We rowed around the rocky headland and saw a calm sheltered inlet. Spread along the curving beach were dozens of ships like our own, pulled far up on the sand. Huts and tents huddled among their black hulls like shreds of paper littering a city street after a parade. Thin gray smoke issued from cook fires here and there. A pall of thicker, blacker smoke billowed off in the distance.

A mile or so inland, up on a bluff that commanded the beach, stood a city or citadel of some sort. High stone walls with square towers rising above the battlements. Far in the distance, dark wooded hills rose and gradually gave way to mountains that floated shimmering in the blue heat haze.

The young men at the stern seemed to get tenser at the sight of the walled city. Their voices were low, but I heard them easily enough.

“There is it,” one of them said to his companions. His voice was grim.

The youth next to him nodded and spoke a single word.

“Troy.”

Chapter 2

WE landed, literally, driving the boat up onto the beach until its bottom grated against the sand and we could go no farther. Then the whipmaster bellowed at us as we piled over the gunwales, took up ropes, and — straining, cursing, wrenching the tendons in our arms and shoulders — we hauled the pitch-blackened hull up onto the beach until only its stern and rudder paddle touched the water.

Hardly any tide to speak of, I knew. When they finally sail past the Pillars of Herakles and out into the Atlantic, that’s when they’ll encounter real tides.

Then I wondered how I knew that.

I did not have time to wonder for long.