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Back The Arrow of Apollo
Chapters (52)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. About the Author
  4. Dedication
  5. By the Same Author
  6. Author’s Note
  7. Map
  8. Domus Libris
  9. House of the Wolf
  10. The House of the Wolf
  11. One
  12. Two
  13. Three
  14. Four
  15. Five
  16. Six
  17. Seven
  18. Eight
  19. Nine
  20. Ten
  21. Eleven
  22. Twelve
  23. Thirteen
  24. Fourteen
  25. Fifteen
  26. Sixteen
  27. Seventeen
  28. Eighteen
  29. Nineteen
  30. Twenty
  31. Twenty-One
  32. Twenty-Two
  33. Twenty-Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Thirty-Six
  47. Thirty-Seven
  48. Thirty-Eight
  49. Timeline of the Trojan Cycle
  50. Further Reading
  51. Acknowledgements
  52. Supporters

Somebody thumped the table, and others took up the action.

‘She has given me a child! A son – a fine son!’

A round of hurrahs exploded through the hall. The tables shook, goblets and plates clattering, hounds barking to the ceilings.

‘The games will be in honour not only of our marriage – but of Penthilos, our new son!’

Tisamenos stood up suddenly, knocking a silver goblet to the floor, and left the feasting hall. Nobody noticed him go, and he was glad for that.

He headed towards the entrance hall of the kinghouse. For a moment he hung on the threshold, the cool darkness of the building to his right, the dusty, hot street to his left. The noise of the feasting was rising. A group of beautiful ladies wandered through, their light clothes floating about them, their jewels shining on their forearms and on their elaborately dressed hair.

He turned towards them. One of the younger ones let fall a floating piece of cloth, and as she bent to pick it up she glanced at him coquettishly.

Tisamenos did not return the glance.

Instead, he went out, down the steps, into the street below.

As his eyesight adjusted, Tisamenos blinked in the now bright morning. Above him the sky was cloudless, and around him already were cheese sellers and a fuller’s boy carrying a pail of something that smelled so rank he almost turned back into the kinghouse. But he didn’t.

Swallows. Where did they live? Under the eaves of houses. He looked up, but could see no nests hanging under the kinghouse. A donkey brayed nearby, and a farmer with a goat over his shoulders wandered past, whistling. The goat bleated.

Would he have to look under the eaves of every building in the citadel, from swineherd’s hut to kinghouse? The kinghouse alone had dozens of roofs.

This was a test, he knew it. A test he had to pass. She’d said something about his mother. The knowledge that Hero was offering him was just out of his reach.

He wandered through the market in the agora, which was bustling with stallholders. Huge piles of dates, apples, pears and olives glistened on trestle tables. ‘Get your finest wild boar from here! Killed it with me own two hands!’ yelled a scrawny man who looked as if he’d never been on a hunt in his life.

The city was going about its business, as it had done for hundreds of years, even before the House of Atreos had come to rule, and as it would continue to do until his family were nothing but a memory.