The Hittite - Ben Bova [85]
“I know that!” Agamemnon snapped. He poked around the wooden framework, obviously suspicious of what to him was a new idea.
Before he could ask, I explained, “It would be best to roll it across the plain at night, after the moon goes down. On a night when the fog comes in from the sea. We can float it across the river on the raft we’ve built and roll it across the plain on its back so that the mist will conceal us from any Trojan watchmen on the walls. Then we raise it—”
Agamemnon cut me off with a peevish wave of his hand. “Odysseos, are you willing to lead this . . . this maneuver?”
“I am, son of Atreos. I plan to be the first man to step onto the battlements of Troy.”
“Very well then,” said the High King. “I don’t think this will work. But if you’re prepared to try it, then try it. I’ll have the rest of the army ready to attack at first light.”
“ To night?” I blurted.
“To night,” Agamemnon said, glaring at me.
“But my lord, one tower isn’t enough. We should have four, perhaps six, so we can attack the walls at different points.”
“You have one,” said Agamemnon. “If it works, all to the good. If it fails, so be it. The gods will decide.”
With that, he turned and strode away.
We got no sleep that night. I doubt that any of us could have slept even if we had tried. Nestor organized a blessing for the tower. A pair of aged priests sacrificed a dozen rams and goats, slitting their throats with ancient stone knives as they lay bound and bleating on the ground, then painting their blood on the wooden framework.
Poletes fretted that they offered no bulls or human captives to sacrifice.
“Agamemnon doesn’t think enough of your tower to waste such wealth upon it,” he told me in the dark shadows. “When he started out for Troy and the winds blew the wrong way for sailing for weeks at a time, he sacrificed a hundred horses and dozens of virgins. Including his own daughter.”
“His daughter?” That stunned me.
Nodding grimly, Poletes said, “He wants Troy. The High King will stop at nothing to get what he wants.”
I had seen massive sacrifices at Hattusas and elsewhere. Human captives were often put on the altar. But his own daughter! It made me realize how ruthless the High King really was.
Fortune was with us that night. A cold fog seeped in from the sea. We rafted the tower across the river, crouched in the chilling mist with the tower’s framework looming above us like the skeleton of some giant beast. The moon disappeared behind the black humps of the islands and the night become as dark as it would ever be.
I had hoped for cloud cover, but the stars were watching us as we slowly, painfully, pulled the tower on big wooden wheels across the plain of Ilios and up the slope that fronted Troy’s western wall. Slaves and thetes strained at the ropes while others slathered animal grease on the wheels and axles to keep them from squeaking.
Poletes crept along beside me, silent for once. I strained my eyes for a sight of Trojan sentries up on the battlements, but the fog kept me from seeing much. Straight overhead I could make out the patterns of the stars: the Bears and the Hunter, facing the V -shaped horns of the Bull. The Pleiades gleamed like a cluster of seven blue gems in the Bull’s neck.
The night was eerily quiet. Perhaps the Trojans, trusting in the truce the Achaians had agreed to, thought that no hostilities would resume until the morning. True, the fighting would start with the sun’s rise. But were they fools enough to post no lookouts through the night?
The ground was rising now, and what had seemed like a gentle slope felt like a steep cliff. We all gripped the ropes in our hands and put our backs into it, trying not to grunt or cry out with the pain. I looked across from where I was hauling and saw Magro, his face contorted with the effort, his booted heels digging into the mist-slippery grass, straining like a common laborer, just as all the rest of us were.
At last we reached the base of the wall and huddled there, panting. I sent Poletes scampering to the corner where the wall turned, to watch