A Song of War: a novel of Troy

by Kate Quinn

  Penthesilea knew she was not meant to answer. There was no good answer she could give anyway. She knew the point of battle in her homeland. Among Cimmerians, raids brought honor and opportunity—the chance to raid in return, to raise the honor of one’s family ever higher, like a banner against the sky. But what indeed was the purpose of this endless conflict? The king of Sparta would have said the purpose was to win Helen back. But any king with a speck of sense would have declared Helen unfaithful and unworthy—would have taken another wife, less beautiful but also less troublesome.

  What was the purpose of war in Troy, in the Achaean lands? Where was the honor in years of deaths, in an endless siege? Penthesilea gazed out over the garden toward the wall of Troy beyond. There were children in that city who had never known a world without fighting, who could never recall a time when their home was not besieged.

  “This curse has followed me all my life,” Helen said, joining Penthesilea at the garden window. A warm breeze lifted the scent of herbs from the beds, a soothing fragrance. Helen seemed not to notice.

  “What curse, my lady?”

  “Womanhood.” She pressed her lips tightly together. For a moment, Penthesilea wondered if Helen would spit out the window. “What I wouldn’t have given to be born a Cimmerian like you. Women are more in your land, aren’t they?”

  “More?”

  “Yes. More than spoils—treasure. More than prizes to be won. All my life, I’ve been a pretty little bauble, something to be haggled over, something to be stolen. First, when I was merely a child, then again when the suitors came for me. And here I am, languishing at Troy, where I thought I could be free—where I thought women could be more than just spoils. But I am still the prize. Nothing has changed.”

  Penthesilea bit her lip. She cast an uneasy glance at Helen from the corner of her eye. There was truth in her words—there was nothing but truth. Penthesilea could offer no comforting denial.

  A tap sounded at the door, startling both women out of their bleak reverie. “Come,” Helen called.

  Penthesilea expected a slave or two, bearing wine or a meal. Instead, it was Helen's husband, Paris, who entered. Penthesilea had seen little of him since she’d arrived in Troy, for Helen kept to herself whenever she could, and Penthesilea remained close by her side. For all that he was Helen’s husband, Paris seldom passed his time in these rooms.

  The prince of Troy was as finely formed as a statue, perfect in his proportions and gleaming with ornaments and fine white linen. His gleaming hair, wavy as the sea, was combed into place with lotus oil. He was a pretty man—there was no denying that. But no Cimmerian woman would bother to bed him. Beneath his ostentatious, swaggering confidence, the faltering heartbeat of a coward was plain to hear. Such a man’s seed could never sprout strong daughters. What good was a man like Paris?

  He came toward Helen grinning, his arms outstretched as if to embrace her, but Helen stiffened as he approached, drawing her typical icy aloofness tight like a fur cloak in winter.

  Paris’ hands fell back to his side, but his grin remained firm.

  “My lovely,” he said.

  Helen allowed him to kiss her cheek—that, and nothing more. “What brings you here?”

  “A man may visit his wife in her chamber. If the gods have made new proclamations forbidding it, I haven’t heard.” Paris laughed with a note of pure confidence. His charm was palpable, even cloying. “You haven’t been seen out in the garden or walking the palace for several days.”

  “Should I go wandering about like Cassandra?”

  “Fresh air is good for the body and the mind,” Paris protested. “A stroll in the garden would brighten your moods.”

  “My moods do not need brightening, thank you.” Helen returned to the window, gazing down on the garden she spurned.

  Paris stepped closer and took her by the elbow, a commanding grip. Helen pulled her arm away with a smooth, unthinking motion, not deigning to meet his eye.

  “Then brighten your people’s moods,” he said. “You know Troy has been under a dark cloud since Hector’s death. They need to see their great beauty out there”—he nodded toward the garden, to the city beyond the citadel—“you, confident and smiling, among them.”

  Helen’s laugh was short and sharp. “I am not their beauty, and well you know it. There is not a tongue in Troy that hasn’t cursed my name. The city despises me, Paris—everyone in it. And so what has this all been for?”

  She gestured out over the city, toward the wall and what lay beyond—what none of them could see but which they could all feel like weights around their necks, dragging them down into dark water. The ranks of tents waiting like wolves on the plain. The black ships anchored in the bay.

  “Troy may yet win,” Paris said jauntily. Penthesilea could hear the waver in his words.

  She expected Helen to give another of her cold, bitter laughs. But she only shook her head slowly. “No, Paris. Not now. Not with Hector dead. He was our hope, our pride. Our gift from the gods. He was our future king.”

  “I’m tired of hearing about Hector,” Paris hissed. “He wasn’t the only son of Priam, you know. He wasn’t our city’s only hero!”

  “Oh, do we have another?” Helen arched one thin golden brow in dark amusement. “Tell me—who is he? That sour-faced prig Aeneas, perhaps? Your little brother Polites, now that he’s all of fourteen?” She held Paris’ eye with a merciless stare. “I haven’t seen a hero in Troy since Hector fell.”

  Paris’ face darkened; his lips thinned as if he’d bitten into a sour fruit. “My own wife believes me a coward—is that the way of it?”

  Helen’s only answer was a tiny, needling smile.

  The prince dropped his forced cheer like a hot brand. He drew close to Helen—so close he seemed suddenly menacing, and Penthesilea moved toward him, ready to defend her cousin.

  “Go outside,” Paris said flatly. “Take the air. Show your face. I’ll hear no more of this moping in your chamber. It’s not a request, Helen. It’s a command from your husband. Since you’ve failed in every other way as my wife—failed to give me children, failed to keep warming my bed as is your duty—you will give me obedience.”

  With that, he turned and stalked out the chamber door.

  “Fool,” Helen muttered before the door had closed.

  When they were alone again, she sighed and turned to Penthesilea with a weary shake of her head. “Hector. He could never pretend liking for me, considering the trouble I brought in my wake, but I always held him in high honor. What are we without him? I can’t tell you how precarious Troy seems now, as if there’s a great blade hanging over all our heads, and any moment it might drop. I almost wish it would just so the waiting would end. Just so it would be over.”

  Penthesilea hadn’t been in Troy long, but she knew at once what Helen meant. The days of mourning Hector, of cowering under the blow of his loss, seemed to be coming to an end. Conflict was gathering its strength once more, preparing to strike again. The whole city felt like a crouching animal—waiting, tensing itself for some terrible blow. Hector had been their shield and their mighty arm. There was no shield now, no defense, even with Troy’s vast and soaring walls. The gods had turned their backs on the city. Achilles, god-born, had taken Hector away.

  “You mustn’t speak that way,” Penthesilea said. “The blade won’t fall. I won’t let it.”

  Helen turned to her, pale as bone. “You won’t? What can you do, Penthesilea—anything more than Paris can? What can a woman do?”

  Helen’s slaves entered the chamber then, bearing an early evening meal. Despite her promise to eat, Penthesilea slipped back to her sleeping alcove while Helen was distracted, pulling her saddlebags from beneath the wicker bed. She found her bag of bones in their soft-worn leather pouch and hid the pouch in her fist. Then she hurried outside and crouched on the other side of the laurel tree’s trunk before Helen could note her absence.

  Penthesilea spilled the bones into her palm and stared at
them for a long time. They were marked all over with the symbols of divination, the symbols rubbed with charcoal so they stood out starkly against the smooth whiteness. She hadn’t cast bones since long before her sister died, and she didn’t know whether the gods would still work their powers for her—for Hippolyte’s killer.

  “Do it.”

  Penthesilea, squatting on her heels, looked up in alarm. The laurel’s shadows played over the face and bare breasts of the woman in the faded black skirt. At close range, she could see that the woman’s feet were bare, hard and dry at the soles.

  Cassandra.

  Penthesilea hadn’t seen her since her first day in Troy, but she had heard plenty of talk about the seer. Some still called her mad, though from what Penthesilea had gleaned from the gossip, Cassandra was the sanest person in the city. She had heard, too, that Cassandra used to be barred in a cell—for her own good, she wondered, or to save her family’s reputation? But since the pall of Hector’s death had fallen over the city, no one had thought to lock the dark woman in her prison.

  “Cast the bones,” Cassandra said.

  Penthesilea hesitated.

  “It makes no difference to you whether Troy stands or falls, isn’t that so?”

  Penthesilea nodded. She struggled to find her voice, but Cassandra seemed to have stolen every word from her throat.

  “So long as you are loyal to the daughter of Zeus,” the woman said, “your purpose will be served. So cast the bones.”

  It seemed as if some other hand tossed the bones into the dust, and Cassandra leaned in to read the divination even before Penthesilea did.

  “What do they tell you?” Cassandra asked.

  Penthesilea stared. She was barely passable with divination. She examined the pattern, counted the pieces lying flat and the ones propped up on their ends, squinted at the incised charcoal symbols, searching for their meaning. Spear, man, horse, black, hollow, carrion crows. It made no sense to her.

  She looked up at Cassandra in desperation, hoping the seer had some advice to offer.

  “You already know what you want to do,” Cassandra said. “Tell me.”

  “Restore the balance,” Penthesilea answered. Her voice was as dry as the bones themselves. “If I can kill the one who killed Hector, then the balance will tip back in Troy’s favor.”

  “That is the way you Cimmerians do it, isn’t it? An enemy tribe kills your best warrior, so you raid them and kill their best fighter in return.”

  “That’s how honor is maintained.”

  “I see.” The wind blew; light and shadow slithered across the seer’s dark features, her wide, staring eyes.

  “If I kill the man who killed Hector, then Helen’s fears will be soothed.”

  “And then you will have served your cousin well.”

  “Yes. That’s all I care about now. I don’t care about Troy—not truly. Troy matters nothing to me.”

  Cassandra nodded, a simple acceptance of Penthesilea’s honesty.

  “They say you are a seer. Tell me: If I fight the Achaeans’ best warrior—this man called Achilles—will I win?”

  Cassandra’s fierce, staring eyes softened with a sudden smile. “I don’t know, Amazon. That, of all things, wasn’t given to me to see. But does it matter? Are you so keen to go on living?”

  Penthesilea knew the answer to that question. She gave it at once, and the word raised no fear in her belly. “No.”

  “It’s death you seek,” Cassandra said. “It’s not Helen you serve, but your slain sister. Her death, not Hector’s, is the balance you seek to right.”

  Her throat too dry to speak, Penthesilea nodded.

  The seer offered her hand. Penthesilea took it—it was softer and warmer than she expected—and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She tugged at the skirt of her tunic, straightening it over her breeches, suddenly conscious of the way she must look to the seer of Troy. She left the bones where they had fallen.

  “The morning,” Cassandra said. “That’s when you must face Achilles.”

  Penthesilea felt the truth of her words. She didn’t bother to ask Cassandra how she knew, which god whispered into her ear. The morning—it felt right. It was right. And whether she died or Achilles did, a balance would be restored.

  “I’ll send a messenger to the Achaean camp for you,” Cassandra offered. “I shall tell them that Troy’s best warrior is coming to avenge Hector’s death, outside the Scaean Gate when the sun rises.”

  “Am I?” Penthesilea blinked at her, startled. “Troy’s best warrior?”

  Cassandra’s full lips bent in a smile. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  Then the seer turned and walked away, the hem of her old, ragged skirt rippling in the garden’s dust.

  Penthesilea stood and watched Cassandra as she crossed the garden. Then the seer vanished amid the bright white of sun on limestone and the all-consuming blackness of shadow. With every step the dark woman took, the weight of grief lifted from Penthesilea’s heart.

  She could smell supper drifting from Helen’s chamber, roasted meat and onions and sweet honeyed wine. Her stomach rumbled; she turned away from the laurel tree and left the divination bones untouched.

  That night, with her stomach full and her heart soothed, Penthesilea slept well for the first time since her sister’s death.

  PHILOCTETES

  Dusk approached, dragging its heavy blue cloak over the Plain of Troy. Released at last from Agamemnon’s quarters, Philoctetes limped outside into the first breath of evening’s oncoming coolness. The sky was the deep blue of indigo dye with a last flush of gold on the western horizon. Philoctetes breathed deeply. Beneath the stench of many men, their beasts, their latrine pits, he could detect the coolness of the River Scamander. And even the smell of a war camp was a relief after the close air inside Agamemnon’s tent.

  Achilles had long since departed. Once satisfied that Philoctetes and his bow had in fact come, the great hero had simply turned and stalked out of the high king’s quarters, swallowed up in a blaze of late-afternoon light. But the pounding of Philoctetes’ heart hadn’t slowed, had only increased as he’d sat listening to the other men talk of their strategies and their plans for the bow of Heracles.

  Philoctetes gazed out over the water. Odysseus’ ship waited patiently among the others, somehow far blacker than the rest. He must send a messenger to his page—tell the boy not to expect him back any time soon. He didn’t know how long he would be in the camp; the other men had reached no consensus on how they might employ the bow. But Philoctetes was certain he wouldn’t be set free until Odysseus and Agamemnon had tried every trick they could scheme up between them, and then a few more. For all Philoctetes knew, he might never see the deck of that ship again nor his page boy nor his small, peaceful home on Lemnos’ southern shore.

  He headed toward the river, drawn on by the coolness of the water and the paltry screen of the few trees that still stood in that plundered woodland. As he made his slow way through the camp, he could feel men turning from their nighttime tasks and their cook-fires to to look at him—to look at the simple horn bow that swung from his hand. Warriors ceased their joking as he passed; an expectant silence trailed him through the ranks of tents and shacks and the rows of bedrolls.

  The river called him on, but before he reached the bank, the faint singing of a lyre captured his attention. He paused, looking around. This was surely the camp of Achilles’ Myrmidons; it stood in better order than the squalor of the other Achaean warriors, the tents well pitched, the men moving about disciplined and quiet—quiet enough to hear the lyre. The notes were soft, not as if the music were muffled or at any great distance from where he stood, but as if the player plucked softly at the strings. His eye fell on a grand tent—a palace, as war tents went. Philoctetes forgot the river and limped toward the great tent.

  A servant stopped him at the door, a young man, reddish-haired, slight of frame, moving with the stiffness of recent injuries. Despite his youthful a
ppearance, he had been active in battle.

  “Is this Achilles’ tent?” Philoctetes asked.

  At the sound of his voice, the lyre ceased to sing. Achilles—unmistakable to Philoctetes’ yearning ears—called from inside the tent. “Automedon.”

  The youth nudged open the tent’s flap and gave a nod to the lamp-lit interior. “It’s the prince of Meliboea,” he said. Then he turned back to Philoctetes with his brows raised. “I think.”

  Philoctetes restrained a chuckle. “You’re correct, lad. May I see him?”

  Achilles said, “Let him in.”

  Automedon drew the flap aside, and Philoctetes stepped through, hesitant and wondering, like a man stepping fully awake and lucid into the realm of dreams. The ground was covered with far finer rugs than had floored Agamemnon’s tent, the space opening into other rooms, more tents and shacks all built together. Light from half a dozen lamps filled the room with a rosy glow. Spoils of war furnished the place as richly as any prince’s villa: trunks strapped with silver and bronze, a bedstead carved with lion’s feet, strewn with cushions and plush animal skins.

  Achilles himself lounged on an ornate ivory chair, his legs crossed casually at the ankles, a nine-stringed lyre resting in his lap. His broad chest stirred with his breath. Those unforgettable eyes, piercing and green as the sea, fixed Philoctetes in silent contemplation, and again the memory of Lemnos came back to him, Achilles in the firelight, Achilles ten years younger. Achilles, about to speak, then turning away with a careless laugh. Philoctetes couldn’t tell whether the inaudible humming in the air was the dying echo of the lyre’s strings or the rising ache of his own foolish old heart.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Achilles said quietly.

  The tent flap thumped softly shut.

  “You still remember me?” They were pathetic words and weakly said. Philoctetes could have kicked himself, but he could think of nothing else to offer.

  Achilles’ broad shoulders jumped once, a silent laugh. “Of course I do. Sit.”

  Philoctetes tried not to limp as he made his way across the patterned rugs to the chair Achilles indicated. There was a jug of wine on the table and cups stacked one inside the other.