Day and night merged quickly into each other on the warship. The drums kept the rowers going, and they rowed throughout the night, taking shifts. Silvius rather liked the way that the beat filled his mind, but he could see that Tisamenos found it difficult, and was jittery and pacing. Elissa simply danced to the beat, making them laugh with her contortions.

At last, they came to Corinth. Helenus beached his ship and went to parley with the Corinthian king. Silvius sat with Orestes whilst he was on shore. Tisamenos and Elissa were with them, side by side on the floor, hands intertwined.

‘We hope that the Achaean cities will send us troops. They all know of the threat.’ Orestes was gazing out towards the land.

‘We will need as many men as we can.’ Tisamenos sounded grim.

‘I hope they’ll help …’ Silvius said.

They waited.

Soon, Helenus returned. ‘Corinth has given us ten ships!’ he announced. ‘And Athens has sent fifteen!’

‘And what about Argos?’ said Orestes, gruffly.

‘We have had no communication from Argos,’ answered Helenus. So the Argives would not send men to help. They were holed up in Mykenai, waiting for the storm to pass.

Even so, a larger fleet made its way through the Gulf of Corinth, and into the Tyrrhenian Sea, where not long before Silvius and Elissa had caused the sea nymphs to look on in wonder as their ship that had once been a nymph sailed by. Then, the sea had been all but empty, and he had been an excited boy, hurtling into something he did not understand. Now he was returning with a fleet of Achaean ships, a Trojan priest, the Bow and Arrow of Apollo, and the head of the Last Gorgon.

He had never imagined it would turn out like this.

Standing in the stern one morning, Silvius’s nostrils pricked. There was something on the breeze, something pine-scented and woody, so unlike the plains of Achaea. He turned and called to Elissa, ‘I think I can smell it. Home! I can smell Italia!’

She came running to join him, her face lit up with joy. ‘I can smell it too!’

He felt a tug in his stomach as he remembered his mother Lavinia, and his little brother Brutus, and the look of disappointment he imagined he would see in Aeneas’s face when they were finally reunited. He had, after all, disobeyed his father, and that was something for which the penalty was severe.

And there was the bigger fear, too. The fear that Lavinium might no longer be standing. That the new palace built so carefully by his father might be destroyed, and his whole family with it.