8. Odette

8

Odette

W hen I had first arrived, it felt as if every camp had been all but deserted when the men went off to fight, each one willing to earn his glory. That’s what all men fought for: honour and glory. The Greeks weren’t so different to the Trojan men after all. They just didn’t know it.

But now, four months later, more and more men lingered around camp, claiming illness. Each day, it seemed their numbers grew, abandoning their swords and choosing to remain behind. Not that I nor any of the other women knew what these supposed ailments were. We were not allowed to work in the medical tent, for we could not hope to understand the medicine of men, or so we were told. No matter that we’d made tinctures like the medics every day when we had been home with our families.

It was common now to hear the usual morning grumbles and murmurs persist like a dull ache while I went about my business, collecting water and food for the day, doing the washing, each step purposeful but heavy, made heavier by the knowledge of the endless days that stretched before us.

But on this particular day as I passed by the watering tents, I caught a snippet of bitter conversation, the voice familiar but one I could not place.

“Nine years wasted!” he exclaimed. “And for what? Nothing but bloodshed and suffering!”

I scoffed under my breath. The ones who stayed behind always complained the loudest. But I held my tongue and kept moving.

When the men returned from fighting on the plains, weary and worn, covered in blood and sand and dirt, their faces etched with exhaustion and longing for respite, the camp seemed poised on the edge of unrest. The usual routine of washing and gathering around the fires was disrupted by murmurs of discontent that simmered just beneath the surface.

A fire could feed no more than a hundred men at a time before we needed replenishments, and there were tens of thousands of them. At least a thousand in each army. Fires littered stretches of sand all the way up the beach. Each camp, for each king and his men, had gathered its own sort of mini community. Unless one of the other kings or generals was visiting, we tended to see the same faces day in and day out.

By nightfall, the whispers of the discontented had turned the camp alive with the sounds of anger and unrest. The fires seemed to burn higher and brighter, the embers spitting into the air, as men shuffled about in the sand and began to fight one another. King Agamemnon eventually dispatched his men to stop the dissent, to carry away those fighting; but those men were just followed with more cries of outrage.

It was more and more common nowadays that certain women did not turn up at the fires, and we learnt in the following days to look for bruises on their arms, necks, and chins in the mornings. The men did not think the women needed aid, so we would save some goat’s milk and honey, hide it, and use it as a balm. Or steal some of the herbs meant for the medical tent. More often than not, those women had been initially presented to that pig of a king, Agamemnon, and he’d later discarded them to his other soldiers.

So the king’s soldiers were no better.

The rest of us were left to gather around the fires of our camps lit along the beach. Water was boiling to cook whatever we had harvested that day, game cooked in a broth and then carved for everyone to come and help themselves. Men first, always.

I had just poured some more water in the broth that had begun to reduce down into a stickier sauce when I felt a large, calloused hand between my shoulder blades. Looking up, I saw Odysseus, his weathered features illuminated by the flickering flames. Despite the chaos that surrounded us, there was a warmth in his gaze that softened the harsh lines of his face.

“There you are.”

I smiled at him before busying myself gathering him a plate, filling it with the foods I knew he liked best. “Thank you,” he said when I handed it to him.

“So polite, Odysseus,” one of the nearby generals I didn’t know said before chuckling. “You would think your beautiful wife, Penelope, didn’t prepare meals for you in all the time you’ve been married.”

I watched Odysseus grin in response, his eyes crinkling at the corners with genuine amusement. “My darling wife is good at many things,” he said. “But cooking is not one of them. She’ll tell you so herself, next time you see her.”

“When do you think that’ll be?” one of the younger soldiers piped up. A nervous murmur rippled through the crowd.

“Soon enough,” Odysseus said, his voice steady, as if another year or more until he saw his wife was not a lifetime. It was the quiet confidence of a seasoned general, one who knew how to keep his men in line.

As he demolished his plate with surprising speed and handed it off to one of the girls responsible for washing dishes, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of bitterness. If I had it my way, it would be a lot longer than that before he saw his wife again.

Odysseus got up and left, and another man approached me. I couldn’t quite place him, but after a while they all started to look the same to me, anyway. But his accent – that I recognised. He was speaking at me in Greek, too fast for me to keep up. It was clear he had some plight with the food, whether it wasn’t enough or if he wanted more I couldn’t quite tell. Portions were rationed for a reason, but I wasn’t going to be the fool who told him that. I would wait for another to convey that particular message. Instead, I tried to calm the man down, to ask him to repeat himself with what limited Greek I had, but with each attempt he got more and more incredulous.

“Kουτ??!”? 1 he cried. “Pórni!”? 2 Tossing his plate on the ground and spitting, he then pinned his eyes back on me. “Pick it up.”

I understood that well enough. I bent down to reach for the plate when I felt the man’s grip on my hair. I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear my hair down, even though Alcander was now gone. Not quite the woman I once was, not quite the woman I now had to be. So his fingers tangled in the intricate braid I had weaved and tugged me upright, until he forced my chin to tip back. He raised his other hand, staring into my eyes, his own flickering with malice. I stared back at him, unflinching. Then …

“Unless you would like to be whipped for touching another man’s property, Thersites, I suggest you let her go.”

Odysseus.

The man’s grip did not immediately recede. But when he looked around, as I too looked up towards Odysseus, I felt his grip loosen and then retreat completely.

“A wise move.”

Thersites muttered something under his breath as he went to walk past, until Odysseus’ hand reached out and made contact with his chest, halting the man where he stood.

“What did you say?” Odysseus asked.

I’d never heard him talk so softly before. For his sheer size, the softer his voice was, the more menacing his demeanour.

“Did someone wound your hearing in battle today, Thersites? I asked you to repeat yourself.”

The soldier muttered something I couldn’t hear, though I cocked my head and strained to listen. His answer must have appeased Odysseus though, who eventually removed his hand and let the man continue on his way.

Then he stepped up to me. “Are you hurt?” He gripped my chin lightly, turning my head one way then the next to survey my face.

“No, I’m fine.” Then, when he dropped his hand and nodded with a clenched jaw, I added, “Thank you.”

That seemed to cause him to release a breath. “We need to talk. Tonight, once you’ve finished your duties here.”

I nodded in compliance. “As you wish.”

When I arrived back at the tent hours later, he had several letters strewn across the palette table. “Come, take a seat.”

“What are these?” I asked.

“Practice materials. Letters from home, for you to read. Had you been proficient in Greek already, Thersites could not have so easily made you cower to him. Twice.”

Somehow, he made that last word sound like an accusation against me.

I scowled. “A man is always able to make a woman cower to him, by the sheer nature of his size.” I mimicked what I meant so that my meaning was clear.

“True,” he conceded. “But, where Thersites has size, as you say, you have wit and cunning. It does not take much to overpower a fool – even a large one – with smarts.”

“You want me to … read these?” I tapped at the letters on the table.

“Yes, and speak them out loud to me. That way, you can practise your Greek and you’ll become familiar with how the letters look on the page too.”

I could not recognise all the words, but one word, one name, I did. “These are letters from your wife that she wrote before the war. To take with you.”

“They are.”

“Don’t you want to read them … in private?”

“When you and I are alone, Odette, we are in private.”

“Oh.” He was right, though I was loath to admit it.

Learning more Greek would come in useful. The longer I was here in this camp, the more frustrated I felt by the lack of things I could say. The girls all knew our common tongue, but the soldiers hated hearing us speak it. They assumed we were talking about them, and the crueller ones would slap the women they heard talking in a foreign language. ‘Speak Greek!’ they’d yell at us, as if it were that easy. As if we weren’t having to translate everything they were saying into our own common tongue in our heads, understand it, form a response, convert that into what little Greek we knew, and then try and pronounce it. Most of the time they jeered and laughed and called us ‘slow’.

So, Odysseus’ offer was tempting, I could not deny that.

“Why?” I eventually asked him.

He looked at me. “Why would I teach you? I have just explained that to you. You have to be smarter. I can’t have you getting on the wrong side of these men.”

“No, not that. Why do you care?” I asked slowly.

“You’re my property, Odette.”

I shook my head. “I have seen how other men treat their property. You are not the same. You once told me you picked me for something. I want to know why, what, you picked me for.”

He blinked slowly, as if surprised by the question, before looking at me as though he’d never seen me before. Then he leaned back from the crates we sat on and crossed his arms. His forearms, dusted in dark brown hairs, bulged even larger, and I saw the fabric of his chiton ripple and stretch taut over the power of his quads, solid and unyielding, like carved stone. That amount of muscle on display made me uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as the assessing look he roamed over my face.

“Because you’re intelligent. That much is clear, and it’s a rare commodity in war.”

“In-tell-ig-ent?”

“Smart. Clever.”

“Ah.”

“And clever slaves,” (to his credit, he did scowl at that word) “are rarer than pretty, fuckable ones. It is wise to own rare things.”

Nothos. ? 3

He might have spat the word ‘slaves’ with distaste, but he still refused to see me as anything more than a tool to be used, playing on my emotions with a clear understanding of how human I was. My first impression of him had been right: while others admired his cleverness, his stirring speeches, and strategic brilliance, I saw through it. He was cunning, manipulative, and used people for his own gain with a callous disregard for anything else. I wondered if he was even aware of his own cruelty – and if his wife saw it, too.

“Let us begin.”

Scowling, I took a seat at the pallet and gently snatched the first letter he held out to me.

When Alcander first taught me all the Greek he knew, I saw it as a vast, sprawling language similar to our own. With that similarity, I had picked it up easily enough. But after I became a mother, relearning had proved challenging. Perhaps it was the stress of the situation, having to learn polite phrases: pleases, thank yous, how can I help, what would you like. Knowing they were all phrases designed to keep me alive; if you could call slavery a life.

Penelope, instead, wrote and spoke as eloquently as her husband. She mused over old memories of her and Odysseus enjoying a sweet moment together before he’d left for the war. They ate akratos? 4 and half a fig each; the juice of a particularly succulent one she had bitten into dripped down her chin and he had wiped it off with his tongue. Then she recounted quite vividly other things he’d done with his tongue, which I read until I’d blushed and refused to read any more, citing I could not possibly understand all the words.

Still, our lessons continued every night after I had finished my duties, and I got to know Odysseus’ wife through her letters. She was clever, sharp, and witty, just as he’d described me. Not all of the letters were so immodest as that first one. My favourites were those in which she’d spun tales of how she’d imagined their son getting older in those first few years, so Odysseus could feel closer to him as he grew up. They warmed my heart, for it was like getting to relive all of Lykas’ moments of growth; being absorbed in the letter and able to deny the reality of him being gone. As if he was simply off in a faraway land, like Odysseus’ son.

Until, one day, the lessons stopped.

Instead, I found Odysseus in our tent as tired and weary as the rest of the men. He barely offered me a glance before going out to wash away the day, again barely a grunt when I pressed a glass of wine into his hands upon his return. I went about preparing something to eat with what we had as he slumped into a seat on the floor, his back against the centre wooden pole that held up the tent. One leg was long and straight in front of him, the other bent at the knee with his foot on the floor, as he held the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb.

“Headache, my lord?”

“This whole war is giving me a headache.” I mulled over what to say, when he beat me to it. “What have the women noticed about the men of late?”

I stilled, then wiped the knife I’d been using against my tunic, placed it down and turned to him. “How did you know the women have been discussing the men?”

“Your shoulder blades sit much tighter together when you have something to tell me, and you don’t know how to broach the subject.”

I hadn’t realised he’d come to know me so well. I thought I’d been all but a closed book, but apparently any amount of time in close quarters proved that even I could not hide my very nature from others. I wondered how long it would be before my other secrets unknowingly slipped out from beneath my skin. I made a mental resolve to push those thoughts down further, deeper , and then cocked my head so I looked inquisitive.

He always liked when I was inquisitive.

“We’ve all noticed the men are angrier, meaner. Not like they were even three months past. It is as if the straw that broke the camel’s back has finally landed. It’s not like when the men were chasing glory. This is a …” I searched for the word. “... Frustrated kind of anger. And some of them are taking it out on the women.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

“Are you not going to do something about it?”

“What would you have me do, Odette? They’re men. Their very nature is to fight, feed, and fuck.”

“It seems to me they are getting plenty of all of that.”

“Yes, but they – we – are losing on the battlefield,” he growled. “Day after day, we gain ground only to lose it. We cut down Trojan after Trojan, only for more to pour out of the gates of Troy. Every day, the men lose their friends and brothers in arms. Every day is the same mindless monotony, as war is prone to be.”

“They knew what they were signing up for.”

“I’m not entirely sure all of them realised the full scope of what it would entail.” He thrust a hand through his hair. I would be due to give him one of his haircuts soon.

I held my ground, my arms folded now. “And the women should suffer for this because …?”

“They shouldn’t. But if foolish men can’t win one fight, they’ll pick another they know they can win against a smaller opponent. It’s in their nature.”

“Men like to blame a lot on the laws of nature, while they pillage the natural world around them.”

“Will you continue to nag me all night, or will you provide a solution to your quandary?”

I uncrossed my arms and rubbed my hands together, before leaning back to grip the makeshift table behind me. He had to see me as open, willing, vulnerable. That was the only way he would listen.

We’d had similar discussions in the past, when the letter reading had turned to more heated, philosophical debates. I had learnt that when Odysseus was cornered, when his intelligence was threatened, it was the boar that I would meet. He would snarl and storm off, only to return much later in the night. But, when I was open, vulnerable … it was as if his mind placed me in a certain category. His protective instincts rose to the fore, and often whatever I suggested became an idea planted in his mind that would bloom.

Such an exhausting game it was, playing the willing slave.

“The men are frustrated at the lack of results, yes?”

Odysseus nodded. “Essentially.”

“Then you must give them something productive. Useless, but productive; something that yields results. That’s what we do, what we used to do, when we had the children count the wheat grains before they were grounded.”

Odysseus looked at me for a moment, and I saw the calculation behind his eyes.

“Just a suggestion,” I shrugged, turning back to the meagre food preparations.

He stayed quiet for a minute or so, as was his custom when he was working through something in his head. Then I heard him stand. It was not surprising to me when he came to place his empty cup beside me.

What did surprise me was how close he stood behind me. I could feel his body heat radiating between us as he leaned in and muttered in my ear. “You are cleverer than half the generals I have to work with, you know that?”

His hands brushed my shoulders gently as he held me in place and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek before releasing me and striding out of the tent.

I lifted my fingertips to my cheek, where the skin still tingled from the bristles of his beard.

Alcander had always been clean-shaven, at my insistence. I had always thought the coarseness of a beard would be too itchy, too unpleasant. But I found myself thrilled at the tingle, at how soft his lips were compared to the harshness of his beard.

How quick it had been – I hadn’t even realised what he was doing. My focus had been on his hands at my shoulders, at the close proximity of him.

I wondered why he’d done it.

But what I wondered at more – something I immediately found so horrifying I had to push it down below any other thoughts or feelings I’d had since coming to this camp – was how utterly normal it had felt.

The next day, when I woke, the morning sounds were different to what I was used to. Scrambling into my tunic and quickly tying my hair into a loose plait, I hurried outside to see the men all marching towards the dais.

“What is going on?” I asked Τ?ιλορ?α as she, too, marched past.

“I’d have thought you’d know. Apparently Odysseus has asked the men to gather at the dais on King Agamemnon’s behalf.”

We followed behind the soldiers, curious to see what the announcement was. Surely, it was about the dissent amongst the ranks, and I wondered if today was the day Odysseus would announce what the men would be doing if they would not go to war. They couldn’t, after all, have them all whipped into compliance. There would be a mutiny.

Sure enough, Odysseus stood on the top of the dais and called out to the men. “Soldiers of all the Greek islands – I speak to you now. I understand your grumbles and groans. It has been a long time away from home. But, you knew this would happen. So said the oracle who, need I remind you, also ensured we would be victorious! Do you really think Achilles, the greatest warrior of all, would be here, fighting a war he could not find glory in?”

Odysseus stepped down and Achilles, that bronzed god-like man with lithe muscles, took his place to deliver a speech to the men. Of course, Achilles was a favourite amongst the men for his fighting skill and the women for his looks. Not that he ever took a woman to his bed. That place was reserved for his cousin, his companion, Patroclus. No one particularly cared. Patroclus was as passive in nature as most women, so it came as no surprise that he shared a bed with Achilles. Still, the women swooned.

I, however, found my eyes darting towards Odysseus. He was so much more heavily muscled than Achilles, and would naturally be slower in speed. They were slow and fast, dark and light in colouring; complete opposites.

I wondered if I was attracted to the darkness of Odysseus because of the darkness that now stained my spirit. What was good in me had died the day I had accepted my fate, and now I was only attracted to the cunning, the dark, the evilness left on Earth.

Stop it. Focus on their speeches.

Even in speech, Achilles was the opposite of Odysseus. While Achilles corralled the men into lifting their hands, swords and spears into the air chanting, his words were laboured. As if every word he landed was like a blow, trying to get through these dense men’s skulls. Odysseus, meanwhile, when he went to speak again, his words were suave, whispering through the men’s ears and behind their defences so that they could find no fault in his argument.

A moat would be built, he declared, along the perimeter of the beach. Wide enough that the Trojans could not simply jump across it, and deep enough that they would not see the spikes that would skewer them. Any man who did not wish to participate in the war and follow Achilles into victory, or who was recovering from wounds, would help build this moat.

I smiled.

It was the perfect pointless project. The Greeks had no need for the moat. The Trojans never came out of their citadel, except to fight the day’s battles. But, it would ensure the men had something to do other than moan. They’d feel like they were accomplishing something. and the ones who despised the hard labour of digging trenches (which would certainly not earn them glory), would begrudgingly return to the battlefield.

Odysseus’ eyes met mine and he returned my smile. It was slight, barely noticeable from where I was on the edges of the mass of Greeks. More of a faint curl at one corner of his lips. But it was there.

Horrified at the joy that threatened to bubble up inside me, I turned to head back to our camp.

I was completely lost in thought, treacherous and heart wrenching, when another of the women fell alongside me.

“Natalia, how are you?” I asked, shaking my head from my reverie. With one glance at her, I caught the bruise dangerously close to her eye, now turning a putrid green. “Shall we make you another pumice for that?” I nodded at the offence.

“No need. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Your Lord Odysseus only went and had Thersites beaten unconscious last night. I was so worried all night I did not sleep a wink, but I found him today in the medics tent. He’s lamenting that he needs to stay at least for a few days, until he can see out of one eye again. At last, I shall get a peaceful two or three nights to myself!”

With that, she practically skipped off.

I stewed over the information, busying myself with the usual chores of the day until Odysseus reappeared in the tent.

“Not off fighting today?” I eyed him warily.

“I’ve been tasked by King Agamemnon to oversee the project while it gets on its feet. Looks like I, too, get a short reprieve from the war for a change.”

I continued pottering about, my back turned to him.

“Odette? There is something you’re not telling me …”

I continued about my chores in silence.

“Odette,” he warned.

“Why,” I ground out, trying to counter my temper as I shook out the blankets and pillows to be washed, “did you have Thersites beaten half to death?”

Odysseus paused a minute, as if sensing a trap, before replying. “For his effect on the men.”

“For his effect on the men?” I almost laughed as I turned to look at him, wringing a loose polishing cloth through my fingers.

“You find that such a strange reason?”

“From a man who is known for his clever ideas and charming words, one who he himself admitted does not like to resort to violence if he can help it … Yes, I find it strange.”

“I am a general, Odette. He was causing insubordination, I had no other choice. If anything, you should be grateful, given the way he targeted you.”

I snorted. “Grateful?! What should I be grateful for? That you did one decent thing amongst all the horrible? Why should I be grateful that I’m a slave? Grateful to you, to this life, that I have the honour of serving ‘the great Odysseus’? Yes, let us forget that I had a kind man that used to care about my honour, and that you killed him. Instead let me be grateful that I have it so easy now.”

“Perhaps then, we should address the other reason.”

I stilled, eyes immediately darting to the sand floor. I hadn’t expected that. Damn my hot temper and my frivolous tongue.

“Look at me, Odette.”

His tone suggested that if I didn’t do so willingly, I would have to regardless.

Odysseus moved until he was standing in front of me. When I went to break eye contact, his thumb and forefinger grabbed my chin with a lightning fast reflex.

But the grip on my chin was not tight as he said, “You and I both know why I resorted to violence.”

“If you are going to give me some contrived notion of our base natures again, then I have heard this argument before.” I stared at him defiantly.

“Is it not a valid one?”

“When every reasoning boils down to our basic animal instinct to survive, it gets a little tedious.” I shook my head, trying to get out of his grip, but he tightened his clasp. The only thing I did was shake my plait loose.

Still, he didn’t let go.

“War puts us in those conditions – the most extreme, the most basic,” he reasoned.

“For some of us. Not all,” I countered, glancing around at the spoils gathered around the tent.

“For all. We all must choose to remain human, or to turn into animals. Every day, we make hard choices. I can choose to let the hatred for my enemies overwhelm me, or I can choose to retain my humanity.”

“And?”

He knew what I was asking.

“I have found that since you arrived, I have been enjoying the simple things for the first time since the war began. Food. Wine. Morning. Company to keep. I find myself loath to lose that.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that raw admission.

“Your hair – I’ve never seen it down before,” he murmured, his hands curling around the ends.

It was all too much. I slapped his hand away.

“You cannot keep making claims on me as your property and then treating me as you might a free woman you care for,” I snapped. “If war invites a choice, then you must choose.”

There it was; now that I had voiced it, it was clear as day why I felt unnerved. The sands were shifting beneath my feet, the hand the Fates had dealt me changing once again. I wasn’t ready for it.

The look of shock on Odysseus’ face turned to piercing clarity in those dark eyes that danced between mine, until his hands leaned onto the table behind me, either side of my hips, effectively caging me.

“Do you think I like to be here? That I like killing innocent men? Fighting for that oaf of a king who is greedy and arrogant, who has no concern for others? That I like this nagging responsibility I feel for you, a gravity I cannot ignore?”

I didn’t answer. I just continued to hold my head up high, staring into the depths of those unfathomable eyes that I swore went on for eternity.

Odysseus’ gaze flicked down to my lips, my cleavage, and then met my eyes again. Our breathing was evenly matched, both dragging in what little air we could between us without our chests crashing into one another.

“You think I want to be here, feeling this need to protect you? This desire to damn the gods and this war and touch you, hold you? That I wouldn’t rather be home with my wife?”

His words were bitter with resentment, yet it did nothing to dull the charge in the air.

“Don’t you think I’d rather be with my dead husband than you?” I hissed.

And then he did something I never expected. His hands gripped my face and he crushed his lips to mine, until there was no more oxygen between us.

1 ? Stupid.

2 ? Also spelt π?ρνη: prostitute, whore, slut, harlot, hooker, wench.

3 ? The equivalent of being called a ‘bastard’.

4 ? Undiluted wine and bread served at akratisma (breakfast).