Vengeance of Orion Read Online Free PDF

he said, looking me over carefully, perhaps for the first time, out of his bulging frog's eyes. "Why is a warrior working as a paid man?"
    Without even thinking about it, I replied, "A duty I must perform. A duty to a god."
    They edged away from me. Their smiles turned to awe. Only the whipmaster had the courage to stand his ground before me. He nodded and said quietly, "I understand. Well, the god must be pleased with you this morning."
    I shrugged. "We'll know soon enough."
    Poletes came to my side. "Come, I'll find you a good fire and hot food."
    I let the old storyteller lead me away.
    "I knew you were no ordinary man," he said as we made our way through the scattered huts and tents. "Not someone with your shoulders. Why, you're almost as tall as Great Ajax. A nobleman, I told myself A nobleman, at the very least."
    He chattered and yammered, telling me how my deeds looked to his eyes, reciting the day's carnage as if he were trying to set it firmly in his memory for future recall. Every group of men we passed offered us a share of their midday meal. The women in the camp smiled at me. Some were bold enough to come up to us and offer me freshly cooked meats and onions on skewers.
    Poletes shooed them all away. "Tend to your masters' hungers," he snapped. "Bind their wounds and pour healing ointments over them. Feed them and give them wine and bat your cow-eyes at them."
    To me he said, "Women cause all the trouble in the world, Orion. Be careful of them."
    "Are these women slaves or thetes ?" I asked.
    "There are no women thetes. It's unheard of. A woman, working for wages? Unheard of!"
    "Not even prostitutes?"
    "Ah! In the cities, yes, of course. Temple prostitutes. But they are not thetes. It's not the same thing at all."
    "Then the women here . . ."
    "Slaves. Captives. Daughters and wives of slain enemies, captured in the sack of towns and farms."
    We came to a group of men sitting around one of the larger cook fires, down close beside the black-tarred boats. They looked up and made room for us. Up on the boat nearest us a large canvas had been draped to form a tent. A helmeted guard stood before it, with a well-groomed dog by his side. I stared at the carved and painted figurehead of the boat, a grinning dolphin's face against a deep blue background.
    "Odysseus's camp," Poletes explained, in a low voice, as we sat and were offered generous bowls of roasted meat and goblets of honeyed wine. "These are Ithacans."
    He poured a few drops of wine on the ground before drinking, and made me do the same. "Reverence the gods," Poletes instructed me, surprised that I did not know the custom.
    The men praised me for my performance at the barricade, then fell to wondering which particular god had inspired me to such heroic action. The favorites were Poseidon and Ares, although Athene was a close runner and Zeus himself was mentioned now and then. Being Greeks, they soon fell to arguing passionately among themselves without bothering to ask me about it.
    I was happy to let them speculate. I listened, and as they argued I learned much about the war.
    They had not been camped here at Troy for ten years, although they had been campaigning in the region each summer for nearly that long. Achilles, Menalaos, Agamemnon, and the other warrior kings had been ravaging the eastern Aegean coast, burning towns and taking captives, until finally they had worked up the nerve—and the forces—to besiege Troy itself.
    But without Achilles, their fiercest fighter, the men thought that their prospects were dim. Apparently Agamemnon had awarded Achilles a young woman captive and then taken her back for himself, and this insult was more than the haughty warrior could endure, even from the High King.
    "The joke of it all," said one of the men, tossing a well-gnawed lamb bone to the dogs hovering beyond our circle, "is that Achilles prefers his friend Patrokles to any woman."
    They all nodded and murmured agreement. The strain between Achilles and