A Song of War: a novel of Troy

by Kate Quinn

  Helen. Bringer of doom. Cause of the downfall of worlds. Helen of Sparta, and then of Troy. Helen of where next, I wondered? My rage got the better of me. I suddenly formed a new plan. I would kill that worm of a woman who had brought so much destruction and death upon us all. I prepared to drop the sacred likenesses and draw my sword, but then another noise drew my attention, this time behind me. Someone else was coming.

  Lost in indecision, I was close to being undone, and at the very last moment stepped back into the shadowed corner as a new figure emerged into the room. I wondered for a moment why Helen did not shout his attention and give me up, but the reason came to me clear: she was hiding from everyone. After all that had happened, she was as afraid of the Achaeans as she was of me, and with good reason, the treacherous witch.

  The big man stepped forward past me, his form illuminated by the light from the doorway. He was a huge figure—an Achaean hero of note, clearly, though the lion pelt that hung from his shoulders was somewhat scratty and had definitely seen better days.

  “Ajax?” the man said in a booming voice that echoed irreverently around that sacred place. “Ajax, are you here?”

  He was searching for my cousin’s ravisher. And he would find instead Helen. And me.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I had taken two steps forward and brought one of the ancient sacred idols in my hand down on the back of the big man’s head. It was a powerful blow, and the hero crumpled into a heap on the floor, his dirty, threadbare lion pelt coming loose from his neck. I had only moments, I was sure, before more Achaeans came looking. Just enough time for a righteous kill.

  I consider myself a pious man, but a fiery rage overcame me so strongly that I pushed aside my reverence for a moment. My people had suffered so much war, and the need to avenge them rose in me, suffusing my blood, and I reached for my sword, dropping the most sacred symbols of the city carelessly to the floor as though they were nothing.

  But there had been no sound as the idols fell. How could that be?

  Snapped from my rage by fuddlement, I looked down. The ancestors’ likenesses had fallen to the lion pelt, which had very likely saved them from damage or destruction. I felt cold as ice suddenly, and my hand slid the sword home in its sheath once more. I had almost thrown away the future of our world for simple revenge. I crouched and was momentarily struck by just how much one of those figurines resembled my own divine mother. She had an imploring face, her mouth formed into an O, and I knew that, like Hector and Cassandra and Chryses and Hecuba, even my mother was urging me to flee.

  Swiftly, I gathered the figurines in the pelt, folding it and using it as a makeshift bag. I slung the sacred burden across my shoulder and prepared to leave once more. I had come looking for Cassandra and had found instead both rage and resolve. Perhaps it was the will of the Fates that I came here, so that I could draw a shroud over the corpse of the old Troy. As warriors, we try to do our duty, but as humans—even god-born ones—we are always subject to the whim of the Fates.

  “May your husband find you and take you home, Helen of Sparta,” I said quietly. Her pale face emerged from behind the statue once more, questioning, her beauty now gone, unsure as to my intentions. I simply sighed deeply. “You have ruined my world. Now let your husband take you home to ruin his. May you bring flames and destruction to Sparta in its turn.”

  The cause of all our ills opened her mouth to speak, her face already creasing in her most calculated expression of manipulation. I turned my back on her, closing my ears to whatever poison she now spat.

  As I spun away from that face, I felt a great weight lifted from my shoulders, as though I had been absolved somehow of any part I had played in this tragedy. Hefting the sacred likenesses in their lion-skin bag, I stepped over the prone figure of the Achaean hero, pausing only briefly to kick him viciously in the testicles, and slipped from the temple. Outside, everything was manic in the square, the enemy rushing this way and that excitedly, looting and burning. I spotted Odysseus in the crowd, dragging a chastened Hecuba. He looked my way for a moment, though I was not sure whether it was me or the temple that he saw. Whatever the case, his attention was distracted briefly, and while he looked away, I slipped from the entrance, past the stone lions and into the shadows of the alley, where I passed along the stone wall, hurried across the open space, lifted the heavy bar at the northeastern gate, and slipped from the citadel into the lower city.

  Here I was at the far side of Troy from the sea and its Achaean invasion, and there was as yet no fire, only quiet, dark houses, where very likely women and children lurked, terrified, waiting for the return of their menfolk who had died on the citadel or in the streets. There was nothing I could do for them, though it rent my heart to know it. Cassandra had warned me. Fate had decreed that I would save no one by design. Anyone I sought to preserve from these houses I would doom by that simple wish. Instead, I ran back home.

  Rounding a corner, I almost bowled over a boy who stood in the street with a look of sad acceptance. I stopped suddenly, looking down at the lad in my way.

  “Mother has died,” he said. I was lost for words. What could I say to such a thing?

  “First Father went off to serve Hector in the underworld, and now Mother has left me alone. Take me with you.”

  “I cannot,” I replied, biting down on those bitter words. How could I? If I took him, I would by that very act damn him. He could not be saved by me. With a regretful glance, I ran on, heading for home and my family. I had gone only two streets farther before I realized that the boy was following me.

  “Go away, boy. Go hide until it is safe. I cannot save you.”

  “Then I shall save myself,” the boy said defiantly and kept coming. I blinked as I turned and pounded on down the street. Could that be an answer? Could this boy save himself by following me? I shortened my stride slightly to give him a chance, and he was still with me when I bounded up the steps to my house, two at a time. My father was within, dressed in a cloak and with a spear at the ready, defending the house. My son was with him, and Creusa. All the other warriors had gone with me, leaving only old Chryses and his daughter and attendants alongside my family. The boy ran in behind me and staggered to a halt, breathing heavily and looking nervous.

  “Who is this?” my father asked quietly.

  “I do not know. He followed me home.”

  “I am Katu, master,” the boy replied and respectfully shuffled into place beside the two lads bearing the laurels and the lyre. Frowning, I unslung the lion-pelt bag and undid it, revealing the sacred figurines. Chryses stared with disbelief. “Where did you get them?”

  “They were delivered into my hands by the queen herself. They must be saved. Would that we had the Palladion that the Achaeans stole. But still, with these and your own relics, we carry the very heart and soul of Troy.” I passed the figurines to Chryses, retaining only the one that had for a brief moment been my mother. This I handed to the boy Katu. “Preserve her,” I said as I tied the lion pelt around my middle like a scraggy, dangling belt.

  “What do we do now?” the old priest said, still peering wide-eyed at the sacred likenesses in his hands.

  “Now? Now you leave,” I said quietly. “I cannot save you, but Katu has shown me the way. If I do not lead, you can save yourselves, and if the gods are kind, I can save myself alongside you. The Achaeans are atop the walls now and likely out in the surrounding area, but only the surrounding area. Priam’s remaining ships are at Dardania in the bay below my father’s palace—I know, for I supervised their removal myself. They were sunk beneath the waves to keep them from the Achaeans, but they will still be good and seaworthy if they can be raised. Dardania is blessedly free of the ship-rot worm.”

  This revelation brought a new fire of hope into the eyes of the assembled. I had not the heart to tell them we were too few to raise the ships ourselves without help, but I felt certain the gods would show the way.

  “The Achaeans will be looking for groups fleeing the city,
and some have bows. You will all be safer alone. There are three gates as yet untouched by the enemy. Split up, take different gates out of the city, and once outside, different paths. You all know the old temple of Telipinu near the sea to the north. It is abandoned, long since fallen into ruin, and the Achaeans are unlikely to be watching it. Meet there, and you should be beyond the Achaean raiders. From there, we can run to the ships openly.”

  I frowned as I realized that my father, Anchises, was busy collecting his bronze corselet.

  “You will move faster unarmored, Father.”

  “I am not going, Aeneas,” he said quietly. “I am too old and slow. I will not make it.”

  He began to armor himself with difficulty, and I gripped my hands into white fists, losing my temper. I grasped his bronze plates and ripped them from his hands, throwing them down to the stone flags once more. “I have already lost too much this day, old man. You may have only a thousand paces of running left in your life, but you will use them now to reach the old temple.”

  I turned and gestured out of the open doorway and was surprised as a streak of silver shot across the black canopy of the night high above the burning city, falling to earth far to the north. “See how even the gods tell you where to go? There, where their sign fell, Priam’s three ships wait beneath the threshold of your very own palace, Father. Ships enough to take all of us and more.”

  “Carry him,” my wife urged. “You are strong. He is tired.”

  “I cannot, Creusa. I can save no one—Cassandra told me as much. It is my fate that those I try to save I cannot. But anyone, it seems, can save themselves.”

  Mere moments later, I grabbed my old cloak, and we left the house, descending the stairs into the burning city: nine figures, including two old men, two women, and four boys. Just one warrior among us, whose hands had been tied by the Fates. We moved through the dark streets at the eastern edge of the lower city, where the Achaeans had not yet brought their bronze and their flames, for they had concentrated primarily on the rich and the sacred. They were atop the walls, ready to sack the narrow alleys below. As we moved, we separated. My father, my son, and young Katu went one way, Chryses and his daughter and attendants another, Creusa and I a third. Each group made for one of the lesser gates in the eastern walls. My world became that of my wife and I, and I barely looked at the city we were leaving as we passed through it, though more than once I caught Creusa glancing up at the citadel and the blazing buildings therein. Finally, we reached the Gate of the Leaping Horses. The gate was utterly deserted. We waited long moments for three Achaean warriors who passed along the walls above to disappear, and bent to our task. It took little work to slide back the heavy timber bar that secured it, so well designed were the gates of the city. Before we passed through, I wrenched the clean, very visible white plumes from Priam’s helmet and dropped them to the dusty ground.

  Outside, Creusa turned to me and grasped my arms. I pulled her into an embrace. “All will be well,” I told her. “Father will look after our son.”

  She smiled sadly. “I know, Husband.” She turned and craned her neck, looking up at the citadel beyond the walls, wreathed in flame. I followed her gaze and noted the silhouettes of figures here and there on the battlements.

  “Would that we had a year, a month, even an hour to spare. I would never let you go.” I kissed her and smiled sadly. “But you have to go. Now. Take this.”

  I passed her my dusty brown cloak. It would conceal her as well as anything. She kissed me once, threw the cloak over her head and shoulders, scurried down the slope, across the great chariot-worn road, and disappeared among the gnarled trunks of ancient olive trees. I watched her go, my heart in my mouth as I waited for the guards on the wall to shout, but there came no such warning. I paused long enough to give her a head start and then slunk across the track myself and into the shade of a tree. I had no cloak, but I realized I had the Achaean’s lion skin. Lions were rare this close to the city, but their very nature made them more camouflaged than a man in his fine clothes. By the time I emerged from the tree and began to scurry through the dusty landscape, my way lit by the blazing city behind me, I was crouched and enveloped by the skin of a lion. If I was spotted from the walls, I suspected the Achaeans had enough to deal with without bothering to try and bring down an old, lean lion.

  It was a strange, brown, flickering, and silent world through which I ran. The roar of flames and the shouts and screams of those still in the city were oddly muted from beyond the walls and merged into some background noise of muffled nightmare. Instead, I concentrated on my path. The abandoned temple of Telipinu, whom the Achaeans claim as Demeter, rose dark and solemn from a coastal promontory six or seven stades from the city walls. I fixed on it but made sure to curve my route to the left. We stood the best chance of success if we spread out well.

  I reached the flat ground between the rise upon which Troy stands and that of the temple and began to pass through the remains of farms that had been abandoned for nearly a decade due to the proximity of the warlike Achaeans. I rounded the corner of an old building, now tumbled and overgrown, and found myself in an old, open yard only forty paces from a patrol of Achaean warriors. This was what I had feared: not all the enemy was in the city, burning and looting. Some were in the surrounding countryside, presumably looking for those people of Troy who had grabbed their most treasured possessions and run for open ground. They had been successful, too, apparently. Half a dozen Achaean warriors had rounded up a small column of slaves, all roped together, and the last of the patrol carried a bag of impounded loot over his shoulder.

  I stopped dead and stared, and the Achaeans turned and spotted me for the briefest of moments. I scurried away, still bent double, even as two of them raised spears to throw.

  “Did you see that?” one said to his friend. “A brave beast, that one.”

  “Looked hungry to me,” said another, “and a bit sick. Probably just about starving enough to attack us. We should kill it.”

  “Let it go,” said his friend with a chuckle. “You’ll have your fill of death this day.”

  I crouched in the darkness below a sprawling fig tree and waited, my breath held, as the Achaean patrol passed, laughing and jesting, their string of slaves dejected and faceless, their visages downcast in sadness. I wished I could save them, but even if I was not constrained by fate, I could not hope to best six men myself, armored only with a mangy lion pelt and a plume-less helmet.

  Once they were safely gone, I rose again and ran on. I prayed as I pounded through the dust, muttering under my breath invocations to the gods, and it took me by surprise when I looked up to check my distance and realized I had arrived. The dark temple stood silent testimony to the piety of my dying people, its stones painted bright but now peeling and faded, untended for years. I rounded the building’s corner and approached the entrance, and my eyes widened. Here were my father and my son. Here were Chryses with the three boys all clutching their sacred burdens—his daughter, too, the lovely young Chryseis, clutching her pregnant belly and refusing to wilt.

  But here also were Trojan warriors, each exhausted and wounded, blackened by smoke and crusted with blood. I recognized a few. Acmon, son of Clytius, Misenus of the loud trumpets, Iapyx, favored of the sun. Once-great names who had stood defiantly on the walls of Troy and watched the Achaeans crash like pointless waves against them. Men who had helped burn the enemy’s ships, now tired and spent, seeking only freedom and a future. Misenus and his fellow warriors shared a look, and I realized then that they had been privy to the ships’ location, for Misenus had been Hector’s own herald, and I myself had told my mighty cousin of the three vessels beneath the Dardanian waves.

  But my searching eyes found no sign of Creusa. I dashed up to them, pushing warriors aside, looking amid the columns.

  “Creusa?”

  Urgent panic gripped me. “Creusa, where are you?”

  Now Anchises and my son joined me. “She was with you,” old Anchises sai
d.

  “We split up, like everyone else. She has not arrived?”

  “Not yet.”

  And the realization sent waves of sickness through my heart. I had given her my cloak. I had tried to save her. And in doing so, I had doomed her.

  “No!”

  I was on my knees a moment later, my father and Misenus crouching, helping me up.

  “No. She was with me. The slavers must have taken her. She might not be dead. They will be taking her back to the city.”

  I made to pull away, but Anchises held tight.

  “She is gone, Son.”

  “She might be alive,” I said again, wrenching myself from their grasp. “I have to find her.”

  “If you find her, then you doom her all over again,” my father reminded me, a voice of reason that I really did not want to hear at that moment. How could I hope to build a new world for my people and a life for my son and yet leave half my heart amid the burning ruins?

  “Run for Dardania,” I told them. “Father’s palace is less than seventy stades distant, and once you are five from the walls, you should be free of marauding Achaeans. Even with a slow, careful start, you can be at the ships long before dawn shows you to your enemies. There are enough of you now to drag at least one ship out of the water and empty her, and Anchises knows his ships. And while you are doing that and preparing to leave, I will find Creusa.” I could feel their disapproval—their sense of the futility of my plan, and I smiled sadly. “I will be back. I will return.”