The Hittite

men who scrambled aboard once the boats were afloat. I watched them unfurl their sails and head off into the sunset.

At last all was ready. We gathered around the cook fire as the sun went down and had our last meal on the beach encampment along the plain of Ilios. In the last rays of the dying sun I saw that Agamemnon’s vengeance on the city was far from complete. Troy’s walls still stood: battered and sooty from the fires that had raged in the city, but despite the Achaians’ efforts most of the walls still stood.

I brought my boys into my tent and made bedrolls out of fine Trojan blankets for them; they fell asleep almost as soon as they lay down. I stood over them while the shadows of dusk deepened. Their faces were as smooth and unlined as statues of baby godlings. All that had happened to them, all that they had suffered and lost, did not show one bit in their sleeping, trusting faces.

At last I laid out a blanket for myself next to them. It was fully dark now, and tomorrow would not be an easy day, I knew.

But before I could stretch out for sleep Magro called my name. I stepped out of the tent and he said softly, “We have a visitor.”

7

Standing in the lengthening shadows was Apet, in her black Death’s robe with its hood pulled up over her head. I sent Magro to his tent as I stepped up before her.

“You come from Helen?” I asked.

“Yes,” she whispered. And without waiting for another word she turned and ducked inside my tent.

A single candle burned beside my cot. It cast enough light to see Poletes lying there asleep, the greasy cloth across his eyes, the blood-caked slits where his ears had been, my two sleeping boys on the other side of the tent.

She gasped. “They talked about it in the camp …”

It was not Apet’s voice. I grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her toward me, then pushed down her hood. Helen’s bountiful golden hair tumbled past her shoulders.

“You!”

In the flickering light of the candle I saw that her face was battered, one cheek bruised blue-black, her eye swollen, her lower lip split and crusted with blood.

“Menalaos?” I asked needlessly.

Helen nodded numbly. “He was drunk. I did what he asked but he was so drunk he couldn’t become aroused. He called me a witch and said I’d cast a spell over him. Then he beat me. Apet tried to stop him and he knocked her unconscious. He says he’ll kill us both once we get back to Sparta.”

“How did you get away from him?”

“He drank himself into a stupor. I told the guard that I was sending my servant to find a healer. Then I left Apet in the cabin and came searching for you.”

Poletes moaned and shifted on the cot slightly.

Helen looked down at him. “Agamemnon did this?”

“With his own hand,” I answered, hot anger seething inside me. “Out of sheer spite. Drunk with power and glory, your brother-in-law celebrated his victory by mutilating an old man. And murdering my wife.”

“Your wife?”

“One of the victims of Agamemnon’s thanksgiving to the gods for his victory.”

Helen lowered her eyes. But not before I saw that there was not one tear in them.

“Your husband stood by and watched it all,” I said to her, my rage growing hotter. “His men held me at spear point while his brother did his noble deed.”

She nodded and turned away from Poletes.

“What do you want of me?” I asked her.

In a flat, almost hopeless voice, Helen replied, “You see how cruel they are. What monsters they can be.”

I said nothing, but in my mind I pictured again Aniti’s final moments: the terror she must have felt. The pain.

“He’s going to kill me, too, Lukka. He’s going to take me back to Sparta and kill me, but not until he’s had his fill of me. Then he’ll have his priests put me on the altar like a sacrificial sheep and slash my throat. Just as they did to your wife.”

Her voice was rising, her eyes were wide, but it seemed to me that she was not panicking. Fearful, certainly. But she was not frenzied; instead she was grimly seeking a way out of the fate that loomed before her.

I asked coldly, “What do you expect me to do about it?”

“You will take me away from this camp. Now, to night, while they are all sleeping. You will take me to Egypt.”

I almost laughed. “Is it the Queen of Sparta who commands me, or the princess of Troy?”

Something flickered in her eyes, but Helen maintained her composure. “It is a woman who has nothing to look forward to but pain, humiliation, and death.”

Like my wife, I thought. Like Aniti.

“Do you want me to beg you?” Helen said, a tiny hint of a quaver in her voice. “Do you want me to drop to my knees and clasp your legs and beg you to save my life?”

She was begging, I realized. In her own way, the most beautiful woman in the world was pleading with me to take her away from her rightful husband, a man who had just fought a war and conquered a powerful city to get her back. She was too proud to admit it, but she was beseeching me to help her escape her fate.

“I have five men with me, not an army. Menalaos will track us down and kill us all.”

“He won’t know I went with you,” she said, her words coming faster now that she felt some hope. “He’ll search the camp, the boats. We’ll be far from here by the time he realizes what’s happened.”

“Egypt is a thousand leagues from here.”

“But there are cities along the way. Miletus. Ephesus. Civilized kingdoms. Apet told me of Lydia, and of Phrygia, where King Midas turns anything he touches into gold!”

“Egypt,” I muttered.

“It’s the only truly civilized land in the whole world, Lukka. I will be received as the queen I am. They will treat me royally. Your men can find a place in the pharaoh’s army.”

I should have refused her. I should have flatly told her it was madness and sent her back to Menalaos. But in my mind a mad tapestry of vengeance was weaving itself. I pictured the fat, stupid, cruel face of Agamemnon when he discovered that his sister-in-law, the woman for whom he had supposedly fought this long and bloody war, had spurned his brother and run off with a stranger. Not a prince of Troy, but a lowly Hittite soldier. Not carried off unwillingly, but run away at her own insistence.

I saw Menalaos, too, he who had his men hold me at bay while his brother mutilated Poletes. He who beat this woman who stood pleadingly before me.

Let them eat the dirt of humiliation and helpless fury, I said to myself. Let the world laugh at them while Helen runs away from them once again. They deserve it. They deserve all that and more.

They would search for us, I knew. They would try to find us. And if they did they would kill me and my sons. And Helen, also, sooner or later.

My sons. It was my duty to protect them. I had come all this way to find them, to save them from slavery. What Helen asked would put them in danger, put all of us in danger.

And there was Helen herself. She was a queen, a woman of the nobility, while I was a common soldier. But she was willing to put herself in my charge, place her life in my hands. Her body, as well?

I shook my head to drive away such thoughts. Madness. I’m just a servant, as far as she’s concerned: a professional soldier who can help her to get away. Nothing more. I looked again at Helen’s face, so beautiful even though battered, her eyes filled with hope and expectation, innocent yet knowing. She was maneuvering me, I