Nestor said pensively, ‘They’ve gone stark raving mad.’
I contemplated the last of our forces streaming past Thorn Hill, and said dejectedly, ‘On the contrary. Aeneas must believe he has seized our decisive weapon and inflicted a reverse we cannot retrieve. I shouldn’t be surprised if he expects us to acknowledge defeat, launch our ships and go.’
‘A very likely assumption. In which case,’ said Nestor gently, ‘we can convert our repulse into a ruse. The Trojans are complacently rejoicing in victory; the last thing they’ll expect from an enemy beaten by day is a sudden attack in the night. We’re deprived of the tower; the culvert remains.’
I stared at his wizened features, the twinkling watery eyes. ‘By Dodona’s sacred oak, you’ve got the answer! We’ll feign evacuation, but leave a force in hiding! Remain in observation, Nestor--and show not a light after sundown!’
I bounded to my chariot, returned at a gallop to camp, called an immediate council and revealed to astounded Heroes a most audacious plan. Counting on the fact that the sea could be seen from Troy while Thorn Hill hid the camp from enemy view I commanded our smaller Hosts to leave baggage and horses ashore, embark skeleton crews, launch galleys and row for Tenedos. When darkness fell they’d rest on the oars, watch for a beacon on Troy and return as fast as the rowers could strike. A deception, I explained, to convince Aeneas that an enemy finally routed abandoned the war and sailed away.
I looked anxiously at a cloud-wreathed sun that dipped to the western horizon. ‘Don’t waste time! You must show yourselves offshore before the light has gone!’ Calling on their followers as they ran Locrian, Arcadian and Cephallenian leaders fled to the beaches.
‘Odysseus and Diomedes,’ I continued, ‘will choose ten valorous Heroes, steal after dark to the conduit they’ve found and hide in the passage till moonrise soon before dawn. Then they’ll run through the streets by the shortest route and open the Scaean Gate. Have you studied the way on Gelon’s map?’
‘We have,’ said Diomedes.
‘Menelaus and I will pick three hundred Heroes apiece from Mycenae’s and Sparta’s Hosts--the best and bravest we have, the spearhead of our onslaught. They’ll don light armour--helmets, targes, leather corselets, stabbing spears and swords--and assemble behind Thorn Hill after darkness falls. At midnight they’ll start crawling--and crawling is what I mean--across the plain to the plateau’s foot. There they’ll crouch in silence and in hiding till Diomedes’ party opens the gate.’
‘And then?’ said Menelaus.
‘We charge the hill--and Troy has fallen.’
‘Has nobody else a part to play?’ Surprise and disappointment threaded Ascephalus’ drawling voice.
‘Certainly. You and everyone else will remain under arms in camp, show no lights and make no noise. When Nestor sees a beacon ablaze above the Scaean Gate he’ll sound his trumpets loud and clear: the signal for you to leave at the double for Troy.’
‘A considerable distance,’ Agasthenes grumbled. ‘Over four thousand paces. Can a scant six hundred Heroes fend the garrison off until we arrive?’
I said amiably, ‘You’ll have to run hard, my portly friend. And The Lady grant we can, otherwise I’ll be dead.’
* * *
An insect explored my ankle, found succulent flesh and bit. Cautiously I reached a hand and scratched. Grass stems tickled my nose, pebbles prodding my chest seemed huge and jagged as crags.
I lay prone on the plateau’s slant a spear’s length below the rim. All round me in the darkness prostrate Heroes gingerly eased aching limbs, quelled dangerous sneezes and coughs, were prodded awake when they snored. Raising my head I glimpsed the loom of the ramparts against a black star-sprinkled sky. A sentinel paced his beat, starshine twinkled a spearhead on the Tower of Ilion’s parapet.
We had lain in the dark since midnight. Moonrise was not far off.
Boisterous noises of revelry had covered our creeping approach. Trojans celebrated victory, the end of a war and the enemy’s flight. Our Wooden Horse had failed; they saw Achaean galleys sail away; at morning they would scour the camp for baggage and spoil abandoned. As night crawled slowly by the sounds of merriment quieted; wine-sodden Trojans sought their beds and dropped--I hoped--into fuddled slumber. Except for the sentry’s footsteps, an occasional distant drunken shout and a cur dog’s mournful howling the citadel slept silent as a sepulchre.
A pallid radiance glimmered on the horizon’s mountain battlements. A stirring and a shifting rustled through the hidden band of warriors. Leaders hissed for quiet. I edged forward on my elbows to the summit of the slope, blinked bleary sleep-starved eyes and examined an ebony patch on the walls that marked the Scaean Gate.
A moon like a copper sickle floated above the skyline and bathed the plain in a misty violet light. Heroes tense as tight-strung bows gripped spears and braced stiff muscles. A ripple of movement fluttered the gloom-wrapped slope.
Not a sound broke Troy’s still silence.
Despite the chill that betokened dawn sweat drops beaded my face. Had Odysseus and Diomedes failed to find the culvert? Perhaps they had missed their way and tiptoed lost through unfamiliar alleys. Perhaps the Trojans had found and blocked the vulnerable entrance.
I peered at the eastern sky. Was a false dawn’s glow already washing the mountains’ farthest peaks?
A smothered cry. The screech and scrape of bars in sockets, a creaking from the gate. Diomedes’ shrill war-cry, a sentry’s frightened shout. Uncoiling rigid limbs I jumped to my feet and ran. Six hundred eager warriors rose from the dark and followed.
Although we had decided an order of attack--Mycenae’s men in the lead--there was momentary jamming in the gate. Bracing my shoulders I burst through the press, entered a square where the captured Horse soared monstrous in the dusk, turned in an alley behind the wall, mounted steps to the battlements and rushed the Tower of Ilion. Two-score Heroes followed close. A narrow door from the rampart walk opened on a guard room crammed with spearmen. Roused shockingly from sleep, bewildered, partly drunk, they had no chance to resist. Short spears lifted and swooped. In a chorus of shrieks and screams we killed them all in the dark.
Heroes grabbed coffers and cots and stools, carried the wood to the Tower’s roof, slew a terrified sentry and fired the pile.
The beacon flared in the night, a signal summoning Nestor’s men and all the Hosts from camp. I went to the inner parapet. Mycenae’s Heroes cleared the ramparts’ circuit, cut down sentries and captured watch towers while Menelaus’ Spartans cried havoc in the streets. Ears told more than eyes, for the crescent moon shed dim uncertain light. A clamour of battle echoed from ramparts above the Dardanian Gate, moonlight glittered on stabbing spears all around the battlements.
The walls, I judged, were safely in our hands.
Within the citadel there was bedlam. Struggles raged in narrow streets that climbed to Priam’s palace. People burst from houses and fell on pitiless swords, eddied in the alleyways like driftwood borne on a flood, scrambled back for shelter to the buildings they had left, screamed and begged for mercy when killers hurtled in. Yet the Spartans met increasing opposition. Uneasily I identified stubborn knots of resistance where naked Trojan warriors snatched what weapons they could and desperately battled enemies sprung like fiends from the night.
I returned to the Tower’s outer parapet, gazed anxiously over a moonlit plain.
Nestor’s Pylians mounted the bluff, streamed through the gate and joined the slaughter. Near Thorn Hill’s shadowy hump long dark lines of glittering spears advanced to the sack of Troy.
* * *
I stayed till noon on Ilion’s Tower. Little remains to be told, and that from other men’s lips. A Trojan slave at spearpoint led Menelaus to the house where Helen lived; a fierce determination to kill his wanton lady melted like snow in sunlight when he saw her naked breasts. (As I have long suspected, my brother’s heart lacks the iron core that makes a good king great.) Her lover Deiphobus died somewhere in the mass
acre. The butchers, keeping my threats in mind, spared the house where a lion skin covered the door; Diomedes saw Aeneas, looking neither left nor right, bear his ailing father Anchises from the Dardanian Gate. Priam was killed in his palace Court, and all his surviving sons. Myrmidons took Polyxena captive, then cut her throat because, they said, she lured Achilles to death.
Ruthless Achaean blades slew every man in the citadel before the sun went down. If you took a single step in the streets or crossed a single threshold you tripped on a mangled corpse. Gutters dribbled blood that caked in scummy puddles; bloodstains patterned walls in lunatic splashes and streaks. Weeping women and crying children were herded away in long processions. At evening, when the carnage ended, the conquerors started a systematic sacking which endured all night and all next day. Enormous wealth in gold and silver, jewellery and bronze, embroidered cloth and costly furs travelled on wagons to camp.
Because Troy fell on a mild spring night when warming braziers were not in use and cooking fires were dowsed, houses did not catch fire during the storm and sack. (Burning fuel accidentally scattered usually destines assaulted cities to finish in flames.) When every scrap of booty had been found--men even dug up house floors in search of buried treasure--I therefore sent in parties carrying torches. Troy, methodically fired, died in a glory that blazoned her end to Ida’s distant peaks, to Samothrace’s faraway crests. Thick black smoke spread a pall on the plain and soared in murky columns to the skies. So many corpses burned in the holocaust that a kitchen stench, like grilling meat, flavoured the air for days.
The spoils were divided--a week-long task--and the treasure was so vast that nobody groused at his portion. My own share crammed four triaconters’ holds. Among thirty other slaves I selected because of her rank a woman called Cassandra, Priam’s daughter: young and darkly beautiful, long-lashed slanting eyes and a mouth like a scarlet flower. Her captor raped Cassandra during the sack--a circumstance I welcomed, being past the age for deflowering virgins--and when she had overcome fear she romped in my bed in agonies of lust.
Otherwise she proved an unfortunate choice. Cassandra, I soon discovered, was not quite right in the head: afflicted by sudden seizures she rolled frothing on the ground and mouthed predictions so outrageous nobody believed them. (But I was credibly informed she foretold her city’s fall.) During her fits she frenziedly besought me not to return to Mycenae, prophesied my death at Clytemnaistra’s hands and gabbled she herself would share my fate. In view of the retribution I envisaged for my adulterous queen I found this grimly amusing.
We lingered nearly a moon beside Scamander, sorted baggage and cleared the camp. Heroes embarked and sailed home, there to recount at tedious length improbable feats they’d performed. In a hundred palace Halls from Thessaly to Crete bards will sing the fall of Troy in a hundred different versions; extravagant lies and warriors’ boasts will envelop the war in mythical mist. I intend to tell Mycenae’s bards the unembellished truth; so one account at least will survive that is close to historical fact.
Hugging his faithless Helen, Menelaus waved farewell from a penteconter’s poop. A distracted Diomedes--he had heard a Hero in Argos pleasured his wife Aigialeia--hastily clasped my hand and waded to his ship. Nestor and Odysseus sailed, the Myrmidons and Cretans. I sent Mycenae’s war-bands home, stayed when they had gone and entertained my leisure in walking the wastes of Troy, prodding among cindered mounds that blackened walls engirdled, surveying the desolation I had wrought.
I had accomplished my ambition, destroyed the city that Tros of Dardania founded centuries ago, erased her fame for ever, left nothing but a legend and a memory.
On arrival in Mycenae I shall pretend ignorance of Clytemnaistra’s crime, accept complacently the plaudits due to a victorious king, arrange a celebratory banquet, go quietly to bathe. (Cassandra mumbles visions of death in a red stone bath. If she weren’t so obviously deranged I might have cause for worry--the bath in my palace is pink-veined marble.) Having lulled an adulterous queen into believing herself secure I shall accuse her during the feast in the presence of Mycenae’s noblest Heroes.
How shall I kill the guilty pair, Aegisthus and Clytemnaistra? Perhaps by strangulation at the stake.
Or thrown from a cliff, as Atreus hurled Aerope.
Or entombed alive, as I buried Thyestes.
I shall make up my mind on the voyage home. Vengeance, when it comes, will be lingering and delicious.
Aegisthus wrought for me death and fate,
and slew me with the aid of my accursed
wife ... so I died by a most pitiful
death ... but the most piteous cry that
I heard was that of the daughter of
Priam, Cassandra, whom guileful
Clytemnaistra slew by my side ...
The Odyssey
(Tr. A. T. Murray)
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