Excerpt from A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'We do not fight among ourselves,' Priam said. 'Not today. I will hear your thoughts, one after another.'

Creusa heard the arguments in favour of every possible fate for the horse, and found she did not care particularly what Priam chose to do. Burn the horse, keep the horse: what difference would it make? The last man to speak was the priest, Laocoon, a fleshy man with oiled black curls who was always too fond of the sound of his own voice. He was determined that the horse should be torched where it stood. It was the only way to placate the gods, he said, who had punished Troy for so many years. Anything else would be a catastrophic mistake.

* * *

Smoke from countless fires billowed around her and Creusa stumbled as she tried to make her way along the path to the city walls. She thought she was going in the right direction, but she could not be sure. Her lungs were screaming as though she were running uphill. She could see nothing ahead of her, and she stretched out her hands, one in front to break her fall if she tripped, one to her right, so she could try to trace the buildings she passed. It was the only way she could be sure she was moving forward.

Creusa tried not to let the thought become words, held it only in its haziest form before hurling it away from her, but it could not be denied: the city was beyond salvation. So many fires raging in every direction. More and more wooden roofs had caught and the smoke was only growing thicker. How much fire could one stone city make? She thought of everything in her own home which would burn: her clothes, her bedding, the tapestries she had woven while she was expecting Euryleon. The sudden sense of loss seared her, as though she had been caught in the flames. She had lost her home. Ten years of fearing that the city would fall, and now it was falling around her as she ran.

But how could this be happening? Troy had won the war. The Greeks had sailed away, and when the Trojans found the wooden horse, they had done exactly what the man told them they must do. And in a terrible rush, Creusa knew what had set her city ablaze. Ten years of a conflict whose heroes had already made their way into the songs of poets, and victory belonged to none of the men who had fought outside the walls, not Achilles nor Hector, both long since dead. Instead, it belonged to the man they had found hiding in the reeds, near the horse, who said his name was – she could not remember. A hissing sound, like a snake.

* * *

'Sinon,' the man wept. Two spears were pointed at his neck, and he had fallen to his knees. The Trojan scouts had found him hiding in the low shrubs, on the far bank of the Scamander just as it opened out to meet the sea. They had driven him – one on either side, armed with knives as well as spears – into the midst of the Trojan men. The prisoner's hands were bound at the wrists and there were angry red welts around his ankles, as though ropes had bitten him there too.

'We might not have seen him,' said one of the scouts, prodding the prisoner with the tip of his spear. The man suppressed a cry, though the spear had not broken his skin. 'It was only the red ribbons which caught our eyes.'

The prisoner was a strange sight: his mousy hair curled into his neck and out again, and if it had ever been oiled, it was now matted with the mud which covered so much of his bare skin. He wore a loin-cloth but nothing else. Even his feet were bare. And yet, around his temples, bright ribbons had been tied. It did not seem possible that so dirty a man – more like an animal than a man, Creusa thought – could have any part of him so clean and pretty. The prisoner let forth a piteous howl.

'What was meant to kill me then is the cause of my death now!'

Creusa could not hide her disgust at the filthy, weeping Greek. Why had the scouts not killed him where they found him?

Excerpted from A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. Copyright © 2021 by Natalie Haynes. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.