"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."