"Bova, Ben - Orion 02 - Vengeance of Orion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

Poletes called to me. "Orion, you must be a son of Ares! A mighty warrior to best Prince Hector!"
Other voices joined the praise as I let myself over the rickety barricade and dropped lightly to the ground. They surrounded me, clapping my back and shoulders, smiling, shouting. Someone offered me a wooden cup of wine.
"You saved the camp!"
"You stopped those horses as if you were Poseidon himself!"
Even the whipmaster looked on me fondly. "That was not the action of a thes," 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 Agamemnon was not over a sexual partner; it was a matter of honor and stubborn pride. On both sides, as far as I could see.
As we ate and talked the skies darkened and thunder rumbled from inland.
"Father Zeus speaks from Mt. Ida," said Poletes.
One of the foot soldiers, his leather jerkin stained with spatters of grease and blood, grinned up at the cloudy sky. "Maybe Zeus will give us the afternoon off."
"Can't fight in the rain," someone else agreed.
Sure enough, within minutes it began pelting down. We scattered for whatever shelter we could find. Poletes and I hunkered down in the lee of Odysseus's boat.
"Now the great lords will meet and arrange a truce, so that the women and slaves can go out and recover the bodies of the dead. Tonight their bodies will be burned and a barrow raised over their bones." He sighed. "That's how the rampart began, as a barrow to cover the remains of the slain heroes."
I sat and watched the rain pouring down, turning the beach into a quagmire, dotting the sea with splashes. The gusting wind drove gray sheets of rain across the bay, and it got so dark and misty that I could not see the headland. It was chill and miserable and there was nothing to do except wait like dumb animals until the sun returned.
I crouched as close to the boat's hull as I could, feeling cold and utterly alone. I knew I did not belong in this time and place. I had been exiled here by the same power that had killed my love.
I serve a god, I had told these gullible Achaians. Yes, but not willingly. Like a poor witless creature blundering through a fathomless forest, I am reacting to forces beyond my comprehension.
Who did inspire my heroics? I wondered. The golden figure in my dream called himself Apollo. But from what the men around the campfire had said, Apollo supported the Trojans in this war, not the Achaians. I found myself dreading sleep. I knew that once I fell asleep I would again have to face that... god. I had no other word for him.
Suddenly I realized a man was standing in front of me. I looked up and saw a sturdy, thick-torsoed man with a grizzled dark beard and a surly look on his face. He wore a wolf's skin draped over his head and shoulders. The rain pounded on it. Knee-length tunic, with a sword buckled to his hip. Shins and calves muddied. Ham-sized fists planted on his hips.
"You're the one called Orion?" he shouted over the driving rain.
I scrambled to my feet and saw that I stood several inches taller than he. Still, he did not look like a man to be taken lightly.
"I am Orion."
"Come with me," he snapped, and started to turn away.
"To where?"
Over his shoulder he answered, "My lord Odysseus wants to see what kind of man could stop Prince Hector in his tracks. Now move!"
Poletes came with me around the prow of the boat, through the soaking rain, and up a rope ladder to its deck.
"I knew Odysseus was the only one here wise enough to make use of you," he cackled. "I knew it!"

Chapter 5