While this was going on outside the walls, there was scarcely less excitement in the city. Certain shepherds had surprised a young Greek, and were dragging their captive before King Priam, with a hooting and jeering crowd at their heels. "Woe is me!" cried the youth as he came into the king's presence; "have I escaped from the Greeks, my bitter foes who sought my life, only to fall among Trojans from whom I can expect no mercy?" But the king bade him fear nothing, and tell his tale. It was an artful tale concocted for him by Ulysses, how to the Greeks, desirous of sailing home and detained by contrary winds, an oracle had come-- "To speed you here a virgin maid was slain, Blood must be spilt to speed you home again"-- how _he_ had been pointed out by Calchas as the destined victim, and had escaped even as he was being led in bonds to the altar. His tattered dress and bleeding wrists bore out this plausible tale. The king ordered his captors to free him from his manacles, and assuring the prisoner that he need fear nothing, begged him to tell them what was the design of the Greeks in building and leaving behind them the Wooden Horse. Sinon (for that was the name that the pretended deserter took) first invoked on his head the direst curses if he failed to reveal to his deliverers the whole truth, and then repeated the lesson in which his cunning master Ulysses had drilled him. "You must know," he said, "that all the hopes of Greece lay in the favor and protection of their patron goddess, Minerva. But the wrath of the goddess was kindled against the host, for the son of Tydeus, at the prompting of Ulysses--that godless knave who sticks at no crime--had invaded her shrine, slain her custodians, and snatched therefrom the Palladium, the sacred image of the goddess, deeming it a charm that would bring them certain victory. And the goddess showed by visible signs her displeasure. In each encounter our forces were routed; around the carven image now set up in the camp lightnings played, and thrice amid the lightning and thunder the goddess herself was seen with spear at rest and flashing targe. And Calchas, of whom we sought counsel in our terror, bade us sail back to Argos, and when in her great temple we had shriven us, with happier auspices renew the fray; but first in her honor we must erect a Wooden Horse, so huge that it could not pass your gates or be brought within your walls. Moreover, Calchas told us that if any man were rash enough to lay sacrilegious hands on the votive Horse, he would straightway be smitten by the vengeful goddess!"