Page 4 of Odette's Vow

“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 sayany 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.”

2

Odette

Ididn’t want to sleep, not when any one of those Greek soldiers could walk into this tent at any moment. But after the day’s events, the heightened adrenaline, and the long arduous walk on no food or sleep, exhaustion soon sucked me under.

Hypnos was waiting for me. He was not, it appeared, fond of mothers who had killed their sons. And so he sent his son Morpheus to haunt me. I stared at the flapping of the tent and whenever Hypnos dragged my eyelids shut, the flickering sound of the tent became the crackle of the log fire Alcander and I had lit last night.

“They’ll come tonight.”Alcander’s voice was quiet.

I had only just put our son Lykas to bed. “You sound certain.”

He sent me a pained look, and I knew what it meant. He was begging me to take this seriously, but when faced with the certainty of eternal damnation, what better way to beat back the desperation than with glib statements?

“We could still take Lykas and run,” I pleaded, for the millionth time.

“Run where, exactly? To the next village on their warpath? Did you hear what they did to the people in Old Theronika, only one village away from our own?”

I shook my head, not wanting to hear, already having heard the rumours, but Alcander was intent on continuing.

“They hung the men’s bodies from their own homes and left the ground slick with their entrails for their wives and children to walk through, as the Greek soldiers dragged them out of their houses kicking and screaming. Then, they hauled the boys by their hair and crushed their skulls against the rocks, until their small bodies were limp and left for the crows to peck at. Those close enough to report back say you can still hear the flies buzzing over their remains from miles away. And the smell of blood, and piss, and shit – and fear – becomes so overwhelming you can’t help but retch. That is what will catch up with us eventually, no matter how far we run. And when it does, we will wish we had stayed to face the sword here, because what waits out there is a death so slow, even the gods look away.”

I had closed my eyes to avoid watching Alcander’s mouth paint such a vivid, crushing picture while also humming a soundless tune in my head to block out his words, but it had not worked. The scene had sunk in regardless, until it took me several moments to catch my breath, to force the bile that had risen in my throat back down again, so I could speak. “We could go to the citadel to seek refuge.”

“The citadel won’t open until the people are banging down the door, and even when they do, the overcrowding is likely to cause disease and death to sweep the streets.”

“At least it would give us a fighting chance,” I countered, but I already knew it was useless. Alcander would say what he had said every time we had this argument. Still, some parts of mehoped he would change his mind at the eleventh hour. But he was already shaking his head.

“Odette, stop it. We would be hunted down like animals. These are soldiers, barbarians. They want to see the fall of Troy – not just the citadel, but the fall of the Trojan people. All of us. I will die and they will butcher our boy like he’s nothing.” His voice hardened. “You know what they do to women. You’d be forced to watch them brutalise us before they dragged you away in chains.”

“They might still spare him, raise him as their own, he’s so young …” I tried, but even I heard the patheticness in my voice.

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