Contents
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
BOOK TWO
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
BOOK THREE
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
BOOK FOUR
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
book
ONE
Chapter One
UNWELCOME VISITORS
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, lay on his stomach amongst a clump of fern. Leaves and twigs were tangled in his thick, red-brown beard, and his face and hands were smeared with earth so that only the whites of his eyes were visible in the undergrowth. He remained perfectly still and silent as he looked down the slope towards a clearing in the dense woodland, where two dozen men sat around a large fire and ate stew from wooden bowls. Their features were grey and blurred in the twilight, but it was clear from their armaments and the sound of their heavily accented voices that they were not Ithacans.
‘That’s them, Eperitus,’ Odysseus whispered, nodding decisively. ‘They’re not a hunting party or a group of woodsmen – they’re the bandits we’re looking for. Can you hear what they’re saying?’
Eperitus, captain of Odysseus’s guard, lay shoulder to shoulder with the king. ‘Most of it,’ he replied, turning an ear towards the circle of men. Despite the distance, his acute hearing – which, like the rest of his god-gifted senses, was unnaturally sharp – could easily pick out the words of their conversation. ‘Something about a troop of dancing girls and . . . well, you can probably guess the rest.’ A roar of harsh laughter broke out below them. ‘They met the girls in Pylos, but from their accents it sounds like they’re Thessalians.’
‘Then they’ve a long journey back home,’ Odysseus said, watching the men thoughtfully and tapping at his teeth with a nail-bitten forefinger.
Eperitus scratched at his closely cropped black beard. ‘The problem is that we were told there were six of them, not four times that amount. And we’ve only brought twenty men with us.’
Odysseus leaned his large, muscular torso to one side and looked at his old friend, a glimmer of playful mockery in his green eyes. ‘When we landed on Samos yesterday morning you told me you were itching for a fight. In fact, hardly a month’s gone by in the past ten years when you haven’t reminisced about the old days or longed for a proper battle to come along. Now the opportunity’s arrived, all you can do is complain.’
Eperitus screwed his lips to one side and fixed his eyes on the camp below. Even though he knew Odysseus was poking fun at him, the king’s words still stung. No other man on Ithaca – not even Odysseus himself – desired glory in battle as much as he did. The islanders were simple folk whose happiness was found in their homes and families, but Eperitus was an exile from a distant city who had never lost the unsettling need to prove himself. It drove everything he did, and though he had long since earned his place amongst the Ithacans he struggled to share their contentment. The handful of skirmishes he had fought in the past few years had left him hungry for a real chance of glory, and it was not until the news that a large group of bandits were terrorizing Samos – the neighbouring island to Ithaca – that he had realized how deep that hunger had eaten into him.
‘I’m not complaining,’ he replied. ‘I’m a warrior, and a warrior wants nothing more than to kill his enemies. It’s just that you’re the king, Odysseus, and I’m sworn to protect you. Zeus’s beard, if we take these lads on as we are there’s a good chance they’ll win and you’ll be killed. And just look at them: I thought brigands were supposed to be armed with daggers and rusty swords, not breastplates, shields and spears!’
He pointed to the weapons piled against the mouth of a cave at the back of the clearing, and then at the armour worn by each man and the long swords hanging from their belts. Both he and Odysseus knew that the men who had been robbing the people of Samos were not a band of disorganized thugs, stealing at need and fleeing back into the woods; they were soldiers, turned to common robbery for survival in a country where peace had reigned for a decade. They had arrived from the Peloponnese by ship several days before, and if they were allowed to establish themselves on Samos they would not only continue to threaten the welfare of the islanders, they would soon pose a challenge to Odysseus’s own power and authority.
‘Well, we need to deal with them,’ the king said, resolutely. ‘And I can’t wait for more of the guard to be fetched from Ithaca – we have to defeat them here and now, with the men we’ve got.’
‘What about Penelope?’ Eperitus responded, noticing the look in Odysseus’s eye at the mention of his beloved wife. ‘She’s three weeks away from giving birth to your first child, the child you’ve been trying for ever since you were married. This isn’t the time to go risking your life.’
‘I love my wife,’ Odysseus said, simply but seriously. ‘And no pack of outlaws is going to prevent me from returning home to her. But a king who isn’t prepared to risk his life for his people isn’t worthy of the title, and for the sake of my unborn son I have to live up to who I am.’
Eperitus looked at his friend and knew he had spoken truly. ‘Well, evening’s not far away,’ he sighed, glancing up at the azure sky through the canopy of budding branches overhead. ‘And there’ll only be a faint moon tonight. We could bring the rest of the guard up here after dark and . . .’
‘And kill them in cold blood? We won’t need to resort to that.’
‘Why not? You slit the throats of a dozen sleeping Taphians once, so what’s the difference?’
‘I had to do that,’ Odysseus answered. ‘They were invaders, whereas these poor swine,’ he pointed a thumb towards the men below, ‘are just soldiers fallen on hard times – warriors, like you and me. I won’t kill them without giving them the chance to leave peacefully first.’
Eperitus shook his head resignedly. It was not that Odysseus was too proud to accept advice, it was just that he always thought he knew better. And he invariably did: if anyone could think of a way to defeat the bandits, it was Odysseus, the most clever, devious and resourceful man Eperitus knew.
‘I assume you’ve got a plan,’ he said.
‘Of course I have,’ the king replied with a grin. ‘Now, let’s get back to the others and tell them what we’ve seen.’
He raised himself on all fours and backed away from the screen of ferns, followed by Eperitus. Once they were sure they would not be spotted by any of the men around the campfire, they stood and quietly made their way back through the wood, picking a route between the silvery-grey trunks in the darkness. Soon they found the path they were looking for – a rutted cart track that crossed from one side of the forest to the other – and began the trek east towards their own camp.
‘I dreamed about her again last night,’ Odysseus said after a while. He was looking up at the early evening stars, which could be seen pricking the sky through the fissure in the canopy overhead.