Ben Bova: Vengeance of Orion

“Then the women here…”

“Slaves. Captives. Daughters and wives of slain enemies, captured in the sack of towns and farms.”

We came to a group of men sitting around one of the larger cook fires, down close beside the black-tarred boats. They looked up and made room for us. Up on the boat nearest us a large canvas had been draped to form a tent. A helmeted guard stood before it, with a well-groomed dog by his side. I stared at the carved and painted figurehead of the boat, a grinning dolphin’s face against a deep blue background.

“Odysseus’s camp,” Poletes explained, in a low voice, as we sat and were offered generous bowls of roasted meat and goblets of honeyed wine. “These are Ithacans.”

He poured a few drops of wine on the ground before drinking, and made me do the same. “Reverence the gods,” Poletes instructed me, surprised that I did not know the custom.

The men praised me for my performance at the barricade, then fell to wondering which particular god had inspired me to such heroic action. The favorites were Poseidon and Ares, although Athene was a close runner and Zeus himself was mentioned now and then. Being Greeks, they soon fell to arguing passionately among themselves without bothering to ask me about it.

I was happy to let them speculate. I listened, and as they argued I learned much about the war.

They had not been camped here at Troy for ten years, although they had been campaigning in the region each summer for nearly that long. Achilles, Menalaos, Agamemnon, and the other warrior kings had been ravaging the eastern Aegean coast, burning towns and taking captives, until finally they had worked up the nerve — and the forces — to besiege Troy itself.

But without Achilles, their fiercest fighter, the men thought that their prospects were dim. Apparently Agamemnon had awarded Achilles a young woman captive and then taken her back for himself, and this insult was more than the haughty warrior could endure, even from the High King.

“The joke of it all,” said one of the men, tossing a well-gnawed lamb bone to the dogs hovering beyond our circle, “is that Achilles prefers his friend Patrokles to any woman.”

They all nodded and murmured agreement. The strain between Achilles and Agamemnon was not over a sexual partner; it was a matter of honor and stubborn pride. On both sides, as far as I could see.

As we ate and talked the skies darkened and thunder rumbled from inland.

“Father Zeus speaks from Mt. Ida,” said Poletes.

One of the foot soldiers, his leather jerkin stained with spatters of grease and blood, grinned up at the cloudy sky. “Maybe Zeus will give us the afternoon off.”

“Can’t fight in the rain,” someone else agreed.

Sure enough, within minutes it began pelting down. We scattered for whatever shelter we could find. Poletes and I hunkered down in the lee of Odysseus’s boat.

“Now the great lords will meet and arrange a truce, so that the women and slaves can go out and recover the bodies of the dead. Tonight their bodies will be burned and a barrow raised over their bones.” He sighed. “That’s how the rampart began, as a barrow to cover the remains of the slain heroes.”

I sat and watched the rain pouring down, turning the beach into a quagmire, dotting the sea with splashes. The gusting wind drove gray sheets of rain across the bay, and it got so dark and misty that I could not see the headland. It was chill and miserable and there was nothing to do except wait like dumb animals until the sun returned.

I crouched as close to the boat’s hull as I could, feeling cold and utterly alone. I knew I did not belong in this time and place. I had been exiled here by the same power that had killed my love.

I serve a god , I had told these gullible Achaians. Yes, but not willingly. Like a poor witless creature blundering through a fathomless forest, I am reacting to forces beyond my comprehension.

Who did inspire my heroics? I wondered. The golden figure in my dream called himself Apollo. But from what the men around the campfire had said, Apollo supported the Trojans in this war, not the Achaians. I found myself dreading sleep. I knew that once I fell asleep I would again have to face that… god. I had no other word for him.

Suddenly I realized a man was standing in front of me. I looked up and saw a sturdy, thick-torsoed man with a grizzled dark beard and a surly look on his face. He wore a wolf’s skin draped over his head and shoulders. The rain pounded on it. Knee-length tunic, with a sword buckled to his hip. Shins and calves muddied. Ham-sized fists planted on his hips.

“You’re the one called Orion?” he shouted over the driving rain.

I scrambled to my feet and saw that I stood several inches taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.

“I am Orion.”

“Come with me,” he snapped, and started to turn away.

“To where?”

Over his shoulder he answered, “My lord Odysseus wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!”

Poletes came with me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, and up a rope ladder to its deck.

“I knew Odysseus was the only one here wise enough to make use of you,” he cackled. “I knew it!”

WHICH god do you serve?” Odysseus asked. I stood in the presence of the King of Ithaca, who was sitting on a wooden stool, flanked on either side by other noblemen. He did not appear to be a very tall man; his legs seemed stumpy, but heavily muscled. His chest was enormous, broad and deep like that of a man who had swum every day since boyhood. Thick strong arms, circled by leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli even in the gloom inside his shipboard tent. White scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest.

There was a fresh gash on his right forearm, as well, red and still oozing blood slightly.

The rain drummed against the canvas, scant inches above my head. The tent smelled of dogs, musty and damp. And cold. Odysseus wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had a sheep’s fleece thrown across his wide shoulders.

His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair. Only a trace of gray in that beard. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as gray as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.

He had asked his question the instant Poletes and I were ushered into his tent, without any preliminaries or formal greetings.

“Which god do you serve?”

Hastily I replied, “Athene.” I was not sure why I picked the warrior goddess, except that Poletes had said she favored the Achaians against the Trojans.

Odysseus grunted and motioned for me to sit on the only unoccupied stool in the tent. The two other men sitting on either side of him were dressed much as he was. One of them seemed about Odysseus’s age, the other much older: His hair and beard were entirely white and his limbs seemed withered to bones and tendons. He had wrapped a blue cloak around himself. They all looked weary and drained by the morning’s battle even though neither of them bore fresh wounds as Odysseus did.

Odysseus seemed to notice Poletes for the first time. “Who is he?” he asked, pointing.

“My friend,” I said. “My companion and helper.”

He nodded, accepting the storyteller. Behind Poletes, barely inside the tent and out of the pelting rain, stood the officer who had summoned us to this audience with the King of Ithaca.

“You did us a great service this morning,” said Odysseus. “Such service should be rewarded.”