"The Trojan Horse" by Lovis Corinth (1924): "A four-legged bonfire, ready for its flame" 

"You know how this works."

"May I assure you, that not only do you not have to torture me, you don't even have to bother threatening me with torture."

"And may I assure you that I have no shame or hesitation in torturing a defenceless old man. So, talk."

"How can I assist your curiosity?"

"You know. The war. The Trojan war. I'd like to hear the understory, the truth."

"The truth? How do you define — "

"Let's not start that. I've heard the Stories and I've heard some stories. I've heard the... talk...I want the what-I-saw from someone who was there."

"I was there."

"You know what I'm asking. Everyone swears this was the greatest of the wars, everyone has heard the stories of the glories. Everyone says the heroes' names will be lip-ferried to the future. Tell me about the War at Troy."

"How do you define war? What is a — ?" 

"Chop two."

***

"You still have some fingers left and a good chance of not bleeding to death."

"Thank you. I didn't like those fingers anyway. And a man my age needs so few."

"Let's start again. No word-fiddling."

"The stories are...well, what everyone says about the war, they don't have much to do with what happened. The stories and the lived, they're as similar as, say, a horse and a leech."

"The beginning?"

"Of course. Now if I were to point out every untruth, we'd be exhausted — "

"I'm in no rush."

"First of all, probably, in all likelihood, the most important thing to say about the Trojan War is: there was no war."

"No war?"

"Well, and please let me finish, because I honestly want to satisfy your curiosity, it again depends what you intend when you confer the title of war. If you see war as a few  ships sinking in the middle of the waves, a few dozen warriors in  armour, frankly not as gleaming as it could be, being welcomed whole-heartedly by the water, far, far away from Troy, if you see that as war, then it was a war."

"Helen?"

"Helen's not a story. She was the wife of Menelaus. Good-looking, not that good-looking, but good-looking."

"Paris?"

"Real."

"And he abducted her to Troy?'

"Not in the widely accepted use of the word abducted. Menelaus forced her on Paris. He was bored with Helen; once you've had your wife in fifty-six positions, it's not the same, is it? Menelaus wanted Troy's wealth and an excuse. He told Paris he was divorcing Helen and he would consider her removal a courtesy. Paris was only up to position number five or so, so he cheerily agreed. And Paris returned to Troy with a barkful of wine, congratulating himself that Greek and Trojan relations were as happy as a mouse in a granary."

"And Menelaus got together an army of all the Greeks?"

"A few of the Greeks. Have you ever asked anyone for a favour?"

"They all said they were there."

"Afterwards, they all said they were there. Have you ever noticed how when something important or funny happens   everyone pretends they were there? I was there when Kalchas ate a whole pig in one night. There were five of us there. Since then I must have met fifty people who insist they saw Kalchas eat a whole ox. Stories recruit. Give people what they want and you'll never go hungry."

"So Agamemnon and Menelaus set sail for Troy?"

"No, not  King Agamemnon. He sent floral encouragement."

"So the Greek fleet set sail for Troy?"

"Again, it depends how you care to define fleet, but we set sail for Troy."

"And the fleet sank?"

"All but one ship."

"How?"

"There are at least two ways of looking at this. Some would argue that Menelaus and his intimates were guilty of serial impiety and that the Gods  meted out punishment by storm."

"Or?"

"Menelaus was poor. As kings go, a beggar. The reason he wanted to loot Troy was not greed, but need."

"Ornamentation is all. Only those who are poor at greed speak ill of it. What is the point of being in a world  full of appearance, if you don't have the appearance you want? How will your greatness be known, if it can't be seen from afar?"

"Your greatness is unmistakably great—"

"My greatness doesn't require your notice. Back to Troy."

"Menelaus owed a lot of money to Xanthos the Wine-trader. You owe a man one goat, it's your problem; you owe a man fifty good-yielding goats, it's his. Xanthos had concluded that the only way he would get any money back was by investing in war. So Menelaus's battle-fleet was really Xanthos's salesmen."

"Not much in the way of preparation?"

"‘Is this a good idea, going to fight Troy?' That thought was slinking around. But no one knew how well-defended Troy was. One or two traders had been there. ‘So what's Troy like?'  ‘They've got walls.' Okay. ‘Have they got towers?' ‘How do you define tower? Yeah they've got towers.' So they have walls and towers. Does that help you much? ‘Are they moderately-assailable walls or not?' ‘How do you define moderately-assailable? I'm not sure; it was a long time ago. Maybe.'"

"And why did you go?"

"I had nothing better to do. My brother had the goats, and I was a bean-grower whose beans shunned life."

"This Xanthos was to blame?"

"No. Unless you count good sense as a crime. Out at sea, the weather turns nasty. You didn't have to be a bore of windlore to see this was bad.  Xanthos orders us to land. Menelaus who has been afloat twice, on a lake, says no, we can ride it out. Xanthos's crew, these old salts, they're so maritime, they're practically fish, they're terrified, some of them are crying like little girls, growing the sea. Menelaus's bodyguard, his favourite killers, they're terrified. They're doing everything to look like brutish bronze-drivers, but fears are bulging out of them like horns.

"You understand how when someone's really helped you, you really hate them? Menelaus hated Xanthos, because he owed him everything, and because he made money from wines of no fame. ‘People don't want good wine, they want bad wine, cheaply,' Xanthos used to say. ‘Bad wine is, even if you piss into it, which I do...wine. You only go out of business worrying about quality.' Menelaus countermanded Xanthos not because he thought he was right, but because he had to. The storm comes, and afterwards we're the only ship in sight, in a corpse and wreckage soup.

"No one said anything. There was much toe-gazing. Even for a king, it's embarrassing losing your entire army before the war starts, although army might be an over-generous epithet for the band of simpletons, thieves, fishermen, ne'er-do-wells and a pet seal under Menelaus's command. There was even one group who thought they were travelling to Egypt. They had  paid a hefty fare.

"Finally, Menelaus breaks his silence. He had Xanthos weighted and thrown overboard. ‘That's the debts. Now, a slow story-building trip home,' he proclaims. ‘It was Xanthos's impiety and recklessness that cost us everything. Any questions?' No questions. We're glad to be alive and heading home, all of us vowing never to leave land again. Then the look-out shouts there are three ships approaching, with Trojan insignia.

"We're almost crippled, we can't outrun them and the storm must have pushed us into Trojan waters. ‘Listen carefully,' says Menelaus. ‘There was no army. There was no war. We love those Trojans to profanity.'  I'll say this for Menelaus: he would have decapitated his mother for a bowl of fresh figs and he couldn't organise a cockfight, but he could lie from dawn to dawn.

"The Trojans board. They're no fools. Word has reached them about Menelaus. They see the floaters, but since Menelaus hails them like brothers, as brothers you actually like, they take him to Troy, which he maintains  is exactly where he wants to go.

"At Troy, we are greeted like dead rats in your water supply. The idea of slitting Menelaus's throat and using him as fertilizer is visibly given consideration. Maybe they admire the way he lies, but King Priam and the others listen. 

"Menelaus stands there and declares he came to Troy because he wanted a Trojan wife now that Paris has a Greek one. He adores their culture so much he wants to learn how to speak Trojan, to recite some of their great epics and to gorge on that famous Trojan fried pigeon. They listen to him, pondering fertilizer. 

"But he's their jug. And everyone has a sister or daughter they want to get rid of. They think about fertilizer and selling the rest of us into slavery, but maybe it's better to have a marriage of some sort. And if they kill Menelaus maybe, possibly, someone in Greece will seek revenge, or perhaps the deities of hospitality will be vexed. They marry Menelaus off to a very minor princess so ugly she has to sneak up on a fig tree to pick the fruit. They tattoo Menelaus with Trojan emblems, since he professed such admiration for Trojan culture, including one on his back, which, I was reliably informed, signified ‘I am Priam's jug.' And they make him recite thirty lines of poetry every evening."

"That's it?'

"Nothing happens for a long time. Menelaus doesn't want to go home. He realises he's a contender for jug of jugs. And, curiously, life at the Trojan court, even as a jug, isn't bad. He has all he wants, and the fried pigeon is, as they say, remarkably good. He becomes a very fat, very drunk fat drunk. The Trojans mock him mercilessly. They can't believe he's still draining their hospitality years after arriving. ‘You're sure you're not the Menelaus who said he was going to burn Troy?'  ‘Lose any armies today, lard lord?'  Priam joked some rulers have pet lions, some have pet giraffes, I have a pet king. The court magicians used to work him into their displays."

"And what were you doing?"

"I was retinue. Troy had its own bean-growers, so I had to tag onto the ankle of Menelaus. The great Belly-Grower said to me, ‘You. I don't know how long we'll be here or how I'm getting out of this, but we need some verses to cover our red, smacked arses. You, you'll be the wordwarden. We need a yarn when we get back. Get me some good stories and well-wrought epithets or I'll have you impaled. Meanwhile, I'll have a think about how to get out of this.' He thought about it for six years."

"So Troy's towers were untouched?"

"I didn't say that."

"But you said there was no war?"

"You don't need a war to raze a city. It was six years after we had arrived. I was reconciled to dying there. I could have got back, but I, like Menelaus, had nothing to go back to. I got a bit of fried pigeon every now and then, so crisp and yet so succulent, and I had done some work I was very proud of, creating Beta, a bare-breasted princess warrioress of Greece who has a six-year single-combat with Zeta, the bare-crotched princess warrioress of Troy, at very close quarters, if you follow me. Who doesn't like to hear about over-oiled women locking limbs? Well, Menelaus didn't. He felt it wasn't martial enough. Beta's sidekick was a wise talking tortoise, but Menelaus didn't like the tortoise either. He had been bitten by one as a child.

"One day, Menelaus is staggering around the dock, more grape than man, as a Greek ship is putting out to sea. Some kid, eleven or twelve, on the deck spots Menelaus and makes this well-known gesture of contempt."

"That one."

"Menelaus goes mad. He's been snooked by the Trojan nobility every day for six years, but he has accepted this as a ruse in his masterplan of revenge. This Greek kid is too much. He dives in and almost drowns trying to reach the ship, he wants to throttle the kid so badly.

"He summons his retinue.  There are five of us left. Helen, of all people, helps us; her conjunctions with Paris aren't as regular as they had been. And Menelaus has an advantage in his plotting. He's a well-established buffoon no one in Troy takes seriously. He announces he's going home, but he wants to leave a present."

"This wouldn't be the Trojan Horse?"

"How did you guess? Yes, Menelaus wants to leave an offering. Helen did the real work, she was very clever. It wasn't easy doing things unnoticed there, but as I said they'd stopped worrying about Menelaus. They had other, slimmer, more vigorous enemies who were sniffing around, in the distance with their chariots, prodding. We built the giant horse, as the stories relate."

"But no warriors?"

"No one remotely heroic. Menelaus still had two bodyguards, but one had a bad back and the other was blind."

"No Achilles then?"

"Ever meet anyone who knew Achilles?"

"Yes."

"Then you can take pleasure in knowing they were shameless liars.  Achilles was... my private joke. A skinny child who liked wearing dresses. I scattered some truth in the stories. Any ten-year-old girl with spirit could have bested him. They only took him on the expedition because with so many men on a lengthy military campaign, they might need a jug.

 "He reached Troy with us where he made clothes for the women. He was the only one of us exiles to be successful there."

"And God-like Odysseus?"

"Odysseus was god-like. Powerful, good-looking, cunning, daring. The man all men would want to be. Of course, he never got to Troy."

"What happened to him?"

"This I didn't witness. This is tittle-tattle, though my sources are trustworthy. Odysseus was with us in the storm, then ... no sign. What I heard was, after several misfortunes, he eventually adorned the King of Ethiopia's bed, pumped full of poppy and bummed into madness. He was there for some fifteen years. At the end they said you could drop a vole into his rear."

"So he didn't want to get back to Ithaca?"

"Have you been to Ithaca? I'm not surprised he wasn't in a rush to return to kingship, to listen to someone complaining about their goat's yield being affected by their neighbour's incantations or someone filching some beans. The King of Ethiopia got tired of him or died. So he, the poppy-eater, had to go home. It's not surprising that none of his companions made it back from the Ethiopian court with reminiscences to offer around the fire during the long winter evenings. Nor is it a wonder he butchered everyone he found in his palace."

"And how did the real Trojan Horse work?"

"We built it with fire-growing materials, it was stuffed not with soldiers but with hay, as a horse should be. We waited till the high point of the summer, when it was dry and hot,  we placed it next to the houses of the poor. A four-legged bonfire, ready for its flame.

"Menelaus wasn't in the mood to be hacked to death by irate Trojans, so his  plan was to sneak away at night, to be already well out to sea, cherishing the distance and the darkness, while his army stayed behind and took the risk of igniting the Horse. The army was me and the bodyguard with the aching back."

"Your loyalty was remarkable."

"It depends how you define loyalty. The two of us were ordered, at the least wakeful moment of the night, to light the horse and as many buildings as we could. Then to rush to a boat through wrathful Trojans and row out to find Menelaus, waiting for us gratefully, in the middle of the dark. Not a proposition that guaranteed a tranquil old age. 

"If I had refused, being the former lackey of an unpopular fat drunk in a foreign city who had tried to destroy it, that wasn't a very appealing proposition. On the other hand, carrying out the orders was suicide. At the last minute, as we stood in front of the Horse with our torches, the bodyguard with the bad back cursed his luck for not going blind and decided to go to the Trojans to squeal about Menelaus's treachery.

 "It was strange. I was getting what I wanted when I had followed Menelaus: to burn down Troy. There I was, clutching a torch, with the opportunity to ash an entire city single-handedly with a single hand. I was getting what I wanted but in a way I didn't want. In a cowardly, despicable way, that would almost certainly bring me death. And even more exasperatingly, it wasn't just a cowardly way to attack your enemy, your hosts who'd given you some fried pigeon, not as much as you'd like — but it would be a cowardly, anonymous way. 

"No one would ever know it was me, because Menelaus would seize any glory, and so even that small clique who admire perfidious arson and shameful murder, even that small clique wouldn't admire me."

"So you chose to burn Troy? I'm looking at the man who destroyed Troy?"

"No, I did what most people do when faced with a difficult choice. I did nothing. I stood there with the torch, wondering. As my mind circled like a dog chasing its tail, the wind chased a spark into the Horse and that was that. I was knocked off my feet by the blast. I ran    and I ran with an interest in running I'd never had before.

"I got to the boat and rowed out into the darkness. I didn't think I'd find Menelaus, but I figured it would be safest to be out at sea, that I might be picked up by someone who wouldn't kill me straight away. When I hit Menelaus's ship, I don't know who was more surprised, him or me. I could see the weighting-and-throwing-overboard order being given consideration. ‘Why aren't you dead?' he observed, doubtless thinking it would be inauspicious to kill a man with such luck."

"Your fortune does seem to be good." 

"Men with good fortune usually have ten fingers and a plate of fried pigeon, Trojan style. Miles out, we could see the flames feasting on the city. We could see whatever might remain, Troy was broken. Helen and Menelaus stood together like the old couple they were and watched a city burn, tired. It is a pity pleasure can't, like a stream, flow endlessly out of one person. There would be fewer burning cities.

"Bearing in mind I'd won his war for him, Menelaus could have said thank you in a brief, insincere, offensive monarch-like way, when no one was listening.

"I only have one real regret. I have my disappointments and I wonder how my life might have been if I hadn't embarked for Troy or if Menelaus, the Fat-Gatherer hadn't been so stupid or if I had taken one of the trade routes out of Troy to see what was there; but that's the unknown, you don't know whether there's a friendly bosom or a rusty dagger lurking. I wish I'd been braver or cleverer, but my only regret is that I didn't tell Menelaus, more pig than man, to his face what I thought."

"But then you wouldn't be here. What I don't understand if what you say is true, why didn't Menelaus make you, as the wordman, give him unlimited praise? Why does he take such little glory in the stories?"

"The fat hadn't softened Menelaus's mind. He wanted the story to grow, to hide the truth, so he told me to make him a spectator. He knew if the story was his slaughtering everyone, no one would swallow it, but this way he could be a small part, but a part of a glorious story. He knew he couldn't be greedy here; he had to give away the spoils imaginatively. Agamemnon and Odysseus and the many others who weren't there wouldn't refuse the glory of city-sacking, and no one could be too jealous of a hero like Achilles, who didn't exist and who was dead to boot. It's one thing to lose, another to see your hated rival win. 

"They say a great god once came in disguise to a goatherd who gave him hospitality. In return, the god offered the goatherd any wish. Ah, said the goatherd, there is a man in the village who has a black goat. This goat is the envy of all, its milk flows day and night and is beyond compare. It makes the best cheese in the region. He is becoming rich from this one goat. What do you think the goatherd asked for?"

"Ten goats like the black one?"

"No."

"Of course not. A thousand goats."

"No. The goatherd asked for the black goat to sicken and die."

"I grew up with the stories, old wordman, and found no point to war because we were in infant battles, the crumbs fallen off the heroes' table for us ants. I sobbed because I couldn't have been at Achilles's side. My ambition was poisoning me, but now I can see the throne is vacant. Have you ever seen a real hero?"

"How would you define a hero? I would say someone who is cheerful when there is no reason to be cheerful invites admiration."

"I wouldn't. Now to more important matters. Now your mouth can change history."

"Tell a story that is wanted and it will stick to ears like tar. Tales of bravery are so popular, because that's as close to bravery as most of us will ever get. But, what is praised everywhere but welcome nowhere?"   

"The truth?"