Fall of Kings

EPILOGUE

Queen Andromache stood on the grassy hilltop, motionless, as she had been since the morning. Now the sun was falling brightly into the west, and still she watched the preparations on the old ship below. She was dressed in a faded brown robe and wrapped in her ancient green shawl. She felt the weight of her years. Her knees ached and her back was on fire, but still she stood.

She saw someone move out of the crowd on the beach below and sighed. Yet another serving maid with a cup of warm goat’s milk and advice to rest for a while? She squinted shortsightedly, then smiled. Ah, she thought, clever.

Her small grandson trotted up the hill and without a word sat down on the grass at her feet. After a moment she knelt beside him, ignoring the pain in her knees.

“Well, Dios,” she asked, “what did your father tell you to say to me?”

The seven-year-old squinted up at her through his dark fringe, and she impatiently brushed his hair from his face. So like his namesake, she thought.

“Papa says it’s time now.”

She glanced at the sun. “Not yet,” she told him.

They sat in companionable silence for a while. She saw that his gaze was fixed on the Xanthos. “What are you thinking, boy?” she asked.

“They say Grandpapa will dine tonight with the gods in the Hall of Heroes,” he ventured.

“Maybe.”

He looked up at her, his eyes wide. “Isn’t it true, Grandmama? Grandpapa will dine with Argurios, and Hektor and Achilles, and Odysseus?” he persisted anxiously.

“Certainly not Odysseus,” she told him briskly.

“Why not? Because he is the Prince of Lies?”

She smiled. “Odysseus is the most honest man I’ve ever known. No, because Odysseus is not dead.”

The people of the Seven Hills last had heard from Ithaka some ten years before. The collapse of the Mykene empire, its leaders dead, its armies in ruins, its treasuries empty, had opened the way for barbarians from the north to sweep down through the mainland, and where once-proud cities had ruled, there lay only darkness and fear. But little Ithaka still stood, as Penelope and her growing son Telemachus stood on the cliffs each sunset watching for their king to come home. Andromache remembered Odysseus carving his wife’s face in the sand and wondered if he was doing it still somewhere.

“How do you know he’s not dead?” little Dios asked.

“Because Odysseus is a storyteller, and storytellers never die as long as their stories live on.”

Invigorated by the thought, she stood up, cursed as her knees cracked, then set off down the hill, the boy running after her. Spotting her, two men peeled away from the crowd and raced up the hillside to meet her where a campfire blazed in a small hollow. Andromache’s old bow and specially prepared arrows lay beside it.

She took each of her sons by the hand and gazed at them fondly. Astyanax had her flame hair and green eyes, and his handsome face bore a dreadful sword wound, a legacy of a battle with the Siculi the previous spring when he nearly had died saving his brother’s life. Still, when he smiled, he looked just like his father. Dex had his mother’s fair hair and the powerful build and dark eyes of his Assyrian sire. He had taken the name Ilos as an act of fealty to his adopted people, but the local folk called him Iulos.

“I am ready,” she told them, “I have said my goodbyes.”

She had lain all night racked with grief at the king’s funeral bier, her heart cracked and drained, her soul bereft, her tears staining his face and hands. Then, in the morning, she had dried her eyes, kissed his cold lips and his forehead, and walked away from him forever.

Now Astyanax turned and signaled, and a score of men leaped to put their shoulders to the Xanthos. There was a rumbling of wood against gravel, a groan of protesting timbers, and then the old ship once more was afloat. Her mast had been dismantled, and the steering oar tied. The galley was heaped with fragrant cedar branches and herbs. At its center the body of Helikaon lay on a cloth of gold. He was dressed in a simple white robe, and the sword of Argurios was on his breast. On his right foot only he wore an old sandal.

As the drifting ship reached the center of the river and was snatched by the current, the sun touched the horizon. Andromache bent to pick up her bow. She put an arrowhead to the fire, and it blazed brightly. She notched the arrow to the string and closed her eyes briefly to summon all her remembered strength and courage. Then she sighted and loosed the arrow.

It soared into the sky like a rising star, dipped again, and hit the golden ship at the stern. A blaze started instantly. Within heartbeats archers all along the riverbank had shot their fire arrows into the ship. There was an explosion of flame, and the Xanthos was alight from stem to stern. It was so bright that people in the crowd shaded their eyes, and the roar of burning timbers was the sound of thunder. High above an eagle rose through the blue sky, lifted on the warm air.

Unbidden, faces appeared in Andromache’s mind: Hektor, the bravest of the Trojans; his brothers Dios and Antiphones; the tale spinner Odysseus; the valiant Mykene warriors Argurios, Kalliades, and Banokles. And Helikaon, her lover, her husband, the keeper of her heart.

I have walked with heroes, she thought.

Andromache felt her heart fill again, and she smiled. Then she raised her bow in her fist in final farewell as the blazing ship sailed into the west.