A Hero and a Prince

The night after the council, Teucros sat alone, examining his arrows. He was determined not to lose the archery competition at the funeral games to Meriones of Crete a second time. When he'd left Ajax' tent, his brother had been similarly intent on planning his moves for the wrestling. Of all the Achaeans, only Teucros knew how much pride and pain the draw at Patroclus' funeral games had cost Ajax.

He sighted along a shaft into his lamp, twirled it, then set it with a sigh into the pile too imperfect for the next day's contest. The other pile, where all the shafts were perfect, still held only enough arrows for a single flight. He began to sort through the imperfect arrows, looking for ones he could improve by refletching, when he felt a draft from the entrance of the tent.

"Ajax," he began, but stopped on looking up. Two strangers stood within the tent flap, wrapped up tightly in their cloaks despite the warmth of the evening.

"May we enter?" He couldn't place the man's voice, beyond a certainty that he didn't hail from any of the islands he'd visited.

"Come in and be welcome," he answered. Peaceful strangers were never refused a welcome at his father's hall. Teucros stood to fetch the wineskin. He gestured at his visitors to sit, but stopped in mid-motion. He had only the one stool, and the fire had guttered out, making him the most poorly equipped host in the Argive camp. He grabbed the wineskin and held it out in palliation.

The shorter of the two reached him first. The man accepted the offered drink, saying, "Thank you, Cousin." Teucros could only be grateful that he had not dropped the skin when his guest stepped into the lamplight. It was Paris, the Trojan prince. i I could end the war here, if I dispose of his guard and capture him . . . Ajax is less than a minute away, a single shout . . . /i He let go of those thoughts. The man had accepted his welcome and his wine. No bond was as sacred before Zeus as that between host and guest.

While Paris dripped a libation and took the customary sip of his host's offering, Teucros examined his companion. The man stood a little taller than the Prince, and his dark hair hung nearly straight over a solemn, almost painfully honest face. Not one of the King's sons, Teucros knew, but one of the nobles of the city. He searched his memory for a moment, then recalled seeing that face contorted as the man lifted up a great rock to throw.

"You are Aeneas, the one they call the goddess' son."

The taller man shrugged. "Boasting of a thing doesn't make it more or less true," he replied. "If you want to see the true favorite of the goddess, you have only to look to our kinsman, here." The lamplight caught Paris' smile at that.

The Trojan prince had been called many names in Teucros' hearing: coward, adulterer, thief. The handsome man he saw, dark-eyed and curly-haired, looked none of those things. More than that, though, Paris had a quality of brilliance about him, as Achilles had on the battlefield, or Odysseus in council. Teucros remembered a poet singing of the ancient hero Cadmos, "the goddess poured grace upon him, and made him stronger and goodly to look at." Seeing Paris' glowing confidence, even among his enemies' tents, he knew what the poet had meant.

"We've come to ask for your aid, Cousin," Paris spoke softly, a gold pin glinting in his cloak. Distantly, Teucros heard his brother's men singing at their fires. How had these elegant Asians slipped past the men of Salamis without a challenge?

"You name me 'Cousin,' but we have never met."

Paris laughed. "Your very name proclaims our kinship. Would you deny it?"

"Would i you /i claim it?" Teucros parried. He needed more time to think, more air – perhaps some of the wine. As if sensing his incipient panic, Aeneas handed back the wineskin. Teucros reflexively poured a splash for the gods, whichever might be watching this unreal scene, and drank down a healthy slug.

"The Achaeans are in disarray," Aeneas urged. "You have no great part in their force, but in Troy, you would be a hero . . . and a prince."

"With Achilles dead, it should take but one more setback to send them fleeing back to their shores," Paris added. Aeneas shot the prince a quelling look even as Teucros opened his mouth to protest the slur on his people.

"That's not what we mean," Aeneas assured him. "We've all been seeking a way to break this dreadful stalemate for the last ten years. If we could end the war and save face on both sides . . ." He spread his hands. "Many who will die otherwise can be saved."

Teucros' vision of ending the war returned, headier and more possible than before. A chance to influence the lords of Troy would mean a chance to get Helen returned to her home and her family, to see the black ships sail away to Achaea safe and with all honor, to return to his father's hall in Salamis a hero, as famous as Ajax. All the honor he had ever dreamed of, offered to him freely.

He couldn't hide his pleasure at the prospect. Paris said warmly, "In Troy, your skill with the bow would receive its true measure of honor. We Teucrians have always regarded archery as an essential art of war. Now that we have lost Hector, our strategy must change. We will need archers rather than spearmen." The laughing goddess Aphrodite had truly endowed her favorite with the gift of persuasion. Teucros felt already half-enraptured by the man's words.

"There is a place in our council for you as well," Aeneas added. "Your knowledge of Achaea and the Isles will be invaluable to us as we seek to make peace with the Lords of the Danaans."

"You don't need to be such an old woman, Anchisides," Paris interrupted. "I might as well have brought my mother, to hear all this talk of making peace. When we have my cousin's bow on our walls, we will seek victory, which any real man knows is ten times the value of peace." His warm eyes smiled at Teucros, but Telamon's son felt cold. For all of the lofty ideas Aeneas offered him, if he accepted their offer, he would soon have to use his bow against his brother and all the men he'd fought beside for so long.

With the bitterness of that realization burning in his heart, he couldn't it when Paris reached out to clasp his shoulder. Teucros shook off his cousin's hand and said coldly, "You may think that you will defeat the Danaans with archery, but we have sent for a bowman of our own. You especially, Lord Paris, will find his shafts bitter indeed."

Once his temper roused, it took little more to drive his guests from his tent. They bowed and looked over their shoulders as they left, but he resolutely turned his back. He stared into the fire, clenching his fists as if he could squeeze back the tears that ran down his cheeks, the anger, and the shame. Even as he cried, he could not decide why he wept: for daring to think of abandoning his brother, or for rejecting the dream of honor the Trojans had offered.

Epilogue

There were no good choices for Teucros. Achilles' funeral the next day ended in Ajax, the brother Teucros had followed to war, losing the contest for Achilles' armor and committing suicide in rage and disgrace. Paris died not long after when Philoctetes shot him with one of Heracles' envenomed arrows, howling in pain and rejected by his first love, the nymph Oenone. Troy fell that year, and the sack was brutal: men butchered, women and children enslaved. When Teucros led his brother's men back to their father on Salamis, Telamon disowned and exiled his younger son for failing to prevent his brother's disgrace.