They took it and then fled.
They were back the next evening and we got a better look at them. The boy, Helios, was around three or four, skinny and looking as if he had been put together with the unwanted pieces of other people’s bodies. His sister, Helike, angel-faced and graceful, was a year or so older.
Again we said nothing and, as Leon reached out his hand, the boy offered a small bowl, containing a dozen figs.
We all sat around the fire and munched away. Apart from Leon, none of us had any experience of children and were slightly at a loss. They were here. Now what should we do with them?
They solved that problem themselves. The little girl pulled out a roughly carved doll with a rag dress tied around it, clambered onto Guthrie’s lap, and began to chatter away to him. His face was a picture. No one dared laugh.
When I looked back, Leon, Markham, and the boy were playing jacks together in the dust and getting on like a house of fire. I heard Markham say, ‘Stop picking your nose, kid. Your head’ll cave in.’
Markham took them back to the tavern after an hour or so. He fussed around them, making them hold his hand as they set off into the night. Their father seemed very relaxed about the whole thing. It’s small events like this that bring home the differences in various cultures.
When you have a small population, children are valued – they are the future, after all, and, for the kids themselves, this manifests itself in a careless confidence. Who would hurt them? Why would anyone hurt them? They wandered happily wherever they pleased. In this era of extended family groups and nosey neighbours, someone, somewhere was always watching out for them. They never came to any harm. I remembered my first day here, the running child who fell over and the man who, without breaking his conversation in any way, picked him up, dusted him down, tousled his hair, and sent him on his way again, unharmed.
They seemed to regard us as their second home after a while, coming around in the evening, playing hand games, singing their own songs. Markham took them back every night. It paid off. He was offered work and paid in wine and half a cheese.
In case you’ve ever wondered, Trojan wine, Greek wine, all wine from that era, was ghastly. Seriously awful, tasting of liquorice and sulphur. Invented a couple of millennia before battery acid was required, they called it wine and drank it instead. Strong enough to strip paint, it was always served with water, which, believe me, did not help in any way. Mixing wine had evolved into a ceremony. In the Iliad, Achilles, receiving the Greek delegation of Odysseus, Phoenix, and Big Ajax, did them the honour of mixing the wine with his own hands.
I allowed them all a drink on what would have been Saturday night. If we had any honey cakes or anything special, we saved that for Saturday nights as well. Sometimes people came down from Site A as well, and we had a bit of a knees-up. The kids tried to teach us to dance. So Roberts strummed away as the men stamped, more or less rhythmically in the dust. Women danced separately. Probably because we were considerably better at it.
There was a lot of laughing. Life was good.
The city was thriving. There was no hint of the conflict to come. If Priam was aware of the Greeks massing over the water, no word had yet filtered down to street level. The rich got richer and even the poor didn’t do that badly. Priests distributed food from the palace and from public and private sacrifices. Once or twice – in the spirit of historical research – we queued up ourselves.
Our neighbours were congenial and couldn’t care less about the new people suddenly living two fields away. Houses went up and down all the time as family needs dictated. No one was bothered about a couple of scruffy shacks on the far side of the olive grove. In fact, we were joined briefly by a small family plus grandmother and two goats, who camped twenty yards away, waved and smiled cheerfully, sent their children across to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.
One of the men got a small job of some kind occasionally, picking olives or grapes or stacking lumber for a day. The payment of eggs or olives or, once, an old boiling fowl was greatly appreciated.
We lived quietly, established our daily routines and noted what went on around us. The war was over a year away.
Life was good.
It would have been very good, but the gods rarely allow perfection.
Kal and her team had spent weeks observing and identifying all the members of the royal family and their household, and, unless Paris had her locked in a cellar somewhere, reluctantly we had to accept the fact – Helen of Sparta never came to Troy. There was absolutely no trace of her anywhere.