The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

Astynome joined him, resting her head against his shoulder. Together they watched the teams of men working at every point of the walls, dismantling the battlements stone by stone and sending the huge blocks tumbling to the ground below. Progress was slow, but already the great defences had lost their sense of order and uniformity, taking on a frayed look as if the seas had risen up and smoothed away their edges. The perfection that the gods had made was being destroyed by men in an act of sacrilegious vandalism. From the streets behind the walls came the hiss of fire and the occasional crash of yet another building succumbing to the flames. These sounds were dominated, though, by the incessant beating of hammer and pick, as those structures that the fires were not bringing down were made unusable by the hands of the Greek army, its tight discipline restored now after its fanatical rampage of the night before. Other soldiers were still busy carrying out the plunder from the city and placing it in carefully arranged heaps outside the walls, marching back and forth in lines like ants.

‘So ends Troy,’ Astynome sighed.

‘As long as the stones remain, the city can be rebuilt,’ Eperitus replied.

‘But who will build it? With every male dead, who will come back and restore Troy to anything like her former glory? And look! There’s another. They’ve been doing it all morning!’

She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face against his armoured chest. Eperitus looked and saw two men on top of one of the towers, holding a small boy between them. The boy struggled when he understood why they had taken him up to the battlements, then the men pitched him over the broken parapet and his body was dashed to death on the stones below. Only then did Eperitus see the other boys, scores of them, lying all along the circuit of the walls in the strange, confused poses of bodies from which the energy of life had departed.

‘Savages,’ he whispered, vehemently. ‘This is Agamemnon’s work!’

‘I suppose this is the price we Trojans have to pay for our defiance,’ Astynome said. ‘Perhaps if we hadn’t fought so hard we would have been shown more mercy. Perhaps not, I don’t know. Maybe all great civilisations have to end like this, otherwise we might rise up to challenge the gods themselves.’

Eperitus put his arm around her and pulled her closer, cursing the armour that stopped him feeling the warmth of her body against his.

‘Do you wish things had turned out differently?’

‘This destruction saddens me, and I’m sad I will never see my father again or return to Chryse. But also I’m happy. This is the past – that burning, crumbling city over there is the past – but you are the future. I have you and we have life, and we will bring more life into this world. The war’s over and we’re together. That’s something to be hopeful about, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ he answered, before kissing her on the cheek and standing upright. ‘And now I had better find Odysseus again. He gave me permission to see that you were alright, but he also wanted me to find him at the Council of Kings once I’d spoken with you. Do I have your permission to leave?’

Astynome smiled and nodded. Eperitus left the way he had come, stealing a last glance at her as he negotiated the precarious gangplank to the sand below.

Chapter Forty-six

THE LAST KING OF TROY

The Council of Kings were seated in a wide double-circle before the Scaean Gate, partly beneath the shade of the sacred oak tree where Achilles had killed Hector. A handful of Agamemnon’s bodyguard kept watch over the commanders of the army, though there were no enemies left alive in Ilium to do them harm. The only remaining Trojans now were women, and as Eperitus approached the assembly he noticed several standing beneath a canopy a few paces away from the Council, their hands bound with rope. Hecabe, Cassandra and Andromache – Hector’s wife – were among them, looking grief-stricken and dishevelled, and Eperitus realised these were the remainder of Troy’s royal household. To his surprise he saw Helen there, too, though unlike the others her clothes were fresh and her face and hair clean. Her chin was held defiantly high, but her eyes were fixed on the broken stones at the foot of the city walls where the Greeks were still busily hurling down the parapets that had withstood them for so long. Eperitus followed her gaze and saw the body of a small child among the rubble by the gates, where he had been thrown to his death. Eperitus turned his eyes away and headed towards the noisy ring of men.