‘Sire, don’t come near!’ he cried. ‘It’s a nest of vipers! They’ve been bitten!’

I raised my hands to the crimsoned depths of the firmament. ‘O Father of the Skies, you have sent a sign! You struck Lakoon down in front of us because he spoke against your daughter’s offering to the people of my city! The horse is good! The horse is sacred! It will keep the Greeks from our gates for ever!’

They were over, those ten years of war against a mighty foe. We had survived and we still owned ourselves. The Hellespont and the Euxine were ours again. The Citadel would have golden nails again. And we would smile again.

I led the Court into my palace and commanded a feast; our last misgivings laid to rest, we gave ourselves over to rejoicing like liberated slaves. Shouts of laughter – songs – cymbals – drums – horns – trumpets floated up from the honeycomb of streets below the Citadel, while from inside the Citadel the same noises floated down. Troy was free! Ten years, ten years! Troy had won. Troy had driven Agamemnon from its shores for ever.

Ah, but for me the best sight of all was Aineas! He hadn’t gone to see the horse, nor stirred from the palace through all our travail. He couldn’t very well avoid attending the feast, however, though he sat with face set and eyes smouldering. I had won, he had lost. The blood of Priam still existed. Troy would be ruled by my descendants, not by Aineas.

33

NARRATED BY

Neoptolemos

They shut the trapdoor on us well before dawn, and we who had experienced darkness every night of our lives discovered what darkness really was. Opening wider and wider, my eyes strained to see, yet still there was nothing to see. Nothing. I was struck blind, the world a blackness tangible and unendurable. A day and a night, I found myself thinking – if we were lucky. At least a day and a night crouching in one spot without so much as one pinprick of light – no way to tell the time from the sun, each instant an eternity, ears so finely attuned that men’s breathing rolled like distant thunder.

My arm brushed against Odysseus; I shuddered before I could stop myself. My nostrils twitched with the smells of sweat, urine, faeces, malodorous breath, despite the covered pails of hide Odysseus had issued between each three men. I understood now why he had been so adamant about it. To have been soiled by excrement would have been beyond any of us. One hundred men struck blind – how did some men survive a lifetime of blindness?

I thought, I will never be able to see again. Will my eyes recognise light, or will the sheer shock of it dazzle me back into permanent darkness? My skin was tight, I could feel the terror licking all around me in the pit as one hundred of the most courageous men alive were stricken with mortal dread, incarcerated. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth; I reached for the water skin, anything to be doing something.

We did have air, cunningly filtered in through a maze of tiny holes punctured all over the beast’s body and head, but Odysseus had warned us that we wouldn’t see light through these holes while there was daylight outside because layers of cloth shielded them. Finally I closed my eyes. They ached so much from trying to see that it came as a welcome relief, and I found the blackness easier to bear.

Odysseus and I sat spine to spine, as did everyone. We ourselves were the only back rests our prison possessed. Striving to relax, I leaned on him and began to recall every girl I had ever met. I catalogued them meticulously – the prettiest and the ugliest – the shortest and the tallest – the first girl I had bedded and the last – one who had giggled at my lack of experience and one who had had barely enough strength to roll her eyes at me after a night in my arms. Girls exhausted, I began on all the beasts I had killed, the hunts I had attended – lions, boars, deer. Fishing expeditions in search of grampus and leviathan and vast serpents, though all we found were tunny and sea bass. I relived my days of training with the young Myrmidons. The little wars I had fought in their company. The times I had met great men, and who they were. I told over the tally of ships and Kings who had sailed for Troy. I thought of the name of every town and village in Thessalia. I sang the lays of the Heroes over in my mind. Somehow the time did pass, but snailed.

The silence deepened. I must have slept, for I awoke with a jerk to find that Odysseus had clapped his hand over my mouth. I lay with my head in his lap, my eyes starting from their sockets in panic until I remembered why I couldn’t see. A movement had aroused me, and as I lay collecting my wits it came again – a gentle jolting. Rolling over, I sat up, groped for Odysseus’s hands and clasped them tightly. He bent his head, his hair against my cheek. I found his ear.

‘Are they moving us?’

I felt his grin against my face. ‘Of course they are. Not for one moment did I doubt they’d move this thing. They fell for Sinon’s story, just as I knew they would,’ he whispered.

The sudden activity broke the suffocating inertia of our imprisonment; for a long time we felt brighter, cheerier as we lurched and jerked along, trying to work out our speed, wondering when we would reach the walls, wondering what Priam intended to do about the fact that the horse was too big. And for this span of time we rejoiced in being able to speak to each other in low but normal voices, sure that the noise our conveyance made as it groaned along would drown us out. We could hear our progress, though we couldn’t hear men or oxen. Just the roaring, squealing turning of all those wheels.

It wasn’t difficult to determine when we reached the Skaian Gate. Movement ceased for what seemed like days. We sat praying silently to every God we knew that they wouldn’t give up; that they would – as Odysseus had insisted they would – go to the lengths of demolishing the archway. Then we started to move again. There was a grinding, sickening jolt which knocked us sprawling; we lay still, our faces pressed against the floor.

‘Fools!’ Odysseus snarled. ‘They’ve miscalculated.’

After four such jolts we began rolling once more. As the floor tilted, Odysseus chuckled.

‘The hill up to the Citadel,’ he said. ‘They’re escorting us to the palace, no less.’

Then all was silent again. Come to rest with a mighty groan, we were left to our thoughts. The huge thing took time to settle like a leviathan into mud, and I wondered whereabouts exactly we had come to this final halt. The perfume of flowers came stealing in. I tried to estimate how long it had taken them to haul the horse from the plain, but could not. If one cannot see sun or moon or stars, one cannot gauge the passage of time. So I leaned back against Odysseus and wrapped my arms about my knees. He and I were placed right next to the trapdoor, whereas Diomedes had been sent to the far end to keep order (we had been told that if a man started to panic, he was to be killed immediately), and I wasn’t sorry. Odysseus was rocklike, unshakeable; just having him at my back calmed me.

When I let myself think about my father, the moments flew. I hadn’t wanted to think about him, fearing the pain, but in the anticlimax of our last wait I couldn’t hold out. And was shorn of any pain at once, for when I opened the shutters of my mind to admit him, I could feel him physically with me. I was a small child again and he a giant towering far above my head, a God and a Hero to a little boy. So beautiful. So strange with that lipless mouth. I still bear the scar where I tried to cut off my own lip to be more like him; Grandfather Peleus caught me at it, and whipped me soundly for impiety. You can’t be someone else, he said to me. You are yourself. Lips or no lips. Ah, and how I had prayed that the war against Troy would last long enough for me to go there and fight alongside him! From the time I turned fourteen and counted myself a man I begged both my grandfathers, Peleus and Lykomedes, to let me sail for Troy. They had refused.