Troy: A Brand of Fire

by Ben Blake

  *

  Half an hour later they were outside Sparta and hurrying south. Helen had used her authority to acquire a chariot from the stables, pulled by a pair of horses so poor they would have been killed and turned into glue and stew meat, if this was Troy. But they would do. Paris drove with Helen beside him, while the sixty raiders ran on either side. Surprisingly no alarm had been raised. It might not be until morning, now, but there was no sense in waiting to find out.

  Some miles down the road Paris called a warrior up to drive and swung down, to run beside Molion. He explained the situation to the captain as quickly as he could. The soldier glanced at the thin white mark on Paris’ throat and grunted. “She really had a knife on you? Quite a woman.”

  “You don’t know the half,” Paris said feelingly.

  “You will keep your oath?”

  “I will,” he said. “I invoked too many gods to risk breaking it. There would be no place in the world for me to hide from them all.”

  Molion nodded. He was running quite easily, even in armour and with miles of road already behind him. “Antenor won’t like it. You’ve ruined his carefully designed plan, Prince Paris.”

  “The gods ruined it,” Paris disagreed. “Helen had no way of knowing intruders were in the palace, or that I was in her chamber. But she was awake and standing by the door with a knife in her hand. More than mere mortals were at work in this, Molion.”

  “Perhaps they were,” the big soldier said. “But whose gods, then? Troy’s, or the Argives’?”

  He hadn’t thought of that. “I suppose we’ll find out.”

  The chariot rattled on, and the men ran with it.