“The Great King?” I asked.
Nikkos gave me a peculiar look. “Of Persia,” he said. “Don’t you know anything?”
I could only shake my head.
Nikkos did not trust the newly-arrived Argives. He kept calling them “pretty boys” who would be next to worthless in a real battle. For their part, the Argives swaggered through the camp as if they were each personally descended from Achilles, and laughed at our constant drilling.
“Why doesn’t the king send them against the wall?” Nikkos grumbled. “Then we’d see what they’re really made of.”
But Philip apparently had no intention of attacking the city wall. The army sat outside and did little more than drill—and fire a few missiles into the city each day. The Perinthians sat tight and cheered each time a ship sailed into their wall-protected harbor.
Our phalanx was camped next to the strutting Argives, and there was plenty of bad blood between us. It was natural, I suppose; if we were not allowed to fight the real enemy we fought each other. There were rows and fistfights almost every night. The officers on both sides sternly punished the men involved; Nikkos himself took ten lashes one morning while we were all made to stand at attention and watch. One of Philip’s generals, Parmenio, threatened to stop our wine supply if we did not behave.
“We’ll see how belligerent you are on water,” he growled at us. I had heard that Parmenio was a wine lover, and he looked it: heavy and red-faced, with broken blood vessels splotching his cheeks and bulbous nose.
The Argives were punished by their own officers, of course, but it seemed to us that their punishments were much lighter than our own.
I tried to stay out of the squabbling. Without quite remembering the details I recalled how another army had been almost destroyed because of a quarrel between its leaders. Was that at Troy?
Then came the night that changed everything.
“Where is Troy?” I asked Nikkos that evening, as we reclined on our blankets in front of the dinner fire.
He furrowed his brow at me. “Who knows? Maybe it’s only a story.”
“No,” said one of the other men. “It’s on the other side of the Hellespont.”
“It’s still there? I thought it was burned to the ground.”
“That’s where it was.”
“How do you know? If it ever existed it was so long ago—”
“In the time of heroes.”
“Heroes?” I asked.
“Like Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon.”
Odysseus. That name rang a bell in my mind. Was it he who gave me the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh?
“What do you horse thieves know about Agamemnon?” shouted one of the Argives, barely a stone’s throw from our fire.
“He was one of the leaders of the Achaians at Troy,” I answered.
“He was an Argive,” said the mercenary, stepping into the light from our fire. “King of Mycenae. Not some shit-footed farmer from the hills like you bunch.”
I got to my feet. The Argive was big, and wearing his muscled cuirass plus a short stabbing sword at his hip, but I was taller by half a head and wider across the shoulders.
“I am of the house of Odysseus,” I said, half-dreaming. “I remember that.”
His jaw dropped open, then he laughed and planted his fists on his hips. “You’ve taken one too many blows on your head, Scythian. You’re crazy.”
I wondered how he knew that I was believed to be a Scythian.
Another Argive stepped up beside the first one. He too was armed. Nikkos and several others of my band scrambled to their feet.
“Odysseus has been dead for a thousand years,” said the second Argive. He had a nasty sneer on his bearded face. “If he ever lived at all.”
“He lived,” I said. “I was with him.”
“At Troy, I suppose.”
They both laughed at me. Then the second one stepped close and looked up into my face. He barely came to my shoulders.
“You’re crazy, all right,” he said.
“Or a champion liar,” said the first Argive.
I could feel Nikkos and the other men behind me stiffen with tension.
“No, look,” I said, reaching for my dagger. “Odysseus gave me—”