Over by the Pelagios, a loud voice caught my attention. A soldier I didn’t know was standing face to face with Lopex, fists on his hips. “Overboard? How will we bury him now? How will his shade rest?”
Men’s heads turned as the man gestured at Lopex, raising his voice. “Do you know what he’s done? Callos, Phota, Krith—they died of their wounds during the storm after Ismaros. And he threw them into the sea! How can they reach Hades now?”
Angry muttering spread. Even more than the Trojans, the Greeks believed that a proper burial, or for heroes, a cremation, was the only way a soul could reach Hades.
Lopex spun on his heel and jumped to grab the rail of the Pelagios, then swung himself up by one hand, muscles flexing. In his other hand he carried a purple mantle which he threw over his shoulders and pinned at his throat with a gold clasp. Dressed like that and standing above us, it was suddenly easy to believe he was a king, back wherever he came from.
He held up his hands for silence. The men ignored him, an angry clamour growing. Mutters broke open into shouts.
“Kritha saved my life at Scamander! This is how he’s honoured?”
“What if we die? Will you dump us too?”
Fists appeared clenching swords or knives. This wasn’t like Ismaros. This time they weren’t ignoring him—they were turning against him.
A flicker of an expression crossed his face, too quick to identify. “That’s right!” he shouted, his voice booming above the clamour. “It was hard, but I acted for the living! Do you think they’re the first men to die at Poseidon’s hand? I sent those poor souls on their way with a gem beneath their tongues valuable enough to buy their passage into Hades ten times over!”
It wasn’t working. The men’s anger was boiling over now, the crowd beginning to surge toward the ship, carrying me along with it. I scrambled onto a boulder to avoid being trampled.
Lopex spotted me and spoke again. “Wait! You’ve all witnessed the skill of our Trojan healer. He knows the dangers dead men bring.” His eye fell upon me. “Isn’t that right, boy?”
The men turned toward me on the boulder in their midst, their expressions hard. “Dead men?” I stammered. “What—”
“That’s right, boy, ” he broke in quickly. “Tell them. What you told me. You know. What the Trojan healers knew.”
I couldn’t think what he was talking about. I opened my mouth, then stopped. Lopex was losing control of his men before my eyes. And Lopex was the only thing protecting me from Ury.
His eyes were fixed on me. I thought fast.
“Dead men? Oh, absolutely. Dead men—” I paused. What would sound convincing? They’d seen a lot more dead men than I had. “Men who die, uh, over water, are a danger to everyone around them. You see—” I hesitated, my mind scrambling “—all deaths at sea are the rightful due of Lord Poseidon. For Trojans, this is common knowledge.”
I thought for a moment, thankful that none of my fellow Trojans spoke Greek. Lopex was nodding, a glint in his eye urging me on.
“If a body that dies over water, um, isn’t returned to his domain soon after death, Poseidon comes for it. He sends spirits. The spirits of—miasm. To collect his due.” Miasm? Where had that come from? Then I remembered: the old beggar on Armoury Street used to mutter it when people walked by.
I looked at the men as though just realizing something. “You mean—you haven’t heard of the miasm? Ask Lopex. He knows.” Behind the men he was nodding, the corners of his mouth turning up in satisfaction.
“He had no choice. Within”—I chose a number quickly — “two days, at most, they would have been upon us.”
Lopex leaned out from the deck of the Pelagios, hands chopping out his words. “Heed him, men. With their foul breath, the kiss of the miasm takes living and dead alike. Or would you have preferred to taste their breath in your nostrils as you slept? Only by releasing the bodies of our comrades to Poseidon’s embrace were we saved.”
The men muttered and drew back a pace. I blinked. Just like that, he was back in control.
He straightened up again and let the hard edge of his voice drop. “I know. I want to see Phota and the others safely to Elysium too. So now that our ill fortune is over, I declare a day of celebration! We will send our fallen companions off with a full day of funeral games, feasting, and sacrifice to Lord Poseidon. A celebration that will ensure their passage from Poseidon’s realm to Hades!”
The tension in the crowd dissolved and a cheer went up. Lopex basked in it for a moment before turning to climb down the ladder. He brushed past me in the buzzing crowd. “Nice catch, boy, ” he murmured.
The hunting party that Lopex had arranged returned in the mid-afternoon, bringing the day’s funeral games to a halt. Just as well. I’d had enough of watching naked Greeks wrestling and running foot-races in the sand. Even so, if I hadn’t been a slave I would have taken them all in the stone throw. After hitting gulls on the wing for supper back in Troy, I could have knocked out their wooden stakes with my eyes shut.
I looked up at the wrong time and caught a gesture from one of the hunters. I sighed and trudged over. Handing me two bare and bloody thigh bones from the carcass on a bronze platter, he trimmed a thick layer of glistening fat from below the skin and wrapped it around them, carefully tucking it around the ends. He pointed to their priest, a thickly-bearded man from another ship preparing a fire on the beach, and gave me a shove.
This had to be a joke. I went to say so but the hunter bent down and clapped a hand over my mouth. “Carry it to the priest, boy, ” he hissed. “And by the gods, you don’t say a single word until the sacrifice is done. Now get going!”
If this was some sort of trick, I wasn’t about to play the fledgling for them. As I trotted over to the priest, I joggled the bundle until one edge of the fat slipped off to reveal the bare bones beneath.
The priest’s unkempt eyebrows furrowed as he looked at it. “What do you think you’ve got there, boy? You think the gods will accept that?” he whispered hoarsely.
I opened my mouth to reply, but stopped as he began carefully rewrapping the bundle to hide the bones. As he lanced it with a large skewer and thrust it into the fire, he glanced over at me. “Don’t do that again, boy, ” he muttered. “We can’t ever let these bones show, or the gods won’t accept the sacrifice.” As he turned away to waft the smoke into the sky with his free hand, he began a slow chant of offering.
I stared, my mouth hanging open. That was a Greek sacrifice? Bones and fat? It was an insult, at least to any gods I knew. But then, whatever the Greeks were doing, it had worked. At least at Troy. I wasn’t so sure it was working for them any longer.
The Greeks feasted all afternoon and into the early evening. Long before they could eat all the meat they’d dressed, the strong Ismarian wine had laid them out around the cooking fires, bloated and snoring. We were clustered at one end of the camp near the slaves’ fire pit.
Zosimea and I were sitting down to a platter of goat strips that I had liberated from a snoring soldier when a thin, spiteful-looking Trojan woman came up and snatched the plate from me. “Stop! The gods deserve their share. We need an offering of our own. A proper sacrifice, a Trojan sacrifice.” Her eye fell upon Kassander lurking by the edge of the camp. “You there! Come here!” Nearby, an unconscious soldier sprawling across a stand of beach grass twitched.
Kassander padded over reluctantly. The thin woman crept up to the soldier and eased his knife from its sheath. “You’re of the age, ” she said to Kassander. “Do us a proper sacrifice.”
He looked down at the knife and shook his head. “I’m sorry, ” he murmured. “I’m not the right person for this.”
“What’s the matter, old man?” she said loudly, poking him in the ribs with the handle. “Do you not respect the gods? Perhaps you’re an apostate?” She raised her voice and gestured around at the waiting Trojans. “Perhaps it’s your fault we’re here now!”
Kassander glanced around uncomfortably. “Very well, ” he
said, accepting the knife. He walked over to where the Greeks had draped several skinned goat carcasses across a log. Laying one of them out on a slaughterboard, he knelt and set to work, his back to us. Eventually the woman called out again. “Move it along, old man. These Greeks won’t sleep all night.”
“I’m nearly done. The light is poor.” A moment later he scrambled to his feet, holding the board in both hands. “Here, ” he said awkwardly.
There was a murmur from the waiting slaves. This wasn’t right. In the twilight I could just make out two long bundles on the board, wrapped in glistening sheets of fat. The thin woman stalked over and picked one up. “What are you playing at, old fool?” It slipped from her hand, exposing two bloody foreleg bones that tumbled to the ground.
The watching Trojans gasped. The woman picked up one of the bones and shook it at him. “What is this?” she hissed. “Are you trying to insult the gods?” It looked just like the Greek sacrifice from earlier in the day.
Kassander took an uneasy breath. “I’m sorry. I haven’t done this in a long time.” His eye fell upon me. “Alexi! Can you come and lend me a hand?” he said anxiously, his accent stronger than usual.
As if a torch had been lit, I suddenly saw the pattern. His accent. How he knew so much about Greek customs. How he hid his face around the Greeks. And how he didn’t know something any Trojan boy could have told him—what a Trojan sacrifice looked like.
“Wait,” I breathed, staring at him. “You’re not Trojan at all.” My eyes opened wide. “You’re Greek!” He looked over at me uncertainly. “That’s it, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re one of them!” A soldier beyond the fire mumbled something and rolled over at the noise.
Kassander dropped the board and swept over to me in a few quick strides. “Alexi,” he said quietly. “Please.”
“Why should I help you, Greek?” I spat. Dismay flickered across his face.
“Keep it quiet, Alexi,” he murmured, glancing at the sleeping soldiers nearby. “You don’t know how dangerous this is.”
“Dangerous?” I shot back. I was so angry I was shaking. “You attacked us! How many Trojans did you kill, Greek?” The soldier in the beach grass nearby stirred and caught my eye. “Maybe I’ll wake him up and ask! Hey! You!” I called. “Did—” but my voice was choked off as Kassander’s hand clamped over my mouth. He put his face down to mine.
“Alexi, please. I swear I have good reasons for what I’ve done. If I promise to tell you everything, will you agree to stay quiet and help me with the sacrifice?” I struggled for a moment, but he was much stronger than he looked. Eventually, I nodded.
He took his hand away tentatively, then straightened up. “My apologies, everyone,” he said to the Trojans, who had been watching our exchange curiously. “Just a misunderstanding. We’ll have a sacrifice ready shortly.” He took my arm and guided me over to the dying fire where he had prepared the first one. Laying out another goat, he knelt beside it and looked up. “Okay, Alexi. What does a Trojan sacrifice?”
I shook my head. “You first.”
Kassander sighed and tapped the ground beside him. “Sit down, Alexi. I said I’d tell you.”
I stayed standing, my arms folded. “So tell me.” Then I frowned. He’d answered in Greek! He caught my eye and nodded.
“That’s right, Alexi. I’m Greek. They don’t know it’s me. I need to keep it that way.”
“Why?”
“Please, Alexi,” he said. “Kneel here and help. I’ll explain as we work. What parts do I need?”
I took a breath and knelt beside him. “First the heart. Now start talking.”
He set methodically to work cracking the breastbone. “My real name is Arkadios,” he said. “I was a commander in the Greek army, a lawagete.”
“You were a general?”
He nodded. “Close.” The chest cavity was open now and he was feeling inside expertly with the tip of his knife. He glanced over. “Commanders have to take the omens before a battle. I’ve eviscerated a few beasts in my time.” His hand came out, dark with cold blood, holding the heart. “What else do I need?”
“The liver. If it’s a special occasion, a lung as well.”
He looked up at me. “Is that all?”
“Were you a spy?”
Kassander shook his head and bent back over the carcass. “We were losing the war, Alexi. We weren’t prepared for an operation this long. King Agamemnon thought you Trojans would welcome us! Liberators from the tyranny of your King Priam.” He paused to scratch his nose with the butt of the knife.
“We were too far from home, with no supply lines. We spent more time raiding down the coast for food than we did fighting. By year three we were down to two meals a day, and meat once a week.” He removed the liver and laid it beside the heart.
“You think it was better for us?” I said. “We were starving! And you started it, Greek.”
He sighed. “I’m not looking for sympathy, Alexi.” He began sawing at something in the chest cavity. “It had become clear we would never win, ” he continued. “My general agreed, but when he spoke of it, Agamemnon had him killed outright. Conditions were terrible. By mid-winter of year five the only meat available was rats. And still Agamemnon refused to admit defeat.”
“You started it, Greek, ” I repeated. Anger was making my tongue thick. “You could have stopped it.”
Kassander looked up at me. “I’m sorry we brought this on your people. And I’m sorry I couldn’t be honest with you.”
“You’ve been lying from the day we met!” I broke in. “Why should I believe you now?”
Kassander sighed. “I’ve been honest about everything except who I was. I couldn’t tell anyone that.” He rubbed his hands, slippery with goat blood, in the sand beside his knees, then dusted them off and picked up the knife again. “You see, Alexi, the Greeks don’t take kindly to traitors.”
“Traitors?”
“It was the plague in the ninth year that finally tipped the scales for me. It hit our whole encampment hard. Men walking around healthy one day were dead two days later. My unit was one of the hardest hit.”
He pulled a neatly separated lung from the chest cavity and laid it beside the heart and liver on the board. “What else do I need?”
I gestured impatiently. “Go on.”
“The seers said it was because Agamemnon had insulted Apollo by taking a priestess as his slave.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, but when he refused to admit it, the entire Myrmidon army dropped arms and withdrew from the war. That was the moment I realized we were all going to die there. Agamemnon would never withdraw until the last of us was dead. With my unit destroyed and my commanding officer killed, something inside me snapped.” He took a deep breath. “That night I crept out of camp and knocked at the east gate. Your King Priam confined me to a wing of the palace, something between guest and a prisoner. When the Greeks came, it was a simple matter to dirty my face, dress as a slave and let myself be captured.”
“You’re lying.” I could feel my blood rising again. “Back at Ismaros you said the Greeks would kill anyone who could be a soldier in disguise. So why didn’t the Greeks kill you?”
“I was telling the truth, Alexi, ” he said quietly. “The trick is to act so much like a slave that they never even think of you as anything else. Stoop. Cringe. Keep your eyes dull. Most importantly, never look them in the eye. I’ve been doing it since Troy. You’d do well to learn how.”
I glanced back to see the same spiteful-looking woman stalking toward us, and reached to unfold the lung and arrange the liver and heart as I’d seen the priests do. “Is there something I need to say?” he muttered.
“Apollo Protector and Life-Giver Helios, thanks and praise, ” I muttered back. He scrambled up, board in hand, and turned toward the slaves.
“Above your head, ” I hissed. He hoisted the board over his head without a pause and repeated the consecration. The slaves filed forward one by one to touch the edge of the platter, then h
eaded quickly for the now-roaring slaves’ fire to fill their bellies.
Kassander stood until they had all gone by, then at my instruction led the way to a high boulder. He set the board down on the rock and turned to me. “We’re not that different, Alexi, ” he said softly as we gathered kindling to burn the offering. “We’re both slaves of the Greeks. And we each have a secret.”
My gaze snapped in his direction. “What do you mean?”
His voice developed a sudden hard edge. “I’ve told you this because I need your help to stay hidden, Alexi. If you’re ever tempted to give me up to the Greeks, just remember that I’m keeping your secret too.” His hand clamped my elbow in a grip like a blacksmith’s tongs, and he looked me hard in the eye. “I know who killed Ury’s brother.”
Chapter 14
THE CAVE GAPED out of the hillside like a mouth. Before it, a semi-circle of boulders jutted to create a large, sloping courtyard. A high awning of rough timber shaded the entrance from the mid-afternoon sun. It could have been any shepherd’s cave from the hills around Troy, except for one thing: it was far too large.
We had spotted the cave that morning while exploring a small offshore island in the Pelagios. Lopex had left the other ships at the larger island we had landed on two nights earlier, with orders to refit and provision.
Upon sighting the cave, Lopex had insisted that we return to the ship, beached at the eastern tip of the island, to fetch more of the wine he had taken at Ismaros. There were twelve of us with him, leaving the rest of the crew with the Pelagios. Ury was one of the twelve.
We watched for a few moments, but nobody was moving near the cave, the tangled thicket of grapevines on the hillside unattended. “Come on, men, ” Lopex called. “Let’s see who lives here.” He strode off up the hill, his purple cloak billowing behind him.
Except for the sword across Lopex’s back, the weapons had been left at the ship. “By making alliance with our enemies the Trojans, the Cicones made us their enemies. Whoever these people are, they did not. Our duty to Zeus, patron of guests, demands that we approach them first in peace, ” he explained as we set off.
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