1. Odette

1

Odette

T he first murdered body I saw was my son’s. The second was my husband’s.

We had known they were coming, of course – the Greeks. Seven years ago, they had landed on Trojan shores, their approach signalled by rumours seeping through the citadel walls and whispers carried across the ocean. One of their kings, Agamemnon (a strange name), had done what no man before his people had. He’d united the fractured Greek kingdoms for one cause: her.

Well, that’s what they said. But we all knew the truth. The Greeks wanted access to our trade route with the other countries. Helen was just a convenient excuse to go to war.

I had seen her only once. Helen of Sparta. I could see why they coveted her. Hair when lit by the sunset shone like woven gold. A rare sight, in these parts. Yes, I could see why the men fought over her like she was a bone.

Worse, too, she had been kind when she’d visited my village. Shy, but kind. Asking gentle questions of the other women in that higher-pitched, accented voice of hers. Taking flower offerings from the children. Smiling demurely at the men. A people’s princess.

Now, they whispered she was Helen of Troy. That one of our princes, Paris, had saved her from a fate no woman would wish for. Yes, poor Helen. A queen, then a treasured prize behind Troy’s walls. Poor Helen, married to a rich king and in love with a richer prince. Poor Helen, safe behind those citadel walls while our men were slaughtered.

Those were my thoughts as I’d watched my husband Alcander die before dawn. When the soldiers arrived, they had barged through our door and dragged him away before I could reach for him. Another soldier came for me, hauling me into the chaos outside.

When I emerged, the wheat fields were on fire, but my eyes found Alcander, pinned to the ground by a different soldier again, this one a boar of a man, driving his spear into my husband. It seemed to pin his body to the ground as easily as my knife had speared boiled potatoes the night before. Alcander’s face had been smashed into the dirt and rocks, and blood pooled around his head, dirtying that mop of light brown hair. Still, my loving husband had turned his face to me, his eyes bleak – as if the blade had bled all colour from them – pleading with me to run .

But, there was nowhere to go. Our lands were on the outskirts of the citadel, a small modest wheat farm my husband’s family had run for generations. Acres of golden fields stretched out around us, the ones not on fire now browned and muddied by the Greeks who had cut through them on their way to finally raid us. The only place for me to run was towards the citadel’s walls, usually an entire day’s walk.

Instead, I’d watched the boar of a man pin my husband to the ground like a fish. Even his Greek armour did not hide the barrel of his huge torso, and he wore no helmet, so I could see his dark hair and beard. Matching dark cold eyes stared down at my husband, bulging arms holding the spear as Alcander’s body convulsed and writhed on the ground with its dying breaths.

I may have cried out, tried to reach for him; I do not know. I do not remember everything that happened in those moments. I remember strange things instead. When my husband’s blood seeped into the ground outside our family home, I had thought of the gods and our sacrifices to them. The demands they made of us. The blood offerings over doorways to ward off evil spirits. I remember being on my knees as my eyes went to the heavens.

My offerings had gone unnoticed. I had lost everything. The gods wanted this war regardless, just like the men.

“You owe me a debt that cannot be repaid.”

It was a calm statement, said in a moment of utter surrender to facts I could not change, and something in it stilled the air. The winds died, the screams stopped. It was as if Gaia herself cocked her head and watched me. One mother to another.

I watched back.

Perhaps mercifully, my boy was already dead when the soldiers arrived. None of the men or boys of the village had survived; only we remained – the herd of women on our knees in the courtyard, rounded up like cattle. Together we’d watched as the soldiers looted our homes, taking anything of value to them and placing it in a pile beside us. War prizes and property. Some of the women cried, others begged the soldiers to let them go, that they wouldn’t say a word to anyone. They had not been told what to expect from the coming war.

I had.

I remember glancing at the body of my dear Alcander lying a few feet away. He had warned me as best he could. He had been a good man, in his own way. Yet, there would be no funeral pyre for him, no coins laid on his eyes for the ferryman’s crossing of Styx to the Underworld. These brutes would not do our men that courtesy. Nor our children. Their souls would remain to travel these plains for the rest of their existence.

So, when the flames went up in our homes and the wailing women’s cries with them, mine had not joined in. Instead I had watched the boar soldier, the one responsible for the death of my husband and by proxy, my son. He stood there, arms folded as he watched the flames with us.

Some of his brothers in arms laughed. He did not. He just stood and watched, vigilant in his task. Then his eyes turned to me. He didn’t smile, didn’t leer. He and I both knew there was nothing more he could take from me. Not even with what we both knew would come next. These brutes could not take my agency if I had already resigned myself to the fact. Which left my pride, and that had died last night when I put the hemlock to my son’s lips. To spare him from this.

I hoped the soldier saw the promise in my eyes even as I swore an oath to the gods under my breath.

“If I am never to return here, may he never return to his home, either.”

We walked in silence along the road that would lead to the beaches. Most of the women were barefoot, having been dragged from their homes before dawn broke along the horizon. The soldiers had not allowed them to retrieve their shoes, and those women struggled as the sharp rocks dug into their heels. But, they didn’t complain out loud. I only saw them wince, and the soldiers must have seen it, too.

The crying finally stopped when the women tasted ash in the air. The fires continued to burn at our backs, and once the Greeks were satisfied nothing would remain, we had been ordered up. The one I watched, the boar, had said something in Greek that most of the women didn’t understand. I pretended not to, either. In our small village, Thracian or Lydian were more common tongues. The soldiers gestured and prodded enough that it was obvious they expected us to walk.

“Let’s go,” he’d said.

His voice was surprisingly melodic. I’d expected something gruff, something that matched his facial features, but from his tone and pacing, even in a different tongue, it was clear he’d been trained in the art of speech. This wasn’t just one of the soldiers, then. This was a general. That made me hate him even more.

The smell of fire stayed with us for a long time.

I took small satisfaction in the soldiers’ frustration with our slow pace. Every now and then, one would shove us forward, but since the entire group moved sluggishly, they had no choice but to let us continue at our own speed.

No one asked why I was wearing shoes.

Not sandals, either; buskins my husband had gifted me, that weaved their way halfway up my calves to protect my legs from dirt and bristles. I had told him if he expected me to work on the farm, then I needed proper attire. I had worn them in the fields all six years of our marriage.

Then, once I’d heard the Greeks had begun raiding villages and towns not far from our own, I had worn them to bed every night.

Our Trojan soldiers had met the Greeks when they’d arrived, of course, but there were no natural defences on a beach. It didn’t take a seasoned general, like Hector, to figure that out. You only had to look at the land to realise a force mighty enough could push Troy’s army back behind the citadel – exactly as the Greeks had.

I discovered that for myself when I surveyed the land, hours after we had started walking from our village. The sun was beginning its descent, a heavy summer’s dusk settling in the sky and signalling a cloyingly warm night, despite the breeze blowing off the ocean. The Greeks had occupied the land around the beach, which was grassy but still plagued by sand. Tents were pitched haphazardly, as if the soldiers had anticipated a swift victory and thus a swift departure.

As we trudged through the camp, the men began to gather in front of their tents. Some followed us, some jeered, some grabbed their cocks and waved them at us, as if we had never seen them before. We were farm girls and women, did they really think we did not know the realities of life? Most of these women had not actually waited to lose their maidenhoods in marriage, but practised in the hay bales and empty fields with boys desperate to know what lay between a woman’s legs, what it felt like to hold heavy breasts in their palms.

The jeers continued until we reached what I assumed was the centre of camp. A rug woven with rich reds and golds was spread across the grass and sand. At each corner stood a column and ropes stretched up to support the tent overhead. Fire torches were planted at each point, and in the middle of the rug was a throne on which sat a large, red-faced man. If the soldier who stood to the right of him was a boar, this man was a pig.

“I am King Agamemnon,” he declared.

As if that meant anything to us.

The women didn’t say anything, didn’t bow their heads or curtsy, and I could have sworn this turned the man redder. We heard murmurs from the crowd of Greek soldiers that had now gathered around us, and then the king gestured to one of the soldiers by his side.

“A good haul, men of Greece! I shall take this fair, shapely female at the front as mine, along with the gold pieces you found. Bring them to my tent. For the others who won their loot today, come forward and claim your prizes.”

A bronzed blonde soldier stepped forward first. Hard narrowed eyes roamed the collection of us and then lithe, muscular arms gleaming with sweat grabbed the second-prettiest.

“Very well, Achilles.”

The women realised what was happening and started to panic, their heads turning this way and that. It must have looked like chickens in a coop because the men started laughing again. I grabbed the hand of the woman closest to me and stroked it in reassurance.

The boar’s eyes zeroed in.

The woman whose hand I held did the same to the woman beside her, and that woman beside her, and so on. Eventually, all the women calmed.

Agamemnon chuckled. “You next, Odysseus. You led the raid, after all.”

No man stepped forward, so I did not know who the king was talking to until the boar man lifted his chin. He didn’t even bother to survey the other women as he looked me dead in the eye.

“I want her.”

“Very well,” the king said again.

The boar, Odysseus as he was called, did not step forward to claim me. Instead, he continued to look me in the eye, as if he knew I could understand him. But, the gods would be damned before I took a step. We eyed each other, both unblinking, until he finally stepped towards me. His calloused fingers on my upper arm gripped tight enough to bruise as he yanked me forward to stand beside him; to watch as the rest of the women were distributed like platters of meat.

Once the business of the day had been decided, the fire torches doused with water and dunked in the sand for good measure, the crowd of men dispersed with their new spear-wives and bed-slaves. Any names or titles we’d held had died with our husbands and fathers. One by one, the women left with their new masters until I was left standing on the dais alone. With him.

“Come,” he grunted.

When I refused, his eyes hardened. That was the only warning I got before he seized my wrist and dragged me along beside him.

The boar’s tent was lavish compared to the others in the camp. I hadn’t seen inside them, but this was larger than the other tents around it, with a rug and plenty of cushions and blankets on the pallets. Another pallet doubled as a serving table. I had never imagined such wealth could exist in a war camp. More riches were here than had filled my modest home. I doubt they had brought this all over themselves, which confirmed the rumours – in my mind – that they’d already raided other villages, too. There would be other women here.

The tent, however, was empty except for the two of us. The minute we got inside, he released his vice-like grip on my wrist.

“Take a seat,” he grunted.

Instead, I surveyed the space and then turned to face him.

He chuckled. “I know perfectly well you can understand Greek.”

I shot him a piercing glare, but he turned his back to do something as he continued talking. I took the opportunity to scan the tent some more. The only weapons I saw were the sword still attached to his hip and the spear he had just placed on the wall beside him. There was no way I could get it in time. Even if I could, where would I go? There were a thousand Greeks out there waiting to chase me.

“I suggest you take a seat and break your fast with me.” He turned and eyed me again. His hands were now full with two plates, each with bread and cheese and fruits. My stomach chose that moment to betray me with a large growl. We hadn’t eaten the entire walk here.

He chuckled again and my hackles rose. The sound felt too easy, too intimate, after what he had done in the early hours of the morning.

He noticed my eyes scanning my husband’s blood still splattered on his skin. “Ah.”

He put the plates down on the pallet before grabbing a jug of water. He then went to the tent’s opening and poured water over each arm, one at a time, and scrubbed with his hands. He returned and placed the jug on the pallet, the remaining water sloshing inside as it hit the surface.

“Better?”

“How kind of you,” I remarked in Thracian.

He must have understood it, for his brow darkened. “Sit.”

Begrudgingly I agreed, because starving wasn’t going to serve me. But, to break my fast in the evening with the man who had killed my husband, to sit opposite him … My stomach may have physically needed the food, but my appetite was not there. It took conscious effort to take a bite of bread, to chew every mouthful, to swallow. Every movement felt like an act of betrayal.

The deaths of the day clearly did not affect him so much. He ate quickly, efficiently. As if the food was merely fuel for his body and nothing more. Perhaps he didn’t savour life, only death.

“So, where did you learn Greek?” he asked.

From the man you killed, I muttered in my head. But how did he know? He must have seen the question in my eyes, because he answered.

“You don’t have that glassy-eyed confused look that the other women do. I’m assuming your husband taught you? Your father?”

I didn’t bother nodding at either guess.

“Rare for a farmer to know Greek.”

It was. But my husband hadn’t wanted to be a farmer; he’d wanted to be a scholar. We’d met outside the citadel library …

I had run into him on the library steps. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but my mother was busy chatting away to a woman who had called for her by name: Callidora. After she’d commented on how long my hair was getting, just the same shade as my mother’s, and ‘wasn’t I turning into a proper young lady’ now that my body was starting to fill out with ‘womanly hormones’ (though I didn’t know what they were), I stopped listening. So, I decided to make a game on the steps. I was only eleven. I hadn’t been watching where I was going and bumped into a much taller boy, whose flat brown hair fell into his eyes as he looked up from his book.

“Oh, hello,” he said, as he snapped the book shut and smiled at me.

Mortified, I stood there looking at him with eyes wide, afraid to blink. I think, at the time, I hoped he would mistake me for a statue, though I didn’t have the porcelain skin to pull that off.

He laughed. “Shy one, are you? Me too. That’s why I come here,” he whispered conspiratorially as he pointed at the overwhelmingly huge building behind me. I’d never been in it. My mother told me only the smartest of men got to visit. But, this one didn’t look much like a man, all long-limbed with no meat on his bones, as she would say. He definitely wasn’t as old as my father, but he was older than the boys I knew.

“You’re allowed in there?” I folded my arms over my chest and fixed him with my sternest look, the one my mother gave me when she knew I was lying.

He laughed at me again. “When I have time to study, yes.”

I hesitated. “What do you study?”

He shrugged. “All sorts. The kings, the politics, the geography of the land.”

“Geo-gra-fee?”

“The arrangement of the land.”

“Why would you want to learn a thing like that, in there? Why not just look at it?” I gestured at the land around us as if that would prove my point, and caught my mother watching us. She was wearing a peacock-blue tunic, her hair in a braid atop her head to signal she was no longer a maiden and half down her back – to shock the neighbours, my father said. She looked like a goddess surveying the steps, as if she was about to walk up into the temple herself. But, there was a strange expression on her face. I couldn’t tell if she was angry at me or not, but I could see her eyes peering intently at us from all the way over here. I turned to look back to the older boy.

“My family are farmers. My brother will inherit the land, but I thought I’d do something useful to help. Study it. See if we can’t get a bit more coin for our crops if we’re smart about it,” he continued.

“Oh.” I didn’t have anything smarter to say. I don’t think he realised I was distracted by my mother.

Luckily, she chose that moment to call my name. “Odette!”

“Bye!” I turned and rushed down the stairs as fast as my legs could carry me, which was quite fast given I was unnaturally tall for my age. According to my mother, I got my height from my father (even though she was taller than most of the ladies around here, too).

“Who was that?” she asked when I arrived beside her, out of breath.

“No one.”

“Looks like you had a lot to say to no one.”

I turned back to see him still watching me. I shrugged. “He was chatty.”

I hadn’t known it then, but Alcander had asked around, figured out who I was and where my family lived. Then, on the eve of my fourteenth birthday, he came to ask my father for my hand in marriage. His proposal was initially rejected, my parents unorthodox enough to let me wait until I was sixteen to give me a chance to mature into a young woman. But their plan for me was always to be a wife, to bear children, to be a good Trojan woman of solid stock and breed. To do my part and to do it well. Given that Alcander was only eight-and-ten himself, the two-year wait had been approved by both families.

His marriage hadn’t been as important as his elder brother’s, who would inherit the land, which was good because my dowry wasn’t very large. But it was good enough for him, and the match suited my parents just fine. It perhaps would not have been fine had his family known that their eldest would come down with a fever he could not break. But by then it was too late; Alcander and I were already married.

I was one of the lucky ones, losing my maidenhead to a good man. A studious man. Not one of those rough-and-tumbles in the barn I later heard about from other women. They’d given me looks of pity when they’d discovered I’d only had dalliances with my husband, even though that was the proper way to do things. I’d simply smiled at them. He found his pleasure and gave us a good life, what more did I need?

I found it far more invigorating when he would share with me the texts he’d been reading in the library. No other farmers’ wives got that privilege. Alcander liked nothing more than to tell me what he had learned, in a time before he had to take over the farm, and I liked nothing more than to listen by the fire at night. Geography, as he had loved, the history of our townships, and … Greek.

Then our son had arrived, and those conversations made way for the ones all new parents have. The Greek was barely practised, until we’d heard the greatest Grecian Army the world had ever seen was coming to our shores. Then, Alcander had dug through his memory to recall everything he could to help us survive what was to come, knowing he likely wouldn’t, if – and when – they raided us.

I didn’t say any of this to the boar across from me, who continued eating. Watching me and eating. Eating and watching. Until he finished and stood, leaving his empty plate on the makeshift table beside my barely-touched one.

“That’s your pallet over there,” he pointed to the one farthest away from the entrance of the tent, lined with burgundy cushions and a thick blanket. “I suspect you’ll eat when I’m gone and then I’d suggest you stay here and sleep. You need it.”

At the look of confusion on my face, he nodded towards my feet. “If you were smart enough to be wearing buskins when we arrived, then you knew we were coming, which means you weren’t sleeping when we raided your village. You must be tired. Rest. I’ll be back later.”

But, he’d mistaken my look of confusion for something else. When I looked between one pallet and the other – his and mine it seemed – he realised where my concern lay.

“Ah.” He gave me a long, measured look while he stood at the tent opening, his hand on the fabric, ready to leave. “I have no interest in sleeping with you, spear-wife. I didn’t pick you for that.”