Gods on Speed

Gods on Speed is a short thriller set during the last days of the Trojan War.

It's available on www.wattpad.com.

Here's the brief synopsis:

The Greeks are struggling after besieging the City-State of Troy for ten years. Achilles, the great warrior-king, has withdrawn from battle because of a tiff with Agamemnon King of Mycenae and leader of the Greek contingent. Abruptly Achilles returns, the Greeks regroup and, following the stratagem of the wooden horse, they finally breach Troy’s walls. But who or what made Achilles change his mind? And how did the war-weary Greeks think of deceiving the Trojans with a wooden horse?

Helen of Sparta is considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Her husband Menelaus is King. Her sister Clytemnestra is married to the ambitious Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and Menelaus’s brother. When the Trojan Princes Hector and Paris visit Sparta on a diplomatic mission, Paris seduces Helen and she elopes with him. An enraged Menelaus turns to Agamemnon for help and the latter sees this as an opportunity to unite and lead the various Greek Kings, notably Odysseus of Ithaca, who is renowned for his cunning and Achilles of Phthia, a feared warrior. After sacrificing his young daughter Iphigenia at the port of Aulis, Agamemnon leads the Greeks in a thousand ships across the Aegean Sea to attack the Kingdom of Troy, ostensibly to recover Helen and avenge the insult to Menelaus. But Troy’s walls have never been breached. King Priam and his sons, particularly Hector and Paris, are able commanders. Troy defies the Greek assault for ten long years.

Cracks develop in the Greeks’ unity during the long siege. Soldiers become homesick; the Kings 

begin bickering. Achilles, who leads a contingent of fearsome warriors called Myrmidons, clashes 

with Agamemnon when the latter deprives him of his favourite slave Briseis. In a fit of rage,

 Achilles withdraws his troops from battle. The Greeks begin to suffer terrible losses due to Prince

 Hector’s skills. Then they turn to Odysseus to break the impasse...

Gods on Speed relies on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book II) for the story outline. It’s a retelling of the Trojan War in a contemporary style, similar to the movie Troy, although many details differ. This is not unusual since there’s no ‘original’ story of the Trojan War. It was handed down orally over generations from the twelfth or thirteenth century B.C. until Homer gave it an epic form in the sixth or seventh century B.C. Its themes of love, honour and power struggles are eternal as is the mystique surrounding the central character Helen, who was described by Shakespeare as ‘the pearl whose price hath launched a thousand ships’ (Troilus and Cressida).

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