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.