A sealed clay jar. Found floating in the strait by a Greek patrol boat at dawn. Small enough to fit in a man's palm. Wax-sealed. Inside: a strip of leather, rolled tight, covered in compressed shorthand.
Agamemnon read it alone in his tent.
Then he sent for his kings.
The council assembled at the eighth hour. Odysseus. Diomedes. Menelaus. Nestor. Idomeneus.
Agamemnon set the leather strip on the table.
"From the source," he said.
Odysseus leaned forward. "During the siege. How."
"A sealed jar. Floated out on the harbour current. Found by a patrol boat at dawn."
Odysseus looked at the strip. At the shorthand. At the precision of the information.
"Someone inside Troy dropped that jar into the water knowing the current would carry it out."
"Yes."
He unrolled the leather and set it flat on the table. A hand-drawn map of Troy's harbour. The walls. The barrier pilings. The harbour mouth. And on the eastern section of the harbour wall — below the waterline — a gap.
