Ben Bova: Vengeance of Orion

“So he is,” admitted Achilles. “And well beloved by Father Zeus, I’m sure.”

It was going to be a difficult parley, I could see.

“Perhaps our guests are hungry,” Patrokles suggested in a soft voice.

Achilles tousled his curly mop of hair. “Always the thoughtful one.”

He bade us sit and told the serving women to feed us and bring wine cups. Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix took couches arranged near Achilles’s dais. Patrokles filled their cups from his pitcher of gold. We underlings sat on the floor, by the entrance. The women passed trays of broiled lamb with onions among us and filled our wooden cups with spiced wine mixed with honey.

After a round of toasts and polite banter, Achilles said, “I thought I heard the mighty Agamemnon bawling like a woman, earlier today. He breaks into tears quite easily, doesn’t he?”

Odysseus frowned slightly. “Our High King was wounded today. A cowardly Trojan archer hit him in the right shoulder.”

“Too bad,” said Achilles. “I see that you did not escape the day’s fighting without a wound, yourself. Did it bring you to tears?”

Ajax burst out, “Achilles, if Agamemnon cries, it’s not from pain or fright. It’s from shame! Shame that the Trojans have penned us up in our camp. Shame that our best fighter sits here on a soft couch while his comrades are being slaughtered by Hector and his troops.”

“Shame is what he should feel!” Achilles shouted back. “He’s robbed me! He’s treated me like a slave or even worse. He calls himself the High King but he behaves like a thieving whoremaster!”

And so it went, for hours. Achilles was furious with Agamemnon for taking back a prize he had been awarded, some captive girl. He claimed that he did all the fighting while Agamemnon was a coward, but after the battle was won the High King parceled out the spoils to suit himself and even then reneged on what Achilles felt was due him.

“I have sacked more towns and brought the Achaians more captives and loot than any man here, and none of you can say I haven’t,” he insisted hotly. “Yet that fat lard-ass can steal my proper rewards away from me and you — all of you! — just let him do it. Did any of you stick up for me in the council? Do you think I owe you anything? Why should I fight for you when you won’t even raise your voices on my behalf?”

Patrokles tried to soothe him, without much success. “Achilles, these men aren’t your enemies. They’ve come here on a mission of reconciliation. It isn’t proper for a host to bellow at his guests so.”

“I know,” Achilles replied, almost smiling down at the young man. “It’s not your fault,” he said to Odysseus and the others. “But I’ll see myself in Hades before I’ll help Agamemnon again. He’s not trustworthy. You should be thinking about appointing a new leader for yourselves.”

Odysseus tried tact, praising Achilles’s prowess in battle, downplaying Agamemnon’s failures and shortcomings. Ajax, as blunt and straightforward as a shovel, flatly told Achilles that he was helping the Trojans to murder the Achaians. Old Phoenix appealed to his former student’s sense of honor, and recited childhood homilies at him.

Achilles remained unmoved. “Honor?” he snapped at Phoenix. “What kind of honor would I have left if I put my spear back in the service of the man who robbed me?”

Odysseus said, “We can get the girl back for you, if that’s what you want. We can get a dozen girls for you.”

“Or boys,” Ajax added. “Whatever you want.”

Achilles got to his feet, and Patrokles scrambled to stand beside him. I was right, he was terribly small, although every inch of him was hard with sinew. Even the slender Patrokles topped him by a few inches.

“I will defend my boats when Hector breaks into the camp,” Achilles said. “Until Agamemnon comes to me personally and apologizes, and begs me to rejoin the fighting, that is all that I will do.”

Odysseus rose, realizing that we were being dismissed. Phoenix stood up and, after glancing around, Ajax finally understood and got up too.

“What will the poets say of Achilles in future generations?” Odysseus asked, firing his last arrow at the warrior’s pride. “That he sulked in his tent while the Trojans slaughtered his friends?”

The shot glanced off Achilles without penetrating. “They will never say that I humbled myself and threw away my honor by serving a man who has humiliated me.”

We went to the doorway, speaking polite formal farewells. Phoenix hung back and I heard Achilles invite his old mentor to remain the night.

Outside, Ajax shook his head wearily. “There’s nothing we can do. He just won’t listen to us.”

Odysseus clapped his broad shoulder. “We tried our best, my friend. Now we must prepare for tomorrow’s battle without Achilles.”

Ajax trudged off into the darkness, followed by his men. Odysseus 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 the war.”

“And if I am not?”

Odysseus smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. “No man lives forever, Orion.”

IN less than an hour I found myself picking my way across the trench that fronted our rampart and heading into 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 right hand was the impromptu symbol of a herald.

“These should get you past the Trojan sentries without having your throat slit,” Odysseus had told me. He did not smile as he said those words, and I did not find his reassurances very reassuring.

“Get to Prince Hector and speak to no one else,” he 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 asked.

Odysseus smiled at my naivetй. “Of course. But always with the demand for a huge ransom, plus all the fortune that Helen brought with her. And always when we were fighting under the walls of Troy. Priam and his sons never believed 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.”

“Returning Helen is nothing more than a face-saving compromise?” I blurted.

He looked at me curiously. “She is only a woman, Orion. Do you think Menalaos has been pining away in celibacy since the bitch ran off with Aleksandros?”

I blinked at him, so taken aback by his attitude that I had no reply. I wondered, though, if Odysseus felt the same way about his own wife, waiting for him back in Ithaca.

He made me repeat my instructions and then, satisfied, led me to the top of the rampart, not far from where I had gained my moment of glory earlier in the 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 thing. Here and there I could make out the glow of Trojan campfires, like distant faint stars in the shrouding fog.

“Remember,” said Odysseus, “you are to speak to Prince Hector and no one else.”

“I understand,” I said.

I scrambled down the slope of the rampart, into the inky shadows of the trench, and finally made my way through the slowly drifting tendrils of mist toward the Trojan camp, guided by the fires that flickered and glowed through the fog. The mist was cold on my skin, like the touch of death.