Tudhaliyas IV, emperor of the Hittites, strode into Priam’s megaron surrounded by his retinue. Xander watched with interest. He never had seen an emperor before. Apart from the Hittite mercenaries he had treated, who seemed the same as any other mercenaries, the only Hittite Xander had met was Zidantas. Zidantas was huge, with a shaved head and a forked black beard. This emperor was thin and very tall, with a curled beard, and was dressed in shiny clothes like a woman. His retinue was even more strangely garbed in brightly colored kilts and striped shawls. But they all were armed to the teeth, as were their hosts.
Xander had wanted to stay with the wounded, but as Agamemnon left the queen’s gathering room, he suddenly turned to Meriones. “Bring the healer,” he ordered.
Xander now stood nervously at Meriones’ side, feeling that the black-clad Kretan was his only friend in the room.
Emperor and king met in the center of the megaron, which still was heaped with corpses and abandoned weapons. Tudhaliyas looked around silently, his dark eyes revealing nothing.
Agamemnon spoke first. “My condolences on the death of your father. Hattusilis was a great man and a wise leader,” he said, and Xander was surprised at the sincerity in his voice. “Welcome to Troy, a city of the Mykene empire.”
Tudhaliyas regarded him for a moment, then replied mildly, “The Hittite emperor is accustomed to his vassals prostrating themselves before him.”
Agamemnon’s eyes hardened, but he replied evenly, “I am no man’s vassal. I fought for this city, and you enter it with my permission. I opened the Scaean Gate to you as a gesture of friendship. Everything you see belongs to me. And to my brother kings,” he added swiftly, seeing Idomeneos frown.
“You fought to win this charnel house?” Tudhaliyas commented, looking around again at the corpses, the blood, and the gore. “You must be very proud.”
“Let us not misunderstand each other,” Agamemnon replied smoothly. “The allied kings of the west fought to win this city, and by superior strategy and military strength and the will of the gods, we succeeded. Your fame as a strategos precedes you, Emperor. And you know that for a people to dominate the Great Green they must first dominate Troy.”
“You are right, Mykene,” Tudhaliyas said. “It is important that we do not misunderstand each other. Priam ruled this city on the suffrance of the Hittite emperors. Under his kingship Troy flourished and became rich, and the land was at peace. The city guarded the Hittite trade routes by sea and land, bringing prosperity to our great city Hattusas. Trojan troops fought for the empire in many battles. My friend Hektor”—he paused for the words to sink in—“was partly responsible for the triumph over the Egypteians at Kadesh.
“Now,” Tudhaliyas went on, his voice hardening, “Troy is in ruins, its bay unnavigable. All its citizens are dead or fled, and its army is destroyed. The countryside is barren, with crops ruined and livestock dying. That is why I have taken the trouble to come here myself with my thirty thousand warriors.”
He paused, and a thoughtful silence hung in the air.
“The Hittite empire cares little who holds Troy if the city prospers and showers its wealth around it. But a dead city in a dying land attracts only darkness and chaos. The empire is forced to intervene.”
Xander felt the atmosphere in the megaron become icy. There were fewer Hittites in the chamber than there were Mykene warriors, but they were fresher and better armed, and they looked as though they were spoiling for a fight.
Agamemnon gazed around assessingly, perhaps thinking the same thing. “Troy will prosper again under Mykene rule,” he vowed. “By next summer the bay will be full of trading ships once more. The city will be rebuilt, and under our strong leadership it will flourish again.”
Tudhaliyas suddenly stepped forward, and Agamemnon instinctively moved back. The emperor, his bodyguard shadowing him, strode over to Priam’s gold-encrusted throne and sat down gracefully. Agamemnon was forced to stand in front of him to speak to him.
Tudhaliyas told him, “The Bay of Troy has been silting up over the last hundred years, I am told. Now a Mykene fleet lies wrecked there, and already new mud banks will be building around the hulks. My experts predict that within a generation the bay will have disappeared and the city will be landlocked. Trading ships will pass it by in favor of the young cities flourishing higher up the Hellespont. Troy is finished, Agamemnon, thanks to you.”
“I did not start this war, Emperor!” Agamemnon spit it out, his composure lost. “But I saw, before all others, the danger Troy offered to the nations of the Great Green. Priam’s ambition, backed by his son’s cavalry and the Dardanian pirate fleet, was to subdue all free peoples to his will. And while others were bribed or seduced by him, Mykene was not fooled.”
Tudhaliyas leaned back in the throne and laughed, his voice echoing richly in the great stone hall. Then he told Agamemnon, “This nonsense might have fooled your puppet kings as you sat around your campfires at night, telling one another Priam was a monster of ambition determined to conquer the world. Yet this monster brought forty years of peace until you chose to destroy it.”
“I have fought for this city,” Agamemnon roared. “It is mine by right of arms.”
At that moment a Hittite warrior walked into the megaron and nodded to the emperor. Tudhaliyas flicked his eyes to him, then back to the Mykene king.
“So you invoke the right of arms,” Tudhaliyas responded, smiling. “At last, something we can agree on.”
He stood up and looked down at Agamemnon. “Outside this city are thirty thousand Hittite warriors. They are all well fed and well armed, and they have marched a long way without the chance of a good fight.”
He paused as a Mykene warrior came into the megaron and hurried up to Agamemnon. He spoke in the king’s ear, and Xander saw Agamemnon blanch.
“I see you have heard, King,” Tudhaliyas said. “My warriors have taken the Scaean Gate and are already starting to dismantle it. They will unseal all the great gates and take them apart one by one. For a while Troy will be a truly open city.”
Xander held his breath as he waited for the explosion he was sure would come from Agamemnon. But it did not come.
“We discussed misunderstanding earlier,” Tudhaliyas went on smoothly. “I do not want Troy.
“Before I left our capital, Hattusas, with my army, I consulted our… soothsayers, I think you call them. One told me a tale of the founding of this city. He said that when the father of Troy, the demigod Scamander, first voyaged to these lands from the far west, he was met on the beach by the sun god. They broke bread together, and the sun god advised Scamander that his people should settle wherever they were attacked by earth-born enemies under the cover of darkness. Scamander wondered at the god’s words, but that night when they camped on this very hilltop, a horde of famished field mice invaded their tents and nibbled the leather bowstrings and breastplate straps and all their war gear. Scamander vowed his people would remain here, and he built a temple to the sun god.
“But the gods the Trojans brought from the western lands were not our gods. Your sun god is called Apollo, also the Lord of the Silver Bow and the Destroyer. He is a god of might and battle. Our god of the sun is a healer called the mouse god. When our children are sick, they are given a mouse dipped in honey to eat as a tribute to the healing god.
“Over the years, as the city grew, the mouse god’s temple became neglected. The Trojans built greater temples, decorated with gold, copper and ivory, to Zeus and Athene and to Hermes. When the great walls were built around the city, the mouse god’s temple was outside them. When the small temple collapsed during an earthquake, it was not rebuilt, and eventually grass grew over it, and, with perfect irony, field mice ran in its halls.