Troy

A walled city on a far coast, behind whose stones the Trojan prince Paris had taken Helen and refused to give her back. The Greeks came across the sea in their thousands, set their camps on the beach, and stayed. Ten years. They ground through a siege that killed Achilles, killed Patroclus, killed Antilochus, killed countless men whose names were sung once and then mostly forgotten. Odysseus built the wooden horse. The city that had held for a decade fell in a night. They burned it. They divided the women and the gold. On the beach, Ajax dragged the prophetess Cassandra from Athena’s temple and the goddess turned her face from them, and the storm that followed scattered the Greek fleets across the sea. Troy is where the story before the story happened. Every man Odysseus meets in the underworld died there or died because of it. Every wound he carries home has its first cause behind those walls. When the bard Demodocus sings of Troy in Phaeacia, Odysseus pulls the cloak over his face and weeps. The city is the price he is still paying, twenty years on. He won the war. He has not stopped losing it.