She is watching.
I think she is watching me.
The little stone harbor at Sigeum smelled of fish, brine, dank seaweed, rope, and wood. Homer could feel the change from inland to stony beach underfoot but the light was bright here, too bright, making him screw up his face against the dazzle. This had been the location of the Greek camp during the Trojan war, but Homer felt no resonances here. It was too used; occupied by the present.
“Don’t let the lad walk so close the edge!” his mother scolded.
His father grasped Homer’s arm. “Stand there!” he said. “Don’t go wandering. We’ve got to find the boat’s governor. It’ll be easier for us to leave you here.”
“Sit down,” said his mother, nudging his shoulder down. “Less likely to wander on your bottom than on your feet.”
Homer sat, his ankles scraping on the uneven stones as he crossed his legs.
“Don’t move!” his mother said again. Then she called for her younger children to follow.
Their footsteps faded. Homer listened to the slap of the water and the gentle tap of a boat tied below him against the harbor wall. Sea birds shrieked high above, waiting for the fishermen to return. A big shape just offshore was probably the ship his family wanted to board for their return journey to Smyrna. For a few minutes, he enjoyed the peace. He stretched out to sunbathe and found a large pebble under his back. He held it close to his eyes, almost touching his lashes, and could see fine grey textures, even a little sparkle.
Ah, beauty, he thought, in wonder.
Then he heard footsteps again.
“He looks a bit simple, that’s all,” a man’s voice said. “You’re not drunk, are you, young man?”
Homer sat up and tried to face the voice but he couldn’t sort it out from the wooden posts surrounding the harbor. “No,” he said. I’m not simple, either, he thought, but held his tongue.
A woman’s voice murmured, accompanied by the sound of a baby’s cooing.
Homer sat, frozen by the arrival of strangers. He always hated the moment when they noticed that something was wrong with him.
They didn’t seem interested in him. The man and woman spoke in low voices together in a fragmented way, unable to keep a conversation going. Even the baby remained quiet. Then the woman started to cry. His presence forgotten, Homer might as well have been a harbor statue.
“How can you leave us now!” she said. “You are my only family now. I’ll have nothing, no one, except our son.”
Homer’s hearing grew sharper. He remained absolutely still, fastened on the voices at his back.
“You know I have to go, love,” the man said defensively. “If I stay, you won’t have any honor anyway. Look, I understand how hard this is for you. But you’ll be proud of me once I’ve done my duty. Everything will be different.” He seemed to try to sound soothing, almost lighthearted.
“Yes, I’m sure it will be different!” she said angrily in a choked voice.
Although the words paused, the sounds didn’t. Homer imagined the scene he heard — the man walking away in vexation, the wife hanging her head and weeping freely, the baby whimpering.
With a shiver, Homer remembered the sound of the Trojan women on the ruins.
Then the sound of the man’s feet in the coarse sand returned. “The governor and some people are coming. Perhaps you should go. It will be less painful, eh?”
Her outpouring didn’t ease but changed tone from anger to sadness.
“Look, go home, love,” the husband said. “Work hard. Be a good wife and mother. I will come home as soon as I am able. Yes?”
She murmured something Homer couldn’t catch.
“Let me say good-bye to my boy,” the man said.
The baby wailed, almost as if frightened of his father.
But the man laughed and said, “They will all say, ‘Here is a better man than his father. He makes his mother proud!’ Be strong, son.”
All three of them wept, then the man croaked, “Go, love! Now!”
Homer didn’t dare move in the small silence; the woman’s light footsteps hurried up towards town. He felt hot with someone else’s grief. If only he had a sweet-voiced wife like that! He would never leave her! But for honor…well, for honor…a sigh shuddered out of him.
I’ll never have a wife anyway, he thought. Who would have me?
Then came the voices of his own family and of others, including a thick Halicarnassan accent, also the sound of a man breathing heavily as if ill or very fat, then a few others who were perhaps sailors and other passengers. The Halicarnassan barked out orders here and there.
“Oh, and here’s our son, gov’nor,” Homer’s mother was saying, panting as if the whole party had been moving too quickly for her. “He’s no trouble, really, except that he can’t see beyond a finger-length. We’ll have to make sure he doesn’t tumble overboard.”
Homer stood and faced the voices, dimly perceiving the mass of movement along the beach towards him. Then he was plucked up in the crowd by his mother’s grip (something he knew well) and guided down the rope ladder with cautions and advice diving all around him like seagulls on a scrap. Once the small boat was loaded with people, they began to row out towards the ship in the offing.
Homer, squeezed behind his father and the heavily-breathing other passenger, felt strange ankles and shins pressed up against his. He could hear his little sister’s and brother’s delighted laughter at the other end of the boat but couldn’t quite hear their observations. The wind strengthened and cooled as they moved offshore, blowing his mother’s shushing of the younger ones back on everyone else. Two rowers grunted, four oars dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, while the governor stood (even Homer could see him), perhaps using the long pole.
“What do you see?” Homer finally asked his father.
“It’s the same ship we came up on,” his father said. “Black-hulled with great white sails. The old governor’s not on this journey.”
Homer wanted to ask if there was a sad-looking man on the boat with them but didn’t dare. The heavy-breather next to him worried him. Was the illness catching? he wondered.
“Can’t you see, boy?” the breather whispered.
“No,” Homer said, his face pointed straightforward.
“But you have your wits, don’t you?” the man said.
Homer shifted uncomfortably.
“Are you nervous on the sea?” the breather whispered. It seemed to be his normal voice.
“Not now,” Homer said, lifting his face. “Hesiod says this is the time for sailing, in the fifty days after the solstice.”
“Hesiod!” The breather’s voice was almost above a whisper. Then he coughed. “So, the lad is a scholar.”
Homer dug a finger into his father’s ribs. No doubt his dad had been daydreaming, but Homer didn’t want to talk to this man alone. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” asked Homer’s father, leaning across Homer’s lap.
“Is your lad a scholar?” the man breathed. “He knows of Hesiod.”
“No. Oh, he listens to all the singers in Smyrna and his head is full of odd things. There’s not much else for someone like him to do, is there? He’s useless. We don’t know what to do with him now he’s nearly a man. Can’t do a day’s work of any kind.”
“I know all of Mimnermos’s poem of Smyrna,” Homer boasted tentatively. “I didn’t used to like his Nanno, but I do now.”
“Ah, you’re growing old enough to be romantic, eh, lad?”
Homer felt himself blush.
“I was a singer.” The whisper was low.
Homer turned his face towards the heavy-breather, interested.
“I sang in Smyrna a few years ago.”
“Perhaps I heard you.”
“Yes…They call me Keleuthetis. I usually sing of Theseus or Achilles.”
“I remember that! It was Achilles in Smyrna.” Homer remembered a honey voice and a nimble lyre. Of course, the Trojan War songs were always his favorites.
“Good lad,” Keleuthetis almost chuckled.
“You don’t sing anymore?” Homer asked.
His father nudged him.
“If you could see me, you would know why,” the man said, hissing out the whisper this time. “I’m being murdered by my own body. A great tumor on my neck. Going home to Knossos to die.”
Shocked and embarrassed, Homer made himself small on the boat’s bench.
“I had a boy to follow me, but he died of fever last year,” Keleuthetis whispered sadly.
One question formed in Homer’s mind. Then another. Then his mind began to rain with questions, as if Zeus himself had sent a thundershower of thoughts. But Homer kept them to himself with his parents so close to hand. Besides, they were about to board the black-hulled ship; he could hear the sails flapping in the wind, the governor calling to the sailors there.
Wearing broad-brimmed hats to keep off the hot sun, Keleuthetis and Homer sat on boxes on the deck. His parents were on the other side of the ship somewhere, apparently relieved that Homer had found someone to keep him occupied. Sometimes the boxes shifted under them with the pitch, roll, or yaw of their journey, then shifted back again; Homer hung on tenaciously as he talked with Keleuthetis about singing, curious about how the singers could remember so many words.
The sick man told Homer the value of composing in circular thoughts, one of the aids to memory. “And I always call someone by the same name. If you have a ‘glad-hearted Homer,’ for instance, he’s ‘glad-hearted’ even when he’s just lost his best friend or is being killed.” Keleuthetis panted with the effort of talking.
“Every time?” asked Homer doubtfully. He didn’t like some of the epithets that Keleuthetis chose and had a secret store of his own. Especially for the Trojans, which Homer always felt were neglected by the traditional singers.
“I don’t want to be pausing and trying to remember if this is where I call him ‘dour-faced,’ do I?”
“I see.” Homer scratched his chin thoughtfully. “So you have to think up names that are flexible, that could do in many situations.”
After a pause, Keleuthetis said, “You’re a quick one.” He heaved out a sigh, almost of relief. Then he said, “You want to be a singer, don’t you? I will buy you from your parents if you like.”
Homer hadn’t dared say it himself. But when Keleuthetis said those words, he felt as full as a spring lake and as light as sunshine. He couldn’t speak other than to say, “Oh, yes.”
A deep voice from behind them said, “What’s the matter? Sailors too hairy for you?”
“Sailors,” Keleuthetis said dismissively. Then in a different tone, “I don’t have much time left, lad. Would you be willing to stay with me to the end?”
“Yes,” Homer said.
“Have one of your little sisters fetch my lyre. We’ll begin.”
The boy. That boy was back.
Schliemann was down in a trench, below the edge of a wall. Sofia had managed to distract the beady-eyed Turkish museum officials while Schliemann uncovered another twenty or so golden sewing needles. The workers dug up on the hill, working two different trenches, while a third party down on the plain still searched for the two fabled springs — one hot, one cold — outside the walls of the city. So far the many springs they’d measured in the plain of the Küçük Menderes Çayi, the ancient River Scamander, were tepid all year round.
The boy, of whom he caught a fleeting glimpse from the trench, was dressed in a tunic such as some of the Greeks wore but barefooted and without leggings, even in this chilly autumn weather. He was also clumsy; Schliemann swore that he looked as if he had fallen off a wall.
Schliemann scrambled up. Where was the boy now?
The nearest workmen were thumb-sized at this distance, passing buckets of soil hand to hand along a chain then, just beyond, Sofia in her black and red dress, apparently explaining something to one of the Turkish museum officials, waving her arm about expressively. He felt a sudden pang of love for her; he sighed with regret at his advancing years and endless illnesses.
He tugged at his ear. The constant low buzz was there, now with a sort of high piping over it, like a double flute. But he knew that his own worsening ears produced the music from nowhere.
When I’m back in Athens, he thought, I will have them looked at again.
Earlier in the day, here, workmen had come upon an area of ash and charred wood. Immediately, but with an air of nonchalance, Schliemann sent them off to an earlier dig. Ashes…Perhaps from the Sack of Troy, the real Trojan War Troy, itself? The burning towers of Ilium? A night of chaos and death such as the ancient world had never seen.
The boy suddenly appeared again, ran across the uncovered wall, then jumped out of sight.
Schliemann frowned. Is it the same one? This one looks younger than the previous lad but just like him. Brothers?
“Boy!” he yelled in Greek, Turkish, and then French for good measure. He climbed the steps, looked down the other side of the wall, most of it still under centuries of accumulated earth. Later, he would dig outside this enclosure.
The boy’s head passed the turn in the wall, just visible.
“You there! Stop!” Vexed, Schliemann found his native German pouring out. In his ears, the noise rose; the wind was fierce today but Schliemann heard nothing of it. He chased him down to the corner of the wall that they had passed by in yesterday’s digging.
Where’s that boy? Schliemann ground his teeth with earache and irritation.
Something glittered in the jumbled wall of soil. Schliemann stopped, dropped to his knees to get a closer look. And here, too, were ashes. Why hadn’t that been spotted yesterday? Bad light?
He reached for the green-flecked thing.
I feel my guts go cold as a stonemason’s butt in Boetia in the month of Aristogeton when the messenger announces, “You are to report to the palace immediately.”
Leo is asleep on the floor where we soldiers are celebrating. I’m not quite drunk enough. No one else hears my summons, they carry on drinking and shouting jokes and resolutions about what they are going to do tomorrow, now that peace has come.
The palace!
My first thought is that Lord Aeneas has seen my face too often in the wrong places since last night. Then I think I might be needed for special guard duty. Or invited by King Priam to royal celebrations. Or to receive bad news about my family.
I follow the messenger through the alleys of the city; from nearly every window there is the sound of partying, a lot of it in bed. Trojan men and women are groaning with joy.
However, the palace is strangely dark. Just about the time I work out that the unlit windows mean everyone is in the Great Hall and nowhere else, the messenger who brought me leads me further inside. I can hear laughter and singing — the winners’ song already being composed — and smell the free flow of wine and warm fires. But we turn away from all that down a darker corridor.
The messenger shows me a door, then leaves. I knock, wary.
Cassandra opens the door to what I recognize as her bedchamber. Fully dressed in the finest woven gown edged with golden and scarlet threads, her dark hair loose, her eyes wide with fear, she’s got me again. I can’t help it. All she ever has to do is to look at me and I’m hers.
“Prince of Phyrgia,” she says, in formal greeting, stepping back slightly.
I remain where I am. “Princess of Troy,” I answer.
“Son of Mygdon.” Her voice softens.
“Daughter of Priam.”
“Coroebus.”
“Hello, Cassandra,” I say.
She reaches forward and takes my wrist, pulling me into the room. Then she shuts the door. “Help me,” she says.
“What’s the matter?”
“We’re all in terrible danger.” Her eyes fill with tears.
“Cassie…the Greeks are gone. I saw their ships sailing away.”
“Oh, you, too,” she says impatiently. “The curse is certainly thorough.” Run
ning her hand through her hair in exasperation, she turns away.
“What can I do anyway?” I ask her, shrugging.
“Set the giant horse alight! Now!” Her eyes are mad.
“But…but the horse belongs to the goddess! Surely not!” I am shocked.
“Then I will do it myself!”
“You can’t! The crowd will rip you to pieces! The giant horse means victory. Peace!” I can’t believe she’s so foolish.
She looks up at me. Close. Intently. Then she just shakes her head, crying, unable to say anything.
“Cassie,” I say, holding out my hand.
Just like that, she comes to me and presses her face into my neck. She is sobbing so that her words are all broken up. “Everything has already happened in my head. I can’t change it, of course. I can’t.”
I hold her until she is calmer. It feels good to be this close to her. Then she pulls away toward the window, picks up a fine cloth from a small table and wipes her face with it, moaning a little, then sighing. “Please, Coro. Let’s talk. I’m so filled with dread. You can distract me. Sit down.”
I look around and move to a three-legged stool which is too short for me but there is nowhere else except the bed. My knees stick up higher than my elbows. Cassandra makes this sort of brave-effort face that women do when things aren’t going their way. She sits on the window ledge.
“Do you remember when we first met?” she asks me in a falsely cheerful voice.
I don’t want to let her know that I’ve thought of it more and more over the years, growing in me as indestructibly as a healthy tree. “Wasn’t that at my father’s palace?” I say casually.
Cassandra nods, her smile flickering. “I thought of you often after that. Then…Apollo…”
I shrug and inspect my knees.
“Then I knew that we could never marry. We were a likely match, though, don’t you think?”
“I had thought so,” I say. My voice isn’t as strong as it should be. I am growing uncomfortable. The wine I drank earlier is having its effect as I sit still, growing hot and muddled. Why couldn’t we marry? I wonder.
“Coro,” she says, as if she had just thought of something.
I look over at her. “Yes, Cassie?”
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