Fall of Kings

by David Gemmell

  “Help me. Please help me.” The cry came from a dying man, and the young healer Xander, pulling a cart full of severed limbs past the rows of wounded soldiers at the barracks hospital, hesitated before stopping. He pulled a bloodstained cloth over the cart to hide its grisly load, then went over to the man.

  He was a rider. Xander, who had seen more injuries in his young life than most soldiers, could tell at a glance. One leg had been severed raggedly below the knee, perhaps by a blow from an ax. The other had been injured so badly, perhaps by an awkward fall from his mount, that it had been amputated high on the thigh. Both stumps were rotting, and Xander knew the man would die soon and in agony. He laid his hand gently on the man’s shoulder. “Are you Trojan Horse?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, Phegeus son of Dares. Am I dying, sir?” Xander saw that Phegeus had been blinded by a blow to the head. He believed he was being visited by a commanding officer, not a freckle-faced healer of fewer than seventeen summers.

  “Yes, soldier,” the youngster said gently. “But the king knows you fought bravely for your city. Your name is on his lips.”

  Xander long since had learned to lie glibly to dying men.

  “Is he coming, sir? The king?” Phegeus reached out anxiously, grasping at the air, and Xander took his flailing hand and held it between his own.

  “King Priam will be here soon,” he said quietly. “He is proud of you.”

  “Sir,” the man said confidentially, pulling Xander toward him. “The pain…Sometimes I cannot…Sometimes…the pain is too bad. Let me know when the king comes. I would not have him hear me cry like a woman.”

  Xander reassured Phegeus that he would tell him when the king arrived, then left to deposit the contents of his cart outside the barracks. He stopped for a moment, gratefully sucking in the fresh night air off the sea before going back into the hot fetid building.

  The king would not come, Xander knew, but he had given Phegeus a small hope to cling to in his dying moments.

  He found Machaon, the head of the house, washing blood off his hands in a barrel of water in the corner of the barracks. Machaon was still a relatively young man but now looked like an ancient. His face was gray, the cheekbones jutting from pallid skin. His eyes were hollow and deeply shadowed.

  “We need hemlock,” Xander told him urgently. “We have brave men here whose courage falters when they face the torment of their wounds.”

  Machaon turned to him, and Xander could see the pain in his eyes. “There is no hemlock to be found in the city,” the healer responded. “My prayers to the serpent god have gone unanswered.”

  Xander realized in a moment of dread that Machaon was not just exhausted, he was gravely ill.

  “What’s wrong, Machaon?” he cried. “You are suffering, too.”

  Machaon stepped closer to the youngster, then lowered his voice. “I have had a vileness growing in my belly since the winter. I have tried herbs and cleansing honey, but it continues to grow.” His face suddenly spasmed, and he bent over as if gripped by a clawing pain. When he stood up again, his skin was ashen and beaded with sweat, his eyes unfocused.

  “I have told no one, Xander,” he said shakily. “I ask you to keep my secret. But I am too ill to travel down to the battlefield. You must go in my place.”

  Despite his concern for his mentor, Xander’s heart leaped. It was a chance to leave this place of death and go out in the fresh air, to deal with the lesser wounds of men who were not dying, not in agony. Hektor had decreed that all wounded men who could walk should stay out on the plain in case of a further attack by Agamemnon’s armies. Those with serious wounds that were likely to heal were carried to the House of Serpents in the upper city to recover their strength for future battles. Those likely to die were in this hospital, the former barracks of the Ileans. The barracks were in the lower town, inside the fortification ditch and just a short distance from the funeral pyres that had been burning day and night.

  “I will go, Machaon,” he responded, “but you must rest.” He looked into the tortured eyes and saw no chance of rest there. “Where do I go?”

  “There are injured men everywhere. They will not be hard to find. Do your best.” As Xander turned to go, Machaon’s hand shot out and grabbed his arm. The boy could feel only cold from the older man’s bony fingers. “You always do your best, Xander,” he said.

  Xander packed a leather bag full of healing potions, bandages, his favorite herbs, needles of different sizes, and thread. Then he snatched up a jug of wine and three water skins and set off toward the battlefield.

  The evening was cool, and as he walked, Xander tried to imagine that he was back home on Kypros, strolling the green hills among his grandfather’s herds. The distant cries of injured men became the gentle bleating of the wandering goats. He half closed his eyes as he walked and could smell the distant sea and hear the cry of the gulls. He stumbled on the rough path and nearly fell, and he grinned at his foolishness. Yes, he thought, walk about with your eyes closed and break a leg, Xander.

  Machaon had been right. The injured were not hard to find. Xander walked among them, placing clean bandages on wounds and sewing cuts on faces with fine needles. He used larger bandages for legs and arms, along with thicker needles and sturdier thread. He boiled his herbs in water over soldiers’ campfires to make healing brews and splinted broken fingers. He urged some of the more seriously injured men to go up to the houses of healing, but all refused. He could not blame them.

  The long night wore on, and as the sky started to lighten in the east, Xander carried on working. He had met many of the soldiers before; they had come to him with their wounds and their unexplained pains and minor illnesses, some of them many times over the years. They greeted him as a comrade and joked with him in the way of soldiers everywhere. They called him Shortshanks and Freckles, and he flushed with pleasure at the affection in which he was held.

  The sky lightened, the air warmed, and a heavy mist came rolling down the Scamander valley, making it hard for him to see. He was so tired, he could hardly stumble from one small campfire to the next, and his trembling hands no longer could sew wounds. Still he walked on.

  “Time to go, Xander,” said a familiar voice in his ear.

  “Machaon?” he asked, looking around him, but the fog obscured everything. “Machaon? Is that you?”

  “Quickly, boy,” the voice said with urgency. “Stop what you are doing now and hurry back to the city. Quickly now.”

  Xander packed his leather bag hurriedly and threw it over one shoulder, then picked up the empty water skins and started to make for the river. He barely could see his hand in front of his face, and he was forced to walk slowly, careful not to stumble over waking men or into the flanks of dozing horses.

  Then out of the mist came a loud cry, echoing eerily through the darkness and picked up by rank after rank of warriors’ voices, “Awake! Awake! They are coming!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE FOG OF WAR

  Earlier that night, after the sun fell below the horizon to reveal a sky full of stars, Odysseus had stood on the walls of King’s Joy, nursing a pain in his shoulder and a wound to his heart.

  Three days previously, his valiant force of Ithakans and Kephallenians had been fighting on the Scamander plain when the Trojan Horse had punched into the western armies like a battering ram, turning a knife-edge battle into a near rout.

  Two of Hektor’s riders had charged as one into Odysseus’ infantry, each guarding the other’s flank, hacking with their swords, killing and wounding all around them. As one rider raised his sword high to slash at a young crewman from the Bloodhawk, Odysseus, running up behind, lanced a spear deep into the rider’s side, straight into the heart. The bronze spear head lodged under a rib. Odysseus tried to drag it out but pulled the dead rider off his horse. With dead and dying warriors around him, the Ithakan king was slow to get out of the way, and the body fell on him, dislocating his shoulder. The arm bone had been wrenched back into place b
y Podaleirios, the Thessalian surgeon, but even now, days later, Odysseus was still in pain. He had thrown away the sling he had been given and had hidden his discomfort from others. But now, as he moved his arm experimentally, as if swinging a sword, he cursed as agony fired through his shoulder.

  Twenty years ago, he thought irritably, or even ten, I would have shaken off this injury within a day.

  The greater agony, though, was in his heart. He remembered Penelope’s words years before on the beach at Ithaka. “I fear you will have hard choices to make. Do not make bullheaded decisions you will regret afterward and cannot change. Do not take these men into a war, Odysseus.”

  “I have no wish for war, my love,” he had told her, and he had meant it.

  How the gods on Olympos must be reveling in the irony, he thought ruefully. Or perhaps his wife’s fear never should have been voiced at all, lest the gods were listening and chose to make it real.

  For here he was, within sight of the Golden City, his loyal men fighting side by side with the Mykene for Agamemnon, whose obsession was to destroy the city, kill Odysseus’ former friends, and take its wealth for himself.

  He remembered Helikaon’s words to him at their last meeting: “I have not seen Priam’s hoard of gold, but it would have to be mountainous to maintain the expense of this war. Gold passes from the city every day, to hire mercenaries, to bribe allies. And there is little coming in now. If the fighting goes on much longer and you do take the city, you may find nothing of real worth.”

  Odysseus smiled grimly to himself. Agamemnon and his fellow kings still had faith in the riches of Priam. At least they had a reason to fight. What is your excuse, Ugly One? he heard Penelope say. Because you gave your word? Is your word so powerful, so sacred, that you must fight with your enemies against your friends?

  Three days before, battling on the plain alongside the armies of the Mykene, he had seen the Trojan Horse thundering down the valley. And he had felt his heart leap as if Hektor and his riders were coming to his own rescue.

  Odysseus sighed. War made strange sword brothers. He despised Agamemnon and his fellow kings. Idomeneos was greedy and mendacious. Menestheos of Athens and Agapenor of Arcadia were no better. The weakling Menelaus did whatever his brother told him. Nestor was a kinsman of Penelope, and Odysseus liked the old man, yet he had been beguiled by the promise of Priam’s treasure, too. Only Achilles was at Troy on a mission of honor, to find the warrior who had ordered his father’s death and avenge him.

  He thought back to Hektor’s wedding games, when wily Priam had declared Odysseus an enemy of Troy. A less prideful man merely would have left the city. But Odysseus, slighted and insulted, had allowed his pride to force him into the arms of this rabble of kings. It was true that he was guilty as accused of hiring an assassin to kill Helikaon’s father, but only to protect Helikaon, whom the same assassin had been paid to kill.

  Now Odysseus, sick to the soul, had left his loathsome allies drinking and quarreling in the megaron of King’s Joy and had walked up to the terrace for fresher air.

  He looked around. Agamemnon’s Followers, his henchmen, had roasted two pigs there earlier, and the terrace smelled of blood and burned meat. Then they had played a game with one of the pigs’ heads, kicking it around until it was a shapeless black mass. Odysseus picked it up and gazed at it for a moment before throwing it over the wall. He smiled to himself, thinking of the pig Ganny, first rescued from the sea and then, in his yellow cloak, sitting as if listening to Odysseus’ tale of the golden fleece on the pirates’ beach.

  “By Apollo’s balls, Ganny, my boy, we had some adventures together!” he said out loud.

  Cheered by the memory, he strolled to the western side of the terrace. In the starlight he could see down to the Bay of Herakles, its white sand scarcely visible under the hulls of the hundreds of ships beached there. A sitting target for Helikaon’s fire hurlers, he thought. Had Agamemnon learned nothing from his disaster at Imbros? Odysseus had heard no news of the Xanthos since it had left Ithaka but prudently had quietly moved most of his own fleet farther down the coast to a small hidden cove.

  He turned and looked in the other direction, to the walls of Troy lying moonlit in the distance, like a city of magic from one of his stories, and, before him, the plain of the Scamander, where the Trojan army was camped, waiting. The myriad lights of their campfires showed they were formed in defensive squares. Hektor would not be stupid enough to attack, he knew, as the idiot Menelaus had claimed. A man with no sense of strategy assumes others are as stupid as he is. Odysseus glanced down to where soldiers had labored to dig an inner earthwork. A waste of time and energy, he thought, and just another obstacle when we attack. The stupidity angered him. Looking south, along the valley of the Scamander, he saw that a blanket of thick mist was forming over the river and starting to roll slowly toward the Trojan armies on the plain. They cannot see it coming, he realized. Before long they will not be able to see their swords in front of their noses.

  His mind working quickly, he left the terrace and stomped back down the stone stairs to the megaron, to be greeted by drunken shouts and laughter. Menelaus was lying on the floor in a pool of wine, apparently unconscious. Agamemnon gazed expressionlessly at the Ithakan king. Agamemnon never drank, and Odysseus always was careful not to drink in his company.

  “Well,” said the Mykene king, “the tale spinner has chosen to join us again. We are honored. Have you a story to entertain us tonight, Prince of Lies?”

  Odysseus ignored the insult and said nothing, merely standing in the doorway until he had their attention.

  “Sober up quickly, you drunken sots,” he bellowed. “I have a plan.”

  Achilles, unarmored and wearing a simple black kilt and leather breastplate, his face smeared with soot, crouched in the entrance to the narrow pass and stared into the thick mist. “This is madness,” he said cheerfully.

  Odysseus, resting on one knee beside him, chuckled. “We have to attack at dawn, anyway,” he replied. “Our allies have pledged to be here soon after sunup. By attacking now, this fog gives us the extra element of surprise.”

  “Well, it surprised me,” a red-bearded warrior said gloomily. “It’s the middle of the night, and the mist is so thick, I can’t see the end of my sword. We won’t know who we’re killing.”

  “The ones lying down, Thibo, either sleeping or dead, will be the enemy,” Odysseus told him.

  He thought the plan through again. Agamemnon was committed to attack that day, which meant funneling his armies through the pass. The heavy mist gave him the perfect opportunity to get them through under cover. Hektor, of course, would expect that, and by dawn he would have his forces ready. By attacking in the dead of night they might catch him unprepared.

  Odysseus and Achilles, the fifty Myrmidons, and another hundred handpicked warriors were to creep out of the pass under cover of the dark and mist, cross the earthworks, and descend on the Trojans as they slept. None were wearing armor lest any clink of metal on metal betray their presence. The Trojans would raise the alarm quickly, but Odysseus calculated that as many as a thousand would die first, slaughtered as they dreamed.

  Far behind them, through the pass, the rest of Agamemnon’s armies waited restlessly. Once the silent band of killers had done their grisly work and the alarm had been raised, the infantry would come charging through.

  The cavalry would have to wait on the seaward side of the pass until the dawn came and the mist cleared. But the enemy was in the same position. Even the Trojan Horse could not attack if they could not see.

  Odysseus moved his shoulder and grimaced at the pain, then licked dry lips. Just one more battle, he thought to himself. You’ve done this before, old man. He grasped his sword in one hand and a long dagger in the other. He glanced at Achilles, who had his swords on his back and two daggers drawn, and nodded.

  The pair crept forward, silent in the muffling mist, their small army moving noiselessly behind them. Odysseus climbed the new earthw
ork, cursing it under his breath. By the time he reached the main earthwork, he had fallen well behind Achilles, who had disappeared ahead of him like a wraith. Hurrying to keep up, Odysseus clambered over the bank of earth and mud, glimpsing dark-garbed warriors, swords and knives in hand, passing him silently on either side. It was an eerie sight.

  Then the killing began. Ahead, Odysseus heard the small muffled sounds of cold bronze plunging into flesh and soft gasps quickly cut off. He hurried forward. Soon he was walking in the dim light of campfires, bodies strewn around them, the dead and the dying, blood still gushing from slashed throats, eyes staring up at him, hands reaching out for aid that would not come.

  It was so quiet that he could hear his heart beating. Then there was a loud cry. “Awake! Awake! We are under attack!”

  In an instant the air was filled with the sounds of clashing blades, the screams of the wounded, the snarls and grunts of fighting men, the snapping of bones and the rending of flesh. Odysseus heard Achilles’ booming battle cry from somewhere up ahead and moved toward the sound.

  A warrior appeared in the half-light, a Thrakian tribesman with a painted face. The Ithakan king leaped to the attack, but the man moved like quicksilver, blocking his thrust and turning into him. His shoulder struck Odysseus in the chest, knocking him back. He fell to the ground and rolled quickly as a sword blade was thrust into the ground beside him. Odysseus plunged his dagger into the unprotected thigh of the tribesman. Blood sprayed out, and the man fell. Odysseus jumped up and slashed his sword across the man’s head.

  He bent to pull out his dagger, but one of Priam’s Eagles leaped at him with a snarl, recognizing the Ithakan king. Odysseus parried his sword blow and reversed a cut to the warrior’s neck. The blade hammered into the breastplate and snapped. Dropping the useless hilt, Odysseus grabbed the man by his breastplate and hauled him forward, butting him savagely, then crashing his fist into the man’s belly. The Eagle doubled over, and then his head snapped back as Odysseus’ knee exploded into his face.