The brutal midday sun had driven good people into their homes, where they could wait out the scorching heat.
The Sun God Tiwaz was at full strength right now, and it'd be a few more hours before he'd start setting, gradually giving way to his eternal enemy Arma, the Moon God.
There was no shade here to hide from the burning rays pouring down on the earth and baking it hard as stone.
Just heavy, oppressive heat like a granite slab, crushing everything down with its unbearable weight.
The second half of summer was lousy—nobody liked it around here.
But the heat didn't scare me—I was used to it.
The olive groves growing along the road were thriving, drought didn't bother them.
The grapes planted on all the surrounding slopes were filling with sweet juice.
They'd spread their leaves and were greedily soaking up every drop of that solar fire that was killing the peasants' vegetable gardens on the spot.
I sprawled in the bottom of the rattling cart and enjoyed watching the rare clouds drift across the sky toward the sea.
There weren't many of them, so nothing held back the waves of heat that the sun kept throwing at the plains, already worn out by the sweltering weather.
The rays of light falling down greedily drank up all the remaining moisture from the withered grass that crumbled like ash.
A caravan of several carts pulled by donkeys, along with a small herd of horses, was approaching a city whose citadel you could see from dozens of stadia away.
It sat on a high mountain, so it was gradually turning from a blurry spot on the horizon into a fortress surrounded by a belt of greenery.
The steady pace of the little donkeys carried us closer and closer, and now I could already make out the square brick towers, patches of gardens, and the dirty gray curve of the paved road that climbed from the harbor straight up to the Scaean Gates.
The city was named Troy after Tros, ancestor of the current king, and the whole area by the southern Strait was called the Troad.
The neighbors though, the Hittites, called both the city and the lands around it Wilusa, and the tongue-tied Achaeans had mangled it into Ilion.
My father and I had driven horses here to sell.
His name was Anchises, and he had the best horses in these parts.
My father was from the royal line of the city of Dardanus, which was a day's journey to the north, so we had pasture land and our own fields.
But still, Troy was way richer than Dardanus—here they needed lots of horses for the royal chariot army.
Plus people came here for them all the way from the land of Hatti itself.
The great king Suppiluliuma had all his noble warriors fighting on chariots. Thousands of them, they said.
Troy and Dardanus were close kin.
The local Teucrians, Achaeans, Luwians, and Mysians were all mixed together here, and every twenty years or so we'd beat back a major raid by the overseas Danaans, who crawled in all directions like insatiable locusts.
We were tired of even counting the small raids.
Every now and then some gang would land on our coast, trying either to raid or settle permanently.
Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians, Dryopes, Achaeans, Pelasgians... There was no end to the Danaan tribes.
Their land was poor and there wasn't much of it, so they'd get on their ships and sail in all directions where they could smell any kind of loot.
They'd burned Troy once before too, long ago.
Heracles, an Achaean warlord, grandfather of today's Dorian king Cleodaeus, had come up with six ships, taken the city by storm, and robbed it clean.
And why did the Achaeans honor him as a hero? He was a total bandit.
He'd been dead a long time, but people here still remembered his atrocities.
Anyway, the city had flourished again on trade tariffs, and ever since all the routes the tin used to travel were gone except the one northern route, the Trojans had really gotten full of themselves.
They hauled that tin from some wild steppes, through the mountains and swamps of Maeotis right to the shores of the Azzi Sea, and then to this very port.
Now people sailed here for it from all over the Great Sea. Because there was nowhere else to get it anymore.
I sighed enviously and started examining the ships standing in the city harbor.
Pot-bellied tubs twenty-five to thirty cubits long, with a square sail and a row of oars—they were pretty much the same among all peoples.
There it was, the source of Troy's wealth.
The harbor here was really convenient. Easy to hide from a storm or wait until the wind blew northeast.
Without wind, on oars alone, there was no way to get through the straits—the current was way too strong.
We didn't have such a convenient harbor in Dardanus, which was why my home city wasn't rich.
Father said the Achaeans were pissed at the Trojans, didn't want to pay the tariff.
But King Priam was powerful and had a strong army. You couldn't slip past him without paying.
His name meant "very brave."
"Brave! Ha ha!" I laughed, remembering father's stories.
"Everyone calls him Priam, 'the bought one.' When Heracles—may he get hiccups in their Achaean underworld—burned Troy, his sister bought the boy's life for a pretty scarf. His older brothers were already dead by then. That's how he became king."
Father had driven the horses to the royal pasture, and I was wandering around Troy with my mouth hanging open.
I'd already crawled all over everything here, consumed by insatiable curiosity.
Father had taken me with him for the first time.
Big city, way bigger than my native Dardanus.
A bit off from the fortress, by the harbor, the Lower City sprawled where thousands of people lived.
Behind the wall lived the king with his family, noble warriors, scribes and merchants who were close to the ruler.
The warehouses with grain, oil and wine were there too, along with workshops and stables.
Common folk lived down below, in little stone houses that pressed up against each other.
The roofs here were flat, low, covered with a layer of clay baked hard by the merciless sun.
They didn't fear rain here, they even prayed for the gods to send at least a little moisture.
But the gods weren't listening—this summer not a single drop of water had fallen from the sky.
Father said we'd better hope famine didn't hit.
The one saving grace was the sea nearby. You could always catch fish.