"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.