I grew more and more impatient as I waited for the bard to finish. There were many more verses about other nations, places I didn’t recognize, and then he finally ended his song. I took the opportunity to push through the crowd so that I could speak with him.
“You did a wonderful job,” I told him.
The bard beamed at me. “Thank you!”
“You sang about the Carians ... I thought their nation had been destroyed.”
“That is what the songs say.”
Supposedly Troas had been utterly ruined after the Great War, and yet Ilion had found a way to rebuild and come back stronger than ever, putting a blockade on Locris and slowly starving us to death.
Why couldn’t Caria have done the same?
It wouldn’t have surprised me if the reason the songs said Caria had been ruined was because the men of Ilion had thought that, without them, the nation must have fallen apart.
And no one had ever bothered to check.
“What’s important about their iron soil?” I asked the bard.
He seemed delighted to have someone so interested in his stories. “The songs of long ago say that the Carians would stand on theirdirt when they fought. That their god would give them supernatural strength so long as their feet stayed in contact with it. It’s why they didn’t attack other nations—they had to be standing on their own soil to win.”
It sounded similar to what we could do when performing magic—if we touched someone with a white light, it powered us. Their soil seemed to do the same.
But their dirt hadn’t worked for them when the Ilionians had attacked. I wondered why.
And the Carians had apparently decided that they no longer had to stay home to fight. They had come up with a way to distribute the dirt to bring their fight to others.
“Which god do the Carians worship? Is it Arion?” I asked.
The bard looked alarmed and made a motion with his fingers and then spit on the ground. “We do not speak his name, but yes, he is the god of the Carians.”
I was about to ask why we knew Arion’s name but not the goddess’s until I remembered that it was Lysimache’s doing. She had done her best to remove the goddess’s name so that no priestess could call on her power again.
She wouldn’t have cared if Ilionians knew the Carians’ god’s name.
Maybe Io’s theory about Arion’s power being in opposition to his mother’s was correct. What if the Ilionians had done something to disrupt the dirt from working?
I asked the bard that question but he only shrugged. “That has been lost to us. We don’t know why the Ilionian men were successful, other than the goddess willed it.”
That seemed doubtful to me, considering she had put into place the rule that men were no longer allowed into her temple because of their actions in Caria.
Or had Lysimache been the reason behind that, too? She had been furious with the men abandoning them after the war and removing their ability to worship the goddess. That must have been a terrible blow.
“Thank you,” I told the bard. “You’ve been extremely helpful.”
The scholars and historians hadn’t known this information, but a storyteller had. This bard might have just saved all of Ilion.
Now we could prepare. Now we would know where to send scouts and spies. We could get ready.
I made my way back over to Io and Suri and filled them in on what the bard had told me. “You need to go find Zalira and Ahyana. Tell them what we learned. I’m going to go tell Xander, and then we should all meet up to figure out our next move.”
Suri nodded and led Io out of the room.
The Carians worshipped an earth god with dominion over metals. It made sense that his symbol would be a hammer. Did every Carian have a reddish-brown tattoo of a hammer on their chest? We had seen one on a dead soldier, and Artemisia also bore it.
How far was Caria from here? When would their armies arrive? Would they come by land or by sea? The Carians had come after me on theNikos, so they obviously had some kind of navy.
When I entered the dining hall, I spotted Stolos and Xander deep in conversation. I was sure that whatever they were discussing was important, but this was more pressing.
