for the pyre, although Menelaus and many of his friends, including Diomedes standing next to him here in the Achaean contingent, thought that burning Paris’s putrid corpse on a funeral pyre was an absolute waste of good firewood since both the city of Troy and the miles of Achaean camps along the shore had been out of fuel for campfires for many months, so picked-over were the scrub trees and former forests surrounding Ilium itself ten years into that war. The battlefield was a stubble of stumps. Even the branches had long since been scavenged. The Achaean slaves were cooking dinners for their masters over dung-fueled fires, and that didn’t improve either the taste of meat or the foul mood of the Achaean warriors.

Leading the funeral cortege into Ilium was a procession of Trojan chariots, one by one, the horses’ hooves wrapped in black felt and raising little noise on the broad stones of the city’s thoroughfare and town square. Riding on these chariots, standing silent beside their drivers, were some of the greatest heroes of Ilium, fighters who’d survived more than nine years of the original war and now eight months of this more terrible war with the gods. First came Polydorus, another son of Priam’s, followed by Paris’s other half brother, Mestor. The next chariot carried the Trojan ally Ipheus, then Laoducus, son of Antenor. Following in their own jewel-bedecked chariots were old Antenor himself, down among the fighting men as always rather than up on the wall with the other elders, then the captain Polyphetes, then Sarpedon’s famed charioteer, Thrasmelus, standing in for the Sarpedon himself, co-commander of the Lycians, killed by Patroclus months ago when Trojans still fought Greeks rather than gods. Then came noble Pylartes—not, of course, the Trojan killed by Great Ajax just before the war with the gods began, but this other Pylartes who so often fights alongside Elasus and Mulius. Also in this procession are Megas’ son, Perimus, as well as Epistor and Melanippus.