First he kills Orsilochus, putting a barbed arrow in the short man’s heart. Then he kills Ophelestes, putting a point through the captain’s right eye when the Trojan peeks above his rawhide shield. Then Daetor and Chromius fall mortally wounded from two fast, perfectly placed shots. Each time Teucer fires, the Trojans unleash their own arrows and spears in a vain attempt to kill the archer, but Big Ajax crouches over both of them and his massive shield deflects every missile.
The Trojan volleys pause, Ajax lifts his shield, and Teucer shoots Lycophontes, prince of his distant city, but just wounds the man. As Lycophontes’ captains rush to his aid, Teucer puts a second arrow into the fallen man’s liver.
Polymaeon’s son, Amopaon, falls next, Teucer’s shaft through his throat. Blood fountains five feet high and the powerful Amopaon tries to rise, but the arrow has pinned him to the ground, and he bleeds out in less than a minute, his body kicking and spasming ever more weakly. The Achaeans cheer. I know . . . knew . . . Amopaon. The Trojan used to eat in the little open restaurant where Nightenhelser and I liked to meet, and we’d spoken many a time of trivial things. He told me once that his father, Polymaeon, had known Odysseus in friendlier times, and once, when traveling to Ithaca and joining the friendly Greeks on a hunt, Polymaeon had killed a wild boar that had deeply gored Odysseus’ leg and would have killed him if Polymaeon’s spearcast had missed its mark. Amopaon told me that Odysseus bears the scar to this day.
Ajax crouches, holding his massive metal shield over him and his half-brother like a roof, and Trojan arrows rattle against it. Ajax rises, lifts the shield, and Teucer kills Melanippus—eighty yards away—with a shot that enters the man’s groin and protrudes from his anus as the Trojan falls. His comrades step away and grimace as Melanippus writhes on the ground and dies. The Achaeans cheer again.
Agamemnon swings down off his chariot and shouts encouragement at Teucer, promising the archer second choice of tripods or purebred teams of horses—if Zeus and Athena ever allow him to plunder the treasure troves of Troy, he says—and then promises Teucer a beautiful Trojan woman to bed as well, perhaps Hector’s wife, Andromache.
Teucer is angered by Agamemnon’s offer. “Son of Atreus, do you think I’ll try any harder than I already am, spurred on by your talk of plunder? I’m firing as fast and accurately as I can. Eight arrows—eight kills.”
“Shoot at Hector!” cries Agamemnon.
“I have been shooting at Hector,” screams Teucer, his face red. “All this time—Hector’s been my target. I just can’t hit the son of a bitch!”
Agamemnon falls silent.
As if responding to the challenge, Hector suddenly urges his chariot to the front of the Trojan ranks, trying to rally his men who’ve lost heart because of the archer’s slaughter.
Ajax doesn’t bother to lift his shield this time, because Teucer stands, goes to full draw, takes careful aim at Hector, and lets fly.
The shaft misses Hector’s heart by a hand’s breadth, striking Gorgythion as that son of Priam steps behind Hector’s chariot. The big man stops, looks surprised, stares down at the protruding shaft and feathers as if he is the butt of some barracks joke, but then Gorgythion’s head appears to become too heavy for his massive neck and falls limp to his shoulder as the weight of his helmet pulls it down; then Gorgythion falls dead in the blood-muddied sand.
“Damn!” says Teucer and fires again. Hector is the closest of all the Trojans now, turned full-torso toward Teucer.
This arrow catches Archeptolemus, Hector’s driver, full in the chest. The horses—war-trained as they are—rear and leap ahead as Archeptolemus’ blood geysers onto their flanks, and the young man pitches backward and off and into the dust.
“Cebriones!” cries Hector, grabbing the reins and calling to his brother—another bastard son of profligate Priam—to be his driver. Cebriones leaps up onto the chariot just as Hector jumps down. Enraged, beside himself with fury and grief at the death of his faithful Archeptolemus, Hector runs into no-man’s-land—a clear target for Teucer—and grabs the largest, sharpest rock he can lift in one hand.
Hector seems to have forgotten all the finesse of warfare he’s bragged about so many times and has reverted to caveman tactics, lifting the rock and cocking his left arm far back, looking like nothing so much—I think—as Sandy Koufax preparing to unleash a pitch. I haven’t noticed until today that Hector is ambidextrous.
Teucer sees his chance, grabs another arrow from his quiver, and draws full back, aiming at Hector’s heart, sure he can get off a shot, perhaps two, before Hector throws.
He’s wrong. Hector pitches hard, fast, flat, and accurately.
The rock hits Teucer in the collarbone, just beside the throat, an instant before the archer releases the arrow. Bones crack. Tendons rip. Teucer’s hand goes limp, the bowstring snaps, and the arrow buries itself in the ground between the archer’s sandaled feet.
Hector rushes forward, scattering Achaeans like chaff, and the Trojan archers fire arrow after arrow at the fallen Teucer, but Big Ajax doesn’t abandon his brother; he covers him with his wall of a shield while other Achaeans fight off the Trojan infantry. At Ajax’s call—bellow, really—Mecisteus and Alastor rush forward and carry the moaning, semiconscious Achaean archer back across the trench-bridge to relative safety in the shadow of the hollow ships.
But Teucer’s fifteen minutes of fame are up.
Things get worse for the Greeks very fast after this. Hector sees his survival as another sign of Zeus’s love and approval and leads his men in charge after charge against the dispirited, retreating Achaeans.
Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the other lords who’d led their men into joyous combat just hours before are truly beaten now. The Achaeans are too routed at first even to man their defenses along the trench and stakes and makeshift wall, and the only thing that stops the Trojans from burning the ships right now is the setting sun and the sudden fall of darkness.
While the Achaeans mill about in confusion, some of the men already readying their ships for departure, others sitting shell-shocked and vacant-eyed, Hector does his Henry V thing, roaming tirelessly up and down the Trojan ranks, urging his men on to more carnage come the dawn, sending men back to the city to herd cattle out for slaughter and sacrifice and feasting, ordering in rations of honeyed wine, calling up the wagons of fresh-baked bread that the ravenous Trojans attack as if it were Agamemnon himself, and giving the command to set hundreds of watchfires just beyond the Achaean defenses, so the fearful Greeks will get no sleep this night. I don my Hades Helmet and walk invisible among the Trojans.
“Tomorrow,” cries Hector to his cheering men, “I’ll gut Diomedes like a flopping fish in front of his men if he doesn’t choose to flee tonight. I’ll break his spine with the tip of my spear and we’ll nail the braggart’s head above the Scaean Gates!”
The Trojans roar. The watchfires send sparks flying up toward the hard-burning stars. Invisible to gods and men, I recross the trench bridge, wind my way through the sharpened stakes, and walk again amongst the dispirited Greeks.
For me, it’s time for truth or consequences. Agamemnon’s already called the meeting of his captains and they’re arguing courses of immediate action—flee or send an embassy to Achilles?
There’s no turning back now. I morph into the form of Phoenix, Achilles’ faithful Myrmidon tutor and friend, and walk across the cooling sand to join the council.
If you’re going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.
28
The Mediterranean Basin
Savi followed the Atlantic Breach across the ocean, sometimes flying lower than the surface, hopping and dipping the sonie every few miles to avoid the connecting current cones that crisscrossed the Breach like transparent pipes in a long green hallway.
Lying prone to the left of Savi—seeing Harman lying in his spot to her right—Daeman was aware of the older man’s grim expression and of the empty passenger slots behind them. Daeman was thinking about the last twenty-four hours.