Heir of Troy: The Third Son

The fleet came back into the bay at Aulis three hours before dusk, and the men on the beach counted the ships twice before they believed the number.

Fifteen thousand had sailed east. Fifteen thousand came home. No black smoke trailing behind them, no missing hulls limping in under half-sail. Whatever they had found out there, it hadn’t cost them blood to find it.

But it had cost them something else. The men who came ashore moved with the particular heaviness of soldiers who had expected a fight and found silence instead, and who understood that silence from an enemy was worse than any battle. Silence meant the enemy had chosen where to be. Silence meant the enemy was somewhere else.

Odysseus was first ashore, and he didn’t wait for the formalities. He walked straight up the beach past the pyres — still smoking, still ringed with ash from the second attack — past the place where a head had been thrown into the surf three nights before, and into Agamemnon’s tent without being announced.

Diomedes and Idomeneus followed him in. Menelaus came last, and stood near the entrance rather than take a seat, the way he’d stood at every council since Aulis burned the first time.

Agamemnon was on his feet before Odysseus finished crossing the tent. "Well?"

"Nothing." Odysseus set his hands flat on the map table, over the charcoal lines of a coastline he had spent two weeks walking. "Six islands. Three settlements we found by the old fire scars and the flattened grass. Empty, all of them. No ships in the harbors. No people. No weapons left behind. No stores. Nothing. One camp looked like it had been struck within the week — the ash was still soft under my boot when I put my hand in it."

Nestor leaned on his staff. "Within the week."

"Within the week." Odysseus straightened. "Which means they knew we were coming before we left this beach, or they moved the moment your son burned that fishing village, or —" he looked at Agamemnon directly, "— they were never where we were told they’d be, and someone wasted two weeks and fifteen thousand men proving it."

Achilles, silent until now, spoke from where he leaned against the tent pole. "While we were finding that out, they hit this camp again."

"Yes," Odysseus said. "I heard. And I understand there was a head thrown into the sea to make the point."

Nobody answered that.

"So," Odysseus went on, "while fifteen thousand of us searched empty rocks in the east, Teresh sent enough men to reach this beach twice with the rest of us here to defend it, and we still nearly lost the camp the second time. Imagine what happens the day the whole fleet sails for Troy and there’s no one left on this coast at all."

He let the question sit. No one in the tent needed to imagine it. Every man there had a wife, or children, or a household, or a city that stood on the coast they were about to leave undefended.

Agamemnon’s hand closed slowly on the edge of the table. "You have a suggestion, or you came all this way to tell me what I already know."

"Seven thousand stay. Combined with every man the coastal cities can raise on their own account — old men, boys not yet blooded, whoever can hold a wall or a spear line. Not a token guard. A real defense, this time, not three hundred watchmen and a signal fire." Odysseus didn’t soften it. "We nearly learned that lesson twice already. I’d rather not pay for it a third time."

"Seven thousand fewer spears at Troy’s walls," Idomeneus said.

"Seven thousand spears that would have died in the third rank anyway, against a wall that isn’t going anywhere." Odysseus’s voice didn’t rise. "I’d rather lose rank-fillers than come home and find every city on this coast burned to the ground behind us."

He looked at Idomeneus. "You have a wife in Crete. Children in Knossos. If the Sea Peoples land on your coast while your fleet is at Troy — what do you do? Do you sail home and leave the siege? Do you stay and let them burn? Either way you lose. Either way the war is over. Not because Troy was too strong, but because we left our own houses unlocked."

Idomeneus said nothing. His scarred face tightened, and he looked at the brazier, and he did not argue.

Nestor’s staff tapped once against the ground, the closest thing he had to agreement. "Then it wants a commander. Someone the men will hold formation for when nothing is happening for months at a time, which is harder than it sounds."

"Ajax."

Ajax’s arms came uncrossed at the sound of his own name. "I brought twelve ships and my finest warriors to this beach. I didn’t sail here to guard sand while others take the walls of Troy."

"You’re the only man in this tent who can hold seven thousand men together through a summer of nothing happening without them turning on each other from boredom, and the only one I trust not to use that army for anything but what it’s for." Odysseus met his eyes and didn’t blink first. "It’s not an insult. You know it isn’t."

Ajax held the stare a moment longer. His jaw worked, the heavy muscles shifting beneath the scarred skin of his face. Then he looked away first, which settled it.

"That’s one commander," Nestor said. "You’ll want a second, and a high one, or every city that sent men to that beach thinks it’s been cheated."

Odysseus turned to Agamemnon. "Your son goes with him."

The tent went still in the particular way it always went still around that subject now.

Agamemnon’s eyes did not leave Odysseus. The High King’s face was stone — the heavy, unreadable stone of a man who had heard his son’s name spoken in that tone before and had chosen not to hear it each time.

"He sailed east with me," Odysseus said, before Agamemnon could speak. "Under Diomedes’ command, same as every man in that fleet. Ask Diomedes what that was like."

All eyes went to Diomedes. He didn’t need to be asked twice.

"Four times," Diomedes said. "Four times I gave a formation order — hold the treeline, wait for the signal before you land, keep your section together on the second island — and four times he broke it because he wanted to be the one who found something first. The third time he took eleven men and went ahead of the search line on his own account, into ground we hadn’t cleared. If there had been an ambush waiting on that island the way there was supposed to be, we’d have lost eleven men and started a fight the rest of the line wasn’t in position to finish." His jaw was tight. "I told him that to his face. He told me he doesn’t take orders from a lesser king when his father commands the whole expedition. I am done pretending that’s a joke."

The tent was very quiet. Diomedes had said what every commander who had dealt with the boy had thought, and no one in the room was surprised, and the fact that no one was surprised was itself a judgment.

Agamemnon’s expression didn’t change, but something behind it did — the stillness of a man recalculating rather than reacting.

"He wasn’t cruel out there," Odysseus said. "I’ll give him that much, this time. He was reckless, and he was certain his blood made him exempt from every order that wasn’t his father’s, and he nearly got men killed proving it twice in two weeks. That is not a flaw that gets smaller at Troy. It gets men killed faster there, in worse numbers, with fifty thousand watching." He held Agamemnon’s gaze. "Put him on that beach with Ajax. There’s nothing there to disobey his way into a disaster. If he boards a ship for Troy instead, I will not have him under any command of mine again — and if he breaks a line in a real battle the way he broke one on that island, I’ll kill him myself before the men around him pay for it."

The words sat in the tent. No one flinched. No one objected. Every man there had seen the boy’s work on the fishing village and understood that what Odysseus was saying was not a threat but a calculation.

Menelaus, by the entrance, said nothing, but he didn’t look away either.

Agamemnon was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had gone flat and careful, the voice of a man closing a ledger rather than losing an argument. "He stays with Ajax."

"That settles the command," Nestor said quickly, the way he always moved a conversation off a wound before anyone looked at it too long.

"Is it wise," Idomeneus said, "to weaken the host again before we’ve even sailed. Seven thousand men is seven thousand men, whatever they’re worth in the third rank."

"Then we don’t sail thin," Agamemnon said, turning back to the map, glad of a problem that had a shape he could still command. "We take the time to sail heavy instead. Two weeks. We finish burying our dead and we heal the wounded who can still hold a spear. We send word to every city that hasn’t sent its full levy and tell them the price of staying home has changed. We sail at the rise of the new moon, with more men than we have tonight, not fewer."

"Two weeks is a long time for an enemy who already knows exactly where we are," Idomeneus said.

"It’s a long time for us too," Odysseus said. "Long enough to be ready either way."

Nobody argued further. Agamemnon studied the coastline on the map a moment longer than the decision required, his eyes moving from Aulis to the empty islands to the long grey line that led, eventually, to Troy — and said nothing else about what he was thinking.

Outside, the pyres had burned down to embers, and the camp was already settling into the particular quiet of men who had two weeks, now, to decide what to do with the fear they hadn’t had time for until this moment.

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