“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said, reassuring herself as much as him. “We both know what this is.”
It was her turn to kiss him then, soaking up the moments of tenderness, the heated plushness of his mouth. She wanted to stay, wanted that more than she’d wanted anything in her life. “I need to go,” she said. He held her hand until they stretched to the limits of his reach and hers, then let her go. She gathered her laptop and book, and let herself out.
*
The whole group had a rather melancholy air the next morning as they waited for the ticket booth at Troy to open for visitors. Keenan attributed that to the impending departure, just a couple of days away. The guide he’d hired met them right on time, and led all five of them into the walls of varying materials and heights, explaining Troy’s three-thousand-year history of destruction and rebirth as he went. Built, destroyed by fire, rebuilt, destroyed by earthquake, enlarged and rebuilt yet again, destroyed by war, rebuilt, destroyed by war again, rebuilt again, before finally being abandoned for good during the Ottoman period to disappear under the earth.
One thumb hooked in his backpack strap, Keenan looked around. The unexcavated portions of the site were covered in a grass so green it hurt his eyes to look at it. The sky was a rich, cloudless blue. He found it incredible to stand under the same sky Hector and Achilles had fought under, to see the walls they’d defended, breached. Or was it the evidence that time passed, all wars end, the reasons for fighting them disappearing into history along with the bones of the warriors? The factions disappeared, the emotions dissipated, leaving behind at best an epic poem that was as much about the horror of war as it was about the glory of it. At worst, time left behind nothing at all.
“We’re a long way from the coast,” Florence pointed out to the guide as they stood on an excavated rock ramp, probably used to transport goods into the city.
“Just like Ephesus, Troy was at the mouth of a river,” the guide said. “Over time the silt built up, pushing the coastline out. The real cause of the Trojan war was not a beautiful woman. It was control over the Dardanelles and trade routes to the Black Sea. It’s probably also why the site was abandoned finally. No real strategic value, other than good farming land.” He finished with a pragmatic shrug.
“Going to war over a woman is much more poetic,” Grannie pointed out.
“But much less likely,” Marian said dryly.
“I’m a romantic,” Grannie said. “I’ll stick with the fictional version.”
Still quibbling, they drifted out of sight around a corner, leaving him alone with Rose.
“So the Aegeans probably didn’t breach the walls with a hollow horse, either,” she said, looking around. “I’m a little disappointed.”
She was standing by the towering walls reputed to belong to the Troy of Achilles and Patroclus, of Helen and Hector and Paris. Lines from the poem rose to the surface of Keenan’s mind, glorifying war, a warrior’s striving for victory, for justice, for patriotism. “No one wants to admit we go to war over things like trade. So we dress it up in patriotism and freedom, make it less ugly.”
“Controlling trade routes to the Black Sea is far less memorable than love and an illicit affair between Paris and Helen.”
“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” he said after a long silence. Voicing the thought was easier with Rose by his side. “This inspired the most powerful epic poem in all of human history? I thought it would be … bigger.”
She looked around. Bees buzzed in and out of the hive in a tree growing out of the grass on the earth above them. “The size makes that much more compelling. Think of these tiny passages crammed with the bodies of warriors, no matter how they got here. Fighting. Dying.” She looked at him, just inches away. “It’s extraordinarily intimate. War sounds so big, such a grand scale. Maybe it was when they fought on the beaches.” She shrugged. “Maybe it never happened. Maybe the scope presented in the poem contributes to the myth, which is a metaphor for the battles we fight inside. Love. Honor. Respect. A place, or people to call home.”
He didn’t know what to say.
“What are you thinking?” she said, a quizzical smile on her face. “And don’t feed me some line of bullshit. I’ve asked Jack that question. I know from bullshit.”
“Have you ever heard of the dead-man-walking approach to combat?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a trick for dealing with the terror. Even with the training we have, it still comes sometimes, so you just assume you’re dead. That you’re never going home. You have nothing to fear, because you’re already dead. You just … fight, push ahead with the mission, because you’ve got nothing left to lose.”