There were always things to be done in the evenings, and though there were slaves to do them after the series of battles in which they'd sacked the Trojans' allies and client cities, he preferred to work alone. When he sat in his brother's tent in the evenings, watching the captive woman Tecmessa stirring the stewpot while she balanced her son on her other hip, Teucros felt queasy recognition in the sight.
His mother must have looked the same, a slim, quiet captive working at Telamon's fire. She'd always kept her almond-shaped eyes, the mark of her Asian birth, cast down in the presence of Lord Telamon's proper wife, his proper son. And Teucros, her son, had spent too little time looking at her in those years. He'd been too eager to follow his bold older brother in all of his adventures, learning from Ajax how to hunt, how to speak, and how to be a noble Achaean.
His name itself gave his strivings to be a proper Achaean the lie. Teucros was another word for Trojan. Perhaps his mother Hesione had named him, in pride at her royal heritage. Perhaps his father had named him out of pride in his conquest. Telamon had fought at the side of the great hero, Heracles of Tiryns, in the first sack of Troy. Telamon had been a mighty fighter in his day, certainly the equal of any man of the current age, even his demi-divine nephew Achilles. In the days of Heracles, however, even such a strong warrior as Telamon had been an assistant, a follower, rather than a hero in his own right. And although he had once helped to overthrow the divinely-built walls of Troy, his name was spoken less among the Danaans' tents than that of his brother, Peleus.
Teucros saw the rancor of that omission daily in his brother's temper, in Ajax' constant striving to do more and stand out among all the chieftains of the Achaeans. Ajax could never rest content. He always looked for his next battle, his next chance to prove himself above the other kings and heroes of the Argives. He never looked at Tecmessa as she tended the fire in the evenings: his eyes were always on his sword's edge, or on the latest nick in his great shield.
Men rallied to that shield in battle, the largest and heaviest in the host with its seven oxhides. On the field, when other fighters rallied round him, was the only time Teucros saw his brother content. That was the only place his pride fed itself; there he could feel himself a hero among heroes and a great-grandson of Zeus. But Ajax paid for the exaltation of those moments with black gloom at the times when the fighting ceased. Telamon's older son gave place in the Achaean's councils to almost anyone. Achilles, as nobly-spoken in council as he was fierce in war, had always had a leading voice among the chiefs; Nestor's age and wisdom commanded men's attention (and his three strapping sons would be quick to address any disrespect shown to their father); shrewd Odysseus and his partner, Diomedes, caught men's ears with their clever words and knew enough to support one another so that they often got their way, despite being among the lesser lords of the host.
Teucros smiled wryly into the guttering flames of his fire. Ajax could not accept that another lord of the Achaeans could be first in council as he desired to be first on the field. Since mighty Achilles' death, when the whole army had camped without threatening the Trojans' lines, he'd listened to the other leaders urging one course and then another with growing bitterness. Teucros, well used to councils where he had no say, had accepted the debates without question. Their golden cousin was dead, and he, Teucros, would never be foremost in battle or in council. He lived, he might get some share of the spoils in the distant event of their actually capturing the town, and he must be content with that.
On the field, many scorned the use of the bow, the weapon Teucros had the most skill with, as a coward's weapon. He stuck with it despite their jeers. He had not received the same training in war that Ajax had; his practice had been hunting with his brother rather than drilling with sword and shield. When they'd arrived in Asia, the Argive host had faced skilled archers, and he'd been very valuable, even if not very valued, against them. The Trojan archers might have put the Argives to flight many times if Teucros and the few other bowmen of their host had not provided answering fire, and it was by the bow that the Trojans had brought down Achilles, a fighter too powerful for even their strongest swordsman to best. Sometimes, alone in his tent, Teucros allowed himself to feel a perverse pride in his Trojan ancestry and his skill with the bow.
He'd spoken in the chieftains' council for the first time this very week, when archery was at issue. After Achilles' death, the threat of Paris' arrows from the walls seemed greater. The men whispered among themselves that the archer god Apollo had built those walls with his own hands to be a vantage point for a bowman, and all the Danaans remembered the plague-bearing shafts the god himself had sent against them when King Agamemnon had tried to hold the daughter of Apollo's priest as his slave. As they had during the plague the god had sent, the common soldiers had begun to say that the city could not be conquered, and that either Apollo's arrows would cut them down or Poseidon would open the earth under them before they could scale the walls that the two gods had built.
