This day was definitely good.
I'd checked out a pretty girl, had a solid lunch, and made it to King Priam's dinner. I'd already forgotten when that had last happened.
The king was our relative, though distant, so we'd been invited to his feast.
Not going was unthinkable! That would be a mortal insult, disrespect to the host.
And why wouldn't you go when they fed you there?
Troy's fortress was huge and built on a high hill. It was five stadia around, at least!
Its northern edge stood on a sheer cliff, and the southern side faced the harbor through the Scaean Gates, the biggest and richest of all.
It was built cleverly. To get through the gates, you first had to walk along the road between a steep slope and the wall, turning your right side toward it.
This was done so enemies couldn't get to the gates, and if they did get close, they'd be walking with their unprotected side exposed while arrows and stones rained down on them.
Smart!
There were five gates in the southern wall, but the others were tiny, more like wickets. A donkey pulling a cart could barely squeeze through them, and a tall person couldn't get through at all without ducking first.
The Dardanian Gates were exactly like that. They brought supplies to the palace through them.
"Don't gawk around like a country bumpkin," father said quietly. "You're embarrassing me in front of people. Conduct yourself with dignity."
Father!
I really did think of him as my father.
A sturdy, tanned man well into his forties, with a head that looked like it was sprinkled with salt and pepper, walked beside me, proudly raising his chin.
I respected him a lot.
Or was that not me?
The personality of the boy Aeneas had dissolved into me like sugar in hot water. I couldn't tell where he was and where I was.
I'd never been so impulsive and aggressive, and honestly I didn't like fighting. I'd always been a nerd, a bookworm.
But Aeneas had fought from the heart and slung stones from a sling in ways I couldn't dream of. Though here almost everyone knew how to throw stones. They were everywhere.
So now I was a sixteen-year-old kid, strong, healthy, and scrappy.
Funny!
I'd been walking around with a knife on my belt as long as I could remember, and I handled a spear and shield pretty decently, because I was a free man from a good family.
I had a half-brother from a concubine—Elimus. After mother's death, father didn't remarry, but he didn't deny himself small male pleasures.
That was the custom here, and slave women were meant to please their master. And when they had children—again, profit, no need to buy a new slave.
The palace at this time wasn't just a place where people lived. The palace was the heart of any kingdom.
All the workshops and supply warehouses were located in it. In its hundreds of rooms lived not only the king with his family, but also his servants and slaves. And they worked right there, not leaving the gates for years.
Here they wove fabrics, baked bread, smelted metal, made weapons and jewelry.
The palace was something between an elite residential complex and an industrial zone surrounded by a strong wall.
It had been that way since Crete, before it was washed away by the wrath of the sea gods. In one day an entire kingdom perished, because the proud Cretans, following a habit learned long ago, went out to sea when they felt the first tremors of the earth.
They were swept away by a giant wave after the Santorini volcano exploded. And so simultaneously drowned the kings, warriors, skilled craftsmen, and almost all literate people.
Crete as a civilization disappeared in an instant, losing all its elite, though its people survived.
And now the Achaeans had captured it, turning it into a pirate's nest.
"Wow!" I was amazed seeing the palace, which was about twenty or thirty times bigger than the residence of the king of Dardanus.
The huge, rather haphazard pile of stone didn't pull off being an architectural masterpiece at all.
You could see it had been built over decades, more out of necessity than according to a plan.
Right in front of me rose a full two stories that gradually lowered in steps. And if the building's facade, decorated with pot-bellied columns carved from stone and lion statues at the entrance, still looked like something grand, to the left and right of it began a real labyrinth.
That's where Priam's numerous workshops were located.
Bronze Age palace economy, damn it.
Throughout the inhabited world it was built almost the same everywhere, whether in Greece, Egypt, Canaan, or among the Babylonians.
The Greeks hadn't invented any democracy or philosophy yet. Here, wherever you looked, it was the harshest simplicity.
There was the family of the local oligarch called king, there was a handful of aristocrats, priests and merchants around him, there were noble chariot warriors, and there was everyone else living in huts made of wicker coated with clay and dry dung.
Those who lived in huts were about ninety-nine out of a hundred.
In Troy there were no wicker huts—they built from stone here. There was way more of it here than wicker. An earthquake had destroyed the city a hundred years ago, and after it the residents had divided the old big houses into cubicles with partitions. They still lived like that.
Most of the economy of the tiny kingdoms was concentrated in the palaces.
Behind their walls and in surrounding villages almost all the crafts were gathered. Dozens of women sat in one place weaving fabrics. And they made weapons right there too.
Not a shekel of copper or tin passed by the royal scribes. An ordinary craftsman couldn't even think of competing. They simply wouldn't let him buy raw materials or sell any significant volume.
People just fussed around with small stuff.
And all international trade was under kings and tamkarus, their trusted merchants. A typical monopoly that led to unheard-of enrichment of individual people like lord Priam.
However, the local kings weren't any kind of eastern despots. Here there was a very complex system of balanced relationships, where the king was more first among equals than a living god like in Egypt.