Quest of a Goddess

Quest of a Goddess chapter 1

Aftermath

The smell was the first thing he remembered.  The strong, cloying miasma of smoke and burning.  For an instant he was taken back to his childhood, dozing near the hearth of his father’s house.  As soon as his mind remembered his age, his imagination took an even more fantastic leap; he thought he had woken up on his own funeral pyre.  The lack of coins on his eyes forced him quickly, and gratefully, decide that this to was not the case.

            While still trying to figure out the smell in his nostrils, Agathon noticed the weight pressing him into the dirt and dust.  As he opened his mouth to take a deeper breath, a drop of liquid tumbled down into his throat.  It was bitter and salty, yet at the same time very familiar to an experienced warrior.  The liquid was human blood.  With that realization, Agathon’s memories suddenly flowed back into his brain with strength and power like that of the nearby river Scamander.  He was in Troy and he had failed.  Agathon and his fellow Trojans had lost their ten year battle to defend the city from the invading Greeks and this was the result.  Now that he was awake, Agathon could hear the shrill screams and wails of the vanquished and the joyous, triumphant shouts of the victors.  Galvanized by these sounds he was hearing, Agathon tried again to move out from under the weight he couldn’t identify.  The effort dragged him swirling back into unconsciousness.

            In another section of the city, a young woman was offering up fervent prayers to Pallas Athena. She had been in the temple of the goddess since sunset of the previous evening.  That had been the evening when the entire city had been celebrating over the Greeks’ recognition of the fact that they couldn’t take Troy despite their ten years of labor.  While the rest of Troy had drank, feasted, danced, and made love around the horse which had been found in the abandoned Greek camp, Athenais had gone to the temple with her fellow priestess.  They had gone to offer their thanks to Athena for the melting of her rage against the city and her people over the folly of Paris.  The seeming ending of this anger was held by the Priestesses, and others, as largely responsible for the Greek withdrawal. 

            It wasn’t till nearly dawn when the merrymaking had drifted away like a warm breeze that the first shouts and then screams had began to billow up from the different sections of the city.  Athenais and her sister priests knew then… knew that the Athena and her fellow Olympians had not spared them had merely played one last cruel jest on Troy before the end.

            Athenais would never clearly remember the hours which followed.  Flashes of memory would spring upon her, as if from ambush, as time passed.  Each time they did so, Athenais would do her best to push them back.  She did not ever want to fully remember the last days of Troy.

            The first clear memory of that time was standing barefoot on the beach of Troy in the tatters of her white priestly garments, a chill wind blowing through her long, black tresses.  Other than being bound and dragged from the now defiled temple of Athena to this harsh and unforgiving sand, Athenais had not been touched by the Greeks.  She could not fully comprehend the reason for it, because her fellow priestesses had been ravaged and either left for dead or already apportioned among the Greeks.  She was deathly afraid that the same could happen to her at any moment.  So Athenais stood on that windswept beach and tried to remain as unobtrusive as possible.  In her mind, one question raged again and again, “Why Athena, Why?”

            It took three days for the fires in the city to die out completely.  Indeed, were it not for a gentle rain which began to fall on the second evening and continued all through the third day, it is probable that the fires would have kept burning.  The rain was a mystery, having come out of a cloudless, clear sky and beginning slowly and gradually building to a steady downpour.  Some of those on guard that evening swore that they had heard a woman’s weeping in among the drops, but couldn’t find her when they looked.  These stories were dismissed out of hand by all to whom they were related the next morning.  In most cases the Greeks were too concerned with arguing over spoils to care about the vagaries of the weather.  These arguments had erupted at almost the same instant as Trojan resistance had died and had yet to find an end.  Most of the Greeks would have agreed that Achilles was entitled to the lion share of the spoils due to his great victory on the Scamander plain as well as over Hector beneath the Scyian Gates.  Achilles was dead however, and along with him Ajax and many other of the leading Greeks.  As nominal leader of the Greek army, Agamemnon claimed the lion share of the spoils but had enraged many with this demand.  After all, had not Agamemnon’s feud with Achilles been the cause of many Greek deaths?  Had it not been Agamemnon’s false message from Zeus led to Hector’s routing the Greeks on the Scamander plain?