Chapter 206: Silent Treason

Hecuba did not summon anyone.

That was the first decision. She made it sitting alone in her chamber with the tablet in her lap and the lamp burned down to a stub.

Three names. If she called them in, they would know. If they knew, they would stop. A spy who stops is a spy you never catch.

So she would not call them in.

She would watch.

She read the tablet one more time. Her eyes stopped at the second name. They had stopped there the first time too.

She folded the tablet. Put it in her robe. Went to find him.

Fylon was in the records room at the second hour of the morning. He was always in the records room at the second hour of the morning.

He stood when she entered.

"Queen Hecuba."

"Sit."

He sat.

She did not. She stayed standing near the door, where she could see the corridor.

"Your list," she said. "Three names."

"Yes."

"Your name is on it."

Fylon did not look away. "Yes."

"Why."

"Because I had access to every piece of information that reached the Greeks. All of it. The defensive positions. The compound. The net placements. I collected most of it myself." He paused. "A list that leaves out the man who made it is not a list. It is an argument."

Hecuba studied him.

"You understand what you have done," she said. "If I decide it is you, I will not warn you. You will simply be arrested."

"I understand."

"And you put your name on it anyway."

"I put my name on it because I want you to trust the other two names." Fylon met her eyes. "If I had given you two names, you would have asked why I excluded myself. Then you would have spent a week doubting me instead of watching them. We do not have a week."

Hecuba was quiet.

Then she said: "Who else knows you made this list."

"No one."

"Keep it that way."

She turned to leave.

At the door she stopped. "Fylon."

"Yes."

"If it is you, I will be very disappointed."

"If it is me," Fylon said, "you should be."

She watched for four days.

She did not follow anyone. A queen following people through her own palace would be noticed within an hour. She did something simpler.

She sat.

She sat in the courtyard outside the supply office in the morning, with her weaving, the way an old woman sits in the sun. She sat in the corridor near the archive in the afternoon. She sat in the upper gallery above the eastern gate at dusk, where she could see the whole lower yard.

Nobody looked twice. She was the widow of a dead king. Widows sat.

She learned things.

She learned that the supply office received deliveries at the third hour and the ninth hour, and that between the ninth and the tenth there was almost no one in the corridor.

She learned that the harbour gate guard rotated late by about ten minutes every evening, because the man on the second shift ate first.

She learned who walked past the granary section on their way to nowhere in particular.

On the third day she saw something.

She did not write it down. She did not tell anyone. She went back to her chamber and sat with it for two hours in the dark.

Then she went back out the next morning and sat in the same courtyard with the same weaving.

Because one thing was not proof.

One thing was one thing.

Under the earth, they went down.

Miros went first.

They had argued about it for an hour. Dexion said he should go first because he had two working arms. Miros said he would go first because if something was waiting at the bottom, it should meet the oldest man.

He went first.

The passage was not a shaft. It was a slope. Narrow. It ran down and to the left, exactly as Deia had said it would.

The blue light stopped four paces in.

After that there was nothing. Miros held the lamp in his left hand and braced his shoulder against the wall because he had no right hand to catch himself with.

"Count your steps," he said back up the slope.

"Why," Echion said.

"So we know how to get out in the dark."

They counted.

At one hundred and twelve steps the slope levelled.

At one hundred and twenty the air changed. Colder. Wetter. It smelled like the inside of a well.

At one hundred and thirty-one, the lamp found the wall in front of them.

It was not stone.

Deia came forward. She put her hand on it. Pulled it back.

"Metal," she said.

"Bronze?"

"No." She touched it again. Held her palm flat against it. "It’s warm."

Miros looked at her. "Warm."

"Warmer than the air. Warmer than my hand."

Dexion drew his sword. Echion moved beside him, shoulder to shoulder, the way they had been trained.

Miros raised the lamp higher.

The wall went up past the light. It went left past the light. It went right past the light. They could not see the edge of it in any direction.

And in the centre, at chest height, there was a mark cut into the metal.

A circle. A line through it. And below the line, a root, curving down and to the left.

Deia stared at it.

"It’s the same symbol," Dexion said.

"No." Deia’s voice was flat. "Look at the root."

They looked.

The root on this one did not curve down and to the left.

It curved up.

Deia took out her tablet. Her hand was steady. Her voice was not.

"Every symbol up there means descend," she said. "This one is the only one I have ever seen that means the opposite."

"Meaning what," Miros said.

"Meaning this is not the bottom." She wrote as she spoke. "This is the far side. Whatever is behind this wall, the people who built the city did not build it to go down into it."

"Then what did they build it for."

Deia looked up at the metal that went past the light in every direction.

"To keep it shut," she said.

And behind the wall, something moved.

Not loud. Not fast.

A single low sound, like weight shifting.

Then silence.

Echion’s knuckles were white on his sword. "Miros."

"Back," Miros said.

"Miros—"

"Back. Now. Count your steps."

They went back up the slope in the dark, counting, and none of them turned their backs to the wall until the blue light found them again.

In the Greek camp, the covers came off at midday.

Odysseus had put them under sailcloth for three days, in the section of the camp behind the horse lines where the Trojan watch could not see. Now he pulled the cloth off himself.

Diomedes limped over. The arrow wound in his thigh was eleven days old and he still favoured it.

He stopped.

"What is that."

"A bridge."

Diomedes looked at it.

It was a platform. Six paces wide. Mounted on four solid wheels, axles reinforced with iron, the frame braced underneath like a ship’s hull. The forward edge was cut at an angle so it would sit flush against stone. The whole top surface was covered in ox hides, soaked and nailed down.

Behind it stood eleven more.

"Twelve," Diomedes said.

"Twelve."

"Three days."

"Three days and every carpenter in the camp. And every smith. The axles are the hard part." Odysseus put his hand on the frame. "Wood alone snaps under that weight. It needed iron."

Diomedes walked the length of it. Slowly. He knew what he was looking at. He had been a soldier for twenty-two years.

"The gaps," he said.

"Yes."

"Their gaps kill one man at a time. One man walks in, they turn him, they take him from the sides."

"Yes."

Diomedes put his hand on the platform’s forward edge. Six paces wide.

"Six men," he said. "Abreast."

"Six men abreast, shields locked, and nothing behind them but more men." Odysseus’s voice did not change. "The gap kills one. It does not kill six. There is no room to turn six men. There is no side to take them from. There is only the front, and the front is a wall of shields walking at them."

Diomedes was quiet for a long moment.

Then: "How do they get to the wall."

"Slowly. Under the hides. Arrows will not go through wet hide, and fire will not catch it." Odysseus looked toward Troy. "Two hundred men push each one. They will lose men on the way. Not enough to matter."

"And the ditch."

"There is no ditch." Odysseus almost smiled. "They built killing gaps instead. They chose the clever thing over the simple thing."

Diomedes looked at the twelve platforms under the sun.

"The mind behind the wall," he said. "The third son. He will see these coming."

"He will."

"Then he has time to answer them."

"He has four days." Odysseus pulled the sailcloth back over the first platform. "And he cannot dig a ditch in four days. Not one deep enough. Not with four thousand men who are also holding a wall."

He tied the cloth down.

"Whatever he does," Odysseus said, "it will have to be something no one has thought of. That is what he does. So I have spent three days thinking about what a man like that thinks of."

"And?"

"And I built twelve. Not six."

That night Agamemnon walked to the far end of the camp himself.

He did not take guards. He did not send a runner ahead.

The fire there was small. The man beside it did not stand up when the High King of Mycenae arrived, and did not look up either.

He was working a whetstone along the edge of a blade. Slow. Even. He had been doing it for a long time.

"Odysseus has finished his engines," Agamemnon said.

The whetstone kept moving.

"Twelve platforms. Four days from now, we go at the northern wall."

The whetstone kept moving.

Agamemnon waited.

"I am not asking," he said. "I am telling you to be ready."

The whetstone stopped.

Achilles looked up. The firelight caught his face and there was nothing in it at all — not anger, not interest, not even contempt.

"Your engines will take the wall," he said.

"Yes."

"Then take it."

He went back to the blade.

Agamemnon stood there. "You have sat out four assaults. The men are talking."

"Let them talk."

"You came here to fight."

"I came here for one man." The stone moved. Once. Twice. "He stands on that wall every morning. I have watched him for eleven days. He does not come down and I do not go up."

"And when the wall falls?"

Achilles smiled.

It did not reach anything above his mouth.

"Then he will have nowhere left to stand," he said. "And I will not need your engines."