9. Οdysseus

9

Οdysseus

I shouldn’t have done it. I knew that.

But it had been nine long years since I’d last felt the warmth of a woman’s touch, and in that moment of weakness, I succumbed to the allure of Odette’s presence. Yet now, as I rubbed my jaw, remembering the sting of the slap she had delivered afterwards in her rightful anger, I couldn’t help but feel a strange fascination alongside the sense of regret.

Penelope was a woman of strength and cunning. Unlike Odette, she possessed a quiet resolve, a calculated wisdom that she wielded with precision. In all our years together, she had never lashed out at me in such a manner, never raised a hand in anger. Her silence spoke volumes, her words measured and deliberate. She’d always held me steady.

Odette was different. She was a tempest of emotions that threatened to consume everything in her path. Her desperation created a vacuum in the very air around her. All of her emotions were so obvious in every action she took, painted across her face, and yet somehow it was not a weakness. For the way it drew me in, it made me the weak one.

Had she been in another man’s tent, I’m sure she would have taken a beating for her insolence. But violence had never appealed to me, certainly never against one of the opposite sex. Punishing her would just make her fearful and myself displeased. So what would be the point? No one else needed to know what went on between us.

I couldn’t ignore the pang of guilt that echoed through my bones for betraying Penelope’s trust. But I was aware enough to admit I was lonely. It was an ever-present state in this war; comfort was scarce. I longed for Penelope, who had always challenged me; and now here was Odette, offering the same gift and solace in the midst of chaos.

She was both a confidant and a rival. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I was taking advantage of her station, but she stirred something within me, a longing that I had long since buried beneath the weight of duty and responsibility. And though I knew I should resist, I found myself drawn to her in ways I could not fully understand.

With a heavy heart, I sighed and turned to stare at the horizon, where the shadows of war loomed large on another day in battle.

The moat project had only lasted three weeks, and yet somehow in that time I had forgotten the scent of true battle. Now that I was back, all I could smell was shit. I should have been used to it – how often men shat themselves right before they died. Late in the day, when both sides retreated and each collected their bodies, the ground was always soaked with blood, sweat, and other bodily fluids cast across the plain as we cut down man after man.

Looking out on the barren expanse of the field on a fresh day that offered only death in its void, I felt a wave of despair wash over me. I could feel it in the men beside me, too, sneaking between us on the wind, as we listened for Agamemnon’s cry to charge towards the wall of Trojan soldiers awaiting us. The same cry he would have made yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.

Except, with each passing day, there were fewer men. Not just on the battlefield itself, but back in camp. A dreaded black plague had begun to sweep through the tent rows and firepits, infecting the men. It had arrived on the night of the first full moon after the moat was built. Many men grumbled that Artemis had sent it, but those of us closer to King Agamemnon knew the truth.

The king hadn’t been satisfied with just taking Achilles’ war-prize, Briseis. No, he’d also claimed a woman named Chryseis, the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo. The priest had come to beg for his daughter back, risking slaughter himself, and still Agamemnon had denied him.

This plague was Apollo’s punishment for Agamemnon’s greed and cruelty. Twelve nights of fever and chills, swollen faces and discoloured skin. Twelve nights of death to welcome us, even when we returned from the battlefield.

Agamemnon willfully remained ignorant to the rumors like the coward he was. Instead, he turned to us, as if he could sense the despair and offered a cajoling – clearly rehearsed – speech. “Men, I have decided it is time for us to give up this charade. Let us return to Greece, knowing that we have slaughtered a good many Trojans, and have made our point loud and clear. You cannot take from us without losing many of your own.”

His tone was prideful, as always, but there was an inflection there, a catch I didn’t believe the other men heard. Agamemnon sent me a glance with a small smirk, as if to say ‘watch how they rally for me now’.

He and I both knew why despair hung heavily off the men, after all. He’d insulted the great warrior, Achilles, who now refused to fight. Without the one who could win this war for us, what hope did the other men hold?

This, I realised, was a test. One which failed almost immediately as a deafening cheer went up around me and carried back through the crowds of men, who upon hearing the news, turned on their heels and started running for the ships. There were splashes of ocean, an ever-gathering crescendo, as the men quickly waded into the water. I turned back to Agamemnon, who looked more like a forlorn boy than a king.

Then, she whispered in my ear. I knew it was Athena who spoke to me, but for the strangest reason I heard her words in Odette’s voice. “You must call them back. You are not done here yet.”

“Are you really so cowardly?” I bellowed, catching Agamemnon’s look of surprise as I turned around to face the men heading for the ships. “Do you not remember what the soothsayer Calchas said to us before this war began? Do you not remember your vow, that you would not abandon this struggle we all face, until this city falls? Are you really so weak to put that all on Achilles’ shoulders? Do you have no pride? Have you not held your own on this battlefield day after day, for the last nine years?”

The men shifted on their feet, their faces a mix of shame and defiance, but no one moved closer to the ships.

“You have made it this far, and now you would turn and run when victory is millimetres from your grasp? Nine years, men. That is what the soothsayer said. You know it is darkest before dawn. This is it, the end in sight! Are you so very sure you want to return home when you are so close to claiming honour?”

The silence was thick now, charged with possibility.

“Come, what say you? Will you fight just one more day?”

“Buy them time,” Odette whispered in my head. “Buy us time.”

Jarring words, for she would almost certainly never say them.

Regardless, whatever I’d said had worked as the men began the battlecry wave towards us. I turned to find Agamemnon standing beside me, a grin on his face that suggested the words were his own. His slap on my back confirmed it.

“To war!” he cried.

“TO WAR!” every man cried back.

Despite the resolve I placed in the men, our steadfastness slipped between us like quicksand. Ares fought alongside Hector. Even my bloodthirsty friend Diomedes sent me a look of fear that paled his face when we watched Tlepolemus slaughtered in front of us. I responded in kind, slaughtering an entire line of Trojans in my wake. A second. A third. But I was no match for Hector.

The Trojans pushed us back and back and back, until we were almost at our own moat. We had lost today’s battle miserably.

The men looked to us at the front – myself, Diomedes, the other kings, Agamemnon – for signs of what to do. I waited for Athena, or Odette, to appear in my head, to tell me what to say, when Agamemnon began weeping.

“The war truly is a failure. I was right this morning. We should leave for Greece.”

Incredible. Even in defeat, he maintained he was right. This man knew no shame.

Frowning, I considered my reply, when Diomedes beat me to it. “I will stay and fight, for I know the words Odysseus spoke this morning were true.” He looked each of the men in the eye, studying each of them just long enough to make sure they were listening. A clever trick I had taught him long ago, when he became king of his own lands. “The prophecy stated that Troy was fated to fall. We may have lost today, but this was just one day of many. Eventually, even a rock relentlessly beaten by the ocean turns to sand.”

“He is right,” Nestor, another of our generals, urged. At the men’s skeptical looks, he made another suggestion. “Perhaps, my Lord and King Agamemnon, we should look to reconcile with Achilles.”

Agamemnon looked up from his place of weeping, where he’d collapsed on the ground. “Yes,” he said, rising. “Perhaps you are right. I will offer Achilles a great stockpile of gifts, so long as he should return to the frontlines of battle. Odysseus, Ajax, Phoenix – go tell him the good news.”

I returned to the tent to wash and gather what I needed for the walk across the long expanse of beach to get to where Achilles and his men had camped, high up on the hill.

To my surprise, Odette was in the tent upon my return. Ever since our altercation, she had taken to being out when I returned, volunteering extra hours to help prep the food, tend to the bonfires, wash rags and the like. We had barely spoken, beyond the day-to-day operations we had to discuss. I had tried to engage her in discussions, suggesting that we go back to our Greek lessons. She had replied in almost fluent Greek where I could ‘stick’ my saviour-like intentions.

I let out a small, throaty sound.

She glanced up from her place where she was folding blankets and pinned me with a stare a lesser man would wither under. She pushed boundaries far too often, yet even that was a thousand times better than the hollow, despondent shell she'd been when I first brought her here.

“I must speak with Achilles tonight,” I began, my focus fixed on her, searching for her understanding. “I’ll need food and water for the walk over, something to gift him, and a fresh cloak.”

I wanted her to ask why, but she merely nodded, stood, and began to gather the things as requested.

“Agamemnon finally wants to fix his insult of Achilles,” I told her.

“What a surprise,” she muttered sarcastically, yet in Greek, and for some reason pride swelled in my chest.

“I doubt it will do any good,” I continued. “Rumour has it that even when Achilles’ men have asked him, he says he intends to return to Phthia so that he might live a long, ordinary life rather than the short, glorious one he was fated to have should he stay, according to his mother.”

“Strange.”

My chin lifted in surprise at her response. “What is?”

“A Grecian man choosing the ordinary over glory.”

I was silent for a moment, contemplating if I should share a little more of myself with this woman. “I do not blame him. I would choose an ordinary life, too.”

Odette snorted, and I had to grit my teeth to stop myself closing the space between us again and shaking her. It would only lead us back to what got us here in the first place.

Instead, I said, “Achilles is young and foolish. He cares too much for his pride. I think he has simply been biding his time in this war. But I am a tired old man, and I would like to go home.”

I saw her clench at that, no doubt wondering what her fate would be when the war ended. I was still contemplating that myself. I wanted her to ask; I felt myself yearning for her curiosity, but she didn’t broach it. I could feel her hoarding thoughts, and I wanted to tug them out of her, one morsel at a time.

“What are you thinking?”

Once again, she surprised me. “I am thinking, if you want to be successful on your quest this night, you will appeal to the one thing Achilles won’t say no to.”

“His pride?”

“No. Patroclus.”

The men and I had found Achilles engrossed in his lyre within his tent, Patroclus listening intently beside him. Within minutes of being there, it became evident that persuading him to rejoin the war would not be a simple task. Achilles rebuffed Agamemnon’s offer immediately after we presented it, his resolve unwavering. The chance to voice my own thoughts, so closely aligned with Odette’s, was ripped away as Phoenix launched into a fervent plea, invoking the story of Meleager in a desperate effort to bend Achilles’ resolve.

It had failed.

With another meeting scheduled for tonight comprising myself, Diomedes, Nestor, Phoenix, Agamemnon, and Meleanus, the weight of decision loomed before us as Ajax, Phoenix, and I trudged back into Agamemnon’s territory. It did not help that the camp remained quiet, as it was when we had left. There had not been revelries around the firepits for weeks. There had been nothing to celebrate. Instead, all we could hear was the scuffing of our feet across the sand and the snores of men behind their tents.

“Well?!” Agamemnon demanded, as soon as we entered his tent.

The others gave him grimaces, while I shook my head and cloak off at the same time.

“Then, pray tell, what are we going to do with wretched Achilles? How can we force him to do what we wish, when he did not kneel to me?”

The men all looked at one another. I wondered which of them would be the first to speak. When the silence stretched on, uncomfortably taut, I sighed. “We cannot force him to do anything. Therefore, it seems obvious to me that we need another plan.”

“Well, then, what do you suggest, Odysseus?” Agamemnon snapped.

I crossed my arms as I regarded him. The temptation to say something snide was appealing, but I held my tongue. Just.

“Why don’t we send a spy to infiltrate the Trojan ranks?” Nestor suggested, breaking the eye contact – and the tension – between Agamemnon and myself. “If we can figure out their movements, pre-empt them, we will have a greater chance of beating them on the battlefield tomorrow. And if we can show the men that we can do it without Achilles, we can win this war and be done with it.”

A round of nods and murmurs followed.

“I would go,” Diomedes offered. “Though I wouldn’t say no to another joining me?”

“I’ll join you, friend,” I replied.

“It’s decided then,” Agamemnon declared. “You’ll come back and report to me before dawn and we will show Achilles how pathetic his pride is.”

With that, we were dismissed. Diomedes threw me a look and I shrugged. We knew who Agamemnon was when we came to these shores. He hadn’t changed; he had only become more petulant and child-like the longer he didn’t get his own way. War, like greed, simply highlighted and exacerbated a man’s character.

“Well, friend, we best arm ourselves if we’re going into the enemies’ trenches.” Diomedes slapped me on the back and we returned to camp to get what little sleep we could. The best time to raid a man, as we had learned from villages like Odette’s, was at the third watch when a clock would strike four in the morning. Then, men were prone to drowsiness and sloppiness. Easier to get past. Easier to kill.

At three, we met again at the intersection of our two camps. Diomedes nodded to me, I to him, and we continued quietly on foot across the plain. Nothing needed to be said. We had been on the battlefield together long enough to know each other’s styles. He was quicker on his feet, more brash with his execution of movements. He would inevitably catch any man who spotted us, and I would kill them. I was quieter when it came to that part.

We stuck to the outer edges of the field, where the long grass brushed against our calves, and for some reason, I thought of Odette. A heron called to us with its three rolling ‘rohs’, and once again I found it puzzling that I saw a sign of Athena while I thought of Odette.

“We should pray,” Diomedes whispered loudly to me, nodding at the heron.

Exactly what I was thinking.

We each muttered under our breath. “Lady Athena, protect us. Lady Athena, guide us. There is none wiser than you, particularly in the art of warfare. Guide our path and protect us, good lady, if you should see fit.”

In the privacy of my mind, I thought of Odette’s inquisitive eyes. That I might see them again.

The heron gave us one calling ‘roh’ before it flew off.

For the next hour, it was unnervingly quiet. I was used to the grunts of men thrusting swords and spears, shouting, screaming, pleading, groaning as weapons were removed with force from lifeless bodies. Not this unending silence.

I was not used to being able to smell the sea breeze on this battlefield, and I was so enamoured with it, it took me a minute to place the second scent.

Sweat.

Not mine, not Diomedes’ – I knew his as well as my own – but another.

A Trojan’s.

I motioned to Diomedes to crouch below the tall grass and he immediately followed my order, despite the fact we were equals both in our respective home cities and on the battlefield. Together, we scanned the area and there was a poke in my shoulder when Diomedes spotted him first.

The man was moving quickly, quicker than either of us as he strode through the thick grass. Diomedes motioned to me that he was going to circle around, on his belly like a snake, and capture the man from behind. I nodded my agreement and crawled forward to capture the man from the front in a pincer movement.

The only signal I got that Diomedes had achieved his quest was a sharp, surprisingly high-pitched yelp. The sound was far too high for Diomedes’ guttural tones, so I stood, moving quickly to the source.

I found Diomedes with a grin on his face as he held a rather ugly man in a chokehold. The man, who reminded me of a warthog, was kicking and flailing to no avail – he was far too short. Diomedes’ strength alone could lift him off the ground. But he was a fighter, that much was clear by the way he bared his teeth at me.

Time for me to break him.

Over the years, I had learned that breaking a man could take many forms. As a king, diplomacy was your blade. You had to instill the fear of the gods in your people, while showing just enough mercy to hold their loyalty. Cross that line, and the gods would make their displeasure known, and their retribution unpleasant.

With fellow kings, fear alone would not suffice. You had to appeal to their pride, their duty, their honour. You had to outmaneuver them, play the game more shrewdly than they ever could.

But soldiers, especially enemy soldiers, required something far more visceral. You had to show them death, strip away their hope, until the presence of Thanatos lingered around them. Your every move became a ritual, a summons for the God of Death to claim what was his.

And I’d become adept at this.

I unsheathed the blade at my side, dangling it in my fingers, as if I were happy to be careless with it. As if I welcomed the cutting of flesh, regardless if it were my own.

That was tactic one.

Then, I smiled. Not a smile that I would offer Penelope, or even Odette. A smile that did not reach my eyes. One that left them feeling as cold as I was when I inevitably plunged a weapon into their body and bled all the warmth, all the colour, all the life out of them.

Tactic two.

Already the man’s grimace wavered as I closed the gap between us with small, slow steps.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked him softly.

That was tactic three – softly does it. There was something far more menacing about a man in control of his voice than one wildly screaming. As if he’d take his time carving you up. It was an effective tactic. Usually.

“Grecian scum!” the man spat at me. Literally.

Very well.

“They call me Odysseus. They speak of me as a patient man. A clever man. But, after years of slaughter on the battlefield – endless, mind-numbing years of it – I find myself bored. Quick kills no longer satisfy me. I think it’s time I tried something new. Perhaps, with you, I can practise patience again. Take my time. Peel off your skin inch by inch until you’re willing to talk. Then cut out your tongue if I know your so-called truth is a lie. Yes. I think I might rather enjoy that.”

I stepped closer now, until I could smell the man’s rotten breath. He would also be able to hear Diomedes breathing against the shell of his ear. We were all so close. The man tried to hide it, but he couldn’t – we knew he was trembling.

“What say you, Diomedes? Shall we have some fun with the Trojan?”

My friend squeezed the Trojan’s neck until his eyes bulged slightly.

“Wait!” he choked out.

“Why?”

“I can tell you,” he gasped, desperately clawing at Diomedes’ forearm. He barely managed to scratch it.

“Tell me what?” I purposefully made my voice sound bored, neutral even.

“I can tell you how we position ourselves, and how our allies do, too.”

“What good is that to me? You could lie, only for me to find out tomorrow. I told you how I feel about liars and their tongues.” I tapped my blade against his lips to make a point and heard him whimper.

I smiled. Good.

“Well? I’m waiting.”

“The Thracians. They – they’re vulnerable to attack. They just arrived. With their king, Rheus. You could slaughter them now, the two of you, they’re that unprepared. I—I could show you where they are and then you could let me go.”

“Oh, could I just?”

“Please, I?—”

But he had already given it away. I had been watching his eyes, which had darted to the left one too many times. Another tactic I had learned. Men were desperate to have you believe them when you put them under just enough pressure. So desperate, in fact, that they practically begged you to believe them by pointing out the truth of their words. Even if it was with their eyes.

I nodded to Diomedes, who with one quick jarring motion, broke the man’s neck and he crumpled to the ground at our feet. Almost methodically, we stripped him of his armour. If we were going into the Thracian camp, it would help to have items of familiar armour to disguise us. Just long enough for us to fool them.

The Trojan scout wasn’t lying; we found the camp lying just beyond the next hill. It was a small camp, no more than thirteen men in total. Each of us had slain more Trojans alone. Making our way down the hill on our bellies was slow going, but by the time we hit the base of their camp, Diomedes and I were quick on our feet, whipping out our weapons. He crouched and circled the camp and I waited for five beats before I knew I could move.

The man closest to me had his back to me. A deep slit across his carotid and he was dead. The man opposite him cried out, but Diomedes got to him. The others realised what was going on and tried to rally, but drawing swords or running for weapons when you’d just been lying lazy-limbed by a fire was no match for two already bloodthirsty generals. We cut them down one by one, Diomedes and I both moving in a circular motion that mirrored one another. A death dance these untried and untested soldiers had never seen before. They barely had a chance to fight for their lives.

I didn’t feel sorry for them. This was war.

“It’s time to go, Odysseus.” There it was again, Odette’s voice in my head. “You wouldn’t want some angry god to wake the other soldiers in the nearby camps.”

She was right, of course. She always was. Gesturing to the empty chariot that still had two restless horses bridled, Diomedes nodded and we both made haste. It must have been their king’s – Rheus, the scout had called him – chariot. As Diomedes spurred the horses into action, I looked at the pile of men we were leaving behind and wondered which was their king.

Not that it mattered.

He was dead.