shore.

“Why would a Trojan ally be burning a Trojan village?” Poletes asked.

I had no answer. My attention was fixed on that column of smoke, and the pitiful cluster of burning huts that produced it. I could see wagons and horses now, and men in armor that glittered under the morning sun.

We breasted the ripening grain until we came to the edge of the field. Poletes tugged at my cloak.

“Perhaps we’d better lie low until we find out what’s going on here.”

“No time for that,” I said. “Hector must be attacking the beach by now. If these are Hatti troops, we’ve got to find out what they’re up to.”

I plunged ahead and within a dozen strides broke out of the cultivated field. I could clearly see the troops now. They were taller and fairer than the Achaians. And, man for man, better armed and equipped. Each soldier wore a tunic of chain mail and a helmet of polished black iron. Their swords were long, and their blades were iron, not bronze. Their shields were small and square and worn across their backs, since there was no fighting going on.

A half-dozen soldiers were herding a peasant family out of their hut: a man, his wife, and two young daughters. They looked terrified, like rabbits caught in a trap. They fell to their knees and raised their hands in supplication. One of the soldiers tossed a torch onto the thatched roof of the hut, while the others gathered around the pleading, crying family with drawn swords and ugly smiles.

“Stop that!” I called, striding toward them. I could hear the rustling behind me of Poletes diving into the stalks of grain to hide himself.

The soldiers turned toward me.

“Who the hell are you?” their leader shouted.

“A herald from High King Agamemnon,” I said, stepping up to him. He was slightly shorter than I, well built, scarred from many battles. His face was as hard and fierce as a hunting falcon’s, his eyes glittering with suspicion, his nose bent hawklike. His sword was in his hand. I kept mine in my scabbard.

“And who in the name of the Nine Lords of the Earth is High King Aga… whatever?”

I extended my left hand. “I bear a message from your own High King, a message of peace and friendship he sent to Agamemnon.”

The Hatti soldier grinned sourly. “Peace and friendship, eh?” He spat at my feet. “That’s how much peace and friendship are worth.” To the five men behind him he said, “Slit the farmer’s throat and take the women. I’ll deal with this one myself.”

My body went into hyperdrive instantly, every sense so acute that I could see the pulse throbbing in his neck, just below his ear, and hear the slight swish of his iron blade swinging through the air. Beyond him I saw one of the other soldiers grab the kneeling farmer by the hair and yank his head back to bare his throat. The wife and daughters drew in their breaths to scream.

I easily ducked under the swinging sword blade and launched myself at the soldier who was about to slaughter the farmer. My flying leap knocked both of them to the ground. I rolled to my feet and kicked the soldier in the head. He went over on his back, unconscious.

Everything happened so quickly that my reactions seemed automatic, not under my conscious control. I disarmed the two nearest soldiers before their partners could move. When they did stir, it seemed to be in slow motion. I could see what they intended to do by the movement of their eyes, the bunching of muscles in their biceps or thighs. It was a simple matter to ram a fist into a solar plexus and bring my other hand up into the jaw of the next man, fracturing bone.

I stood before the huddled, kneeling family, five Hatti soldiers on the ground behind me and their leader facing me, sword still in his right hand. His mouth hung agape, his eyes bulged. There was no fear in his face, just an astonishment that made his breath catch in his throat.

For an instant we stood facing each other, poised for combat. Then, with a roaring curse, he pulled back his sword arm for what I thought would be a charging attack at me.

Instead, he threw the sword. I saw its point flying straight for my chest. No time for anything but a slight sidestep. As the blade slid past my leather vest I grabbed at its hilt. The momentum of the sword and my own motion turned me completely around. When I faced the Hatti warrior again I had his sword in my hand.

He stood rooted to the ground. I am sure he would have run away if he could have commanded his feet, but the shock of what he had just seen froze him.

“Get your men together and take me to your commanding officer,” I said, gesturing with his sword.

“You…” he gaped at the sword, not lifting his eyes to look me in the face, “you’re not… human. You must be a god.”

“He serves Athene!” piped Poletes, coming up from his hiding place in the grain field, a gap-toothed smile on his wrinkled old face. “No man can stand against Orion, servant of the warrior goddess.”

I handed him back his sword. “What is your name, soldier?”

“Lukka,” he answered. It took him three tries to get his sword back into its scabbard, his hands were shaking so.

“I have no quarrel with you, Lukka, or with any Hatti soldier. Take me to your commander; I bear a message for him.”

Lukka was totally awed. He gathered up his men: One had a broken jaw; another seemed dazed and glassy-eyed with a concussion.

The farmer and his family crawled on their hands and knees to me and began to kiss my sandaled feet. I pulled the man up roughly by his shoulders and told the women to stand up.

“May all the gods protect you and bring you your every desire,” said the farmer. His wife and daughters kept their heads down, their eyes on the ground. But I could see tears streaming from each of them.

I felt bile in my throat. May all the gods protect me! In his ignorance he thought that the gods actually cared about human beings, actually could be moved by prayers or sacrifices. If this simple man knew what the gods really were he would puke with disgust. Yet, when I looked into his brimming eyes, I could not bring myself to disillusion him. What good would it do, except to fill his days with agony?

“And may the gods protect you, farmer. You bring life from the bosom of Mother Earth. That is a far higher calling than warring and slaying.”

Having offered their thanks, they dashed inside their hut to put out the fire that the soldiers had started. I followed Lukka and his limping, wounded men through the burning village in search of the Hatti commander. Poletes skipped along beside me, reciting a blow-by-blow account of what had just happened, rehearsing it for later storytelling.

It seemed clear to me that this was far too small a contingent to be the Hatti army. Yet there were no other troops in the valley, as far as Poletes and I were able to see from the hilltop earlier in the day. Could this small unit be the force that Hector and Aleksandros expected to help them?

And if these soldiers were allies of the Trojans, why were they burning a Trojan village?

In the village square — nothing more than a clearing of bare earth among the dried-brick huts — a procession of soldiers wound its way past a line of wagons and chariots. The Hatti commander was standing in one of the chariots, parceling out loot for his officers and men. The soldiers were carrying the villagers’ pitiful possessions up to the chariot in a long, ragged line: a two-handled jug of wine, a blanket, a squawking flapping pair of chickens, a clay lamp, a pair of boots. It was not a rich village.

In the distance I could hear women’s screams and crying. Apparently the soldiers were not taking female captives with them; they raped them and left them to their lamentations.

The commander was a short, swarthy, thickset man, more like the Achaians than Lukka and his men. His hair and thick beard were so deeply black that they seemed to cast bluish highlights. A brutal white scar slashed down the left side of his face from cheek to jawline, parting his beard. Like the other Hatti soldiers, he wore chain mail. His leather harness, though, was handsomely tooled, and the sword at his side was set with ivory inlays along its hilt.

Lukka stood at a respectful distance with me at his side and Poletes behind me, while his five men limped off to tend to their bruises and wounds. The commander glanced our way questioningly, but continued dividing the loot his soldiers brought before him: About half of everything went into a growing pile at the foot of his chariot; the soldiers carried away the other half for themselves. I folded my arms over my chest and waited, the stench of burning huts in my nostrils, the wailing of the women in my ears.

Finally the last clay jugs and bleating goats were parceled out, and the commander gestured to a pair of barefoot men dressed in rough jerkins to pick up his share of the loot and load it onto the nearby wagons. Slaves, I thought. Or possibly thetes.

The commander stepped tiredly down from his chariot and summoned Lukka with a crook of his finger.

Watching me as we approached him, he said, “This man isn’t a shit-eating farmer.”

Lukka clasped his fist to his chest and replied, “He claims to be a herald from some High King, sir.”

The commander looked me over. “My name is Arza. What’s yours?”

“Orion,” I said.

“You look more like a fighter than a herald.”

I tapped the wristband on my left arm. “I carry a message from the High King of the Hatti to the High King of the Achaians, a message of peace and friendship.”

Arza glanced at Lukka, then focused his deep brown eyes back on me. “The High King of the Hatti, eh? Well, your message isn’t worth the clay it was written on. There is no High King of the Hatti. Not anymore. Old Hattusilis is dead. The great fortress of Hattusas was in flames the last time I saw it.”

Poletes gasped. “The Hatti have fallen?”

“The great nobles of Hattusas fight among themselves,” said Arza. “Hattusilis’s son may be dead, we’ve heard rumors to that effect.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I asked.

He snorted. “Surviving, herald. As best we can. Living off the land and fighting off other bands of soldiers and marauders who try to take what we have.”

I looked around the village. Dirty black smoke stained the clear sky. Dead bodies lying on the bare ground drew clouds of flies.

“You’re nothing but a band of marauders yourselves,” I said.

Arza’s eyes narrowed. “Harsh words from a herald.” He sneered at the last word.

But my mind was racing ahead. “Would you care to join the service of the Achaian High King?” I asked.

He laughed. “I’ll serve no barbarian king or anyone else. Arza’s band serves itself! We go where we want to go and take what we want to take.”

“Mighty warriors,” I replied scornfully. “You burn villages and rape helpless women who have no soldiers to protect them. Very brave of you.”

From the comer of my eye I saw Lukka pale and take half a step away from me. I sensed Poletes backing off too.

Arza wrapped his hand around the ivory-inlaid hilt of his sword. “You look like a soldier,” he snarled. “Do you want to protect what’s left of this village? Against me?”

Lukka said, “Sir, I should warn you — this man is a fighter such as I’ve never seen before. He serves Athene and…”

“The bitch goddess?” Arza laughed. “The one they claim to be a virgin? My god is Taru, the god of storm and lightning, and he’ll conquer your dainty little virgin goddess every time! She won’t be a virgin for long if she fights against Taru!”

He was trying to goad me into a fight. I shook my head and turned to walk away.

“Lukka,” he commanded loudly. “Slit his cowardly throat.”

Before the agonized Lukka could reply, I wheeled back to face Arza and said, “Do it yourself, mighty attacker of women.”

He broke into a wide grin as he pulled his sword from its well-worn scabbard. “With pleasure, herald,” he said.

I took out my sword, and Arza laughed again. “Bronze! You poor fool, I’ll slice that toy in half with my iron.”

As he advanced toward me, holding his sword in front of him, my senses went into overdrive again. Everything slowed to a dreamlike pace. I could see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, the trickle of a bead of perspiration forming on his brow and starting down his cheek. Lukka was standing like a statue, unable to decide whether he should try to stop his commander or join his attack against me. Poletes was wide-eyed, his mouth slightly open, his hands clutching the air at his sides.

Arza advanced a few steps, then retreated back to his chariot and, without taking his eyes from me, reached back and took up his shield with his left hand. I stayed where I was and let him fix the shield on his arm. He grinned at me again and, seeing I was not moving to attack him, he grabbed his iron helmet and pulled it on. It was polished to a brilliant gleam, and its flaps protected the sides of his face. I could see that his scar ran exactly along the edge of the iron flap.

He was a professional soldier and he would take any advantage I allowed him. For my part, I had no real desire to kill him. But if the only way to gain his respect was to best him in a fight, I was more than ready to do that.

He advanced on me confidently, crouching slightly, peering at me through the narrow gap between the rim of his helmet and the top of his shield. It bore a lightning flash symbol crudely painted on its stretched hide. I waited for him, watching. The shield covered most of his body when he crouched, making it difficult to see which way he intended to move. Still, I waited.

He feinted with the shield, jabbing it toward my face and simultaneously starting a sword cut at my midsection.

I parried his swing with my bronze blade, then slashed backhand and cracked the metal frame of his shield. But the blow snapped my sword in half.

With an exultant cry Arza flung his broken shield away and leaped at me. I could have spitted him easily on the jagged stump of my blade, but instead I stepped into him, grabbed his sword wrist in my left hand, and rapped him sharply on the head with the pommel of my broken sword.

He went to his knees, rolled over, and shook his head. I saw a nice dent in his polished helmet.

Arza got to his feet and lunged at me again. I dropped my sword, took his arm in both my hands, and twisted the weapon out of his hand.

With a snarl of rage he yanked his dagger from his belt and came at me again.

I backed away, open-handed. “I have no desire to kill you,” I told him.

He bent down and scooped his sword from the dusty ground. By now more than a dozen of his troops had gathered around us, gaping.

“I’ll kill you, herald, despite your tricks,” he growled.

He came at me again, sword and dagger, slashing and cursing at me, spittle flying from his mouth. I danced away lightly, wondering how long this game could last.

“Stand and fight!” he screamed.

“Without a weapon?” I smiled as I said it.

He charged again and, instead of running, I ducked under and tripped him. He fell heavily.

But got to his feet, snarling, “I’ll kill you!”

“You can’t,” I said.

“I will! You men — hold him fast!”

The soldiers hesitated just a moment, long enough for me to decide that if I did not kill this maddened animal, he would have me killed.

Before they could lay hands on me, I picked up the shattered stump of my bronze sword and advanced toward Arza. He grinned wickedly at me and lunged with his sword, ready to counter with the dagger once I tried to parry the sword thrust. Instead of parrying, I sidestepped his lunge and drove the jagged end of my blade into his chest just below the armpit.

Arza looked very surprised. His mouth dropped open, then filled with blood. For a moment I carried all his weight on my extended sword arm. I let go of the weapon and he dropped to the dusty ground, his hands still clutching his useless sword and dagger.

I looked toward Lukka. He gazed down at his fallen commander, then up to me. A word from him and the entire squad of soldiers would be on me.

Before he could speak, I shouted to the soldiers, “This man led you to little victories over farmers’ villages. How would you like to join in the loot of a great city, filled with gold? Who will follow me to help conquer Troy?”

They raised their hands and cheered. All of them.

Chapter 14

THERE were forty-two men in the Hatti band, and I led them back across the Scamander and down toward the beach where the Achaians were camped — if they had not been wiped out in the meantime by Hector and his Trojans.

Lukka accepted me as their leader. He kept his hawklike face impassive, but I thought I saw a hint of awe at my fighting prowess glimmering in his dark eyes. The others went along with him. There was no great affection for the fallen Arza among them. He had been their commander when the civil strife had broken out among the various Hatti factions. Like professional soldiers everywhere, they had followed their commanding officer even though they thoroughly disliked him. As long as he kept them together, and ensured their survival by raiding helpless villages, they were willing to put up with his petty tyrannies and nasty disposition.

“We’ve been living like dogs,” Lukka told me as we climbed across the wooded ridges that ran between the high road and the river. “Every man’s hand is raised against every other’s. There’s no order in the land of the Hatti anymore, not since the old king died and his son was driven off by the nobles. Now they fight for the kingdom and the army is split into a thousand little bands like ours, without discipline, without respect, without any pay at all except what we can steal from farmers and villagers.”

“When we get to the Achaian camp,” I promised him, “King Odysseus will be happy to welcome you into his service.”

“Under your command,” Lukka said.

I glanced at him. He was completely serious. He took it for granted that the man who slew Arza would take command of the troop.

“Yes,” I said. “Under my command.”

He grinned wolflshly. “There’s much gold in Troy, that I know. We guarded a tribute caravan from the Troad to Hattusas once. A lot of gold.”

So we marched toward the plain of Ilios. I was now the leader of a unit of professional soldiers who dreamed of looting the gold of Troy. The army that Hector expected to come to Troy’s rescue no longer existed; it had split into a thousand marauding bands, each intent on its own survival.

Lukka became my lieutenant automatically. He knew the men and I did not. He regarded me as little less than a god. It made me feel uneasy, but it was useful for the moment. He was a strong, honest professional soldier, a man of few words. Yet his hawk’s eyes missed nothing, and the men respected him totally.

We slept in the same woods where Poletes and I had spent the previous night. I stretched out, sword and dagger on either side of me, and willed my mind to make contact with the gods. No, they are not gods, I reminded myself. Creators, yes. But not gods.

I closed my eyes and strained with every nerve and sinew in me to see them again, speak with them. Utterly in vain. All I got for my effort was a set of tension-stiffened muscles that made my back and neck ache horribly and kept me awake through most of the night.

The next morning we found a ford in the river, crossed it, and marched toward the sea.

It was well past noon before we saw the beetling walls of Troy, up on its bluff. Trojan tents no longer dotted the plain. Instead, the debris of battle littered the worn ground between the Achaian rampart and the walls of Troy. Broken chariots and tattered remains of tents were scattered everywhere. Black-clad women and half-naked slaves moved slowly, mournfully, among scores of bodies lying twisted and stripped of armor under the high sun. Vultures circled patiently above. Dark humps of dead horses lay here and there. The battle must have been ferocious, I told myself.

But the Achaian ships were still lined up along the beach, I saw, their black hulls intact, unburnt. Somehow, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and the others had survived Hector’s onslaught.

Poletes stared at the carnage across the river with wide, tearful eyes. Lukka and the other Hatti soldiers seemed to be giving the area a professional evaluation.

“That is Troy,” Lukka said, pointing, as we marched along the riverbank.

“That is Troy,” I agreed.

He eyed the high walls appreciatively. “It won’t be easy to breach those defenses.”

“Can it be done at all?”

He smiled grimly. “If the great walls of Hattusas could be overthrown, that city can be taken.”

We waited in the shade of the trees along the river’s edge while Poletes and one of the Hatti soldiers rowed the leaky little reed boat across the current and beached it in the Achaian camp. My orders to Poletes were to report to Odysseus and no one else.

An hour passed. Then two. The sun glittered on the sea; the afternoon was hot and still. Finally I saw a dolphin-headed galley gliding toward us, its oars moving in smooth rhythm. We splashed out waist-deep in the cool water and clambered aboard the Ithacan warship. Lukka insisted that I go first. He brought up the rear.

Poletes was at the gunwale, reaching out his skinny arms to help me aboard. His scraggly bearded face was grim.

“What’s the news?” I asked, dripping water onto the deck and the rowers.

“A great battle was fought yesterday,” he said.

“That I can see.”

He took me by the elbow and led me back toward the stern, away from the rowers. “Hector and his brothers broke through the defenses and into the camp. Still Achilles refused to fight. Patrokles put on his master’s golden armor and led the Myrmidones in a counterattack. They drove the surprised Trojans out of the camp and back to the very walls of Troy.”

“They must have thought it was Achilles,” I muttered.

“Perhaps they did. A god filled Patrokles with battle frenzy. Everyone in the camp thought he was too soft for fighting, yet he drove the Trojans back to their own gates and slew dozens with his own hand.”

I cocked an eyebrow at “dozens.” War stories grow with each telling, and this one was already becoming exaggerated, scarcely twenty-four hours after it had happened.

“But then the gods turned against Patrokles,” the old storyteller said mournfully. “Hector spitted him on his spear and stripped Achilles’s golden armor from his dead body.”

I felt my own face harden. The gods play their games, I thought. They let Patrokles have a moment of glory and then take their price for it.

“Now Achilles wails in his hut and covers his head with ashes. He swears a mighty vengeance against Hector and all of Troy.”

“So he will fight,” I said, wondering if one of those who opposed the Golden One had not arranged all this, manipulated Patrokles into his death as a way of making Achilles return to the battle.

“Tomorrow morning,” Poletes told me, “Achilles will meet Hector in single combat. It has been arranged by the heralds. There will be no fighting until then.”

Single combat between Hector and Achilles. Hector was much the bigger of the two, an experienced fighter, cool and intelligent even in battle. Achilles was no doubt faster, though smaller, and fueled on the kind of rage that drove men to impossible feats. Only one of them would walk away from the fight, I knew.

Even before our galley was beached I could hear the wailing and keening from the Myrmidones camp. I knew it was a matter of form, that Prince Achilles had ordered the women to mourn. But there were men’s deep voices among the cries of the women. And a drum beating a slow, unhappy dirge. A huge bonfire blazed at that end of the camp, sending a sooty black smoke skyward.

“Achilles mourns his friend,” Poletes said. But I could see that the excess of grief unnerved him slightly.

Yet despite the mourning rites among the Myrmidones, the rest of the camp was agog with the impending match between Achilles and Hector. There was almost a holiday mood among the men. They were placing bets, giving odds. They laughed and made jokes about it, as if it had nothing to do with blood and death. I realized that they were trying to drive away the dread and fear that they all felt. The lamentations from the Myrmidones’s camp continued unabated. It sent shivers up my spine. But slowly it came to me that the others all felt that this battle between the two champions would settle the war, one way or the other. They thought that no matter which champion fell, the war would be over and the rest of them could finally go home.

Odysseus inspected the Hatti contingent as soon as they disembarked from his galley. Lukka drew them up in a double line, while I stood at their head, the throb of the funeral drum and the keening of the mourners hanging over us all like the chilling hand of death.

The King of Ithaca tried to ignore the noise. He smiled at me. “Well, Orion, you have brought your own army with you.”

“My lord Odysseus,” I replied, “like me, these men are eager to serve you. They are experienced soldiers, and can be of great help to you.”

He nodded, eyeing the contingent carefully. “I will accept their service, Orion. But not before I speak with Agamemnon. It wouldn’t do to make the High King jealous — or fearful.”

“As you wish,” I said. He knew the politics and personalities of his fellow Achaians much better than I. Odysseus was not called “the crafty” for nothing.

As we walked back to the boat on which Odysseus kept his own quarters, I explained to him that there was no Hatti army marching to the relief of Troy, telling him what Arza and Lukka had told me about the death of the old High King and the civil war that was tearing the Hatti empire to pieces.

Stroking his beard thoughtfully, Odysseus murmured, “I thought that the High King was losing his power when he agreed to allow Agamemnon to settle his quarrel against Priam. Always in the past the Hatti have protected Troy and marched against anyone who threatened the region.”

I saw to it that my Hatti soldiers were fed and given tenting and bedding for the coming night. They sat in a circle around their own fire, not mixing with the Achaians. For their part, the Ithacans and others of the camp looked on the Hatti with no little awe. They especially ogled their uniform outfits of chain mail and tooled leather. No two Achaians dressed the same or carried the same equipment. To see forty-some men outfitted alike was a novelty to them.

To my surprise, the Achaians did not seem impressed or even interested in the iron swords that the Hatti carried. I myself bore the blade that Arza had carried; I had seen firsthand how much tougher the iron blade was than a bronze one.

As the sun was setting, turning the sea to a deep wine red, Lukka approached me. I was sitting apart from the men, taking my supper with Poletes by my side. Lukka stopped on the other side of our little cook fire, nervously fingering the straps of his harness, his face contorted into a deep scowl. I thought he had come to complain about the Myrmidones’s lamentations; I couldn’t blame him for that, even though there was nothing I could do about it.

There was no other chair for him to sit on, so I got to my feet and beckoned for him to come to me.

“My lord Orion,” he began, “may I speak to you frankly?”

“Of course. Speak your mind, Lukka. I want no thoughts hidden away where they can cause misunderstandings between us.”

He puffed out a pent-up sigh of relief. “Thank you, sir.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well, sir… what kind of a siege is this?” He was almost indignant. “The army sits here in camp, eating and drinking, while the people in the city open their gates and go to gather food and firewood. I don’t see any engines for battering down the gates or surmounting the city walls. This isn’t a proper siege at all!”

I smiled at him. Patrokles’s funeral lamentations had nothing to do with what was bothering him. He was a professional soldier, and the antics of amateurs irked him.

“Lukka,” I said, “these Achaians are not very sophisticated in the arts of warfare. Tomorrow you will see two men fight each other from chariots, and that may well settle the whole issue of this war.”

He shook his head. “Not likely. The Trojans won’t let these barbarians inside their walls willingly. I don’t care how many champions fall.”

“You may be right,” I agreed.

“Look now.” He pointed at the city up on the bluff, bathed in reddish gold by the setting sun. “See that course of wall, the stretch where it is lower than the rest?”

It was the western side of the city, where the garrulous courtier had admitted that the defenses were weaker.

“My men can build siege towers and wheel them up to that part of the wall, so the Achaian warriors could step from their topmost platforms right onto the battlements.”

“Wouldn’t the Trojans try to destroy the towers as they approached their wall?”

“With what?” he sneered. “Spears? Arrows? Even if they shoot flaming arrows at them, we’ll have them covered with wetted horsehides.”

“But they’ll be able to concentrate all their men at that one point and beat you off.”

He scratched at his thick black beard. “Maybe so. Usually we try to attack two or three spots along a wall at the same time. Or create some other diversions that keep their forces busy elsewhere.”

“It’s a good idea,” I said. “I’ll speak to Odysseus about it. I’m surprised none of the Achaians have thought of it themselves.”

Lukka made a sour face. “These aren’t real soldiers, my lord. The kings and princelings fancy themselves great warriors, and maybe they are. But my own unit could beat five times their number of these people.”

We spoke for a little while longer, and then he left me to see that his men were properly bedded in their new tents.

Poletes, who had sat quietly through our conversation, got to his feet. “That man is too greedy for victory,” he said, in a whisper that was almost angry. “He wants to win everything, and leave nothing for the gods to decide.”

“Men fight wars to win them, don’t they?” I asked him.

“Men fight wars for glory, and spoils, and for tales to tell their grandchildren. A man should go into battle to prove his bravery, to face a champion and test his destiny. He wants to use tricks and machines to win his battles.” Poletes spat on the sand to show how he felt about it.

“Yet you yourself have scorned these warriors and called them bloodthirsty fools,” I reminded him.

“That they are! But at least they fight fairly, as men should fight.”

I laughed. “Where I come from, old man, there is a saying, ‘All is fair in love and war.’ ”

For once, Poletes had no answer. He grumbled to himself as I left him by the fire and sought out Odysseus.

In the musty tented quarters of the King of Ithaca I explained the possibilities of building siege towers.

“They can be put on wheels and pulled up to the walls?” This was a new idea to Odysseus.

“Yes, my lord.”

“And these Hatti troops know how to build such machines?”

“Yes, they do.”

In the flickering light of the lone copper lamp on his work table I could see Odysseus’s eyes gleaming with the possibilities of it. Absently, he patted the thickly furred neck of the dog at his feet as he thought over the possibilities.

“Come,” he said at last, “now is the moment to tell Agamemnon about this!”

The High King seemed half-asleep when we were ushered into his hut. Agamemnon sat drowsily in a camp chair, a jewel-encrusted wine goblet in his right hand. Apparently his shoulder had healed enough for him to bend his elbow. No one else was in the hut but a pair of women slaves, dark-eyed and silent in thin shifts that showed their bare arms and legs.

Odysseus sat facing the High King. I squatted on the floor at his side. We were offered wine. It was thick with spiced honey and barley meal.

“A tower that moves?” Agamemnon muttered after Odysseus had explained it to him twice. “Impossible! How could a stone tower…”

“It would be made of wood, son of Atreus. And covered with hides for protection.”

Agamemnon looked down at me blearily and let his chin sink to his broad chest. The lamps cast long shadows across the room that made his heavy-browed face look sinister, even threatening.

“I had to return the captive Briseis to that young pup,” he grumbled. “And hand him over a fortune of booty. Even with his lover slain by Hector the little snake refused to reenter the war unless his ‘rightful’ spoils were returned to him.” The scorn he put on the word “rightful” could have etched steel.

“Son of Atreus,” soothed Odysseus, “if this plan of mine works, we will sack Troy and gain so much treasure that even overweening Achilles will be happy.”

Agamemnon said nothing. He waved his goblet slightly, and one of the slaves came to fill all three. Odysseus’s was made of gold, like the High King’s. Mine was wooden.

“Three more weeks,” Agamemnon muttered. He slurped at his wine, spilling some of it over his already stained tunic. “Three more weeks is what I need.”

“Sire?”

Agamemnon let his goblet slip from his fingers and plonk onto the carpeted ground. He leaned forward, a sly grin on his fleshy face.

“In three more weeks my ships will bring the grain harvest from the Sea of Black Waters through the Hellespont to Mycenae. And neither Priam nor Hector will be able to stop them.”

Odysseus made a silent little “oh.” I saw that Agamemnon was no fool. If he could not conquer Troy, he would at least get his ships through the straits and back again, loaded with grain, before breaking off the siege. And if the Achaians had to sail away from Troy without winning their war, at least Agamemnon would have the year’s grain supply in his own city of Mycenae, ready to use it or sell it to his neighbors as he saw fit.

Odysseus had the reputation of being cunning, but I realized that the King of Ithaca was merely careful, a man who considered all the possibilities before he made his move. Agamemnon was the crafty one: sly, selfish, and grasping.

Recovering quickly from his surprise, Odysseus said, “But now we have the chance of destroying Troy altogether. Not only will we have the loot of the city, and its women, but you will have clear sailing through the Hellespont for all the years of your kingship!”

Agamemnon slumped back on his chair. “A good thought, son of Laertes. A good thought. I will consider it and call a council to decide upon it. After tomorrow’s match.”

With a nod, Odysseus said, “Yes, after we see whether Achilles remains among us or dies on Hector’s spear.”

Agamemnon smiled broadly.

Chapter 15

I slept fitfully that night. I had a tent of my own now, as befits a commander of soldiers. And I had expected the heavy honeyed wine to act as a drug on my mind. But it did not. I tossed on my pallet of straw and every time I managed to doze off my inner vision filled with the faces of the Creators. They were arguing, bickering among themselves, placing wagers about who would win the coming battle.

Then I saw Athene, my beloved, standing silent and alone, far removed from the laughing uncaring gods who toyed with men’s lives. She regarded me gravely, without a smile, without a sound. As still as a statue made of frozen flesh. She gazed into my eyes for endless moments, as if she were trying to impart some knowledge to me telepathically.

“You are dead,” I said to her.

Instead of her voice, I heard Poletes’s scratchy, rasping words, “As long as you revere Athene, and serve her, she is not dead.”

Fine sentiment, I thought. But that does not allow me to hold her in my arms, to feel her warmth and her love.

Instead, I told myself, I will take the Golden One in these hands and crush the life out of him. Just as I once…

I remembered something. Someone. A dark, brooding man, a hulking gray-skinned shape that I had hunted down through the centuries and the millennia. Ahriman! I remembered him, his harsh, tortured, whispering voice.

I heard him now. “You fool,” he whispered. “You seek for strength and find only weakness.”

I thought I woke up. I thought I propped myself on an elbow and passed a weary hand over my cobwebbed eyes. But I heard, as distinctly as if he had been standing next to me, the clear cold voice of the Golden One: “Stop fighting against me, Orion. If a goddess can die, think how easily I can send one of my own creations to the final destruction.”

I sat bolt upright and saw a gleam of gold seeping through the flaps of my tent. Scrambling outside, naked except for the sword I grabbed, I saw that it was only the morning sun starting the new day.

The morning dawned clear and bright and windy.

Although the single combat between Achilles and Hector was what everyone looked forward to, still the whole army prepared to march out onto the plain. Partly they went out because a single combat can degenerate into a general melee easily enough. Mostly they went out to get a close look at the fight.

I instructed Lukka to keep his men out of the fighting. “This will not be your kind of battle,” I said. “There’s no point in risking the men.”

“We could be starting to fell the trees we need for the siege towers,” he said. “I saw enough good ones across the river for it.”

“Wait until this combat is over,” I said. “Stand by the gate to the rampart here and be prepared to defend it from the Trojans if necessary.”

He clasped his fist to his breast in acknowledgment.

Virtually the entire Achaian force drew itself up, rank upon rank, on the windswept plain before the camp. By the walls of the city the Trojans were drawing themselves up likewise, chariots in front, foot soldiers behind them, swirls of dust blowing into the cloudless sky. I could see pennants fluttering along the battlements on the city walls, and even imagined glimpsing Helen’s golden bright hair on the tallest tower of Troy.

Odysseus had ordered me to stand at the left side of his chariot. “Protect my driver if we enter the fray,” he said. And he saw to it that I was outfitted with one of the figure-eight body shields that extended from chin to ankle. It weighed heavily on my left arm, but the weight was almost a comfort. Five plies of hides stretched across a thin wooden frame and bossed with bronze studs, the shield would stop almost anything except a spear driven with the momentum of a galloping chariot behind it.

Poletes was up on the rampart with the slaves and thetes, straining his old eyes for a view of the fight. He would interrogate me for hours this night, I knew, dragging every detail of what I had seen out of my memory. Then I thought, if either of us is still alive after today’s fighting.

As I stood on the windy plain, squinting against the bright sun, a roar went up from the Trojans. I saw Hector’s chariot, pulled by four magnificent white horses, kicking up a cloud of dust as it sped from the Scaean gate and drove toward the head of the arrayed ranks of soldiery. Hector stood tall and proud, his great shield at his side, four huge spears in their holder, pointing heavenward.

For many minutes nothing more happened. Muttering started among the Achaian foot soldiers. I glanced up at Odysseus, who merely smiled tolerantly. Achilles was behaving like a self-appointed star, as usual, making everyone anxious for his appearance. I thought that it would have been good psychology on any opponent except Hector. That man will use the time to study every rock and bump on the field, I said to myself. He is no child to be frightened by waiting.

Finally an exultant roar sprang up among the Achaians. Turning, I saw four snorting, spirited, matched midnight-black horses, heads tossing, groomed so perfectly that they seemed to glow, pounding across the earthen ramp that cut across our trench. Achilles’s chariot was inlaid with ebony and ivory, and his armor — only his second-best since Hector had stripped Patrokles’s dead body — gleamed with burnished gold.

With his plumed helmet on, there was little of Achilles’s face to be seen. But as his chariot swept past me I saw that his mouth was a grim tight line and his eyes burned like furnaces.

He did not stop for the usual prebattle formalities. He did not even slow down. His charioteer cracked his whip over the black horses’ ears and they plunged forward at top speed as Achilles took a spear in his right hand and screamed loud enough to echo off the walls of Troy: “PATROKLES! PA… TRO… KLES!”

His chariot aimed straight for Hector’s. The Trojan driver, startled, whipped his horses into motion and Hector hefted one of his spears.

The chariots pounded toward each other, and both warriors cast their spears simultaneously. Achilles’s struck Hector’s shield and staggered him. He almost tumbled out of the chariot, but he regained his balance and reached for another spear. Hector’s shaft passed between Achilles and his charioteer, splintering the wooden floor of the chariot.

A chill went through me. Achilles had not raised his shield when Hector’s spear drove toward him. He had not even flinched as the missile passed close enough to shave his young beard. Either he did not care what happened to him or he was mad enough to believe himself invulnerable.

The chariots swung past each other and again the two champions hurled spears. Hector’s bounced off the bronze shoulder of Achilles’s armor. Again the man made no move to protect himself. His own spear caught Hector’s charioteer in the face. With an awful shriek he fell over backward, both hands pawing at the shaft that had turned his face into a bloody shambles.

The Achaians shouted and surged a few steps forward. Hector, knowing he could not control his horses and fight at the same time, jumped lightly from his chariot, two spears gripped in his left hand. The horses raced on, their reins slack, heading back for the walls of the city.

Achilles had the advantage now. His chariot drove around Hector, circling the stranded warrior again and again, seeking an advantage, a momentary dropping of his guard. But Hector held his shield firmly before him, crouching slightly, and pivoted smoothly to present nothing more to Achilles than a bronze plumed helmet, the body-length shield, and the greaves that protected his ankles.

Achilles cast another spear at him, but it went slightly wide. Hector remained in place, or seemed to. I noticed that each time he wheeled to keep his front to Achilles’s chariot, he edged a step or two closer to his own ranks.

Achilles must have noticed this, finally, and jumped out of his chariot. A great gusting sigh of expectation went through both armies. The two champions were going to face each other on foot, at spear’s length.

Hector advanced confidently toward the smaller Achaian. He spoke to Achilles, who spat out a reply. They were too far away for me to make out their words.

Then Achilles did something that wrenched a great moaning gasp from the Achaians. He threw his shield down clattering on the bare ground and faced Hector with nothing but his body armor and his spear.

The fool! I thought. He must actually believe that he’s invulnerable. Achilles gripped his spear in both hands and faced Hector without a shield.

Dropping the shorter of his two spears, Hector drove straight at Achilles. He had the advantage of size and strength, and of experience, and he knew it. Achilles, smaller, faster, seemed to be absolutely crazy. He did not try to parry Hector’s spear thrust or run out of its reach. Instead he dodged this way and that, avoiding Hector’s spear by scant inches, keeping his own spear point aimed straight at Hector’s eyes.

It is a truth of all kinds of hand-to-hand combat that you cannot attack and defend yourself at the same time. The successful fighter can switch from attack to defense and back again at the flick of an eye. Hector knew this, and his obvious aim was to keep the shieldless Achilles on the defensive. But Achilles refused to defend himself, except for dodging Hector’s thrusts. I began to see method in his madness; Achilles’s great advantages were speed and daring. The heavy shield would have slowed him.

He gave ground, and Hector moved steadily forward, but even there I soon saw that Achilles was edging around, moving to stand between Hector and the Trojan ranks, maneuvering Hector closer and closer to our own side.

I saw the look on Achilles’s face as they sweated and grunted beneath the high sun. He was smiling. Like a little boy who enjoys pulling the wings off flies, like a man who was happily looking forward to driving his spear through the chest of his enemy, like a madman intent on murder. I had seen that smile before. On the lips of the Golden One.

Hector realized that he was being maneuvered. He changed his tactics and tried to engage Achilles’s spear, knowing that his superior strength could force his enemy’s point down, and then he could drive his own bronze spearhead into Achilles’s unguarded body.

Achilles feinted and Hector followed the motion for a fraction of an instant. It was enough. Launching himself completely off his feet like a distance jumper, Achilles drove his spear with all the strength in both his arms into Hector’s body. The point struck Hector’s bronze breastplate; I could hear the screech as it slid up along the armor, unable to penetrate, and then caught under Hector’s chin.

The impact knocked Hector backward but not off his feet. For an instant the two champions stood locked together, Achilles ramming the spear upward with both his hands white-knuckled against its haft, his eyes blazing hatred and bloodlust, his lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Hector’s arms, one holding his long spear, the other with the great shield strapped to it, slowly folded forward, as if embracing his killer. The spear point went deeper into his throat, up through his jaw, and buried itself in the base of his brain.

Hector went limp, hanging on Achilles’s spear point. Achilles wrenched it free and the Trojan prince’s dead body slumped to the dusty ground.

“For Patrokles!” Achilles shouted, holding his bloodied spear aloft.

A triumphant roar went up from our ranks, while the Trojans seemed frozen in gasping horror.

Achilles threw down his bloody spear and pulled his sword from its scabbard. He hacked at Hector’s neck once, twice, three times. He wanted the severed head as a trophy.

The Trojans screamed and charged at him. Without a word of command we charged too. In the span of a heartbeat the single combat turned into a general brawling battle.

I raced behind Odysseus’s chariot, thinking that the very men who had hoped this fight between the champions would end the war were now racing into battle themselves, unthinking, uncaring, like murderous lemmings responding to some mysterious urge deep inside them.

“You enjoy fighting,” I remembered the Golden One telling me once, long ago. “I built that instinct for killing into my creatures.”

And then there was no time for thought. My sword was in my hand and enemies were charging at me, blood and murder in their eyes. Like Achilles, I slid my left arm free of the cumbersome shield. I did not need it; my senses went into overdrive and the world around me became a slow-motion dream.

My iron sword served me well. Bronze blades chipped or broke against it. Its sharp edge slashed through bronze armor. I caught up with Odysseus’s chariot. He and several other mounted warriors had formed a screen over the body of Hector as Achilles and his Myrmidones stripped the corpse down to the skin. I saw the brave prince’s severed head bobbing on a spear, and turned away in disgust. Then someone tied his ankles to a chariot’s tail and tried to fight through the growing melee and make his way with the body back toward the Achaian camp.

Instead of being dispirited by these barbarities, the Trojans seemed infuriated. They fought with a rage born of desecration and battled fiercely to recover Hector’s body before it could be dragged back behind our rampart.

While this struggle grew in fury, I realized that none of the Trojans were protecting their line of retreat, or even thinking about guarding the gate from which they had left the city.

I rushed to Odysseus’s chariot and shouted over the cursing and clanging of the battle, “The gate! They’ve left the gate unprotected!”

Odysseus’s eyes gleamed. He looked up toward the city walls, then back at me. He nodded once.

“To the gate!” he called in a voice that roared across the plain. “To the gate before they can close it!”

Screaming his eerie battle cry, Odysseus fought his way clear of the struggle around Hector’s corpse, followed by two more chariots. I ran ahead, slashing my way clear until there was nothing between me and the walls of Troy but empty bare ground.

“To the gate!” I heard behind me, and a chariot clattered past, its horses leaning hard into their harnesses, nostrils blowing wide, eyes white and bulging.

Within seconds Hector’s corpse was forgotten. The battle had turned into a race for the Scaean gate. Odysseus led the Achaians who were trying to get there before the Trojans could close it. The Trojan army streamed toward it so that they could get inside the protection of the city walls before the gate was closed and they were cut off.

Achilles, back in his chariot, was cutting a bloody path through the Trojans, hacking with his sword until the foot soldiers and chariot-riding noblemen alike gave him a wide berth. Then he snatched the whip from his driver’s hands and lashed his horses into a frenzied gallop toward the city gate.

I saw Odysseus fling a spear into the chest of a Trojan guarding the gate. More Trojans appeared at the open gateway, graybeards and young boys armed with light throwing javelins and swords. From up on the battlements that flanked the gate on both sides others were firing arrows and hurling stones. Odysseus was forced to back away.

But not Achilles. He drove straight for the gate, oblivious to the bombardment from above. The rear guard scattered before him, ducking behind the massive wooden doors. From behind, someone started pushing them closed. Seeing that the gap between the doors was too small for his chariot to pass through, Achilles jumped to the ground, his bloodstained great spear in his hand, and charged at the gate. He met a hedgehog of spear points but dived at them headlong, jabbing and slashing two-handed with his own spear.

Odysseus and another chariot-mounted warrior, whom I later learned was Diomedes, rushed up to help him, their great shields strapped on their backs, protecting them from neck to heel from the stones and arrows being aimed at them from above. I saw the main mass of the Trojan troops not far behind us, a wild tangled melee battling with the rest of the Achaians, fighting its way to the protection of the city’s walls.

I pushed my way between Achilles and Odysseus, hacking with my sword at the spears sticking out from the gap between the doors. I grabbed one spear with my left hand and pulled it out of the hands of the frightened boy who had been holding it. Flinging it to the ground, I reached for another.

Somewhere deep inside my mind I heard myself asking why I should be killing Trojans. They are men, human beings, creations of the Golden One just as I am. What they do they do because the Golden One drives them, manipulates them, just as he drives and manipulates me.

But I answered myself: All men die, and some of us die many times over. The goal of life is death, and as long as these creatures serve the Golden One, even unknowingly, unwittingly, then they are my enemies. Just as they would kill me, I will kill them.

And I did. I pulled on the spear in my left hand, dragging the graybeard holding it, until he was within reach of my sword. He saw the blow coming and released the spear, raising his arms over his head and screaming, as if that would protect him. My blade bit through both his arms and buried itself in his skull.

A teenager thrust his spear at me while I worked my sword free. I dodged it, wrenched the blade from the dead man’s bloody head, and swung it at the youth. But there was little purpose in my swing, except to scare him off. He backed away, but then came forward again. I did not give him a second chance.

The struggle at the gate seemed to go on for an hour, although common sense tells me it took only a few minutes. The rest of the Trojans came up, still battling furiously with the main body of the Achaians. Chariots and foot soldiers hacked and slashed and cursed and shouted and screamed their final cries in that narrow passage between the walls that flanked the Scaean gate. Dust and blood and arrows and stones filled the deadly air. The Trojans were fighting for their lives, desperately trying to get inside the gate, just as our own Achaians had been trying to escape from Hector’s spear a few days earlier.

Despite our efforts, the Trojans still held the gate ajar and kept us from entering it. Only a few determined men were needed to keep an army at bay, and the Trojan rear guard at the gate had the determination born of sheer desperation. They knew that once we forced that gate their city was finished; their lives, their families, their homes would be wiped out. So they held us at bay, new men and boys taking the place of those we killed, while the main body of their army began to slip through the open doors, fighting as they retreated to safety.

Then I saw the blow that ended the battle. Everything still seemed to move in slow-motion for me. Arrows flew through the air so lazily that I thought I could snatch one in my bare hand. I could tell where warriors were going to send their next thrust by watching their eyes and the muscles bunching and rippling beneath their skin.

Still fighting at the narrowing entrance to the gate, I had to turn almost ninety degrees to deal with the Trojan warriors who were battling their way to the doors in their effort to reach safety. I saw Achilles, his eyes burning with bloodlust, his mouth open with wild laughter, hacking at any Trojan who dared to come within arm’s length. Up on the battlements a handsome man with long flowing golden hair leaned out with a bow in his hands and fired an arrow, fledged with gray hawk feathers, toward Achilles’s unprotected back.

As if in a dream, a nightmare, I shouted a warning that was drowned out in the cursing, howling uproar of the battle. I pushed past a half-dozen furiously battling men and reached for Achilles as the arrow streaked unerringly to its target. I managed to get a hand on his shoulder and push him out of its way.

Almost.

The arrow struck him on the back of his left leg, slightly above the heel. Achilles went down with a high-pitched scream of pain.

Chapter 16

FOR an instant the world seemed to stop. Achilles, the seemingly invulnerable champion, was down in the dust, writhing in agony, an arrow jutting out from the back of his left ankle.

I stood over him and took off the head of the first Trojan who came at him with a single swipe of my sword. Odysseus and Diomedes joined me and suddenly the battle had changed its entire purpose and direction. We were no longer trying to force the Scaean gate; we were fighting to keep Achilles alive and get him back to our camp.

Slowly we withdrew, and in truth, after a few moments the Trojans seemed glad enough to let us go. They streamed back inside their gate and swung its massive doors shut. I picked Achilles up in my arms while Odysseus and the others formed a guard around us and we headed back to the camp.

For all his ferocity and strength, he was as light as a child. His Myrmidones surrounded us, staring at their wounded prince with round, shocked eyes. Achilles’s unhandsome face was bathed with sweat, but he kept his lips clamped together in a painful white line as I carried him past the huge windblown oak just beyond the gate.

“I was offered a choice,” he muttered, behind teeth clenched with pain, “between long life and glory. I chose glory.”

“It’s not a serious wound,” I said.

“The gods will decide how serious it is,” he replied, in a voice so faint I hardly heard him.

Halfway across the bloody plain six men carrying a stretcher of thongs laced across a wooden frame met us, and I laid Achilles on it as gently as I could. He grimaced, but did not cry out or complain.

Odysseus put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “You saved his life.”

“You saw?”

“I did. The arrow was meant for his heart.”

“How bad a wound do you think it is?”

“Not too bad,” said Odysseus. “But he will be out of action for many days.”

We trudged across the dusty plain side by side. The wind was coming in off the water again, blowing dust in our faces, forcing us to squint as we walked toward the camp. Every muscle in my body ached. Blood was crusted on my sword arm, my legs, spattered across my tunic.

“You fought very well,” Odysseus said. “For a few moments there I thought we would force the gate and enter the city at last.”

I shook my head wearily. “We can’t force a gate that is defended. It’s too easy for the Trojans to hold the narrow opening.”

Odysseus nodded agreement. “Do you think your Hatti troops can really build a machine that will allow us to scale their walls?”

“They claim they have done it before, at Ugarit and elsewhere.”

“Ugarit,” Odysseus repeated. He seemed impressed. “I will speak with Agamemnon and the council. Until Achilles rejoins us, we have no hope of storming one of their gates.”

“And little hope even with Achilles,” I said.

He looked at me sternly, but said nothing more.

Poletes was literally jumping up and down on his knobby legs when I returned to the camp.

“What a day!” he kept repeating. “What a day!”

As usual, he milked me for every last detail of the fighting. He had been watching from the top of the rampart, of course, but the mad melee at the gate was too far and too confused for him to make out.

“And what did Odysseus say at that point?” he would ask. “I saw Diomedes and Menalaos riding side by side toward the gate; which of them got there first?”

He set out a feast of thick barley soup, roast lamb and onions, flat bread still hot from the clay oven, and a flagon of unadulterated wine. And he kept me talking with every bite.

I ate, and reported to the storyteller, as the sun dipped below the western sea’s edge and the island mountaintops turned gold, then purple, and then faded into darkness. The first star gleamed in the cloudless violet sky, so beautiful that I understood why every culture named it after its love goddess.

There was no end of questions from Poletes, so finally I sent him to see what he could learn for himself of Achilles’s condition. Partly it was to get rid of his pestering, partly to soothe a strange uneasiness that bubbled inside me. Achilles is doomed, a voice in my head warned me. He will not outlive Hector by many hours.

I tried to dismiss it as nonsense, battle fatigue, sheer nerves. Yet I sent Poletes to find out how bad his wound really was.

“And find Lukka and send him to me,” I called to his retreating back.

The Hatti officer looked grimly amused when he came to my fire and saluted by clenching his fist against his breast.

“Did you see the battle?” I asked.

“Some of it.”

“What do you think?”

He made no attempt to hide his contempt. “They’re like a bunch of overgrown boys tussling in a town square.”

“The blood is real,” I said.

“Yes, I know. But they’ll never take a fortified city by storming defended gates.”

I agreed.

“There are enough good trees on the other side of the river to build six siege towers, maybe more,” Lukka said.

“Start building one. Once the High King sees that it can be done, I’m sure he’ll grasp the possibilities.”

“I’ll start the men at first light.”

“Good.”

“Sleep well, sir.”

I almost gave a bitter laugh. Sleep well, indeed. But I controlled myself enough to reply, “And good sleep to you, Lukka.”

Poletes came back soon after, his face solemn in the dying light of our fire, his gray eyes sad.

“What’s the news?” I demanded as he sank to the ground at my feet.

“My lord Achilles is finished as a warrior,” said Poletes. “The arrow has cut the tendon in the back of his heel. He will never walk again without a crutch.”

I felt my mouth tighten grimly.

Poletes reached for the wine, hesitated, and cast me a questioning glance. I nodded. He poured himself a heavy draft and gulped at it.

“Achilles is crippled,” I said.

Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Poletes sighed. “Well, he can live a long life back in Phthia. Once his father dies he will be king, and probably rule over all of Thessaly. That’s not so bad, I think.”

I nodded agreement, but I wondered how Achilles would take to the prospect of a long life as a cripple.

As if in answer to my thoughts, a loud wail sprang up from the Myrmidones’s end of the camp. I jumped to my feet. Poletes got up more slowly.

“My lord Achilles!” a voice cried out. “My lord Achilles is dead!”

I glanced at Poletes.

“Poison on the arrowhead?” he guessed.

I threw down the wine cup and started off for the Myrmidones. All the camp seemed to be rushing in the same direction. I saw Odysseus’s broad back, and huge Ajax outstriding everyone with his long legs.

Spear-wielding Myrmidones guards held back the crowd at the edge of their camp area, allowing only the nobles to pass them. I pushed up alongside Odysseus and went past the guards with him. Menalaos, Diomedes, Nestor, and almost every one of the Achaian leaders were gathering in front of Achilles’s hut.

All but Agamemnon, I saw.

We went inside, past weeping soldiers and women tearing their hair and scratching their faces as they screamed their lamentations.

Achilles’s couch, up on a slightly raised platform at the far end of the hut, had turned into a bier. The young warrior lay on it, left leg swathed in oil-soaked bandages, dagger still gripped in his right hand, a jagged red slash from just under his left ear to halfway across his windpipe still dripping bright red blood.

His eyes stared sightlessly at the mud-chinked planks of the ceiling. His mouth was open in a rictus that might have been a final smile or a grimace of pain.

Odysseus turned to me. “Start your men building the siege tower.”

I nodded.

Chapter 17

ODYSSEUS and the other leaders headed for Agamemnon’s hut for a council of war. I went back to my own tent. The camp was wild with the news: Achilles dead by his own hand. No, it was a poisoned arrow. No, a Trojan spy had done it. No, the god Apollo had slain him personally in vengeance for killing Hector and then despoiling his body.

The god Apollo.

I crawled into my tent and stretched out on the straw pallet. Lacing my fingers behind my head, I thought that for once I wanted to sleep, I wanted to go into that other existence and meet the Creators again. I had things to tell them, questions to ask, answers to demand.

But how could I pass through to their dimension? The Golden One had brought me to them. I could not do it myself.

Or could I? Closing my eyes, I cast my thoughts back to the “dreams” I had gone through before. I slowed their moments down to ultra slow-motion in my mind, stretching each second into hours, peering deeper and deeper into the scene until I could almost visualize the individual atoms that made up our bodies and see them scintillating and vibrating in their eternal dance of energy.

A pattern. I sought a pattern. There must be some arrangement of energies, some alignment of particles, that forms a gate between one world and the other. They are linked, I knew, part of what the Golden One called a continuum. Where is the link? How does the gate operate?

Outside my little tent, I knew, insects buzzed and the stars turned on their spheres. The moon rose and climbed up the night sky. Midnight came and went. Still I lay there as in a trance, my eyes closed, my vision focused on the times when the Golden One had pulled me through the gate that linked his world with mine.

I saw a pattern. I replayed each moment when the Golden One had summoned me before him, and saw the same pattern of energies arrange themselves in the atoms around me. I visualized the pattern, froze it in my memory, and then poured every gram of mental energy I had into that image. I felt perspiration trickling across my brow, my chest, my arms and legs. Still I concentrated until it felt as if my brain was on fire.

I will not stop, I told myself. I will break through or kill myself. There is no third way.

A flash of cryogenic cold swept through me and then, with the abruptness of a light being switched on, I felt a gentle warming glow.

I opened my eyes and saw myself standing in the middle of a circle of the same gods and goddesses I had met before. But this time I was on their level, in their midst. And they looked shocked.

“How dare you!”

“Who summoned you?”

“You have no right to intrude here!”

I grinned at their surprise. They were truly splendid, robed and gowned in rich fabrics and glittering metallics. I had on nothing except my leather kilt, I realized.

“The insolence of this creature!” said one of the women.

I searched their faces for the Golden One. He pushed past two other men and confronted me.

“How did you get here?” he demanded.

“You showed me the way.”

Anger flared in his gold-flecked eyes. But the older, bearded one I thought of as Zeus stepped forward to stand beside him.

“You show remarkable abilities, Orion,” he said to me. Then, turning to the Golden One, “You should be congratulated for making him so talented.”

I thought I saw a trace of an ironic smile on Zeus’s bearded face. The Golden One bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.

“Very well, Orion,” he said, “so you’ve found your way here. To what purpose? What do you want?”

“I want to know if you have decided to make Troy win this war or not.”

They glanced back and forth at one another without answering.

“That’s not for you to know,” said the Golden One.

I looked around at all their faces, so flawlessly beautiful, so unable to hide their inner feelings.

“By that,” I said, “I take it that you are still arguing among yourselves about what the outcome should be. Good! The Achaians will attack Troy one more time. And this time they will take the city and burn it to the ground.”

“Impossible!” snapped the Golden One. “I won’t permit it.”

“You think that by killing Achilles you’ve ruined any chance the Achaians had of winning. Well, you’re wrong. We’ll win. And on our next attack.”

“I’ll destroy you!” he raged.

I regarded him calmly. Strangely enough, I actually felt serene within myself. Not a trace of fear.

“You can destroy me, certainly,” I said. “But I have learned something about you self-styled gods and goddesses. You cannot destroy all of your creatures. You can influence us, manipulate us, but you haven’t the power to destroy us, one and all. You may have created us, but now we exist and act on our own. We are beyond your control — not totally, I know, but we have much more freedom of action than you like to admit.”

Zeus said softly, like the warning rumble of distant thunder, “Be careful, Orion. You are tempting a terrible wrath.”

“Your powers are limited,” I insisted. And suddenly I understood why. “You can’t destroy us! If you did, you would be destroying yourselves! You exist only as long as your creatures exist. Our destinies are linked throughout time.”

One of the goddesses, a cruel smile on her beautiful lips, stepped toward me. “You flatter yourself, arrogant creature. You can be destroyed utterly, and very painfully, too.”

The Golden One agreed. “We don’t have to destroy all of you creatures. Merely striking a city with plague or sending a devastating earthquake is usually enough to get what we want from you pitiful little worms.” The goddess reminded me of what the Achaians had said of Hera, the wife of Zeus: beautiful, wily, and a relentless, implacable enemy.

“Personally, I favor the Achaians,” she said, tracing a fingernail down my bare chest hard enough to draw blood. “But if your conceited interference is what we have to look forward to, I will gladly switch my loyalty to agree with our Apollo, here.”

The Golden One took her hand and kissed it. “You see, Orion,” he said to me, “you are dealing with forces far beyond your scope. Perhaps it would be better if I eliminated you now, once and for all.”

“As you eliminated the one called Athene?” I snarled.

“More insolence!”

“Destroy him now and be done with it,” said one of the other males.

The Golden One nodded, a half-reluctant smile on his lips. “I’m afraid you’ve outlived your usefulness, Orion.”

“Leave him alone.”

The words were spoken in a hissing, rasping whisper, but they froze all the gods and goddesses ringed around me.

They stepped aside to make room for a burly, massive figure who walked slowly toward me. It was as if they were afraid to touch him, afraid that his powerful arms would crush them if he merely reached out. His shoulders were rounded, but broad and thick with muscle. His body was heavy and deep, his legs shorter than I would have expected, but equally massive and powerful. His face was wide, with eyes that burned red beneath thick brows.

Unlike the others in their splendid robes, he wore a black leather vest and knee-length kilt of forest green. His skin was gray, the hair of his head black and pulled straight back. Despite his slightly bent posture he loomed over me and all the others there.

He came straight up to me, glowering before me like a smoldering volcano.

“Do you remember me?” His voice was a harsh, labored whisper.

“Ahriman,” I said, awed by his presence.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then, “We have been enemies for long, long ages, Orion. Do you remember that?”

I looked deep into those red burning eyes and saw pain and hatred and a hunt that spanned fifty thousand years. I saw a battle in the snow and ice of a bygone era, and a struggle between us in other places, other times.

“It’s… all confused,” I said to him.

“Go back to your world, Orion,” said Ahriman. “Once you did me a good turn and now I repay the debt. Go back to your world and don’t tempt your destiny any further.”

“I’ll go back to my world,” I said. “And I’ll help the Achaians to conquer Troy.”

The gods and goddesses remained silent, although I could feel the anger radiating from the Golden One.

Chapter 18

I awoke with the first light of day, as one of the camp’s roosters raised his raucous cry of morning. As I went to pull my gray linen tunic over my head, I noticed the long thin slice of a cut oozing blood down my chest. I willed the capillaries to clamp themselves down and the bleeding stopped.

So the physical body is actually transported to the other realm, I said to myself. It’s not merely a trick of the mind, a projection of one’s mentality. The body moves from one universe to the other, as well.

Lukka and his men were already heading off toward the river to cut down the trees from which they would build our siege tower. I spoke briefly with him before he left, then went to Odysseus’s quarters, up on his boat, to learn what had transpired in the council meeting.

The Trojans had sent a delegation to ask for the return of Hector’s dismembered body. Try as they might to keep Achilles’s death a secret, the Achaians were unable to prevent the Trojan emissaries from finding out the news: The whole camp was buzzing with it. The council met with the Trojan delegation, and after some debate agreed to return Hector’s body, and suggested a two-day truce in which both sides could properly honor their slain.

Once the Trojans had departed with the corpse of their prince, Agamemnon told the council about the siege tower. They swiftly decided to use the two days of truce to build the machine in secret.

I spent those two days with my Hatti troops, on the far side of the Scamander river, screened from Trojan eyes by the riverbank’s line of trees and shrubbery. Odysseus, who above all the Achaians appreciated the value of scouting and intelligence-gathering, spread a number of his best men along the riverbank to prevent any stray Trojan scouts from getting near us. I hoped that our hammering and sawing, which I was certain the Trojans could hear when the wind blew inland, would be taken as a shipbuilding job and nothing more.

We commandeered dozens of slaves and thetes to do the dogwork of hewing trees and carrying loads. Lukka was a born engineer, and directed the construction with dour efficiency. The tower took shape swiftly, and on the evening of the last day of truce Agamemnon, Nestor, and the other leaders came across the river to inspect our work.

We had built it horizontally, laying it along the ground, partly because it was easier to do that way but mainly to keep it hidden behind the tree line. Once it got dark enough, I had several dozen slaves and thetes haul on ropes to pull it up into its true vertical position. Agamemnon peered up at it. “It’s not as tall as the city walls,” he complained.

While Lukka and his men had been building, I had been planning how best to use the tower. We had time only for one of them, if we were to strike as soon as the truce ended. So we needed to strike where it would do us the most good.

“It is tall enough, my lord king,” I replied, “to top the western wall. That is the weakest section. Even the Trojans admit that that section of their walls was not built by Apollo and Poseidon.”

Nestor bobbed his white beard. “A wise choice, young man. Never defy the gods, it will only bring you to grief. Even if you seem to succeed at first, the gods will soon bring you low because of your hubris. Look at poor Achilles, so full of pride. Yet a lowly arrow wound has been his downfall.”

As soon as Nestor took a breath, I rushed to continue, “I have been inside the city. I know its layout. The west wall is on the higher side of the bluff. Once we get past that wall we will be on the high ground, and very close to the palace and temple.”

Odysseus agreed. “I too have served as an emissary, if you recall, and I studied the city’s streets and buildings carefully. Orion is right. If we broke through the Scaean gate, for example, we would still have to fight through the streets, uphill every step of the way. Breaking in over the west wall is better.”

“Can we get this thing up the hill to the wall there?” Agamemnon asked.

“The slope is not as steep at the west wall as it is to the north and east,” I said. “The southern side is the easiest, where the Scaean and Dardanian gates are located. But it’s also the most heavily defended, with the highest walls and tall watchtowers alongside each gate.”

“I know that!” Agamemnon snapped. He poked around the wooden framework, obviously suspicious of what was to him a new idea.

Before he could ask, I said, “It would be best to roll it across the plain tonight, after the moon goes down. There should be a fog coming in from the sea. We can float it across the river on the raft we’ve built and roll it over the plain on its back, so that the mist will conceal us from any Trojan watchmen on the walls. Then we raise it…”

Agamemnon cut me off with a peevish wave of his hand. “Odysseus, are you willing to lead this… this maneuver?”

“I am, son of Atreus. I plan to be the first man to step onto the battlements of Troy.”

“Very well then,” said the High King. “I don’t think this will work. But if you’re prepared to try it, then try it. I’ll have the rest of the army ready to attack at first light.”

We got no sleep that night. I doubt that any of us could have slept even if we had tried. Nestor organized a blessing for the tower. A pair of aged priests sacrificed a dozen rams and goats, slitting their throats with ancient stone knives as they lay bound and bleating on the ground, then painting their blood on the wooden framework. They fretted that there were no bulls or human captives to sacrifice; Agamemnon did not think enough of the project to allow such wealth to be wasted on it.

Lukka supervised rafting the tower across the river, once the night fog began blowing in from the sea. We waited, crouched in the chilling mist, the tower’s framework looming around us like the skeleton of some giant’s carcass, until the moon finally disappeared behind the islands and the night became as black as it would ever be.

I had hoped for cloud cover, but the stars were watching as we slowly, painfully, pulled the tower on big wooden wheels across the plain of Ilios and up the slope that fronted Troy’s western wall. Slaves and thetes strained at the ropes, while others slathered animal grease on the wheels to keep them from squeaking.

Poletes crept along beside me, silent for once. I strained my eyes for a sight of Trojan sentries up on the battlements, but the fog kept me from seeing much. Straight overhead I could make out the Dippers and Cassiopeia’s lopsided W. The constellation Orion, my namesake, was rising in the east, facing the V-shaped horns of Taurus the Bull. The Pleiades gleamed like a cluster of seven gems on the Bull’s neck.

The night was eerily quiet. Perhaps the Trojans, trusting in the truce the Achaians had asked for, thought that no hostilities would start until the morning. True, the fighting would start with the sun’s rise. But were they fools enough not to post lookouts through the night?

The ground was rising now, and what had seemed like a gentle slope felt like a cliff. We all gripped our hands on the ropes and put our backs into it, trying not to cry out or groan with the pain. I looked across from where I was hauling and saw Lukka, his face contorted with the effort, his booted heels dug into the mist-slippery grass, straining like a common laborer, just as all the rest of us were.

At last we reached the base of the wall and huddled there, waiting. I sent Poletes scampering around to the corner where the wall turned, to watch the eastern sky and tell me when it started to turn gray with the first hint of dawn. We all sat sprawled on the ground, letting our aching muscles relax until the moment for action came. The tower lay lengthwise along the ground, waiting to be pulled up to its vertical position. I sat with my back against the wall of Troy and counted minutes by listening to my heartbeat.

I heard a rooster crow from inside the city, and then another. Where is Poletes? I wondered. Has he fallen asleep, or been found by a Trojan sentry?

Just as I was getting to my feet, the old storyteller scuttled back through the mist to me.

“The eastern sky is still dark, except for the first touch of faint light between the mountains. Soon the sky will turn milk-white, then as rosy as a flower.”

“Odysseus and his troops will be starting out from the camp,” I said. “Time to get the tower up.”

We almost got the job done before the Trojans realized what we were about.

The fog was thinning slightly as we hauled on the ropes that raised the tower to its vertical position. It was even heavier than it looked, because of the horse hides and weapons we had secured to its platforms. Lukka and his men stood on the other side, bracing the tower with poles as it rose. There was no way we could muffle the noise of the creaking and our own gasping, grunting exertions. It seemed to take an hour to get the thing standing straight, although actually only a few strenuous minutes had elapsed.

Still, just as the tower tipped over and thumped against the wall in its final position, I heard voices calling confusedly from the other side of the battlements.

I turned to Poletes. “Run back to Odysseus and tell him we’re ready. He’s to come as fast as he can!”

The plan was for Odysseus and a picked team of fifty Ithacans to make their way across the plain on foot, because chariots would have been too noisy. I was beginning to wonder if that had been the smartest approach.

Someone was shouting from inside the walls now, and I saw a head appear over the battlements, silhouetted for a brief instant against the graying sky.

I pulled out my sword and swung up onto the ladder that led to the top of the tower. Lukka was barely a step behind me, and the rest of the Hatti soldiers swarmed up the sides, unrolling the horsehide shields to protect the tower’s sides against spears and arrows.

“What is it?” I heard a boy yelling from atop the wall.

“It’s a giant horse!” a fear-stricken voice answered. “With men inside it!”

Chapter 19

I reached the topmost platform of the tower, sword in hand. Our calculations had been almost perfect. The platform reared a foot or so higher than the wall’s battlements. Without hesitation I jumped down onto the parapet and from there onto the stone platform behind it.

A pair of stunned Trojan youths stood there, mouths agape, eyes bulging, long spears in their trembling hands. Lukka rushed past me and cut one of them nearly in half with a savage swing of his sword. The other dropped his spear and, screaming, jumped off the platform to the street below.

The sky was brightening. The city seemed asleep. But across the angle of the wall I could see another sentry on the platform, his long spear outlined against the gray-pink of dawn. Instead of charging at us, he turned and ran toward the square stone tower that flanked the Scaean gate.

“He’ll alarm the guard,” I said to Lukka. “They’ll all be at us in a few minutes.”

Lukka nodded wordlessly, his hawk’s face showing neither fear nor anticipation.

It was now a race between Odysseus’s Ithacans and the Trojan guards. We had won a foothold inside the walls; now our job was to hold it. As Lukka’s men swiftly broke out the spears and shields that we had roped to the tower’s timbers, I looked out over the parapet. Fog and darkness still shrouded the plain. I could not see Odysseus and his men in the shadows — if they were there.

Trojan guards spilled out of the watchtower, an even dozen of them. And I saw more Trojans coming at us from the other side, running along the north wall, spears leveled. The battle was on.

The Hatti were professional soldiers. They had faced spears before, and they knew how to use their own. We formed a defensive wall by locking our shields together, and put out a bristling hedgehog front with our long spears. I too gripped a spear in my right hand and held my shield butted against Lukka’s. My senses went into overdrive once more and the world around me slowed. Still I felt my heart pounding and my palms becoming slippery with sweat.

The Trojans attacked us with desperate fury, practically leaping on our spear points. They fought to save their city. We fought for our lives. I knew there was no way for us to retreat without being butchered. We either held our beachhead on the wall or we died.

Our shield wall buckled under their savage attack. We were forced a step back, and then another. A heavy bronze spear point crashed over the top of my shield, passed my ear, and plunged into the man behind me. As he died I thrust my spear into the belly of the man who had killed him. His face went from triumph to surprise to the final agony of death in the flash of a second.

More Trojans were pouring up the stairs to the platform, buckling armor over their nightclothes as they ran. These were the nobility, the cream of their fighting strength; I could tell from the gaudy plumes of their helmets and the gold that glinted in the light of the new day against the bronze of their breastplates.

Archers were leaning across the battlements, too, firing flaming arrows at our tower. Others fired at us. An arrow chunked into my shield. Another hit the man on my right in his leg; he staggered and went down. Instantly a Trojan spear drove through the unprotected back of his neck.

The archers were lofting their shots now, to get over our shield wall. Flaming arrows fell among us; men screamed and fell to the stone flooring, their clothes and flesh on fire.

The barrage of arrows would quickly break our shield wall, and then what was left of my men would go down individually under the weight of Trojan numbers. I felt a burning fury rising inside me, a rage against these men who were trying to kill us and against the gods that drove us to such murderous games. Call it battle frenzy, call it bloodlust, I felt the civilized compunctions, the veneer of morality burning away; and out of that flame of hatred and fear there arose an Orion who was beyond civilization, a barbarian with a spear in his hand that thirsted for blood.

“Hold here,” I said to Lukka. Before he could do more than grunt I drove forward, surprising the Trojans in front of me. Holding my spear in two hands, level with the floor, I pushed four of them off their feet and slipped between the others, dodging their clumsy thrusts as they turned in dreamlike slow-motion to cut me down. I killed two of them; Lukka and his men killed several more, and the others quickly turned back to face the Hatti soldiers.

I dashed toward the archers. Most of them turned and ran, although two stood their ground and fired arrows at me as rapidly as they could. I picked them off with my shield as I ran. I caught the first archer on my spear, a lad too young to have more than the wisp of a beard. His companion started to pull out the sword at his side but I knocked him spinning with a swipe of my shield. He toppled off the platform to the ground below.

The other archers had retreated out of range of my Hatti troops, who were still battling to hold their foothold on the wall. For the span of a heartbeat I was alone. But only for that long. The Trojan nobles were rushing along the platform toward me, a dozen of them, with more behind them. I hefted my long spear in one hand and threw it at the closest man. Its heavy weight drove it completely through his shield and into his chest. He staggered backward into the arms of his two nearest companions.

I threw my shield at them to slow them down further, then picked up the bow from the archer I had slain. It was a beautiful, gracefully curved thing of horn and smooth-polished wood. But I had no time to admire its construction. I fired every arrow in the dead youth’s quiver, forcing the nobles to cower behind their bodylength shields, holding them at bay for a precious few minutes.

Once the last arrow was gone and I threw down the useless bow, their leader dropped his shield enough for me to recognize him: Aleksandros, a sardonic smile on his almost-pretty face.

“So the herald is a warrior, after all,” he called to me.

Sliding my sword from its sheath, I responded, “Yes. Is the stealer of women a warrior, as well?”

“A better one than you,” Aleksandros said.

“Prove it then,” I stalled. “Face me man to man.”

He glanced at the Hatti battling behind me. “Much as I would enjoy that, today is not the day for such pleasures.”

“Today is the last day of your life, Aleksandros,” I said.

As if on cue, a piercing, blood-curdling war cry came from behind me. Odysseus!

Aleksandros looked startled for a moment, then he screamed to his followers, “Clear the wall of them!”

The Trojans charged. They had to get past me before they could reach Lukka and Odysseus. I faced a dozen long spears with nothing but my sword. They ran at me in slow-motion, bronze spear points glinting in the dawning light, bobbing slightly with each pounding step they took. I noticed that Aleksandros slid toward the rear and let others come at me first.

I moved a step toward the edge of the platform, then dived between the two nearest spears and got close enough to use my sword. Two Trojans went down, and the others turned toward me. I barely avoided one point jamming toward my belly as I hacked at another spear haft and cut it in two with my iron blade. I ducked another thrust and stepped back — onto empty air.

As I tottered on the edge of the platform, another spear came thrusting at me. I banged its bronze head with the metal cuff around my left wrist, deflecting it enough to save my skin. But the motion sent me tumbling off the platform.

I turned a full somersault in midair and landed on my feet. The impact buckled my knees and I rolled on the bare dirt of the street. A spear thudded into the ground next to my shoulder. Turning, I saw a pair of arrows heading my way. I dodged them and ducked behind the corner of a house.

Aleksandros and his men rushed toward the battle still raging farther along the platform, at the top of the wall: my Hatti contingent and Odysseus’s Ithacans against the growing numbers of Trojans roused so rudely from their sleep. We needed a diversion, something to draw off the Trojan reinforcements.

I sprinted down the narrow alley between houses until I found a door. I kicked it open. A woman screamed in sudden terror as I stamped in, sword in hand. She crouched in a corner of her kitchen, her arms around two small children huddling against her. As I strode toward them they all shrieked and ran along the wall, screeching and skittering like mice, then bolted for the open door. I let them go.

A small cooking fire smoldered in the hearth. I yanked down the flimsy curtains in the doorway that separated the kitchen from the next room and tossed them onto the fire. It flared into open flame. Then I smashed the wooden table and fed it to the blaze. Striding into the next room, I grabbed straw bedding and blankets and added them to the fire.

Two houses, three, then the whole row of them I set ablaze. People were screaming and shouting. Men and women alike raced toward the fire with buckets of water drawn from the fountain at the end of the street.

Satisfied that the fire would keep them busy, I started up the nearest flight of steps to return to the battle on the platform.

Achaians were pouring over the parapet now and the Trojans were giving way. I leaped on them from the rear, yelling out to Lukka. He heard me and led his contingent to my side, cutting a bloody swath through the defending Trojans.

“The watchtower by the Scaean gate,” I said, pointing with my reddened sword. “We’ve got to take it and open the gate.”

We fought along the length of the wall, meeting the Trojan warriors as they came up in groups of five or ten or a dozen and driving away those few we did not kill. The fires I had started were spreading to other houses now, and a pall of black smoke hid the palace from our sight.

The watchtower was only lightly guarded; most of the Trojan strength was being thrown against Odysseus on the western wall. We broke into the guard room, the Hatti using their spear butts to batter the door down, and slaughtered the men there. Then we raced down to the ground and started to lift the heavy beams that barricaded the Scaean gate. A wailing scream arose, and I saw that Aleksandros and the other nobles were racing down the stone steps from the parapet toward us.

We had them on the horns of uncertainty now. If they allowed Odysseus to hold the wall, the rest of the Achaians would enter the city that way. But if they concentrated on clearing the wall, we would open the gate and allow the Achaian chariots to drive into the city. They had to stop us at both places, and stop us quickly.

Archers began shooting at us, but despite them the Hatti tugged and pushed to open the massive gate. Men fell, but the three enormous beams were slowly lifting, swinging up and away from the doors.

I ducked an arrow and saw Aleksandros rushing toward me across the open square behind the gate. “You again!” he shouted at me.

They were his last words. He charged at me with his spear. I dodged sideways, forced it down with my left forearm, and drove my iron sword through his bronze breastplate up to the hilt. As I yanked it out, bright red blood spattered over the golden inlays and I felt a mad surge of pleasure, battle joy that I had taken the life of the man who had caused the war.

Aleksandros sank to the ground. I saw the light go out of his eyes. But in that moment an arrow struck me in my left shoulder. Pain flared for an instant before I reacted automatically and shut it down. I pulled the arrow out, its barbed head tearing at my flesh. Blood spurted, but I consciously damped down those vessels and willed the wound to clot.

Even as I did so, the other Trojans came at me. But they stopped in their tracks as a great creaking groan of huge bronze hinges told me that the Scaean gate was swinging open at last. A roar went up and I turned to see chariots plunging through the open gate, bearing down directly on me.

The Trojans scattered and I dived out of the way. Agamemnon was in the first chariot. His horses pounded over Aleksandros’s dead body and the chariot bumped, then clattered on, chasing the fleeing Trojan warriors.

I stepped backward, dust from the charging chariots stinging my eyes, coating my skin, my clothes, my bloody sword. The battle lust began to ebb and I watched Aleksandros’s mangled body tossed and crushed by chariot after chariot. Lukka came up beside me, a gash on his cheek and more on both his arms. None of them looked serious, though.

“The battle is over,” he said. “The slaughter begins.”

I nodded, suddenly bone weary.

“You are hurt,” he saw.

“It’s not serious.”

He examined the wound, shaking his head and muttering. “It looks halfway healed already.”

“I told you it’s not serious.”

The men gathered around us, looking uneasy. Not frightened, but edgy, nervous.

“This is the time when soldiers collect their pay,” Lukka told me.

Loot, he meant. Stealing everything you can carry, raping the women, and then putting the city to the torch.

“Go,” I said, remembering that the first fires had been set by me. “I’ll be all right. I’ll see you back at the camp.”

Lukka touched his fist lightly to his chest, then turned to what was left of his men. “Follow me,” he commanded. “And remember, don’t take any chances. There are still plenty of armed men left alive. And some of the women will try to use knives on you.”

“Any bitch tries to cut me will regret it,” said one of the men.

“Any bitch who sees your ugly face will probably use her knife on herself!”

They all laughed and marched off together. I counted thirty-five of them. Seven had been killed.

For a while I stood there near the wall and watched Achaian chariots and foot soldiers pouring through the open, undefended gate. The smoke was getting thicker. I squinted up at the sky and saw that the sun had barely topped the wall. It was still early in the morning.

So it is done, I said to myself. Your city has fallen, Apollo. Your plans are ruined.

I felt no exultation, no joy at all. This is not revenge, I realized. Killing a thousand or so men and boys, burning down a city that had taken centuries to build, raping women and carrying them off into slavery — that is not triumph.

Slowly I pulled myself to my feet. The square was empty now, except for the mangled body of Aleksandros and the other slain men. Behind the first row of columned temples I could see flames rising into the sky, smoke billowing toward heaven. A sacrifice to the gods, I thought bitterly.

Raising my bloody sword over my head I cried out, “I want your blood, Golden One! Your blood!”

There was no answer.

I looked down at what was left of Aleksandros. We all die, prince of Troy. Your brothers have died. Your father is probably dying at this very moment. Some of us die many times. The lucky ones, only once.

Then a thought struck me, like a telepathic message beamed into my brain. Where is Helen, the beautiful Helen who was the reason for this slaughter, the calculating woman who had tried to use me as a messenger?

Chapter 20

I strode up the main street of burning Troy, sword in hand, through a morning turned dark by the smoke of fires I had started. Women’s screams and sobs filled the air, men bellowed and laughed raucously. The roof of a house collapsed in a shower of sparks, forcing me back a few steps. Perhaps it was the house I had slept in; I could not be sure.

Up the climbing avenue I walked, my face blackened with dust and soot, my arms spattered with blood — most of it Trojan. I saw that the gutter running along the center of the dirt street also ran red.

A pair of children ran shrieking past me, and a trio of drunken Achaians lurched laughingly after them. I recognized one of them: giant Ajax, lumbering along with a huge wine jug in one hand.

“Come back!” he yelled drunkenly. “We won’t hurt you!”

The children fled into the smoke and disappeared down an alley.

I climbed on, toward the palace, past the market stalls that now blazed hot enough to singe the hair on my arms, past a heap of bodies where some of the Trojans had tried to make a stand. Finally I reached the steps at the front of the palace. They too were littered with fallen bodies.

Sitting on the top step, leaning against one of the massive stone pillars, was Poletes. Weeping.

I rushed to him. “Are you hurt?”

“Yes,” he said, bobbing his old head. “In my soul.”

I almost felt relieved.

“Look at the desolation. Murder and fire. Is this what men live for? To act like beasts?”

“Yes,” I replied. Grabbing him by his bony shoulder, I said, “Sometimes men do act like beasts. Sometimes they behave like angels. They can build beautiful cities and burn them to the ground. What of it? Don’t try to make sense out of it, just accept us as we are.”

Poletes looked up at me through eyes reddened by tears and smoke. “So we should accept the whims of the gods, and dance their dance whenever they pull our strings? Is that what you tell me?”

“There are no gods, Poletes. Only vicious bullies who laugh at our pain.”

“No gods? That cannot be. There must be some reason for our existence, some order in the world.”

“We do what we have to do, old moralizer,” I said gruffly. “We obey the gods when we have no other choice.”

“You speak in riddles, Orion.”

“Go back to the camp, old man. This is no place for you. Some drunken Achaian might mistake you for a Trojan.”

But he did not move, except to lean his head against the pillar. I saw that its once-bright red paint was now blackened and someone had scratched his name into the stone with the point of a sword: Thersites.

“I’ll see you back at the camp,” I said.

He nodded sadly. “Yes, when mighty Agamemnon divides the spoils and decides how many of the women and how much of the treasure he will take for himself.”

“Go to the camp,” I said, more firmly. “Now. That’s not advice, Poletes, it is my command.”

He drew in a long breath and sighed it out, then raised himself slowly to his feet.

“Take this sign.” I handed him the armlet Odysseus had given me. “It will identify you to any drunken lout that wants to take off your head.”

He accepted it wordlessly. It was much too big for his frail arms, so he hung it around his skinny neck. I had to laugh at the sight.

“Laughter in the middle of the sack of a great city,” Poletes said. “You are becoming a true Achaian warrior, my master.”

With that he started down the steps, haltingly, like a man who really did not care which way he went.

I went through the columned portico and into the hall of statues, where Achaian warriors were directing slaves to take down the gods’ images and carry them off toward the boats. Into the open courtyard that had been so lovely I went. Pots were overturned and smashed, flowers trampled, bodies strewn everywhere staining the grass with their blood. The little statue of Athene was already gone. The big one of Apollo had toppled and broken into several pieces. I smiled grimly at that.

One wing of the palace was afire. I could see flames crackling in the windows. I closed my eyes momentarily, picturing in my mind the chamber where Helen had spoken to me. It was there where the fire blazed.

From a balcony overhead I heard shouts, then curses. The clash of metal on metal. A fight was still going on up there.

“The royal women have locked themselves into the temple of Aphrodite,” I heard a man behind me yell. “Come on!” He sounded like someone rushing to a party, or hurrying to get back to his seat before the curtain rose on the final act of the drama.

I snatched my sword from its scabbard and rushed up the nearest stairs. A handful of Trojans were making a last-ditch defense of the corridor that led to the royal temples, fighting desperately against a shouting, bellowing mob of Achaian warriors. Behind the doors locked at the Trojans’ backs waited aged Priam and his wife, Hecuba, together with their daughters and grandchildren, I realized.

Helen must be there too, I thought. I saw Menalaos, Diomedes, and Agamemnon himself thrusting their spears at the few desperate Trojan defenders, laughing at them, taunting them.

“You sell your lives for nothing,” shouted Diomedes. “Put down your spears and we will allow you to live.”

“As slaves!” roared Agamemnon.

The Trojans fought bravely, but they were outnumbered and doomed, their backs pressed against the doors they tried so valiantly to defend, as more and more Achaians rushed up to join the sport.

I sprinted down the next corridor and pushed my way through rooms where soldiers were tearing through chests of gorgeous robes, grabbing jewels from gold-inlaid boxes, and pulling silken tapestries from the walls. This wing of the palace would also be in flames soon, I knew. Too soon.

I found a balcony, swung over its balustrade, and, leaning as far forward as I dared, clamped one hand on the edge of a window in the otherwise blank rear wall of the temple wing. I swung out over thirty feet of air and pulled myself up onto my elbows, then hoisted a leg onto the windowsill. Pushing aside the beaded curtain, I peered into a small, dim inner sanctuary. The walls were bare, the tiles of the floor old and worn to dullness. Small votive statues stood lined on both sides of the room, some of them still decked with rings of withered flowers. The palace smelled of incense and old candles. Standing by the door, her back to me, her hands clasped in fear, stood Helen.

I could hear the sounds of the fighting from outside the temple. I dropped lightly to my feet and walked quietly toward her.

“Helen,” I said.

She whirled to face me, her fists pressed against her mouth, her body tense with terror. I saw her eyes recognize me, and she relaxed a little.

“The emissary,” she whispered.

“Orion,” I reminded her.

She stood there for an uncertain moment, wearing her finest robes, decked with gold and jewels, more beautiful than any woman had a right to be. Then she ran to me, three tiny steps, and pressed her golden head against my grimy, bloodstained chest. Her hair was scented like fragrant flowers.

“Don’t let them kill me, Orion! Please, please! They’ll be crazy with bloodlust. Even Menalaos. He’d take my head off and then blame it on Ares. Please protect me!”

“That’s why I came to you,” I said. As I spoke the words, I knew they were true. It was the one civilized thing I could do in this entire mad, murderous day. Having slain the man who had abducted her, I would now see to it that her rightful husband took her back.

“Priam is dead,” she said, her voice muffled and sobbing. “His heart broke when he saw the Achaians coming over the western wall.”

“The queen?” I asked.

“She and the other royal women are in the main temple, just on the other side of that door. The guards outside have sworn to go down to the last man before allowing Agamemnon and his brutes to enter here.”

I held her and listened to the clamor of the fight. It did not last long. A final scream of agony, a final roar of triumph, then a thudding as they pounded against the locked doors. A splintering of wood, then silence.

“It would be better if we went in there, rather than letting them break in and find you,” I suggested.

She pulled herself away from me and visibly fought for self-control. Lifting her little chin like the queen she had hoped to be, Helen said, “Yes. I am ready to face them.”

I went to the connecting door, unlatched it, and opened it a crack. Agamemnon, his brother Menalaos, and dozens of other Achaian nobles were crowding into the temple. Gold-covered statues taller than life lined its walls, and the floor was of gleaming marble. At the head of the temple, behind the marble altar, loomed a towering marble statue of Aphrodite, gilded and painted, decked with flowers and offerings of jewels. Hundreds of candles burned at its base, casting dancing highlights off the gold and gems. But the Achaians ignored all the temple’s treasures. Instead they stared at the richly draped altar, and the old woman on it.

I had never seen Hecuba before. The aged, wrinkled woman lay on the altar, arms crossed over her breast, eyes closed. Her robes were threaded with gold; her wrists and fingers bore turquoise and amber, rubies and carnelian. Heavy ropes of gold necklaces and a jewel-encrusted crown had been lovingly placed upon her. Seven women, ranging in age from gray-haired to teenaged, stood trembling around the altar, facing the sweating, bloodstained Achaians, who gaped at the splendor of the dead Queen of Troy.

One of the older women was saying quietly to Agamemnon, “She took poison once the king died. She knew that Troy could not outlive this day, that my prophecy had finally come true.”

“Cassandra,” whispered Helen to me. “The queen’s eldest daughter.”

Agamemnon turned slowly from the corpse to the gray-haired princess. His narrow little eyes glared anger and frustration.

Cassandra said, “You will not bring the Queen of Troy back to Mycenae in your black boat, mighty Agamemnon. She will never be a slave of yours.”

A leering smile twisted Agamemnon’s lips. “Then I’ll have to settle for you, princess. You will be my slave in her place.”

“Yes,” Cassandra said, “and we will die together at the hands of your faithless wife.”

“Trojan bitch!” He cuffed her with a heavy backhand swat that knocked her to the marble floor.

Before any more violence erupted, I swung wide the door of the sanctuary. The Achaians turned, hands gripping the swords at their sides. Helen stepped through with regal grace and an absolutely blank expression on her incredibly beautiful face. It was as if the most splendid statue imaginable had taken on the power of life.

She went wordlessly to Cassandra and helped the princess to her feet. Blood trickled from her cut lip.

I stood by the side of the altar, my left hand resting on the pommel of my sword. Agamemnon and the others recognized me. Their faces were grimy, hands stained with blood. I could smell their sweat even from this distance.

Menalaos, who seemed to be stunned with shock for a moment, suddenly stepped forward and gripped his wife by her shoulders.

“Helen!” His mouth seemed to twitch, as if he were trying to say words that would not leave his soul.

She did not smile, but her eyes searched his. The other Achaians watched them dumbly.

Every emotion a human being can show flashed across Menalaos’s face. Helen simply stood there, in his grip, waiting for him to speak, to act, to make his decision on whether she lived or died.

Agamemnon broke the silence. “Well, brother, I promised you we’d get her back! She’s yours once again, to deal with as you see fit.”

Menalaos swallowed hard and finally found his voice. “You are my wife, Helen,” he said, more for the ears of Agamemnon and the others than hers, I thought. “What has happened since Aleksandros abducted you was not of your doing. A woman captive is not responsible for what happens to her during her captivity.”

I kept myself from smiling. Menalaos wanted her back so badly he was willing to forget everything that had happened. For now.

Agamemnon clapped his brother on the back gleefully. “I’m only sorry that Aleksandros didn’t have the courage to face me, man to man. I would have gladly spitted him on my spear.”

“Where is Aleksandros?” Menalaos asked suddenly.

“Dead,” I answered. “His body is in the square at the Scaean gate.”

The women started to cry, sobbing quietly as they stood by their mother’s bier. All but Cassandra, whose eyes blazed with unconcealed fury.

“Odysseus is going through the city to find all the princes and noblemen,” said Agamemnon. “Those that still live will make noble sacrifices to the gods.” He laughed at his own pun.

So I left Troy for the final time, marching with the Achaian victors through the burning city as Agamemnon led seven Trojan princesses back to his camp and slavery, and Menalaos walked side by side with Helen, his wife once more. A guard of honor marched alongside us, spears held stiffly up to the blackened sky. Wailing and sobs rose all around us; the air was filled with the stench of blood and smoke.

I trailed behind and noted that Helen never voluntarily touched Menalaos, not even to take his hand. I remembered what she had told me when we had first met: that being a wife among the Achaians, even a queen, was little better than being a slave.

She never touched Menalaos, and he hardly looked at her, after that first emotion-charged meeting in the temple of Aphrodite at dead Hecuba’s bier.

But she looked over her shoulder more than once, looked back at me, as if to make certain I was not far from her.

Chapter 21

THE Achaian camp was one gigantic orgy of feasting and roistering all that day and far into the night. There was no semblance of order and no attempt to do anything but drink, wench, eat, and celebrate the victory. Men staggered drunkenly around, draped in precious silks pillaged from the burning city. Women cowered and trembled — those that were not beaten or savaged into insensibility.

Fights broke out. Men quarreled over a goblet or a ring or, more often, a woman. Blood flowed, and several Achaians who thought they were safe now that the war had ended learned that death could find them even in the midst of triumph.

“Tomorrow will be the solemn sacrifices of thanksgiving to the gods,” Poletes told me as we sat beside our evening cook fire. “Many men and beasts will be slaughtered, and the smoke of their pyres offered to heaven. Then Agamemnon will divide the major spoils.”

I looked past his sad, weatherbeaten face to the smoldering fire of the city, still glowing a sullen red against the darkening evening sky.

“You will be a rich man tomorrow, master Orion,” said the old storyteller. “Agamemnon cannot help but give Odysseus a great slice of the spoils, and Odysseus will be generous with you — far more generous than Agamemnon himself.”

I shook my head wearily. “It makes no difference, Poletes. Not to me.”

He smiled as if to say, Ah, but wait until Odysseus heaps gold and bronze upon you, and iron tripods and pots. Then you will feel differently.

I got to my feet and went out among the riotous Achaians, looking for Lukka and my other Hatti soldiers. I did not have to look far. They had made their own little encampment around their own fire. The area was heaped with their loot: fine blankets and boots, beautiful bows of bone and ivory, and a couple of dozen women who huddled together, clinging to each other, staring at their captors with wide fearful eyes.

Lukka scrambled to his feet when he saw me approaching out of the raucous darkness.

“Is that what you’ve taken from the city?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. The custom is for the leader to pick his half and the men to divide the rest. Do you want to pick your half now?”

I shook my head. “No. Divide it all among yourselves.”

Lukka frowned with puzzlement. “All of it?”

“Yes. And you’ve done well to stick together like this. Tomorrow Agamemnon divides the major spoils. The Achaians may want a share of your booty.”

“We’ve already put aside the king’s share,” he said. “But your own…”

“You take it, Lukka. I don’t need it.”

“Not even a woman or two?”

I smiled at him. “Where I come from, women are not taken as slaves. They come freely or not at all.”

For the first time since I had met him, the doughty Hatti warrior looked surprised. I laughed and bid him a pleasant night.

As I crawled into my tent I thought that the howling and screaming of the camp would keep me awake. But almost as soon as I stretched out on the pallet, my eyes closed and I fell asleep.

To find myself standing in that golden emptiness once more, in the realm of the Creators. I peered into the all-pervasive glow and made out, dimly, strange shapes and masses far, far off, like the towers and buildings of a distant city seen in the dazzle of an overpoweringly bright sun.

I had not willed myself to make contact with the Creators, I knew. It must be that the Golden One had summoned me once again.

“No, Orion, he has not summoned you. I have.”

A human form materialized about twenty yards from me. The dark-haired one with the precisely trimmed beard, the one I thought of as Zeus. Instead of godly robes, though, he wore a simple one-piece suit with trousers and sleeves and a high collar that buttoned at his throat. It was sky-blue, and it shimmered strangely as he walked toward me.

“Be glad that our Apollo has not called you,” he said, his expression halfway between amused curiosity and serious concern. “He is furious with you. He blames you for the fall of Troy.”

“Good,” I said.

Zeus shook his head in a neat, economical move. “Not good, Orion. In the rage he’s in now, he would destroy you utterly. I called you here to protect you against him.”

“Why?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Orion, you are supposed to thank the gods for the blessing they bestow on you.”

I bowed my head slightly. “I do thank you, whatever your true name is…”

“You may call me Zeus.” He seemed delighted at the idea. “For the time being.”

“I thank you, Zeus.”

His smile widened. “The most grudging thanks a god has ever received, I’ll bet.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Nevertheless, the truth is that you have wrecked Apollo’s plans — for the moment.”

“I doubt that I could have done anything at all without the help of some of you other Creators,” I said. “Several of you opposed his plan for Troy.”

He sighed. “Yes, we were not united about it. Not united at all.”

“Is the one I call Hera actually your wife?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Wife? Of course not. No more than she’s my sister. We don’t have such things here.”

“No wives?”

“Nor sisters,” he said. “But that’s not important. The real question is, how do we continue our work in the face of Apollo’s intransigence? He’s quite enraged. We can’t have an open split among us, it would be catastrophic.”

“Just what is your work?” I asked.

“I doubt that you could understand it,” Zeus said, staring hard at me. “The capacity was never built into you.”

“Try me. Perhaps I can learn…”

But he shook his head, more vigorously this time. “Orion, you can’t visualize the universes. When you freed Ahriman and allowed him to tear down that continuum, you never thought that a new continuum would establish itself out of all that liberated energy, did you?”

His words struck a dim chord of memory in me. “I freed Ahriman,” I said slowly. “After tracking him down in the time before the Ice Age.”

“Before, after, it makes little difference,” Zeus said impatiently. “Ahriman’s people now live peacefully in their own continuum, safely out of the stream that we are trying to protect. But you…”

“The Golden One — Apollo — did he truly create me?”

Zeus nodded. “And the entire human race. There were five hundred of you, originally.”

Faint images were shimmering in my mind like ghosts, blurred and indistinct, but almost within touch. “We were sent to destroy Ahriman’s race, to prepare the Earth for our own kind.”

He waved a hand impatiently. “That’s of little consequence now. That’s all been resolved.” He did not like to think about our task of genocide. He had agreed to it, obviously, but did not want to be reminded of it.

“And a few of us survived to establish the human race on Earth.”

“That is true,” said Zeus.

“And we evolved, over the millennia, to eventually produce…” I remembered now, “to eventually produce you, a race of advanced humans, so advanced that you seem like gods.”

“And we created you,” Zeus said. “The one you call Apollo headed that project. Then we sent you back in time to make the Earth habitable for us.”

“By killing off its original inhabitants: Ahriman’s race.”

“They’re safe enough,” he said, showing that trace of irritability again. “Thanks to you.”

“And Ahriman now has the same powers you do.”

“Virtually.”

I saw it all now. Or most of it. “But what’s Troy got to do with this?” I asked.

Zeus smiled thinly, as if savoring his superior knowledge. “Once you begin altering the continuum, Orion, you create all sorts of side effects that must either be deliberately controlled or allowed to run their natural course until they damp down of themselves. Apollo seeks to control events, to make deliberate adjustments to the continuum wherever and whenever they can be altered to our advantage. Others among us feel that this is self-defeating, that every change we make engenders more side effects and makes it more difficult to protect the continuum.”

I almost understood. “He sent me to Troy, then, to help the Trojans win.”

“Yes. Most of us wanted the war to run its natural course, without our interference. Apollo defied us and sent you to that spot in the continuum. I believe his plan was to have you slay the Achaian leaders in their camp.”

Almost, I laughed. But then a wisp of memory made me blurt, “He said something about dangers from beyond the Earth, and even you spoke of universes — plural.”

Zeus made an effort to control the surprise and fear that my words struck in him. He controlled his face and made it almost expressionless, but not quickly enough to totally mask his emotions.

“There are others, elsewhere in the universe?” I asked. “Other universes?”

“That was something we had not expected,” he admitted. “Our continuum impinges on others. When we make changes in this space-time, it affects other universes. And their manipulations affect us.”

“And what does this mean?”

He made a deep sighing breath. “It means that we must struggle not only to maintain this continuum, but to protect it against outsiders who would manipulate it for their own purposes.”

“And I? Where do I fit in?”

“You?” He regarded me with frank puzzlement, as if a sword or a computer or a starship had asked what its purpose might be. “You are a tool of ours, Orion, to be used where and when we see fit. But you are a stubborn tool; you disregarded Apollo’s commands, and now he seeks to destroy you.”

“He killed the woman I loved. She was one of you: the one I call Athene.”

“Don’t blame him for that, Orion.”

“I do blame him.”

Zeus shook his head. “It’s sad that you should blame the gods and regard us as the source of your troubles. It was your own actions that have brought you worse sufferings than any you were intended to bear.”

“Yet you protect me from Apollo’s anger.”

“You may still be useful to us, Orion. It is wasteful to destroy a tool that can still be used.”

I felt the anger rising in me. His cool smugness, his air of superiority, was beginning to infuriate me. Or was I seething because I knew he was superior, far more powerful than I could ever hope to be?

“Give the golden Apollo a message for me,” I said. “Tell him that I am learning. My memories are coming back to me. One day, whatever he knows, I will know. Whatever he can do, I will be able to do. And on that day I will destroy him.”

Zeus smiled at me, pityingly, the way a father smiles at a naughty child. “He will destroy you long before that day arrives, Orion. You are living on borrowed time.”

I wanted to reply, but he faded into nothingness. The distant city, the golden aura all around me, they all disappeared like the thread of smoke from a candle. I was in my tent again, and the sun was rising on the day when the spoils of Troy would be divided, and the gods would receive their sacrifices of beasts and men.

Chapter 22

THE day dawned gray and dreary. The Achaians, aching and sick from their revelries of the night, were quiet and solemn as the sun climbed slowly behind banks of scudding clouds. The wind from the sea hinted rain, and the chill of approaching autumn.

Neither I nor my Hatti band took part in the sacrifices. Poletes was puzzled at that.

“But you serve the goddess,” he said.

“She is dead. Regardless of what they offer, she won’t be able to receive it.”

Muttering “sacrilege,” Poletes wandered off toward the tall pyres of driftwood and timber that the slaves and thetes were piling up in the center of the camp. I remained near our own fire, close by Odysseus’s boats, and watched.

Nestor led the priests in a procession around the camp, followed by Agamemnon and the other chiefs — all in their most splendid armor and carrying long glittering spears that seemed to me more ornamental than battle weapons.

While they paraded through the camp, singing hymns of praise to Zeus and all the other immortals, the sacrificial victims were being assembled by the pyres. There was a regular herd of goats and bulls and sheep, hundreds of them, kicking up enough dust to obscure the blackened remains of Troy up on the bluff. Their bleatings and bellowings made a strange counterpoint to the chanting and singing of the Achaians.

Standing off to one side of them were the human sacrifices, every man over the age of twelve who had been captured alive, their hands tightly bound behind their backs, their ankles hobbled. Even from the distance where I stood, I could recognize the old courtier who had escorted me in the palace. They stood silently, grimly, knowing full well what awaited them but neither begging for mercy nor bewailing their fate. I suppose they each knew that nothing was going to alter their destiny.

The whole long day was spent in ritual slaughter. First the animals, from a few doves to raging, bellowing bulls that thrashed madly even though their hooves were firmly lashed together, arching their backs and tossing their heads until the priest’s stone ax cut through their throats with a shower of hot blood. Even horses were sacrificed, dozens of them.

Then came the men. One by one they were led to the blood-soaked altar, made to kneel and bow their heads. The lucky ones died in a single stroke. Many were not so fortunate.

By the time it was ended and the pyres were lit, the priests were covered with blood and the camp stank of entrails and excrement. As the sun went down the pyres blazed across the darkening landscape, sending up smoke that was thought to be pleasing to the gods.

Then the whole camp swarmed toward Agamemnon’s boats, in the center of the beach, where the spoils of Troy had been heaped high. Hundreds of women and children stood near the pile of loot, guarded by a grinning handful of warriors.

Agamemnon climbed up onto a beautifully carved chair pillaged from the city. It had been set up on a makeshift platform, to turn it into a rough sort of throne. Then he began to divide the spoils, so much to each chieftain, starting with white-bearded old Nestor.

The Achaians crowded around, greed and envy shining in their eyes. I stayed by Odysseus’s boat and watched from afar. I noticed that Lukka and his men stayed with me.

“Your own goods are safe?” I asked him.

He grunted affirmatively. “They wanted to take our women for the High King to divide out, but we convinced them to leave us alone.”

I almost smiled, picturing Lukka and his disciplined soldiers forming a phalanx against a gaggle of hung-over Achaian warriors.

Far into the night the ceremony went. Agamemnon parceled out bronze armor and weapons, gold ornaments, beautiful urns and vases, porphyry and onyx, glittering jewels, kitchen implements of copper, iron tripods and cooking pots, robes, silks, blankets, tapestries — and women, young boys and girls.

Half of everything he kept for himself: the High King’s prerogative. But as some of the chieftains and men passed me, carrying their loot back to their boats, I heard them complain of the High King’s meanness.

“He’s got the generosity of a dung beetle.”

“He knew we had done the hardest fighting, up on the wall. And what do we get for it? Less than his brother.”

“Those women should have been ours, I tell you. The fat king is too greedy.”

“What can you do? He takes what he wants and we get his leavings.”

I thought that even Odysseus looked less than pleased when he approached me. The pyres smoldered in the distance, but our campfires lit his darkly bearded face with flickers of red.

“Orion,” he called to me. I went to him.

“Your servant Poletes is digging a grave for himself,” Odysseus said. “He is mocking the High King’s generosity.”

I looked into Odysseus’s dark eyes. “Isn’t everyone?” I asked mildly.

His answering smile told me how he felt. “But not everyone is speaking so loosely within earshot of Nestor and Menalaos and others who will report his words to Agamemnon. You’d better see to it. The old storyteller is swimming in dangerous waters.”

“Thank you, my lord. I will see to it.”

I hurried over toward Agamemnon’s part of the camp, passing a stream of disgruntled Achaians toting their loot.

Poletes was sitting on the sand by a small campfire, practically under the nose of one of the High King’s boats, surrounded by a mob of squatting, standing, grinning, laughing Achaian men. None of them were of the nobility. Off in the shadows, though, I noticed Nestor standing with his skinny arms folded across his chest, frowning in Poletes’s direction.

“…and do you remember when Hector drove them all back inside our own gates, here, and he came in with an arrow barely puncturing his skin, crying like a woman, ‘We’re doomed! We’re doomed!’ ”

The crowd around the fire roared with laughter. I had to admit that the old storyteller could mimic Agamemnon’s high voice almost perfectly.

“I wonder what Clytemnestra will do when her brave and noble husband comes home?” Poletes grinned. “I wonder if her bed is high enough off the ground to hide her lover?”

Men rolled on the ground with laughter. Tears flowed. I started to push my way through the crowd to get to him.

But I was too late. A dozen armed men tramped in, and Poletes’s audience scrambled out of their way. I recognized Menalaos at their head.

“Storyteller!” he snapped. “The High King wants to hear what you have to say. Let’s see if your scurrilous tales can make him laugh.”

Poletes’s eyes went wide with sudden fear. “But I only…”

Two of the armed guards grabbed him under his armpits and hauled him to his feet.

“Come along,” said Menalaos.

I stepped in front of him. “This man is my servant. I will take care of him.”

Before Menalaos could reply, Nestor bustled up. “The High King has demanded to see this teller of tales. No one can interfere!” It was the shortest speech I had ever heard the old man make.

With a small shrug, Menalaos headed off toward Agamemnon’s quarters, his guards dragging Poletes after him, followed by Nestor, me, and all of the men who had been rollicking at the storyteller’s gibes.

Agamemnon still sat on his makeshift throne, fat, flushed with wine, flanked by the treasures of Troy. His chubby fingers gripped the chair arms as he eyed Poletes being hauled before him. Rings glittered on each finger and both his thumbs.

The old storyteller knelt trembling before the High King, who glared down at his skinny, shabby presence.

“You have been telling lies about me,” Agamemnon snarled.

Poletes drew himself together and lifted his chin to face the High King. “Not so, your royal highness. I am a professional storyteller. I do not tell lies, I speak only of what I see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears.”

“You speak filthy lies!” Agamemnon screamed, his voice rising shrilly. “About my wife!”

“If your wife were an honest woman, sire, I would not be here at all. I’d be in the marketplace at Argos, telling stories to the people, as I should be.”

“I’ll listen to no calumnies about my wife,” Agamemnon warned.

But Poletes insisted, “The High King is supposed to be the highest judge in the land, the fairest and most impartial. Everyone knows what is going on in Mycenae — ask anyone. Your own captive Cassandra, a princess of Troy, has prophesied…”

“Silence!” roared the High King.

“How can you silence the truth, son of Atreus? How can you turn back the destiny that fate has chosen for you?”

Now Agamemnon trembled, with anger. He hauled himself up from his chair and stepped down to the ground before Poletes.

“Hold him!” he commanded, drawing out the jeweled dagger at his belt.

The guards gripped Poletes’s frail arms.

“I can silence you, magpie, by separating you from your lying tongue.”

“Wait!” I shouted, and pushed my way toward them.

Agamemnon looked up as I approached, his piggish little eyes suddenly worried, almost fearful.

“This man is my servant,” I said. “I will punish him.”

“Very well then,” said Agamemnon, pointing his dagger toward the iron sword at my side. ” Youtake out his tongue.”

I shook my head. “That is too cruel a punishment for a few joking words.”

“You refuse me?”

“The man’s a storyteller,” I pleaded. “If you take out his tongue you condemn him to starvation or slavery.”

Slowly, Agamemnon’s flushed, heavy features arranged themselves in a smile. It was not a joyful one.

“A storyteller, eh?” He turned to Poletes, who knelt like a sagging sack of rags in the grip of the two burly guards. “You only speak what you see and what you hear, you claim. Very well. You will see and hear — nothing! Ever again!”

My guts churned as I realized what he intended to do. I reached for my sword, only to find ten spears surrounding me, almost touching my skin.

A hand clasped my shoulder. I turned. It was Menalaos, his face grave. “Be still, Orion. The storyteller must be punished. No sense getting yourself killed over a servant.”

Poletes was staring at me, his eyes begging me to do something. I moved toward him, only to be stopped by the points of the spears against my flesh.

“My wife has told me how you protected her during the sack of the temple,” Menalaos said, low in my ear. “I owe you a debt of gratitude. Don’t force me to repay it with your blood.”

“Then run to Odysseus,” I begged him. “Please. Perhaps he can soothe the High King’s anger.”

Menalaos merely shook his head. “It will all be over before I could reach the Ithacans’ first boat. Look.”

Nestor himself carried a glowing brand from one of the pyres, a wicked, perverse smile on his aged face. Agamemnon took it from him as the guards yanked on Poletes’s arms while one of them put a knee in his back. Agamemnon grabbed the old storyteller by the hair and pulled his head back. Again I felt the spear points piercing my clothes.

“Wander through the world in darkness, cowardly teller of lies.”

Poletes screamed in agony as Agamemnon burned out first his left eye and then his right. The old man fainted. The smile of a madman still twisting his thick lips, Agamemnon tossed the brand away, took out his dagger again, and slit the ears off the unconscious old man’s head.

The guards dropped Poletes’s limp body to the sand.

Agamemnon looked up and said in his loudest voice, “So comes justice to anyone who maligns the truth!” Then he turned, grinning, to me. “You can take your servant back now.”

The guards around me stepped back, but still held their spears leveled, ready to kill me if I moved on their king.

I looked down at Poletes’s bleeding form, then up to the High King.

“I heard Cassandra’s prophecy,” I said. “She is never believed, but she is never wrong.”

Agamemnon’s half-demented smile vanished. He glared at me. For a long wavering moment I thought he would command the guards to kill me on the spot.

But then I heard Lukka’s voice calling from a little way behind me. “My lord Orion, are you all right? Do you need help?”

The guards turned their gaze toward his voice. I saw that Lukka had brought his entire contingent, fully armed and ready for battle: thirty-five Hatti soldiers armed with shields and iron swords.

“He needs no help,” Agamemnon answered, “except to carry away the slave I have punished.”

With that he turned and hurried back toward his hut. The guards seemed to breathe one great sigh of relief and let their spears drop away from me.

I went to Poletes, picked up his bleeding, whimpering body, and carried him back to our own tents.

Chapter 23

I tended Poletes through the remainder of that night. There was only wine to ease his pain, and nothing at all to ease the anguish of his mind. I laid him in my own tent, groaning and sobbing. Lukka found a healer, a dignified old graybeard with two young women assistants, who spread salve on his burns and the bleeding slits where his ears had been.

“Not even the gods can return his sight,” the healer told me solemnly, in a whisper so that Poletes could not hear. “The eyes have been burned away.”

I knew what that felt like. I remembered my whole body being burned alive.

“The gods be damned,” I growled. “Will he live?”

If my words shocked the healer, he gave no sign of it. “His heart is strong. If he survives the night he will live for years to come.”

The healer mixed some powder into the wine cup and made Poletes drink. It put him into a deep sleep almost at once. His women prepared a bowl of poultice and showed me how to smear it over a cloth and put it on Poletes’s eyes. They were silent throughout, instructing me by showing, rather than speaking, as if they were mute, and never dared to look directly into my face. The healer seemed surprised that I myself wanted to act as Poletes’s nurse. But he said nothing and maintained his professional dignity.

I sat over the blinded old storyteller until dawn, putting fresh compresses over his eyes every half hour or so, keeping him from reaching up to the burns with his hands. He slept, but even in sleep he groaned and writhed.

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.