A Song of War: a novel of Troy Read online

  “They do not compliment you when they call you an Amazon,” Helen observed.

  A grin from Penthesilea, crinkling her almond eyes. “Then they will be even more shamed when I beat them. Though I may not beat your prince,” she added judiciously, looking at me. “He is very good.”

  I stifled a smile. Helen looked speculative. “Perhaps I might accompany you. It has been a long time since I entered a training ground to participate and not merely watch. My husband would not be pleased if I joined the men, but perhaps we might try spears at a private target...”

  Penthesilea laughed carelessly. “You’ll roughen your hands, my queen.” She bowed and was gone in a jingle of silver disks. Her elder sister trailed after her, looking exasperated, and I looked up to see a flare in the Spartan queen’s gray eyes.

  “Helen?” I said, using her name for the first time.

  Her gaze slid down to me, blank as a wall. Why did I think that flash had been fury? She clearly felt nothing at all beyond her remote amusement, her distant cynicism. If that was the price of goddess-like beauty, I was glad I had none.

  “Tell me more of Paris,” she said, returning to her loom. I shrugged and told her of his first audience with Priam when he’d been accepted back as a prince of Troy, feeling no danger from her curiosity about my handsomest brother-in-law. Paris liked hot-blooded women, not marble statues.

  “Are you so certain?” Hellenus asked me late the following evening as we lingered in the courtyard under a half-moon, waiting outside the megaron for Hector to finish listening out young Diomedes of Argos in some bit of bombast about someday bagging a lion for a cloak. “I saw how Paris looked at our Spartan queen after the archery was done. He wants her.”

  “He wants everything in skirts,” I said tartly.

  “True enough.” My brother-in-law leaned against the broad pillar, tracing the bright plaster with one finger. Painted horses pranced in a frozen parade—even in paint, the horses were small and scrubby, not like our proud Trojan stock. Hellenus must have been thinking of the horses, too, because he said, “Hector offered to train one of King Menelaus’ colts tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps working with the horses will lighten his mood. The stables always cheer him.” I peered at Hellenus through the dark, worry rushing back to the pit of my stomach. “He’s been brooding since we left Troy.”

  “All the sons of Priam are victim to such moods, Andromache. The bane of our house.”

  “What do I do?” I heard myself ask because I felt sometimes like Persephone married to Hades: a goddess of spring finding herself linked to a somber lord of shadows. I said some of this to Hellenus, twisting the fringe of my layered kilts between my fingers, and he listened with quiet attention. “A girl who only knows how to pluck flowers and laugh isn’t a match for a dark-mooded lord,” I said, trying to make light of it.

  “Perhaps Hades wanted Persephone because she was a creature of flowers and laughter.”

  “Perhaps he should have chosen a mate who could face the dark as well as he and left Persephone to her flowers and her silly jokes so she could be claimed by an ordinary man.” I looked up at my brother-in-law, suddenly curious. “Who jokes you out of dark moods when they descend?” I didn’t think his poor, troubled twin sister could be much use there.

  The brief gleam of his teeth as he smiled. “Ah, but my moods don’t pass! So I don’t need to do a thing.”

  I bit my lip. “Hellenus—”

  “No pity, Andromache. Please.”

  What to say? I didn’t know, only that I had no skill to cheer my husband or his brother. A queen like my mother-in-law, like Helen, would know what words put fire into a man’s heart in dark moments. All I could do was muster a scolding tone and take Hellenus to task. “Your plait is coming loose.”

  “Fix it for me?”

  He turned, and I neatly retied the leather lace that fastened the end of his tight warrior’s braid. I smelled cinnamon again, the oil with which he plaited his hair. “I always liked that scent of yours. Paris prefers oil of lotus.”

  “Paris smells like an Anatolian whorehouse.”

  I laughed. “Why cinnamon for you?”

  “The slaves say my mother always wore it—something she brought from her homeland. It’s the only thing I know about her.”

  “She would have been proud to see the man you grew to be.”

  “Would she? I’m no great warrior or seer or diplomat, after all. Quite ordinary.”

  He turned back as I finished with his plait, and I linked my hand through his arm. We stood silently, waiting for Hector, and I thought of all those swaggering would-be heroes who filled the megaron every night with their tall tales and their boasts. My quiet brother-in-law in all his ordinariness was worth more than all of them put together.

  HELLENUS

  A storm of hooves and sand. A colt’s black mane tossing. Hector standing perfectly still, holding out a hand.

  It was something rare, watching my brother with an unbroken colt. He used no whip, just a little grain, a few soft words, and an ocean of patience. Even the raucous sea-kings had quieted, watching from the edge of the training yard.

  Andromache had a seat on the dais beside Helen, as usual—and between them sat Paris, which worried me. He’d bounded up ostensibly to offer his sister-in-law a dish of grapes, but then he’d lingered, lounging as he told the Spartan queen some low-voiced story. I saw her listen; I saw her look. Harmless, I told myself. Andromache was not worried, after all, and King Menelaus frowned now and then but did not appear more than usually watchful over his wife's actions.

  I would be happy when this wedding was over. The ceremony would take place tomorrow; a day or two later we could surely take our leave.

  The colt danced skittishly away from Hector. He advanced a step, murmuring, intent.

  I glanced at the dais again and saw Helen descending, making her way through the throng. The warriors looked at her sideways, muttering as she passed, taller than any of them and self-possessed as a goddess. To my surprise, she made her way to my side where I leaned against the pillar.

  “Prince Hellenus,” she said in that level voice that never seemed to rise and fall in mortal cadences. “I have spoken to all my husband’s guests these past weeks except you. If we do not trade some friendly words, I shall think you are avoiding me.”

  “On the contrary, my queen.” I made a small bow. “I did not think myself worthy of your company.”

  She gave me her faint smile. Her eyes were lined in black, making them enormous, and her rose-oiled pale gold hair spiraled to brush the backs of her green-skirted knees. She could dizzy a man’s senses, but she had no effect on me whatsoever.

  Her smile grew a touch more amused, as though she had read my mind. “How interesting you Trojan princes are.”

  “I thought you only interested in one of us, Lady,” I dared to say.

  “Paris? On the contrary, he’s the dullest of you. If the prettiest.”

  I wished Paris could hear her calm dismissal. He’d be crushed. “I thought he had found favor in your eyes, my queen.”

  “He wants my favor, certainly. But all men do.” It was said not as boast but blunt fact. “All men, that is, except you and Prince Hector. It is so rare that I look into a man’s eyes and see complete indifference. No wonder I find you both interesting.”

  I did not know how to answer her directness. “Of course I find you very lovely, Queen Helen—”

  “Don’t bore me. I hear so much flattery.”

  “As you wish.” I decided to match her bluntness. “May I say I am relieved to hear your opinion of my younger brother is not so warm as I had thought?”

  “Your older brother is the one I could have viewed very warmly indeed.” She nodded down at Hector, who had lured the colt into nibbling warily from his palm. “Heir to Troy, a great warrior, perhaps the only man in this pack of pirates who could call himself a hero. But he has eyes for no one but that cheerful little wife of his. I confess I don’t
see the appeal; she’s a coltish, freckled thing with nothing queenly at all about her, but only the men pricked very deeply by Eros’ arrows remain as unaffected by me as Prince Hector is.”

  With a flash of anger, I glanced at Andromache, leaning on her folded arms and smiling down at the training ground. “You will not speak ill of my sister-in-law, Lady.”

  “No indeed.” Helen looked amused. “Freckled little thing or not, Aphrodite has blessed her. The day Andromache came to Troy, I think two arrows sped from Eros’ bow. One landed there”—another nod to Hector—“and one landed here.”

  She tapped me over the heart and then glided away, leaving me dry-mouthed and furious. You bitch, I thought, you swan-necked, spiteful bitch.

  Sharp-eyed bitch. She saw what no one saw, even my own family.

  I looked up at Andromache again, pushing a lock of hair back behind her ear as she gazed, entranced, down at Hector, and felt the familiar desperate pang. What a thing it is to love your brother and desire his wife.

  It was not supposed to be this way, I thought bleakly for perhaps the thousandth time. Andromache had never been intended for Hector at all. When Priam decided his heir needed a wife, a dozen nobly born girls of Troy and various neighboring kingdoms had been invited to our lavish summer festival to be quietly appraised. Everyone wagered on Chryseis, daughter of the high priest of Apollo: a lush-hipped beauty as regal as Hera, royalty on her mother’s side, pedigree perfect in every way. And as Troy’s eyes fastened on Chryseis, mine drifted to the minor daughter of a minor neighboring king, a girl with sparkling eyes and an unabashed laugh like a sunlit stream. Not even a contender in the running to be Hector’s wife, no beauty or riches to her name—except that she lifted my heart every time I saw her and never once gaped at my dark face.

  I will offer for her, I’d thought in a rush of painful hope. When Hector announces his choice of wife, I will ask for the princess Andromache. No one would object; Priam had no interest in me or my marriage and wouldn’t think of forbidding me, nor would Andromache’s father object. For a princess from a kingdom so small they kept goats in the megaron, a prince of Troy was a catch, even if he was born of a concubine. So while all eyes had watched Hector and Chryseis, I befriended Andromache, heart in my throat, dreaming of the gold strands I’d wind about her throat on our wedding day, dreaming of the small palace we could inhabit together, the life we could carve in Troy, which had never felt like home to me. Such a small dream, really: an ordinary man who had never felt like a prince, living an ordinary life with the smiling girl who said she never felt like a princess.

  And then Hector had looked past regal Chryseis and her prince-bearing hips and chose Andromache.

  A ripple of applause spread over the watching crowd. The skittish colt stood calm at my brother’s side as he slipped a rope over its willing head. Andromache blew him a kiss from the dais, and again—as it did every day I watched them—my heart broke.

  The wedding. At last, this gods-damned wedding.

  For me it passed in a haze. The bride was escorted from the women’s quarters, rosy and blushing, a wreath of wildflowers crowning the fine veil that had been one of Troy’s gifts, escorted by that bitch Helen in purple on one side and Andromache on her left—and when I saw Andromache in her layered skirts, small breasts bared in a tight lapis-colored bodice, I reached for the nearest jug of wine. I didn’t often seek Dionysus’ oblivion, but today it had its appeal.

  The rites invoking Aphrodite and Hera, Artemis and Potnia. The sacrifice, a brushed and beribboned horse going to its knees under the priest’s knife. Bride and bridegroom joining hands under a shower of ribald jokes. The wedding feast as the sun sank, many of the warriors already drunk as they fell on the dishes of roast venison and boar, the fruits and cheeses and honeyed cakes. The king of Ithaca and his new queen sat in splendor on the dais, sharing a long-stemmed wine cup. Hector, Menelaus, and Agamemnon conferred over a krater of wine, Paris made eyes at Helen and she ignored him, the Cimmerian princess Penthesilea was laughing with Andromache, who had tipped her head back to drop grapes one by one between her own lips. Her hair was the color of glistening sand on a dawn beach.

  I drank.

  Music, lutes and pipes and lyres. The women took to the floor to dance. Queen Helen remained on her dais, but the bride joined hands with Andromache and the Cimmerian girls and all the Spartan loom-maidens, their skirts opening like a circle of bright flowers. The watching warriors whooped and clapped, and I was glad of their crude company. I had all the excuse in the world to stare at the women, no one knowing I looked only at one.

  “You look far too haunted for a wedding celebration, my friend!” A cheerful voice sounded behind me, and I turned to see the bridegroom in his gold-embroidered finery. I’d not exchanged many words with Odysseus these past weeks: a stocky man a year or two older than I, black-haired, with a smile of cheerful wickedness. “More wine?”

  I took the cup he offered and drank deep. “Congratulations upon your bride.”

  “Thank you.” He turned to look at the radiant young Penelope, dipping and twirling among the women. “All the kings in this hall vied once for the shiniest bauble in the box”—a nod up to Queen Helen—“but I believe I’ve made off tonight with the one whose gleam runs deep and true.”

  I grunted agreement, watching a shining jewel of my own as she laughed and spun. “I wish you happiness and many sons when you bring your wife back to Ithaca.”

  “I would be honored to have you as a guest in my home someday, friend. Do your travels ever take you to my seas?”

  To little islands with nothing but stingrays and sand dunes? I thought ungraciously, but I stamped on my sourness. “I have never traveled so far west as Ithaca, no. Is it beautiful?”

  Odysseus’ smile widened. “Ithaca may not have Troy’s wealth, but my island is rich with charms of its own. Do you know the light is different there? As if Apollo smiles on my hills with special affection. The wine-dark sea comes directly to the land, as if it cannot bear to be separated from it by sand. My people might be called rustic, but you would always know us as peaceful friends, ready to share a meal of fresh cheese on our sunlit hills. A simple life, but rich.”

  What would it be like to love a place so much? I wondered, half-mesmerized by his voice, still watching Andromache’s whirling skirts. When I thought of splendid tall-towered Troy, all I felt was dull resignation.

  Odysseus turned to look at me. “My island is good for a poet’s soul, as I imagine yours might be. You are welcome as my guest any time you wish a rest from your glittering court.”

  No one in this hall had been half so ingratiating to me since I arrived. I slanted a brow at Odysseus. “Why are you wooing me, lord king? If you have some petition for my father, put it to my brothers. Paris is my father’s favorite and Hector his heir—I assure you, few in Troy hear my voice.”

  Odysseus laughed. “Was I wooing, sir? I was merely extending hospitality. But now you must take me up on my invitation, if only so that one day I may visit you in turn and learn the charms of your city.”

  I swirled my wine in my cup. “I doubt your island would welcome me as a guest. Herders and fishermen tend to look on those like me and my twin sister as foreign oddities.” And even if oddities were admired, as my sister’s beauty was always admired, they were not often trusted by insular peasant folk.

  “On the contrary, we have many traders from Nubia and Aegyptos, who come for our dried fish and goat cheese. The kings of these southern lands, they tell me, consider our goods a delicacy. The sight of both you and your sister would raise little comment in my kingdom.”

  “I doubt that. She has a troubled soul, thinks she dreams of the future. She tends to cause worried mutters wherever she goes.”

  “I would still welcome you both. Consider it, my friend—I have a feeling our paths will cross again.” Odysseus clapped me on the back and moved off to greet my cousin Aeneas, with whom he seemed to have struck up an unlikely friendship. The ki
ng of Ithaca could make even dour Aeneas smile.

  Ithaca.

  A poor place, no doubt, for all the honeyed praise I’d just heard. And yet I found myself musing about a sunlit island where breezes came gently off the sea rather than blowing fierce and northerly like Troy’s winds. Since the day I had lost Andromache to my brother, I had begun to dream of leaving Troy… But to go where? I’d known I would need a king willing to welcome a Trojan castoff, a hand outstretched to offer me sanctuary. Was Odysseus the man I was looking for?

  Foolish dreams, I scoffed at myself, but in my wine haze I was suddenly imagining a modest house on a grassy hill overlooking the ocean, a table where dried fish and goat cheese could be eaten in peace, a place where my poor twin could find the silence to heal her wounded soul. And why should I not dream of it? Was I truly going to spend the rest of my days in Troy serving a father who barely acknowledged my existence and my nights burning for a woman I could not have?

  No. I watched Andromache at Hector’s side on the dais and thought again, No. I would return to Troy to collect my twin, and then we would stake our futures elsewhere.

  Night wore on, noisier and more raucous. The enormous ox-like Ajax had passed out at the foot of the dais. Old Nestor was droning about how wine had been much better brewed in his day. Bride and groom were escorted to their borrowed bridal chamber in a shower of rose petals and obscene jokes. The women retired to their own quarters, and the warriors trooped back to the megaron to fall on the wine and the slave girls. Leonine Diomedes was rutting a girl in a corner, and bearded Philoctetes was kissing his handsome young spearman. A pair of Agamemnon’s fighters brawled drunkenly near the fire. Hector would retire soon, I knew; he had no great taste for wild revelry. Paris had already disappeared, doubtless with a dancing girl or two.