Read Online Ithaca by Patrick Dillon - Free Book Online Page A

At last a wary Trojan reconnaissance band, heavily armed, came out from a side gate to see what was going on. They found all the mess of an army that had been encamped for eight years: abandoned tents, piles of rotting food, stinking latrines . . . and the Greeks’ final offering to the gods, the gigantic wooden statue of a horse.
    They found something else as well: a half-crazed soldier hiding in a trench. When they dragged him out, beat him, and hauled him before Priam, Troy’s king, the soldier babbled out the whole sorry tale—of aristocratic infighting, illness and indiscipline, mutinous, half-starved troops and adverse omens—that led to the Greek capitulation. That was when it came home to the Trojans that their nightmare was finally over. Heaving open the gates for the first time in eight years, they all flooded out onto the plain of Troy—soldiers, old men in litters, women and children, priests and slaves. They picked through the abandoned camp, traced the furrows of Greek ships that still marked the beach, kicked out the ashes of their enemies’ campfires. The horse, chocked up on tree trunks, they hauled back across the plain to the great temple of Troy, where garlands of victory were already being hung and fires were lit as the town gave itself over to celebration.
    Odysseus was inside the horse.
    He and twenty companions, sweating, teeth clenched, gripping breastplates and shields so no clink of metal would give away their presence. They crouched in darkness for twelvehours, unable even to relieve themselves in case the stink gave them away. They felt the jolt as the horse eased over the threshold of Troy’s main gate. They heard the Trojans singing and rejoicing, and smelled incense and roasting meat through the horse’s timbers. Only when the last noises of celebration had died away did they let themselves down from the belly of the horse and open the gates of Troy to the Greek army. Because the Greeks hadn’t really sailed away. They’d hove to beyond the horizon, and the moment night fell, they returned to the beach.
    No storyteller on earth could describe the slaughter that followed. The Trojans were bemused, befuddled, unprepared—they had no chance of organizing any resistance. And after eight years’ fighting, the Greeks showed no mercy. Women and children were killed, old men cut down in the streets. The Greeks hunted Priam and his children to the steps of the temple. Shops were set on fire, and fire spread across the doomed town, choking streets in oily black smoke, drowning children’s screams with the crackle of flames. By the time dawn broke, Troy no longer existed.
    I can still remember the first time I heard the story of Troy. It reached Ithaca via a storyteller on a merchant ship. The versions I’ve heard since have added detail—increasingly colorful—but to me, there’s one image that always sticks in my mind. My father—my father —crouching in the horse’s belly, doomed to almost certain death but feeling no fear. I remember what I felt the first time I heard it, and I’ve felt the same thing ever since: I couldn’t do that. The story doesn’t bring my father closer. It drives him further away. Odysseus the fighter, Odysseus the hero. Each time I picture my father’s jaw set, his hand sweating on his sword hilt, and I know—I know —that whatever blood runs in his veins doesn’t run through mine.
    The version told at Pylos makes a few changes. It turns out Odysseus originally suggested a dog, not a horse. The horsewas Nestor’s idea. It was Nestor who modified the design to include a trapdoor and rope ladder. Nestor checked each man’s equipment, ran through the final orders with Odysseus, and rehearsed the actor the Greeks left behind to sell the story to the Trojans. Plus, at the last minute he ordered the horse’s head to be lowered slightly, otherwise it wouldn’t