Omeros and Eurybates ran to help Polites, who was groaning with pain, though his arm had remained in its socket by the sheer density of his muscles. Diomedes walked over to the pile of bones and picked out the ivory shoulder blade.
‘So this is what five of my men died for,’ he said, bitterly. ‘And yet you think we don’t even need the damned thing.’
He offered it to Odysseus, who took the untarnished ivory and held it up to the light of the nearest torch.
‘We must take it back to Troy, of course – the others will expect it – and yet the gods didn’t bring us here just for the sake of a bone. There’s something else, a riddle or a clue that will give us victory over Troy. I just have to find out what it is.’
Eperitus pulled the spear out of the wooden horse and looked about at the bodies of the dead men.
‘What if there is no riddle, Odysseus? What if the gods are playing with us, giving us hope where there isn’t any? What if there never was anything more here than a dead king hidden beneath a wooden horse? Perhaps the Olympians want the war to go on for another ten years.’
‘A king hidden beneath a wooden horse,’ Odysseus repeated, to himself. ‘Or inside a horse.’
Diomedes shook his head. ‘No, the gods wouldn’t lie to us. They sent us to find this bone and take it back to Troy. That’s all there is to it. Why does there have to be something else, Odysseus?’
Odysseus ignored him and walked over to the wooden horse on its toppled granite lid. He stroked its smooth mane and frowned.
‘The Trojans revere horses,’ he said, quietly. Then he turned to Eperitus and smiled. ‘I have it, Eperitus,’ he whispered. ‘I know what the riddle is, and I know the answer. I have the key to the gates of Troy.’
Chapter Nineteen
EURYPYLUS ARRIVES
Helen stood behind Cassandra as she sat on the high-backed chair, staring gloomily at her reflection in the mirror. The polished bronze surface was uneven in places and a little tarnished around the circumference, but there was no hiding the girl’s natural beauty.
‘White suits you,’ Helen said conclusively, gathering Cassandra’s thick, dark hair in her fingers and holding it behind her head to expose the long neck and slim shoulders.
Cassandra laid a modest hand across her exposed cleavage.
‘Black would be more appropriate.’
‘For your husband? Come now.’
‘Did you want to wear white when Deiphobus forced you to marry him against your wishes?’ Cassandra replied, harshly. ‘Besides, Eurypylus will not be my husband until he and his army have defeated the Greeks. My father was clear on that, at least.’
Helen looked across the bright, sunny chamber to where the wind from the plains was blowing the thin curtains in from the window. The air in Cassandra’s room was warm and humid, and carried with it the sound of pipes, drums and the cheering of crowds. Eurypylus’s army had already entered the Scaean Gate and was marching in premature triumph through the lower city on their way up to the citadel of Pergamos. Soon thousands of soldiers would be filling the palace courtyard below, where Priam would formally greet the grandson he had never met and give him Cassandra – Eurypylus’s aunt – to be his wife. And through the wine-induced fog that had obscured her thoughts and emotions almost every day since the death of Paris, Helen recalled how she had stood in her own room in Sparta, twenty years before, and listened with disdain as Agamemnon persuaded her stepfather, Tyndareus, to offer her in marriage to the best man in Greece. She shuddered at the memory and turned back to look at Cassandra.
‘Nevertheless, Hecabe has asked me to make you look your best for him, and your mother’s request is as good as an order.’
‘They say Eurypylus is an ugly man.’
‘Who says, and who would know?’ Helen laughed as she gathered Cassandra’s hair up at the top of her head and pinned it in place. ‘After all, who in Troy has seen him? Mysians and Trojans have hardly been good friends since Astyoche’s feud with Priam.’
‘I have seen him in my dreams,’ Cassandra insisted, ‘and he has a brutal face to match his brutal character. His heart is black, too, made so by an indulgent mother who has never denied him anything.’
‘Really?’ Helen responded, a hint of scepticism in her voice.
She finished tying up Cassandra’s thick locks and lifted her chin a little with her fingertip. The sombre face that had for so long been hidden behind drapes of black hair was now revealed in all its loveliness. She had a small but perfectly proportioned mouth, a slightly pointed chin with the merest hint of a dimple, pale, petite ears pressed forward by the volume of hair behind them, and large eyes heavily rimmed with long eyelashes. Cassandra looked at herself in the mirror and seemed surprised at what she saw, perhaps realising for the first time that she was a woman worthy of any man’s attention. Behind her, Helen stared at her own reflection and saw the beauty that had never withered with the loss of her youth, or been blemished by her grief for Paris. If anything, the years and her suffering had made her more beautiful, as if the divine blood that coursed in her veins had made itself more obvious with maturity. And something inside her suddenly wanted to tell Cassandra to cover up her beauty again, to hide it from a world that would kill and maim, burn and destroy for the sake of a woman’s looks.
Outside, the sound of pipes and drums was growing closer while the cheering had faded. The Mysians had left the crowds of the lower city behind and entered Pergamos itself.
‘Everyone knows there’s nothing Astyoche won’t do for her son,’ Cassandra continued. ‘And in return he hangs upon her every word, doting over her like a pet puppy.’
There was a hint of disgust in her tone, and Helen laid a comforting hand on her shoulder.
‘If she has spoiled him, it’s exactly because she wants him as her pet – a creature that will do her bidding without question. But I don’t believe she has given him everything. Not her heart. Else, why would she send him out to risk his life in battle, for the sake of a father she despises? In her pride she wanted Priam to come begging for her help – as she knew he would, one day – and that victory, symbolised by the Golden Vine, is worth more to her than Eurypylus.’
Another gust of wind blew the curtains inward again, brushing them against a small clay jar filled with perfume that Helen had brought with her for Cassandra. It fell from the table and smashed, making the two women start. As their maids had already been dismissed, Helen slipped her hand from Cassandra’s shoulder and walked over to the broken pieces, picking them up one by one and placing them in her palm. Kneeling there, she heard the pulsing of the drums and the heavy tramp of marching feet coming up the last ramp to the courtyard below, followed by a loud command and then silence. She looked at Cassandra, then stood and moved to the window. Dropping the shards of clay on the table, she brushed the fluttering curtain aside with her arm and looked out.
The large courtyard below was filled with armed men. On three sides, dressed in double-ranks, were Priam’s elite guard – Troy’s fiercest warriors, who wore the richest armour and carried the best weapons. On the far side were the men of Mysia: a sea of soldiers with dusty armaments, all of them young and strong with faces that were keen for war, not beleaguered and desperate for peace like the Trojans and their other allies. Behind them, on the ramp that led up from the lower tier of the citadel and stretching back into the streets beyond, were the ranks of their comrades – spearmen, archers, chariots and cavalry. They numbered in the thousands, an army that could indeed turn the tide of the war against the exhausted Greeks.