Yet I lived, sweaty, dirty, my back stinging with welts, on this strangely primitive oversized canoe heading for an unknown land under a brazen cloudless sky.
Who am I? With a sudden shock of fright I realized that I could remember nothing about myself except my name. I am Orion, I told myself. But more than that I could not recall. My memory was a blank, as if it had been wiped clean, like a classroom chalkboard being prepared for a new lesson.
I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to think about that woman I had loved and that fantastic star-leaping ship. I could not even remember her name. I saw flames, heard screams. I held her in my arms as the heat blistered our skins and made the metal walls around us glow hell-red.
“He’s beaten us, Orion,” she said to me. “We’ll die together. That’s the only consolation we will have, my love.”
I remembered pain. Not merely the agony of flesh searing and splitting open, steaming and cooking even as our eyes were burned away, but the torture of being torn apart forever from the one woman in all the universes whom I loved.
The whip cracked against my bare back again.
“Harder! Pull harder, you whoreson, or by the gods I’ll sacrifice you instead of a bullock once we make landfall!”
He leaned over me, his scarred face red with anger, and slashed at me again with the whip. The pain of the lash was nothing. I closed it off without another thought. I always could control my body completely. Had I wanted to, I could have snapped this hefty paddle in two and driven the ragged end of it through the whipmaster’s thick skull. But what was the sting of his whip compared to the agony of death, the hopelessness of loss?
We rowed around the rocky headland and saw a calm sheltered inlet. Spread along the curving beach were dozens of ships like our own, pulled far up on the sand. Huts and tents huddled among their black hulls like shreds of paper littering a city street after a parade. Thin gray smoke issued from cook fires here and there. A pall of thicker, blacker smoke billowed off in the distance.
A mile or so inland, up on a bluff that commanded the beach, stood a city or citadel of some sort. High stone walls with square towers rising above the battlements. Far in the distance, dark wooded hills rose and gradually gave way to mountains that floated shimmering in the blue heat haze.
The young men at the stern seemed to get tenser at the sight of the walled city. Their voices were low, but I heard them easily enough.
“There is it,” one of them said to his companions. His voice was grim.
The youth next to him nodded and spoke a single word.
“Troy.”
Chapter 2
WE landed, literally, driving the boat up onto the beach until its bottom grated against the sand and we could go no farther. Then the whipmaster bellowed at us as we piled over the gunwales, took up ropes, and — straining, cursing, wrenching the tendons in our arms and shoulders — we hauled the pitch-blackened hull up onto the beach until only its stern and rudder paddle touched the water.
Hardly any tide to speak of, I knew. When they finally sail past the Pillars of Herakles and out into the Atlantic, that’s when they’ll encounter real tides.
Then I wondered how I knew that.
I did not have time to wonder for long. The whipmaster allowed us a scant few moments to get our breath back, then he started us unloading the boat. He roared and threatened, shaking his many-thonged whip at us, his cinnamon-red beard ragged and tangled, the scar on his left cheek standing out white against his florid frog’s-eyed face. I carried bales and bleating sheep and squirming, foul-smelling pigs while the gentlemen in their cloaks and linen tunics and their fine sandals walked down a gangplank, each followed by two or more slaves who carried their goods, mostly arms and armor, from what I could see.
“Fresh blood for the war,” grunted the man next to me, with a nod toward the young noblemen. He looked as grimy as I felt, a stringy old fellow with skin as tanned and creased as weather-beaten leather. His hair was sparse, gray, matted with perspiration; his beard, mangy and unkempt. Like me, he wore nothing but a loincloth; his skinny legs and knobby knees barely seemed strong enough to tote the burdens he carried.
There were plenty of other men, just as ragged and filthy as we, to take the bales and livestock from us. They seemed delighted to do so. As I went back and forth from the boat I saw that this stretch of beach was protected by an earthenwork rampart studded here and there with sharpened stakes.
We finished our task at last, unloading a hundred or so massive double-handled jugs of wine, as the sun touched the headland we had rounded earlier in the day. Aching, exhausted, we sprawled around a cook fire and accepted steaming wooden bowls of boiled lentils and greens.
A cold wind blew in from the north as the sun slipped below the horizon, sending sparks from our little fire glittering toward the darkening sky.
“I never thought I’d be here on the plain of Ilios,” said the old man who had worked next to me. He put the bowl to his lips and gobbled the stew hungrily.
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
“Argos. My name is Poletes. And you?”
“Orion.”
“Ah! Named after the Hunter.”
I nodded, a faint echo of memory tingling the hairs at the back of my neck. The Hunter. Yes, I was a hunter. Once. Long ago. Or — was it a long time from now? Future and past were all mixed together in my mind. I remembered…
“And where are you from, Orion?” asked Poletes, shattering the fragile images half-forming in my mind.
“Oh,” I gestured vaguely, “west of Argos. Far west.”
“Farther than Ithaca?”
“Beyond the sea,” I answered, not knowing why, but feeling instinctively that it was as honest a reply as I could give.
“And how came you here?”
I shrugged. “I’m a wanderer. And you?”
Edging closer to me, Poletes wrinkled his brow and scratched at his thinning pate. “No wanderer I. I’m a storyteller, and happy was I to spend my days in the agora, spinning tales and watching the faces of the people as I talked. Especially the children, with their big eyes. But this war put an end to my storytelling.”
“How so?”
He wiped at his mouth with the back of his grimy hand. “My lord Agamemnon may need more warriors, but his faithless wife wants thetes.”
“Slaves?”
“Hah! Worse off than a slave. Far worse,” Poletes grumbled. He gestured to the exhausted men sprawled around the dying fire. “Look at us! Homeless and hopeless. At least a slave has a master to depend on. A slave belongs to someone; he is a member of a household. A thes belongs to no one and nothing; he is landless, homeless, cut off from everything except sorrow and hunger.”
“But you were a member of a household in Argos, weren’t you?”
He bowed his head and squeezed his eyes shut, as if to block out a painful memory.
“A household, yes,” he said, his voice low. “Until Queen Clytemnestra’s men booted me out of the city for repeating what every stray dog and alley cat in Argos was saying — that the queen has taken a lover while her royal husband is here fighting at Troy’s walls.”
I took a sip of the rapidly cooling stew, trying to think of something to say.
“At least they didn’t kill you,” was all I could come up with.
“Better if they had!” Poletes replied bitterly. “I would be dead and in Hades and that would be the end of it. Instead, I’m here, toiling like a jackass, working for wages.”