Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

Chapter Twelve

  A Knife at the Throat

  The chariots had to go south at first, though Troy was east of the strand where the kings’ ships were drawn up. Ship prows jutted onto the beach fifty yards or so apart, enough room to work the oars on the way in and to unload crates or amphorae held in great nets. Wagons were parked at various angles, some drawn by four horses, others by six. Nestor had seen it before, on previous visits, but he still found six horses a wild extravagance.

  Sailors and longshoremen stopped working to watch them pass. A few top-knotted Thracians were bare chested, muscles gleaming with sweat, but most men wore shirts and either kilts or the loose trousers of southern Anatolia. Nearly all had the flattened features of lifelong dock brawlers, or the spread-footed walk of men used to swaying decks. It made no difference. They paused to gape as the chariots swept by, a long line of them rattling over the shingle, until captains or merchants yelled at them to get back to work.

  Then they reached the road, a wide strip of earth tamped carefully flat, with stones and other bits of detritus cleared away. Chariots ran best on such smooth surfaces, and they picked up speed at once. On their left a channel of the Scamander whispered, flanked on both sides with willow and tamarisk, lotus and bulrushes. A similar double line of greenery stood a little way off to their right, where another of the river’s braided arms flowed. The two channels drew closer and then the chariots splashed across a ford through the western arm, turned south-east and a hundred yards later crossed the joined flow, onto the eastern bank. Both times Nestor’s feet were wetted but not submerged. The Scamander was low in summer, after the spring melt had passed.

  They picked up speed, the horses working now for the first time. An experienced charioteer, Nestor knew the animals had plenty of speed left in them, but he realised too that it took some skill by the driver to run them at this pace. Hector and his friends were showing what they could do; and without much effort, it seemed. It had to be admired, staged or no. Nestor’s old knees had begun to ache but he was damned if he’d ask them to slow down.

  They drove past a hill on the right, thick with brambles and clumped bushes, all grown through one another in a hideous tangle. Then over another ford, across the Chiblak River this time, a smaller stream but faster flowing than the Scamander. The channel had been widened, Nestor noticed, so the water ran in shallow ripples that hardly covered the rims of the wheels. And then at last they were drawing up to the city itself, mighty Troy rising above them in a mass of turrets and towers and the road switching back and forth as it climbed the slope, like the path through Minos’ Labyrinth far away.

  At the top, just outside the southern Scaean Gate, grew a large and gnarled oak tree. Legend claimed it was planted there by Ilos, the son of Tros who had founded the city, three hundred and fifty years before. Troy had been sacked twice in the first years, when it was still only a village huddling under the onslaught of the endless summer wind.

  It had not been sacked since. The walls had been built of brick, then stone. They had risen ten feet and then twenty, then thirty-five. Nestor craned his head back to look at their distant tops and couldn’t help a twinge of unease.

  It wasn’t just the imperiousness of Troy. That was part of it, yes; only a fool could stand in the shadow of these towering walls and not feel a degree of awe. It was unsettling, not least because it was so much greater than anything Greece had been able to do. But it wasn’t that which had Nestor’s senses twitching. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew there was something wrong.

  The chariots slowed as they neared the wall.