A Song of War: a novel of Troy Read online

  And then I saw Prince Hector face Ajax of Locris. It had already been a day for duels, for Queen Helen’s first husband, Menelaus of Sparta, had challenged her second, Paris of Troy, and the two of them had made a clumsy, cowardly show of it that devolved into open battle between the two clamoring armies. But Hector called to halt the fighting with a second duel, and when Ajax stepped to meet him, these two made the others look like the clay they were. Hector was super-human, god-born. I remembered him from when he and his delegation traveled to my home of Lesvos, partly for my wedding to the aging king who was my first husband, partly to ask for our spearmen and ships to clear Achaeans from Troy’s beaches. Hector traveled with his wife, Andromache, and she was the finest woman I had ever seen; not because of the richness of her dress, which was superb, but because she was the partner of this godlike man, not his slave. She stood as straight as a young ash; she never cast down her eyes when she spoke to mighty Hector, who terrified grown men. I searched the distant walls of Troy for her now, remembering how she had sat with me at my wedding, told me things, and praised marriage. My marriage was a dynastic thing, a matter of alliance between an aging king and a princess of seventeen, and my mother had always said marriage was a matter of men’s convenience and women’s slavery, but Andromache made it sound like more.

  To imagine a woman like Andromache as a slave was akin to picturing the sun rising in the west. She was born to be a queen and should die a queen, although a month in the stinking Achaean camp and I knew that a worse fate awaited her if she was taken.

  Hector had dressed in his magnificent bronze armor, just as he did now facing Ajax, and he rode in his chariot, and he and some of his knights played at fighting with my father’s men and my new husband’s. I tried to look at the walls now, and I asked myself if Andromache still went to the gate to watch as if by right, as she had then, or did she shield her eyes now that the men played for blood?

  Did she recall my foolish boasts?

  “Women could be drivers,” I had said to Andromache.

  She looked at me. I saw her take my statement in, and I saw her think about it. I already adored her, I was willing to learn anything from her, and one thing I admired was her care with her speech. She always thought before she spoke, and so did her husband.

  “I suppose they could,” she said with a smile. “You are proposing to be an Amazon? Like Penthesilea and her tribe?”

  “I thought they were a myth,” I said, intrigued.

  And she laughed. “No myth. Women have come to us to sell horses, women with scale armor and heavy bows. Hector the horse tamer knows them. And I met Penthesilea herself when she was little more than a girl, long ago in Sparta.”

  “Then perhaps I will go to the Amazons,” I said, full of adolescent self-importance. “This life bores me.” What a child I was then, wishing for a war I might be a part of.

  Andromache smiled. “All the boredom vanishes with child bearing,” she said and told me of her infant son, recently born after years of prayer and yearning.

  “How do you come to be at my wedding, with Troy under siege?” I asked with the artlessness of the young.

  She looked away, and I thought she might not answer. But then she turned back while Hector chatted with some of his men at our feet. “We grow desperate,” she said. “For years, the Achaeans merely came and raided us. Now they have come to stay, and our fleet has never returned from aiding the Hittite troubles.”

  Now perhaps this mighty war would end with the death of only one man—Hector or Ajax—after a bout of single combat. Then what would happen to me now that Achilles had given me up?

  At any rate, Ajax fought Hector on the plain before Troy, and I watched, remembering Andromache. Their charioteers drove beautifully; I had met Hector’s driver and knew him to be brilliant. But what really made the duel for me was Skara.

  Skara was a Thracian with wild eyes and tattoos and a superb body, the kind of body men pant for. She was bed-warmer to Achilles’ companion Patrocles when he wanted one, and now, as the chariots raised a haze of dust out on the plain, she put a warm hand on my shoulder so that I started and my hand went to my knife, an iron knife that Achilles had given me. But I knew her and liked her, for all that she was not god-born. She grinned.

  “You are not broken, then,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I admitted. There were slaves all around us, but slaves do not pay much attention to each other.

  “Patrocles told me to tell you we'll have you back. Never fear.” She patted my back, felt the knife, and gave me another of her feral grins. “Heh!” she said, waved, and pushed into the crowd.

  I was never really a slave when I lived in Achilles’ camp among his Myrmidons. Patrocles, who was prince of Aegina as well as Achilles’ companion, was as courteous as any warrior I’d ever met; more so, in fact. He had bowed to me when he met me, and when he assigned me tasks, all of which were housekeeping tasks having to do with Achilles and the tent in which he lived, he always asked, as if I was indeed some great queen who happened to deign to wash the Aegyptian faience bottle or the fine alabaster wine amphorae.

  It was a sharp contrast to my life in Agamemnon’s quarters. But I noted that it was Patrocles now who sent me word, and Patrocles who watched over me, and I wondered, when my heart was dark, if Achilles even knew I was alive, or if he cared; if I was just a damaged golden cup or a chipped faience scent bottle. His tent was full of treasures.

  I was not always a queen inside my head.

  And I was always a slave once Agamemnon had claimed me.

  The order of days isn’t clear to me. At some point, I think after Skara came to me, the Achaeans won a great victory under the young King Diomedes of Argos in his famed lion-skin cloak. But the victory led to a feast; the feasters ate, drank, embraced, and vomited, and worse, all together, like hogs at a trough, and the sickness which had been dying down suddenly flared up again like wildfire, and men said that Paean, the god who shot arrows of contagion, was still punishing the Achaeans for their impieties.

  If I thought the Achaeans foul in the first days of my slavery, that was how they behaved in victory. But in the fourth week of my slavery, as spring hardened into summer and my hands coarsened still further from those of a god-born to those of a slave, the Achaeans began to lose their fights with the Trojans. Achilles had refused to bring his Myrmidons to battle since Agamemnon claimed me, and now the Achaeans were paying the price. Twice, their foragers were caught and beaten; several of their little heroes died. I would have cheered, but the Achaeans in defeat were horrible. Then I was struck by men I’d never met; then I was called whore and worse. I can only say that carrying a stone jar full of excrement is, in fact, a deterrent to rape.

  Many men were still recovering from their bout of sickness, still weak and slow, and more than once I simply outran some drunk, enraged monster who didn’t have the power in his limbs to catch me; I didn’t always have a chamber pot to hand. I tried to rally the other slaves, but they would not join me. I was not one of them, and they were all broken men and women, and indeed, sometime in my fourth week of slavery, the steward decided that the high king’s threats were nothing to him, and he would have me for himself.

  He was a handsome man, a captured nobleman from far-off Hattusa, or perhaps an exile. He was pretty enough on the outside, but he was a petty tyrant inside, and he longed to abuse me; I knew him from the first day, kept my eyes downcast and my feet moving.

  But he was cunning, and he cornered me in Agamemnon’s rambling “palace” of tents and sheds; in the back, where the bed-slaves had their quarters, a dozen women and four boys broken to serving the king’s needs at all hours, out under guard having exercise, which was why I was preparing to gather their stained sheets and bed pots. The steward caught me alone, tore my chiton out of its pins before I knew he was there, covered my head with it, and pushed me onto one of the slave’s beds.

  My chiton had once been white, it was so thin as to be indecent, and I could see
him, a dark shape against the light of the tent roof.

  I got the slim iron knife from behind my back while he tried to get my knees apart, and I reached out with my free hand when he pulled his kilt off, reckoning me subdued by one blow of his fist to my head. I saw stars, but the bone hilt of Achilles’ iron knife in my hand kept me steady. With my left hand, I touched his face—gently. He leaned forward, forcing my legs apart. My left hand got his ear just as the High Priestess of the Lady said it would when we learned how to kill rapists as girls. I put the knife in his temple, as the old high priestess had taught us. I think he had a moment of knowing my knife was poised for him, and I’m quite proud of that.

  He was my second kill. Of course, my first was my brother’s charioteer, Dion; but that was only to put him out of his agony. This was easier than the first except that his blood poured over me. My people have a saying, a word: blood guilt. I never really understood it until then. I should not have felt guilt, but I had him on me; it was horrible.

  Although I froze for too long after the iron knife’s point drank his life, I got in a breath and rolled from under him. I took my knife—it was precious to me; I used the sheets to wipe off the blood as best I could, and then I pinned the cleanest one from the next bed on me as a chiton.

  Women laughed, fake laughter, somewhere close; a man made a guttural sound. The slaves were returning.

  I paused and looked at the man I’d killed, and my false calm fled; I vomited over him. Take that to the underworld, dog. I think I said that aloud. And then I left. I don’t know what my plan was—to escape, to live a little while, perhaps to kill myself. Mostly, to be clean.

  Only the last came to fruition. I washed; it was my only clear thought, and I walked into the water without thinking of men on the beach or who might see me. I was sticky with the steward’s blood, and I wanted to be clean, and something in my head was wrong.

  But there was more in my head. Without thinking, I had walked along the beach toward the camp of the Myrmidons. They had the best camp site; hard by the river, with the shade of trees and the cleanest beach and fresh water from the river.

  And Achilles, of course.

  Did he even care? Was I already forgotten? Was I even thinking of him? Wasn’t that like hubris?

  I thought of using the knife on my wrists. Washing won out. I washed, and then I rose from the water to find Skara standing on the Achaean beach. Behind her was Patrocles, Achilles’ greatest friend and companion. He was tall and well made; he had the body of an athlete, and if age had just begun to touch him, it was the age of maturity, not infirmity. He had a few gray hairs and a warm dignity that I’ve never seen equaled in a man.

  He turned his back and said nothing until Skara dressed me in a clean chiton of old red wool. Her hands on my skin were warm and kind. I held her to me.

  “You are going to a small tent,” Patrocles said, as if we’d been talking for hours, “where you will live for a while. Skara will take you, and no one will trouble you. Odysseus of Ithaca has promised that.”

  I had trouble breathing.

  “I had someone watching over you,” Patrocles said kindly. “Achilles still speaks of you. I assume you killed the steward?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He smiled. And then he glanced at Skara.

  “You may indeed be the wife for Achilles,” he said. “Agamemnon has other worries just now, and King Odysseus and I are trying to bend him. Go with Skara.”

  I kissed his hands. I have never been so thankful in all my life, for anything, than I was to rise from the clean water to find Patrocles and Skara on the beach. There must have been other men and women, perhaps hundreds. But they stayed away; such was the Achaean fear of the Myrmidons, I think.

  So my life changed again. I went to a small tent made from the sail of a boat, six full cloths of linen stitched together. I know because it was old and frayed and I had to do a lot of work to make it watertight. But it was mine; there were no pots of men’s shit to carry, and Skara was my Hermes, coming to me every day with wine, food, and news. She told me of the Trojan victories with relish.

  “You hate them?” I asked her.

  She laughed. “I love Patrocles,” she said. “The rest can go choking down into the black depths.” She leaned close. “I have killed three so far.”

  “Myrmidons?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, no silly. Achaeans. When they are puking their guts out from drink or fever, I kill them.” She smiled, showing me her crooked teeth. “I owe them.”

  “But you like Patrocles,” I said.

  “Of course!” She smiled. “He keeps me warm.” She made a gesture with her fingers that was very descriptive.

  “I thought they were lovers,” I said without thinking.

  The Thracian woman laughed aloud. “Of course they were lovers,” she said. “When Achilles was a boy. Boys go with boys until they are men. Didn’t you kiss girls when you were young?” She kissed me suddenly, her tongue just touching my lips, and I was startled. Then she left me, no wiser to the love play of the Myrmidons than I had been before she came, but I ate with relish and drank the wine.

  Whatever deal that Patrocles and wily Odysseus had struck about me, I was unmolested in my little tent, even in the filthy Achaean camp. A day passed, and no man troubled me, and I had no work. I am a woman of action; I grew bored. It is not my way to skulk in a tent. It’s dull. I had a sewing kit that Skara had brought, and as I say, I patched my tent, and then I began to look about for adventure.

  I knew I could not walk about as a woman.

  So I belted my chiton low, almost to my hips, and cut my hair—not much, but just a little shorter, like a Myrmidon’s. I put oil in it so that my normally straight hair fell in ringlets, and I cut up the white linen of the slave’s bedsheet, bloodstains and all, and sewed it all the next day, making the sort of quilted skull cap that the Myrmidons wore under their helmets. Skara came back to me, looked in, and laughed.

  “Now that you are free, you work like a slave,” she said. She looked at my cap and smiled in approval.

  “Make me one?”

  “Your breasts are too big,” I said. “No one will mistake you for a man.”

  But with a little experiment, and wound in the rest of the sheet, I could make her a passable man. She wasn’t as slim as me, and she curved in all directions, but a baggy chiton made her look like a bandy-legged Achaean. Though her lips were too lush for any man.

  “It's dangerous to come here,” she admitted. “Even for me, and I don't take shit from Achaeans.” She frowned. “They're getting the crap beat out of them out beyond the palisades. It’s as if the gods have finally decided to favor the Trojans. Yesterday Aeneas of Dardania put a man down in sight of the west gate.”

  “Lady!” I said, or something less delicate. “And Hector?”

  “He is like a lion,” Skara said in satisfaction. “I would like to see him match my Patrocles, or even Achilles.” She looked at me, and her eyes had a certain look... distant but inflamed.

  “You enjoy the fighting,” I said, almost an accusation.

  “I love to watch them kill each other,” she said and licked her lips. “Blood.” Her manner of saying it chilled me.

  She was pushing hair under the cap I'd made. I used the bright iron knife to cut hers like a Myrmidon’s.

  “Maybe Patrocles will fancy me even more as a man,” Skara said. She licked her lips again.

  “Take my cap and bring me more linen and more thread,” I said. “And news.”

  She laughed. “I'll bring you linen tomorrow.”

  She slipped out into the gathering darkness.

  She was back before dawn. She frightened me, slipping into my tent and putting a hand over my mouth, and I had a hand on my knife when I felt her hip and knew her.

  She brought me linen and a good bronze sword in a tasseled sheath and a man’s kilt and linen greaves, the quilted kind, hundreds of hours of work by slave women somewhere.


  “Patrocles said to bring you the best,” she said. “Achilles has a tent full of this stuff, as you know.”

  I sat all day making a second quilted cap, running the rows of stitches around and around so that the flat circle of linen began to curve and bulge into a dome. I watched a bronze smith once working the crown of a helmet, and it was the same; expanding metal in one place, contracting it in another, except that what he did with a hammer, I did with a slim bronze needle and the tension of my thread; thread that was itself the work of slave women, and probably taken from a palace during a sack.

  Toward evening, there was a sound through the camp, like keening but louder. And at first it was out at the edge of my hearing, but it grew, and feet rushed back and forth outside my little tent. My cap was done; I had a chiton, a kilt, a man’s broad leather fighting belt. I put them on, with linen greaves wrapped on my legs, and I bound my chest flat and put the sword belt over my shoulder.

  I felt an utter imposter. I’d worn men's clothing often enough before I was married, but now it felt... absurd.

  The keening had become a cacophony of sound—shouting, screaming, the calls of men and horses. What I was hearing was the sound of battle—great battle, a battle of thousands of men. What men call the Rage of Ares.

  I had to see it.

  I went out into the dusk into a camp nearly empty of men. A handful of women were standing by a fire at the end of our street of tents and shacks; one woman wrung her hands, and other women gazed out toward the palisade and the ditch.

  I walked past them, and they all flinched away from me. They thought I was a man.

  So. I was amazed.

  I went up to the walls. It was perhaps two hundred paces from my tent to the north wall; I remember it as a very long walk because I was so afraid of discovery. But the walls were almost empty. Off to the right of me stood a huddle of men, none of whom had armor.

  Out over the plain, the sun was setting in red wrath, throwing the color of blood over everything. The battle sparkled at my feet and was much closer to the wall than I would ever have imagined, and men writhed like bronze maggots in the last rays.