The Hittite - Ben Bova [29]
Ajax trudged off into the darkness, followed by his men. Odysseos turned to me, a thoughtful look on his face.
“I have a task for you to perform,” he said. “If you are successful you can end this war.”
“And if I am not?”
Odysseos smiled grimly. “No man lives forever, Hittite.”
17
In less than an hour I found myself walking warily in the moonlight down the ramp before the gate in our rampart and heading toward the Trojan camp. A white cloth knotted above my left elbow proclaimed that I was operating under a flag of truce. The slim willow wand in my hand was the impromptu symbol of a herald.
“These should get you past their sentries without having your throat slit,” Odysseos had told me. He did not smile as he spoke the words and I did not find his reassurances very reassuring. I carried neither shield nor weapons, except for a small dagger tucked into my belt.
“Go to Prince Hector and speak to no one else,” Odysseos had commanded me. “Tell him that Agamemnon offers a solution to this war: if the Trojans will return Helen to her rightful husband, the Achaians will return to their own lands, satisfied.”
“Hasn’t that offer been made before?” I had asked.
Odysseos smiled at my simplicity. “Of course. But always with the demand for a huge ransom, plus all the fortune that Helen brought with her from Sparta. And always when we were fighting under the walls of Troy. Priam and his sons never believed that we would abandon the siege without breaking in and sacking the city. But now that Hector is besieging us, perhaps they will believe that we are ready to quit and merely need a face-saving compromise to send us packing.”
He was crafty, this Odysseos. Far craftier than the other Achaian leaders. But I wondered, “Returning Helen is nothing more than a face-saving compromise?”
He looked at me curiously. “She is only a woman, Hittite. Do you think Menalaos, her husband, has been pining away in celibacy since the bitch ran off with Paris?”
Then he added, “Have you abstained from women while searching for your wife?”
That caught me squarely. I realized once again that it was my sons I truly sought. If we had been childless, would I have come all this way to find my Aniti?
Odysseos made me repeat his instructions and then, satisfied, led me to the gate in the rampart, where I had earned my moment of glory earlier that day. I gazed out into the darkness. In the silvery moonlight a mist had risen, turning the plain into a ghostly shivering vapor that rose and sank slowly like the breath of some living creature. Here and there I could make out the glow of Trojan campfires, like distant stars in the shrouding fog.
“Remember,” said Odysseos, “you are to speak to Prince Hector and no one else.”
“I understand, my lord.”
I walked carefully down the ramp, the inky shadows of the trench on either side of me, and finally made my way through the slowly drifting tendrils of the mist toward the Trojan camp, guided by the fires that flickered and glowed in the distance. The fog was cold, chilling against my bare arms and legs, like the touch of death.
A sharp wind began gusting in from the sea and shredding the mist covering the plain. In the distance I could make out the beetling towers of Troy hulking black and menacing against the moonlit sky.
A dog began barking, and a voice called out of the darkness, “You there! Hold!”
I froze and clenched the willow wand in my fist. It seemed much too slim to protect me.
A pair of sentries approached me warily, heavy spears in their hands. Two massive dogs skulked before them, growling at me. I gulped down a deep breath of chill night air and stood immobile.
“Well? Who are you?”
“I am an emissary from the High King Agamemnon,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I have been sent to speak to Prince Hector.”
The sentries were an unlikely pair, one short and squat with a dirty tangled beard and a potbelly bulging his chain mail corselet, the other taller and painfully thin, either clean-shaved or too young to start a beard. I realized he was holding the growling