Not a Greek ambush, as the first horrified screams suggested. I twisted about to see where it had come from, and there, standing apart from the rest of the Trojans, his back to the shore, was the priest Laocoon, his arms still raised above his head, though the spear he had hurled was lodged, quivering, in the wooden flank of the great horse.
Into the shocked silence, he spoke. ‘Fools!’ he said again. ‘How can you be so blind? How can you not see at once that this is a trick?’ His face was contorted with rage, his chest heaving as he spat the words at us all. At his side, his two young sons stared as though they did not recognise him.
Hope splintered in my chest. I was not alone, not the only one to see it, and the delirious relief of it made me laugh aloud: a peal of gratitude that barked far more harshly from my throat than I had thought it would. Those closest to me drew back, a familiar disdain twisting their features as the empty space widened around me. I did not care; Laocoon could see the danger too, and he would be believed. My very bones ached desperately with the fervency of my trust. He had to be believed; surely he would be.
And then the white blade of light flashed through my head, splitting my skull apart. I writhed like a hooked fish as Apollo shattered the interior of my mind again, the crazed and tortured searing rays of the vision slicing through the tender flesh of my brain, and I saw what happened next in a fragmented series of images.
Laocoon’s fury. The crowd wavering in doubt. A frozen moment; our future hanging in the balance. Then the screaming, the anguished howl of terror, high and thin, keening from the smallest of Laocoon’s sons. His brother thrashed mutely; his cries deadened by the suffocating weight of the scaly coils that already wrapped around his little body.
Sand muffled my cries as I tried to struggle to my feet, blinded again by another piercing flash of light, and I rolled back, my head striking a rock, blood seeping warm and damp down my neck. I could not see through the horrified mass of people, but I knew what was happening as the two giant serpents surged from the waves, twisting around Laocoon’s two children. As he flung himself at their gleaming, glistening coils, they entrapped him, too. I knew the moment that the little boys’ faces went grey and still amidst the shifting scales; I knew that Laocoon saw it, too, moments before the fangs sank through his neck and venom flooded his veins.
Screaming. Fleeing footsteps. Terror and panic sent the crowd rushing across the sand, away from that frozen tableau of horror. Laocoon, between his boys, desperately reaching across to them still, the mighty snakes looped around them all in an inescapable tangle of death. I could feel the blood pulsing from the gash behind my ear as the blindness started to dissolve.
The hissing died away. The serpents slid back into the sea, their work done. And one by one, the people turned their accusing gaze to Laocoon’s spear, still quivering in the horse’s flank.
Perhaps it might have been enough: a clear message to the watching Trojans that the gods moved quickly to punish any damage to the horse. But whether they would have dragged it up the plains and through the city gates itself without Sinon, I do not know. He was a Greek, weeping and swearing to us that he had escaped his own army, who wanted to sacrifice him to the gods for a fair wind home. I watched Sinon speak, every word a poisonous lie. They did sacrifice, these Greeks. I knew that was true, for I saw a girl trembling at a makeshift altar, a knife flashing in the light of the rising sun above her bare neck. But they would not have sacrificed this man, whose eyes slid sideways as he spoke, who urged us to take the horse and steal the luck of the departing Greeks, so that their ships would sink and we would prosper.
I clutched at my father’s elbow. ‘Do not believe this man,’ I implored him.
Priam shook away my hand like it was a fly buzzing about him. ‘The Greeks have treated him ill,’ he said. ‘See the gashes on his legs where they beat him; the weals in his wrists where the ropes bound him.’
‘A trick to make us believe him!’ I said.
I stilled my panicked breathing, shook back my knotted curls and tried to square my shoulders, to assume a regal bearing. Andromache wandered the sand with Astyanax toddling at her side, her thoughts awash with sorrow whilst he squealed with delight at the unfamiliar sensation of sand trickling through his chubby fingers. Helen contemplated the horse. Did she believe that her first husband really sailed back to Sparta, leaving her widowed in this foreign land to which Paris had brought her? Or did she too suspect a grand deception, a final ambush still in store to bring her home at long last? Her beautiful face gave nothing away.