“Not even prostitutes?”
“Ah! Yes, of course. But that’s a different matter. And in the cities there are temple prostitutes, protected by Aphrodite. But they are not
“Then the women here in camp …”
“Slaves. Captives. Daughters and wives of slain enemies, captured in the sack of towns and farms.”
My wife was a slave of the High King’s. How can I get her away from him? I asked myself. Are my sons alive? Where are they?
We came to a group of men sitting around one of the larger cook fires, down close beside the black-tarred boats. They looked up and made room for us. Up on the boat nearest us a large canvas of blue and white stripes had been draped to form a tent. A helmeted guard stood on the deck before it, with a well-groomed dog by his side. I stared at the carved and painted figurehead on the boat’s prow, a grinning dolphin’s face against a deep blue background.
“The camp of Odysseos,” Poletes explained to me in a low voice as we sat and were offered generous bowls of roasted meat and goblets of honeyed wine. “These are Ithacans.”
He poured a few drops of wine on the ground before drinking, and made me do the same. “Reverence the gods, Hittite,” Poletes instructed me, surprised that neither I nor my men knew the custom.
The men around the fire praised me for my daring at the barricade, then fell to wondering which particular god had inspired me to such heroic action. The favorites were Poseidon and Ares, although Athene was a close runner-up and even Zeus himself was mentioned now and then. They soon fell to arguing passionately among themselves without bothering to ask me or my men about it.
I was happy to let them quarrel. I listened, and as they argued I learned much about this war.
They had been campaigning in the region each summer for many years. Achilles, Menalaos, Agamemnon and the other warrior kings had been ravaging the coastal lands, burning towns and taking captives, until finally they had worked up the courage—and the forces—to besiege Troy itself.
But without Achilles, their fiercest fighter, the men thought their prospects were dim. Apparently Agamemnon had awarded Achilles a young woman captive and then had changed his mind and taken her for himself. This insult was more than the haughty young Achilles could endure, even from the High King.
“The joke of it all,” said one of the men, tossing a well-gnawed lamb joint to the dogs hovering beyond our circle, “is that Achilles prefers his friend Patrokles to any woman.”
They all nodded and muttered agreement. The strain between Achilles and Agamemnon was not over a sexual partner; it was a matter of honor and stubborn pride. On both sides, as far as I could see.
As we ate and talked the skies darkened and thunder rumbled from inland.
“Father Zeus speaks from Mount Ida,” said Poletes.
One of the foot soldiers, his leather jacket stained with spatters of grease and blood, grinned up at the cloudy sky. “Maybe Zeus will give us the afternoon off.”
“Can’t fight in the rain,” one of the others agreed.
Sure enough, within minutes it began pelting down. We scattered for what ever shelter we could find. Poletes and I hunkered down in the lee of Odysseos’ boat. Through the driving rain I saw my men scurrying for the shelter of the tents scattered around Odysseos’ boats.
“Now the great lords will arrange a truce, so that the women and slaves can go out and recover the bodies of our dead. To night their bodies will be burned and a barrow raised over their charred bones.” He sighed. “That’s how the rampart began, as a barrow to cover the remains of the slain heroes.”
I sat and watched the rain pouring down, turning the beach into a quagmire, dotting the frothing sea with splashes. The gusting wind drove gray sheets of rain across the bay, and it got so dark and misty that I could not see the headland. It was chill and miserable and there was nothing to do except sit like dumb animals and wait for the sun to return.
I crouched as close as I could to the boat’s hull, smelling the sharp tang of the pitch they had smeared over the planks to keep the vessel watertight. My wife is among the slaves in Agamemnon’s camp, I knew. Are my sons with her? Are they still living?
Suddenly I realized that a man was standing in front of me. I looked up and saw a sturdy, thick-torsoed man with a grizzled dark beard and a surly look on his face. He wore a wolf’s pelt draped over his head and shoulders, dripping with the pounding rain. Knee-length tunic, a short sword buckled at his hip. Shins and calves muddied. Ham-sized fists planted on his hips.
“You’re the Hittite?” he shouted over the driving rain.
I got to my feet and saw that I stood several fingers taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.
“I am Lukka,” I replied. “My men are—”
“Come with me,” he snapped, and started to turn away.
“To where?”
Over his shoulder he answered, “My lord Odysseos wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!”
Poletes scrambled up and pranced happily in the mud beside me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, to a rope ladder that led up to the deck.
“I knew Odysseos was the only one here wise enough to make use of you,” he cackled. “I knew it!”
14
It was slippery going, clambering up the rope ladder in the wind-whipped rain. I feared that Poletes would fall. But, following Odysseos’ man, we made it to the boat’s deck and ducked under the striped canvas. The Ithacan opened a wooden chest and tossed a pair of large rags at us.
“Dry yourselves,” he said curtly. We did, gladly, as he shucked the dripping wolf’s pelt he’d been wearing and slung it to the deck with a wet slapping sound.
I threw my towel next to his sodden pelt. Poletes did the same. For long moments we stood there while the Ithacan looked us up and down.
“Presentable enough,” he muttered, more to himself than to us. Then he said, “Follow me.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance as we walked behind him around a wooden cabin. And there sat Odysseos, King of Ithaca.
He was sitting behind a bare trestle table, flanked on either side by two standing noblemen in fine woolen cloaks. He did not appear to be a very tall man; what I could see of legs seemed stumpy, though heavily muscled. His chest was broad and deep. Later I learned that he swam in the sea almost every morning. His thick strong arms were circled with leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli even in the gloom inside his shipboard tent. Puckered white scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest.There was a fresh gash on his right forearm, as well, red and still oozing blood slightly.
The rain drummed against the canvas, which bellied and flapped in the wind scant finger widths above my head. The tent smelled of dogs, musty and damp. And cold. I felt chilled and Poletes, with nothing but his ragged loincloth, hugged his shivering body with his bare arms.
Odysseos wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had thrown a lamb’s fleece across his wide shoulders. His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair that showed a trace of gray. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as gray as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.
“You are a Hittite?” were his first words to me.
“I am, my lord.”
“Why have Hittites come to Troy?”
I hesitated, trying to decide how much of the truth I should speak to him. Swiftly I realized that it had to be either everything or nothing.
“I seek my wife and two young sons who have been taken captive, my lord.”
