Fall of Kings (39 page)

Helikaon heard him and told him, “We are waiting for the Scythe.” To Oniacus
he added, “Today the north wind is our friend. Perhaps Menados thinks it is his,
but he would be wrong.”

The stiff northerly that whistled through the city of Troy most days of the
year was as predictable as sunrise. A light wind in the morning would build up
as the sun reached its height. After noon the Scythe could cut through to the
bone; then it would die away again as night fell.

Helikaon looked up at the city of Troy standing high above him off the
starboard beam. The golden walls shone serenely in the sunlight, and from the
bay it was impossible to tell that a war was going on beneath them. He could see
movement in the lower town, dust rising, and he could hear distant shouts, but
they sounded like the placid mewing of seabirds from that distance. The only
indication of the war was the smoke from two funeral pyres, one to the west of
the city and one to the south, on the plain of the Scamander.

He turned his gaze back to the enemy fleet and at last felt the wind cutting
hard against his face. Helikaon raised his sword, the steersmen ran to their
stations, and he shouted, “Oars at four!”

The rowers pulled into their oars with a will, and the
Xanthos
leaped
forward, the Trojan ships keeping pace. Out in the mouth of the bay the Mykene
ships saw the challenge and attacked.

Once the enemy oarsmen had built up momentum and the two fleets were racing
toward each other, Helikaon raised both arms in the air and brought them down
sharply. “Reverse oars,” he cried. The powerful rowers leaned on their oars to
back water. The Trojan fleet slowed sharply, as if their commander were afraid
of contact. Seeing that, the Mykene ships powered on, tempted farther into the
bay. For a while they maintained a perfect attack formation.

Then, as Helikaon watched with narrowed eyes, the ships at each end of the
front line hit shallow water and lost their rhythm, veering into the vessels
beside them, their tired rowers fouling their oars. Ignorant of this, the front
line kept pressing forward into the narrowing channel. Helikaon gave the order
to attack again, and once more the Trojan fleet sped forward. At last the
officers on the
Alektruon
realized that the ships at each end of their
line were floundering helplessly, oars locked, in shallow water. The order was
given to slow down, but by then the second and third lines of ships, rowing hard
to get in on the action and pushed by the Scythe, were unable to stop. The
fast-moving galleys started ramming the back of their own attack line.

Helikaon saw a ship in the second line collide with the stern of the
Alektruon,
making her start to turn. The
Xanthos
had the Mykene
flagship’s beam in her sights. “Ramming speed!” he shouted.

The
Alektruon
still was moving forward, her prow drifting helplessly
to starboard, and the
Xanthos
was at full speed when the Golden Ship hit
her. Only heartbeats before the impact Helikaon yelled, “Reverse oars!” Again
the disciplined rowers started to back water.

The two ships came together with a sound like a thunderbolt from Zeus. The
Xanthos
hit her target just behind the prow, shuddered from stem to stern,
then pulled away. On both ships warriors were waiting on the foredeck with ropes
and grappling hooks, swords and shields, at the ready. But many were thrown from
their feet by the impact, and as the
Xanthos
backed away, there was clear
water between the ships before men from either side could jump across. Helikaon
felt a cold thrill of triumph. He knew the
Alektruon
was doomed. At the
moment of collision he had felt the fatal give in the other ship as planks below
the waterline caved in.

Panic erupted aboard the Mykene vessels. Their once-proud flagship started
listing to port, and ships on both sides of the fleet were foundering in shallow
water and thick mud. There were angry shouts and curses as panicking crews
blamed one another for their plight. Then, as Helikaon had predicted they would,
they let fly with the fire hurlers.

He ordered his fleet to back off as fast as possible. Some of the flying clay
balls flopped into the water near the Trojan ships, but none of the enemy’s fire
hurlers had the height and range of those on the
Xanthos.
Helikaon
instructed the crewmen who manned his fire hurlers to stand ready.

But they were not needed.

As the Trojan and Dardanian crews watched, two of the
nephthar
balls
loosed by Mykene galleys hit other vessels of their fleet. Helikaon quickly
ordered his archers to aim their fire arrows at the two ships that had been hit.
Both targets went up in a
whoosh
of flame. The ships’ hulls had been
caulked with pitch, and the fires spread across the fleet with sickening speed.
Crewmen dived and jumped into the waters of the bay, some to founder waist-deep
in sticky mud.

Before long the whole Mykene fleet was in flames as the fire reached
nephthar
balls on other ships and the braziers on listing craft turned over.
Crewmen stuck in the center of the melee of flaming ships died screaming. More
died as they swam into range of the Trojans’ arrows. Others swam and waded to
the shore of the Cape of Tides, where they were killed by the Trojan soldiers
holding the headland. A few made it to the eastern beach of the bay, to their
own armies.

From the distance came the faint sound of cheering, and Helikaon looked to
the walls of Troy, where crowds had gathered to watch the destruction of the
enemy fleet. He ordered two of his ships to pick up survivors for questioning,
then strode back down the
Xanthos
to the aft deck.

Oniacus shook his head in awe, his face pale. “They have lost more than fifty
ships and hundreds of men, and we have just three crewmen with arrow wounds,” he
said, scarcely believing what had happened.

He gazed at Helikaon. “Many Mykene ships are crewed by slaves chained to
their oars. What a hideous death.”

Helikaon knew he was remembering the events at Blue Owl Bay, when Oniacus had
argued against such a death for the Mykene pirates.

“I would not have wished this death on slaves,” he responded. “War makes
brutes of us all. This is no victory to be proud of. These Mykene and their
slaves were condemned to death by ignorance, arrogance, and impatience.”

“
Alektruon
is a cursed name,” Oniacus said.

Helikaon nodded. “That is true. Agamemnon is unlikely to anger Poseidon by
building another one. We have only one problem now.”

“Yes, lord?”

“We must get out of the bay before Agamemnon has time to dispatch another
fleet from Imbros or the Bay of Herakles. And our way is blocked.” Helikaon
cursed. “Those ships could go on burning until nightfall.”

“Although
nephthar
burns fiercely, it burns quickly, we’ve found,”
Akamas, captain of the
Shield of Ilos,
called up to them. “Then you will
find, Golden One, that the
Shield
and her sister ships can go where the
great
Xanthos
cannot.”

As he waited for the fires to die down, Helikaon interrogated some of the
Mykene his crews had fished from the bay. Most were simple crewmen who knew
nothing. They were killed and thrown back into the water. One officer was
rescued, but he died of his burns before he told them anything of importance.

The sun was sinking in the west by the time the
Artemisia
set out for
the last time toward the Mykene fleet. Using oars as boat poles, the crew of the
ship created a narrow channel through the smoldering mass of blackened timbers,
finding and clearing underwater hazards and fishing out large pieces of debris.
One by one she was followed by the other ships, from smaller to larger, each
widening the escape route to the mouth of the bay.

Finally two of them returned: the
Naiad
and the
Dolphin.
The
crew of the
Xanthos
threw down ropes, and the two Trojan ships towed the
huge bireme slowly through the channel the other vessels had made. The
Xanthos
crewmen, oars shipped, watched in silence as they passed the hulls
of ghostly galleys bearing hundreds of charred corpses.

Some of the burned and blackened crewmen still stood, fixed in the moment of
death. Most had died chained to the rowing benches, their bodies writhing in the
heat of the inferno. Many of the
Xanthos
crewmen turned away, appalled by
the horror of the scene. The timbers of the Mykene ships still were smoldering
in places, and the stench was sickening.

It was a long time before the fleeing ships reached open water and fresher
air. Then, as the sun touched the horizon, the
Xanthos
and her small
fleet sped into the Hellespont and out into the safety of the Great Green.

Andromache stood, as she had stood for most of the day, on the western wall
of Troy, watching the events in the bay below. She had not joined in the cheers
around her as the Mykene fleet burned. She had stood stiff and silent, afraid
that if she opened her mouth, she would break down in tears. In her heart she
was saying a final farewell to the man she loved above all others.

As the day cooled, the crowds around her went back to their homes or
barracks, but she stayed on until only she and her bodyguard of four remained.

Her night journey into the city had proved uneventful. The donkey train had
made its way across the plain of the Simoeis and then under the northern edge of
the plateau on which Troy stood. As they neared the city, Andromache could make
out lights high above. They were the windows of the queen’s apartments, which
faced north above the high cliff. There were unlikely to be enemy soldiers
stationed beneath the sheer rock face. But as they reached the foot of the
northeast bastion, scouts were sent ahead to see if the way to the Dardanian
Gate was clear. They waited in darkness, knowing that they had only a few paces
to go but that those paces were the most perilous. If Agamemnon’s troops had
reached the Dardanian Gate, they were lost. It seemed an age before the scouts
returned to say the road to the gate was still open. The donkey train slipped
inside the city to safety.

Andromache’s reunion with Astyanax was joyous. As she embraced the boy, warm
and sleepy and bewildered from being woken in the middle of the night, she saw
another child, fair-haired and white-faced, standing in the corner of the room,
clad in a nightshirt.

Still holding her son to her, she knelt down and smiled. “Dex?” she asked
gently, and the little boy nodded dumbly. She saw that his face was tear-stained
as if he had cried himself to sleep.

She put her arm around him and hugged him to her. “I am Andromache,” she
whispered, “and I will look after you if you wish. Would you like to stay here
with Astyanax and me?”

She sat back and looked into his dark eyes. He said something, but it was so
quiet that she could not hear it. She put her ear close to his lips and said,
“Say that again, Dex.”

The little boy whispered, “Where is Sun Woman? I can’t find her.”

Now, standing on the western wall, she watched as the pall of smoke hanging
over the fleet of dead ships was blown away by the north wind. She realized that
the fog that had clouded her thoughts for the past days, a fog born of
conflicting emotions, fear, and exhaustion, had dispersed. She was glad to be
back in Troy, where she belonged, with her son beside her and his little orphan
cousin. She was no one’s lover, no one’s daughter, no one’s wife. If they were
all to die, as she feared they would, they would be together. She would protect
the children to the last and would die with them.

She waited until the
Xanthos
reached the mouth of the bay, raised her
arm in an unseen farewell, and, her heart at peace for the first time in days,
made her way back to the palace, to her home.

On the west wall Khalkeus also stood watching, but as the Mykene ships
started to burn, he turned and walked away, head bowed. He knew the Golden One
would escape the inferno and make his way out to sea in the
Xanthos.
Khalkeus had no wish to see any more.

Truly it was called the Death Ship, he thought, the name given to it by the
Kypriot carpenters who had built it but refused to sail on it, fearing it was a
challenge to Poseidon, who would sink it for its arrogance.

But Khalkeus had designed the
Xanthos
to be a trading vessel, to hold
more cargo and to be faster than its competitors, and, crucially, to be strong
enough to brave the heavy seas of spring and autumn and prolong its sailing
season well past the days when other ships returned to their safe harbors. And
it had exceeded his wildest expectations, sailing the treacherous waters of
winter all the way to the far west and back in the search for tin. Khalkeus had
looked forward to its return so that he could discuss the ship’s travels with
the Golden One, hear him praise Khalkeus’ skills as a shipwright, and talk about
modifications he could make to the vessel.

Instead, as on that cursed day at the Bay of Blue Owls, he had watched men
burn when the Death Ship sailed.

The Mykene were a callous and ruthless race, he told himself. They brought
destruction down upon themselves. But the fire hurlers were
his
invention; he had built them for Helikaon to fight off pirates and reivers, and
now his mind was clouded by sorrow for the men killed so cruelly in their hasty
bid to copy the
Xanthos
’ fire weapon. The Madman from Miletos, they
called him. Perhaps they were right, he thought. Only a madman would create such
a weapon of death.

He elbowed through the excited crowd of Trojans who were pointing and
cheering at the blazing ships, then climbed down the steps from the western wall
and made his way northeast through the maze of streets. He looked around him as
he walked, seeing the city with troubled eyes. When he first had arrived, Troy
had been a remarkable sight, a city unlike any other in the world. The great
palaces of the mighty were roofed with bronze and decorated with red and green
marble, their walls carved with creatures of legend. Priam’s palace boasted a
roof of pure gold, which shone in the sunlight and could be seen from far out at
sea. Wide stone avenues were thronged with noble men and women garbed in rich
brightly colored clothes, glinting with jewelry, eager to see and be seen. The
whole world came to Troy to gasp at its beauty and profit from its wealth.