The Hittite

by Ben Bova

  A much older man stood beside him, hair and beard white, wrapped in a dark cloak that reached to the ground.

  “I brought Phoenix along,” said Ajax. “Maybe he can appeal to Achilles better than we can.”

  Odysseos nodded his approval.

  “I was his tutor when Achilles was a lad,” Phoenix said, in a frail voice that quavered slightly. “He was proud and touchy even then.”

  Ajax shrugged his massive shoulders. Odysseos said, “Well, let us try to convince mighty Achilles to rejoin the army.”

  We started off for the far end of the camp, where Achilles’ Myrmidones had beached their boats. Half a dozen armed Ithacans trailed the three nobles and I fell in with them. The wind was blowing in off the water, cold and sharp as a knife. The sky above was clouding over. Perhaps it will rain tomorrow, I thought. Perhaps there will be no battle, after all.

  Once we entered the Myrmidones’ portion of the camp we passed several sentries on duty, fully armed and armored, with helmets strapped on tightly, heavy shields and long spears in their hands. They wore cloaks, which the wind plucked at and whipped around their gleaming suits of bronze. They recognized giant Ajax and the squat King of Ithaca, and allowed the rest of us to pass unchallenged.

  Finally we were stopped by a pair of guards whose armor glittered in the light of a big bonfire, just before a large cabin built of planks.

  “We are a deputation from the High King,” said Odysseos, his voice deep and grave with formality, “sent to see Achilles, prince of the Myrmidones.”

  The guard saluted by clasping his fist to his heart and answered, “Prince Achilles has been expecting you and bids you welcome.”

  He stepped aside and gestured them to the open door of the cabin. Odysseos turned and beckoned me to accompany him, Ajax and Phoenix. The other Ithacan troops remained outside.

  Mighty warrior that he was, Achilles apparently enjoyed his creature comforts. His cabin’s interior was draped with rich tapestries and the floor was covered with carpets. Couches and pillows were scattered across the spacious room. In one corner a hearth fire smoldered red, keeping out the cold and damp. I could hear the wind moaning through the smoke hole in the roof, but inside the cabin it was reasonably snug and warm.

  Three women sat by the fire, staring at us with great dark eyes. They were slim and young, dressed modestly in sleeveless gray chemises. Iron and copper pots stood on tripods at the hearth, faint wisps of steam rising from them. I smelled spiced meat and garlic.

  Achilles himself sat on a wide couch against the far wall of the cabin, his back to a magnificent arras that depicted a gory battle scene. The couch was atop a dais, raised above the carpeted floor of the cabin like a king’s throne.

  My first sight of the fabled warrior was a surprise. He was not a mighty-thewed giant, like Ajax. His body was not broad and powerful, as Odysseos’. He seemed small, almost boyish, his bare arms and legs slim and virtually hairless. His chin was shaved clean and the ringlets of his long black hair were tied up in a silver chain. He wore a splendid white silk tunic, bordered with a purple key design, cinched at the waist with a belt of interlocking gold crescents. He wore no weapons, but behind him a half-dozen long spears rested against the arras, within easy reach.

  His face was the greatest shock. Ugly, almost to the point of being grotesque. Narrow beady eyes, lips curled in a perpetual snarl, a sharp hook of a nose, skin pocked and cratered. In his right hand he gripped a jeweled wine cup; from the bleary look in his eyes it seemed to me that he had already drained it more than once.

  At his feet sat a young man who was absolutely beautiful, gazing not at the four of us but up at Achilles. His tightly curled hair was reddish brown, rather than the usual darker tones of these Achaians. I wondered if it was his natural color. Like Achilles, he was beardless. But he seemed young enough not to need to shave. A golden pitcher of wine stood on the carpet beside him.

  I looked at Achilles again and thought that I understood the demons that drove him. A small ugly boy born to be a king. A boy destined to rule, but always the object of taunts and derisive laughter behind his back. A young man possessed with fire to silence the laughter, to stifle the taunting. His slim arms and legs were iron-hard, knotted with muscle. His dark eyes were absolutely humorless. There was no doubt in my mind that he could outfight Odysseos or even powerful Ajax on sheer willpower alone.

  “Greetings, Odysseos the Ever-Daring,” he said in a calm, clear tenor voice that was close to mocking. “And to you, mighty Ajax, King of Salamis and champion of the Achaian host.” Then his voice softened, “And to you, Phoenix, my well-loved tutor.”

  I glanced at the old man. He bowed to Achilles but his eyes were on the beautiful young man at Achilles’ feet.

  “You bring a stranger with you,” Achilles said, his cold eyes inspecting me.

  “A Hittite,” Odysseos replied, “who has joined my house hold, together with his squad of men. They will make a fine addition to our forces.”

  “Indeed,” Achilles said thinly.

  Odysseos got down to the subject at hand. “We bring you greetings, Prince Achilles, from Agamemnon the High King.”

  “Agamemnon the bargain-breaker, you mean,” Achilles snapped. “Agamemnon the gift-snatcher.”

  “He is our High King,” Odysseos said, in a tone that suggested they were all stuck with Agamemnon and the best they could do was to try to work with him.

  “So he is,” admitted Achilles. “And well-beloved by Father Zeus, I’m sure.” The sarcasm in his voice dripped like acid.

  It was going to be a difficult parley, I could see.

  “Perhaps our guests are hungry,” suggested the young man in a soft voice.

  Achilles tousled his curly mop of hair. “Always the thoughtful one, Patrokles. Always thoughtful.”

  He bade us sit and ordered the serving women to feed us and bring wine cups. Odysseos, Ajax and Phoenix took couches arranged near Achilles’ dais. I stepped back, as befitted a common soldier. Patrokles got to his feet and filled all their cups from his pitcher of gold. The women passed trays of broiled lamb with onions among the noblemen. No one paid the slightest attention to me.

  After a round of toasts and polite banter, Achilles said, “I thought I heard mighty Agamemnon bawling like a frightened woman earlier today. He breaks into tears quite easily, doesn’t he?”

  Odysseos frowned slightly. “Our High King was wounded this morning. A cowardly Trojan archer hit him in the right shoulder.”

  “Too bad,” said Achilles. “I see that you did not escape the day’s fighting without a wound. Did it bring you to tears?”

  Ajax burst out, “Achilles, if Agamemnon cries it’s not from pain or fear. It’s from shame! Shame that the Trojans have penned us up in our camp. Shame that our best fighter sits here on a soft couch while his comrades are being slaughtered by Hector and his Trojans.”

  “Shame is what he should feel,” Achilles shouted back. “He’s robbed me! He’s treated me like a slave or even worse. He calls himself High King but he behaves like a thieving whoremaster!”

  And so it went, for nearly an hour. Achilles was furious with Agamemnon for taking back a prize he had been awarded, some captive woman. He claimed that he did all the fighting while Agamemnon was a coward, but after the battle the High King parceled out the spoils to suit himself and even then reneged on what Achilles felt was due him.

  “I have sacked more towns and brought the Achaians more captives and loot than any man here, and none of you can say that I haven’t,” he insisted hotly. “Yet that fat lard-ass can steal my rightful rewards away from me, and you—all of you!—allow him to do it. Did any of you stick up for me in the council? Do you think I owe you anything? Why should I fight for you when you won’t even raise your voices on my behalf ?”

  Patrokles tried to soothe him, without much success. “Achilles, these men are not your enemies. They come to you on a mission of reconciliation. It isn’t fitting for a host to bellow at his gue
sts so.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Achilles replied, almost smiling down at the young man. Turning to Odysseos and the others, he said, “It’s not your fault. I’m not angry at you. But I’ll see myself in Hades before I help Agamemnon again. He’s not trustworthy. You should be thinking about appointing a new leader among yourselves.”

  Odysseos tried tact, praising Achilles’ prowess in battle, downplaying Agamemnon’s failures and shortcomings. Ajax, blunt and straightforward as a shovel, flatly told Achilles that he was helping the Trojans to slay the Achaians. Old Phoenix appealed to his former student’s sense of honor and recited childhood homilies to him.

  Achilles remained unmoved. “Honor?” he snapped at Phoenix. “What kind of honor would I have left if I put my spear back into the service of the man who robbed me?”

  Odysseos coaxed, “We can get the girl back for you, if that’s what you want. We can get a dozen women for you.”

  “Or boys,” Ajax added. “What ever you want.”

  I thought of my sons and felt glad that they were still as young as they were.

  Achilles got to his feet, and Patrokles scrambled to stand beside him. I was right, he was terribly small, although every inch of him was hard with sinew. Even slender Patrokles topped him by a few finger widths.

  “When Hector breaks into the camp I will defend my boats,” Achilles said. “Until Agamemnon comes to me personally and apologizes, and begs me to rejoin the fighting, that is all that I will do.”

  Odysseos rose, realizing that he was being dismissed. Phoenix stood up beside him and Ajax, after glancing around, finally understood and got ponderously to his feet also.

  “What will the poets say of Achilles in future generations?” Odysseos asked, firing his last arrow at the warrior’s pride. “That he sulked in his cabin while the Trojans slaughtered his friends?”

  The shot glanced off Achilles without penetrating. “They will never say that I humbled myself and threw away my honor by serving a man who humiliated me.”

  They walked slowly to the doorway, speaking polite formal farewells. I fell in behind Odysseos, as befitted my station in his house hold. Phoenix hung back and I heard Achilles invite his old mentor to remain the night.

  Outside, Ajax shook his head wearily. “There’s nothing we can do. He just won’t listen to us.”

  Odysseos clapped his broad shoulder. “We tried our best, my friend. Now we must prepare for tomorrow’s battle without Achilles.”

  Ajax trudged off into the darkness, followed by his men. Odysseos turned to me, a thoughtful look on his face.

  “I have a task for you to perform,” he said. “If you are successful you can end this war.”

  “And if I am not?”

  Odysseos smiled grimly. “No man lives forever, Hittite.”

  17

  In less than an hour I found myself walking warily in the moonlight down the ramp before the gate in our rampart and heading toward the Trojan camp. A white cloth knotted above my left elbow proclaimed that I was operating under a flag of truce. The slim willow wand in my hand was the impromptu symbol of a herald.

  “These should get you past their sentries without having your throat slit,” Odysseos had told me. He did not smile as he spoke the words and I did not find his reassurances very reassuring. I carried neither shield nor weapons, except for a small dagger tucked into my belt.

  “Go to Prince Hector and speak to no one else,” Odysseos had commanded me. “Tell him that Agamemnon offers a solution to this war: if the Trojans will return Helen to her rightful husband, the Achaians will return to their own lands, satisfied.”

  “Hasn’t that offer been made before?” I had asked.

  Odysseos smiled at my simplicity. “Of course. But always with the demand for a huge ransom, plus all the fortune that Helen brought with her from Sparta. And always when we were fighting under the walls of Troy. Priam and his sons never believed that we would abandon the siege without breaking in and sacking the city. But now that Hector is besieging us, perhaps they will believe that we are ready to quit and merely need a face-saving compromise to send us packing.”

  He was crafty, this Odysseos. Far craftier than the other Achaian leaders. But I wondered, “Returning Helen is nothing more than a face-saving compromise?”

  He looked at me curiously. “She is only a woman, Hittite. Do you think Menalaos, her husband, has been pining away in celibacy since the bitch ran off with Paris?”

  Then he added, “Have you abstained from women while searching for your wife?”

  That caught me squarely. I realized once again that it was my sons I truly sought. If we had been childless, would I have come all this way to find my Aniti?

  Odysseos made me repeat his instructions and then, satisfied, led me to the gate in the rampart, where I had earned my moment of glory earlier that day. I gazed out into the darkness. In the silvery moonlight a mist had risen, turning the plain into a ghostly shivering vapor that rose and sank slowly like the breath of some living creature. Here and there I could make out the glow of Trojan campfires, like distant stars in the shrouding fog.

  “Remember,” said Odysseos, “you are to speak to Prince Hector and no one else.”

  “I understand, my lord.”

  I walked carefully down the ramp, the inky shadows of the trench on either side of me, and finally made my way through the slowly drifting tendrils of the mist toward the Trojan camp, guided by the fires that flickered and glowed in the distance. The fog was cold, chilling against my bare arms and legs, like the touch of death.

  A sharp wind began gusting in from the sea and shredding the mist covering the plain. In the distance I could make out the beetling towers of Troy hulking black and menacing against the moonlit sky.

  A dog began barking, and a voice called out of the darkness, “You there! Hold!”

  I froze and clenched the willow wand in my fist. It seemed much too slim to protect me.

  A pair of sentries approached me warily, heavy spears in their hands. Two massive dogs skulked before them, growling at me. I gulped down a deep breath of chill night air and stood immobile.

  “Well? Who are you?”

  “I am an emissary from the High King Agamemnon,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I have been sent to speak to Prince Hector.”

  The sentries were an unlikely pair, one short and squat with a dirty tangled beard and a potbelly bulging his chain mail corselet, the other taller and painfully thin, either clean-shaved or too young to start a beard. I realized he was holding the growling dogs on a chain leash, and struggling to keep them under control.

  “Prince Hector the Tamer of Horses he wants to see,” said the potbelly. He laughed harshly. “So would I!”

  The younger one grinned and showed a gap where a front tooth was missing.

  “An emissary, eh?” Potbelly eyed me suspiciously. “With a cloak on his back long enough to hide a sword. More likely a spy. Or an assassin.”

  I held up my herald’s wand. “I have been sent by the High King. I am not here to fight. Take my cloak if it frightens you. There’s nothing hidden beneath it.”

  “Be a lot safer to ram this spear through your guts and feed you to the dogs,” growled Potbelly.

  The youngster put out a restraining hand. “Hermes protects messengers, you know. I wouldn’t want to draw the anger of the Trickster.”

  Potbelly scowled and muttered, but finally lifted my cloak and satisfied himself that I was not hiding a weapon. He took my dagger, though, and tucked it into his own belt. Then the two of them led me to their chief.

  They were Dardanians, allies of the Trojans who had come from several leagues up the coast to fight against the invading Achaians. Over the next hour, while the moon climbed higher in the starry sky and then began its descent toward the sea, I was escorted from the chief of the Dardanian contingent to a Trojan officer, from there to the tent of Hector’s chief lieutenants, and finally past a stinking makeshift horse corral and rows of silently
waiting chariots tipped over with their long yoke poles poking into the air, to the small plain tent and the guttering fire of Prince Hector.

  At each stop I explained my mission again. Dardanians and Trojans alike spoke a dialect similar to the Achaians. Not one of them had the wit to notice that my words were differently accented, the speech of a stranger to their shores. I realized that Troy’s defenders included contingents from many areas up and down the coast. The Achaians had been raiding their towns for years, and now they had all banded together under Trojan leadership to resist the barbarian invaders.

  It must have been close to midnight when at last I was brought before Hector. His tent was barely large enough for himself and a servant. A pair of armed nobleman stood outside by the fire in bronze breastplates and fine helmets. Insects buzzed and darted in the firelight. No slaves or women were in sight. Hector himself stood at the entrance flap to his tent. I recognized those steady, grave brown eyes.

  He was tall for these people, nearly my own height. Hector wore no armor, no badge of rank, merely a soft clean tunic belted at the waist, with an ornamental dagger hanging from the leather belt. He had no need to impress anyone with his grandeur. He possessed that calm inner strength that needs no outward decorations.

  In the flickering light of the campfire he studied me for a moment. His face was handsome, intelligent, though there were lines of weariness around his eyes, furrows across his broad brow. Despite the fullness of his rich brown beard I saw that his cheeks were becoming hollow. The strain of war was taking its toll on him.

  “You are the man at the gate,” he said. His words were measured, neither surprise nor anger in them.

  “I am, my lord.”

  He looked me over carefully. “Your name?”

  “Lukka.”

  “From where?”

  “From far to the east, the land of the Hatti.”

  His eyes widened. “You are a Hittite?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  He puzzled over that for a few moments, brow knitted. Then he asked, “What brings you to the plain of Ilios? Why are you fighting for the Achaians?”