Page 46 of Odette's Vow

We waited in silence as the soldiers called for the gates to the city to be unlocked. As those gates we had never been able to penetrate slowly swung open.

We waited in silence as our horse was pulled through the streets of Troy. As cries of joy and false victory rose around us.

Let them celebrate. Let them have this one last moment.

Celebrate through the night they did. Drums beat throughout the city. Music played, ale flowed. We could hear giddy young Trojan women laugh joyously as soldiers cheered and danced with them. Every time one of them would get too close, the men and I would close our eyes and hold our breaths. Until, eventually, the flutes and other instruments drowned out our breathing.

The night went on. The celebrations only quietened when King Priam made his speech thanking his people for standing steadfast, telling them to enjoy this era of peace that the Trojan Horse – as they called it – brought with it. A hurrah went up into the air, and they spent the evening dancing and weaving ribbons on the horse in celebration. Throwing garlands of flowers on it.

Until they were all exhausted with joy, drowsy from the exertion, and dawn – as she always did – came to claim them. They slept.

The trapdoor in the horse was in the right leg flank. We had considered putting it under the belly of the horse, but we figured that would be the first place the Trojans would look for a trap, if they’d been smart enough to look. Instead, we’d built little ledges into the right leg flank. I went first, climbing up the leg, unlatching the hinge, climbing out and then shimmying down the leg as one would a tree trunk.

One by one, the Greeks slipped into the shadows behind me until fifty of us stood deep in the heart of Troy’s citadel. After years of bloodshed, it had come to this.

We moved silently towards the gates, sticking to the dark, for surely Priam hadn’t been foolish enough to let every guard go. I was right. There were still sentries at their posts. We dispatched them expeditiously, steel slicing through flesh, our hands muffling their dying gasps. No alarms raised. Then, we lit the fires. They flared bright, a signal to our comrades from the ships, now cutting across the plains, the Greek Army ready to storm in.

Troy’s fall came quickly after that.

I left a handful of men at the gate as the rest of us spread out, igniting fires around the outer perimeter. The flames funneled the panicked citadel folk inward, forcing them towards the palace of Priam and his sons, where my third group waited, poised to slaughter every man who entered. Women and girls would be spared, but no Trojan man would live. We would end this war.

The smoke thickened, the horns blared, and the city stirred. Footsteps thundered, shouts clashed with screams, and the first of their soldiers ran straight into our blades, impaling themselves as they tried to defend what little they had left. Panic reigned. The women shrieked as we advanced, their pleas falling on ears dulled by a thousand sieges before.

These Trojans were no match for us, soft and unprepared for the fury we brought. We moved through them like a wave, drowning any resistance in blood. They buckled quickly, crumbling under the pressure. With every smoky breath they became more docile, helpless beneath our boots.

Menelaus, Pyrrhus – Achilles’ son – and I fought our way through the mass of Trojans, now swarmed by Greeks as our brothers poured through the gates. We pushed up the main road, the path our great horse had been dragged up only hours before, now slick with blood and littered with cut-down bodies.Ahead, the palace doors were open, a flood of desperate citizens surging inside, seeking sanctuary. They would find none.

Foolish Priam.

The fight was brutal, but not in its physicality. Most of Troy’s soldiers were still drunk, sleepy, or hungover. Only a few fought like they had on the battlefield. No, it was brutal in its decimation. At one point, I passed a woman who lay weeping over the dead body of a man I assumed was her husband. Two of our men were hitting her across her back with their spear butts.

“Pick her up, gods damn it, and take her to where the rest are,” I barked at them. If these had all been my men, they would have known that I didn’t accept the beating of women. As I reminded my men, war trophies and prizes were to be treasured, polished, and protected if you wanted them to maintain any worth, which the men always did. But these were not all my men; they were from each army that had gathered for the Greeks.

There was no need for this animalistic ritual, this slaying. If only the Trojans would come quietly. If only our men weren’t so desperate to get home that they would do anything to achieve it.

If only I hadn’t played a hand in forcing this war with my blood vow over Helen.Stupid.

Each thrust of my spear after that felt like the heaviest blows I’d had to deliver in these last ten years. Each new death was more difficult than the last, harder to execute, harder still to pull each man from my spear again and watch him fall. I used to be able to watch the eyes of the man I was killing, to honour his final breath, but now all I felt with each stab, each twist, each thrust and grunt, was shame.

I thought there was no more shame in my bones left to give, until I finally made it the naos?1 of the palace. At the end of the long marble room, with its large columns, each one with an intricate carving and dedication to each of the Olympians, where Priam had undoubtedly hosted his war counsel, his sons, hisdaughters, his family, his royal meetings, was the altar. There, lying across it, was King Priam himself, and Pyrrhus stabbing him up under his ribcage with a smile on his face.

It was the grimmest part of the war, for me. The victory.

The screams quietened by daybreak. The smoke was beginning to clear as I and the other generals examined the royal women who remained at the gates of Troy. They’d been dragged here, to the holding pen the men had formed, by force.

Polyxena. Andromache. Hecuba. Cassandra. Helen.

Most of the women in Troy had come kicking and screaming, dragged by their limbs – and in some cases, their hair – by our soldiers. These five royals had not. They held their heads high and now stood before the Greek generals in a semicircle, guards holding them in place.

Myself, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the rest of the generals stood opposite them. Most of us had our arms crossed as we regarded them, but when I glanced at the others, I saw Pyrrhus puffing out his chest while casually swinging his sword like a child. Agamemnon was leering at Cassandra. Meanwhile, Menelaus appeared like a bull, his breathing heavy and laboured, practically rubbing his heel into the dirt, ready to run towards Helen and drag her back off to where they’d come from.

I shifted my posture, preparing to speak.

One of our men, Talthybius, spoke. “Women of Troy, may I present to you Lord Odysseus, King of Ithaca.”

“We recognise no such king.” The woman in the middle spoke for them all.

Her voice was like Odette’s was when I had first met her: rich and thick in a way that broadened the e’s, stressing the last syllable of each word and the only noun in her statement – ‘king’. I recognised that it made her declaration sound more ominous than she perhaps intended.

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