Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

Word reached Nestor too, in his palace in Pylos. He had expected it, even planned for it with Odysseus, and made what preparations he could. He didn’t know if they would be enough. The new taxes on the Trojan Road wouldn’t merely hurt, they’d make it all but impossible for Greeks to trade with the nations of the Euxine Sea at all. Merchants would lose their businesses, shops and traders their supplies. Nestor had already set aside a fifth of his treasury to help support small tradesmen through the troubles, through a variety of tax reductions and specially funded market fairs. But he knew all that, the work had been done a long time ago. He didn’t need to dwell on it now.

  The news made him restless, though. Nestor went out into the gardens, then back inside to prowl around the kitchens for a while. He nibbled at a plate of figs, but left a cup of kykeon untouched; he didn’t need wine now, even honeyed. Not in this mood. The servants, as familiar with the king’s temperament as anyone, kept out of his way. He wandered back outside again and finally, as the maids and butlers had known he would, he found himself upstairs in his bed chamber, the room he’d shared with his wife through so very many years.

  There was nobody there. Of course not; the servants would have been advised to find something else to do. Nestor put it out of his mind and went to the balcony, looking out over the sea while a breeze filled the air with spray and the tang of salt.

  “It’s happened, Eurydice,” he said. “As we thought it would.”

  His dead wife made no reply, unsurprisingly. Though there were times when Nestor would swear on his own soul that he heard her, just a whisper in wind or in the rustle of a bed sheet. Usually at night, when the world was sleeping and the air hung quiet and heavy. Still, when he talked to her it was only ever his own voice Nestor heard. He supposed he did so because he always had, when they were married, and that had been for a long time. Thirty years. He hadn’t been ready to let her go.

  Strange, the things people did, to deal with grief. Nestor’s mind tugged on that thought and then followed it, and was led to Tyndareus of Laconia, Helen’s father, dead these five years.

  Tyndareus hadn’t coped well when Castor died. Grief had broken him, in truth. Until then he’d been a typical Greek king, all swagger and the threat of force, convinced he could bend even the Fates to his will. He’s a fighter, that boy of mine, he’d said in Thessaly, after the boar had snapped Castor’s leg like a toothpick. As though by bravado, by sheer strength of will, he could browbeat destiny into letting his son live.

  He’d failed, and after the loss Tyndareus withdrew, shrivelled into himself, becoming wrinkled and worn in the space of one winter. He clung to life for a long time after that, but Nestor had never been quite sure why the Fates didn’t take him too. Tyndareus had decided he had nothing to live for. Every morning he awoke without his son was torment.

  Castor’s death made Helen a prize for the princes of Greece to fight over. Her only brother was dead, her only sister already married to Agamemnon in Mycenae. Helen was now heir to Laconia, to the rivers and hills of that pleasant land, its wealth and the red-cloaked warriors who guarded it. Nobles and heroes began to circle like wolves around a lamb.

  Nestor and Tyndareus had never been close. But they had fought together, two proud young men riding their chariots into war, throwing their spears at the same enemy. Some of the time, anyway. Over the years Nestor had come to respect the other king. Tyndareus might have been an old-style Greek, still caught up in the pride and brag of the warrior culture, but he wasn’t a fool. Or he hadn’t been, until his son died and he fell into self-willed decay, while the wolves crept closer around him. His hand had loosened around his spear haft then, and he hadn’t the will to close his fingers again.

  Helen must have been wounded too, though she didn’t show it. Her brother lost, her sister gone away, and her father shrunken and silent. How could that not affect her? But she carried her scars inside, if scars she bore. All Nestor could say was that she seemed content enough with Menelaus; and a good thing, too, because there was no way for her to leave that marriage. Not when she had chosen it herself, so publicly. Still, he wondered sometimes what her griefs were, and how she coped with them.

  “Listen to me,” he told Eurydice. “Worrying about another woman’s feelings. You’d have words for me, I know, if you were here. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about her.”

  He knew how he coped with grief though. He worried for Thrasymedes now more than he had since his son was a small boy, toddling through the world with wide eyes and a perpetual smile. Mostly there wasn’t much he could do: young men liked to test their strength, and Thrasymedes was going to hunt and spar no matter what Nestor might say to him. And he'd have to, since a king who couldn’t command the respect of warriors wouldn’t hold his throne for long.

  Nestor could work to hand Thrasymedes a wealthy kingdom to rule, though. One stable and at peace. But he couldn’t help feeling that this news from Troy, expected or not, made that a lot less likely.

  He shook himself and left the room, pausing only to touch his fingers to the headboard of the bed where his wife had lain so often.

  Book TwoThe Doves That Speak