Ilium (11 page)

An Achaean commander named Elephenor rushes in, grabs Echepolus’ ankles, and begins dragging the gory corpse back through the melee of spears and swords and crashing shields. I’ve seen Elephenor around the Achaean camp over the years, watched him fight in lesser skirmishes, and I have to say that the man’s name suits him—he’s huge, with gigantic shoulders, powerful arms, heavy thighs—not the sharpest knife in Agamemnon’s drawer of fighters, but a big, strong, brave and useful brawler. Thus Elephenor, Chalcodon’s son, thirty-eight years old this past June, commander of the Abantes and Lord of Euboea, drags Echepolus’ corpse behind the screen of thrusting Achaean attackers and begins stripping the body.

Then Agenor—a Trojan fighter, son of Antenor, father of Echeclus (both of whom I’ve seen on the streets of Ilium)—slips between the battling Achaeans and catches sight of Elephenor’s exposed ribs as the big man bends low beneath the protection of his shield to finish stripping Echepolus’ corpse. Agenor leaps forward and stabs his spear into Elephenor’s side, splintering ribs and pulping the big man’s heart into a shapeless mass. Elephenor vomits blood and collapses. More Trojan fighters surge forward, beating off the Achaean attack, as Agenor rips his spear free and begins to strip Elephenor of
his
war belt and sheaves and chestplate. Other Trojans drag Echepolus’ near-nude body back toward Trojan lines.

The fighting begins to swirl around these fallen men. The Achaean called Ajax—Big Ajax, the so-called Telemonian Ajax from Salamis, not to be confused with Little Ajax, who commands the Locrisians—hacks his way forward, sheaths his sword, and uses his spear to cut down a very young Trojan named Simoisius, who has come forward to cover Agenor’s retreat.

Just a week earlier, in the walled safety of Ilium’s quiet parks, while morphed as the Trojan Sthenelus, I had drunk wine and swapped ribald stories with Simoisius. The sixteen-year-old boy—never wed, never even bedded by a woman—had told me about how his father, Anthemion, had named him after the Simois River, which runs right next to their modest home a mile from the walls of the city. Simoisius had not yet turned six when the black ships of the Achaeans had first appeared on the horizon and, until a few weeks ago, his father had refused to allow the sensitive boy to join the army outside Ilium’s walls. Simoisius admitted to me that he was terrified of dying—not so much of death itself, he said, but of dying before he ever touched a woman’s breast or felt what it was like to be in love.

Now Big Ajax lets out a cry and thrusts his spear forward—batting aside Simoisius’ shield and striking the boy’s chest above the right nipple, shattering his shoulder and running the bronze point through and out until it protrudes a foot beyond the boy’s mangled back. Simoisius staggers to his knees and stares in astonishment—first at Ajax and then at the spear protruding from his chest. Big Ajax sets his sandaled foot on Simoisius’ face and rips the spear free, allowing the boy’s body to fall facefirst into the blood-dampened dust. Big Ajax pounds his chestplate and roars for his men to follow him.

A Trojan named Antiphus, standing not more than twenty-five feet away, hurls his spear at Big Ajax. The spear misses its target but strikes an Achaean named Leucus in the groin even as Leucus is busy helping Odysseus haul off the corpse of another Trojan captain. The spear passes through Leucus’ groin and comes out his anus, the tip trailing curls of gray and red colon and intestine. Leucus falls on the Trojan captain’s corpse but lives another terrible moment, writhing, grasping the spear and trying to pull it from his groin but only succeeding in spilling more of his bowels into his own lap. All the time he is tugging at the spear, Leucus is also screaming and tugging at his friend Odysseus’ bloody arm.

Leucus dies at last, his eyes glazing over, one hand still tight around Antiphus’ spear and the other still clinging to Odysseus’ wrist. Odysseus breaks the dead man’s grip and whirls around, dark eyes blazing under the rim of his bronze helmet, seeking out a target—any target. Odysseus hurls his spear and rushes after it. More Achaeans follow him into the gap he creates in the Trojan lines.

Odysseus’ first spearshot kills Democoon, a bastard son of Ilium’s King Priam. I was in the city nine years ago on the morning Democoon arrived to help defend Priam’s Ilium. It was common knowledge that Priam had put the young man in charge of his famed racing stables in Abydos, a city northeast of Troy on the southern shore of the Hellespont, to keep him out of sight of Priam’s wife and legitimate sons. The horses stabled in Abydos were the fastest and finest in the world, and it was said that Democoon considered it an honor to be named stablemaster at so young an age. Now that young Trojan is in the act of turning his head toward Odysseus’ maddened war cry when the bronze spearpoint hits him in his left temple and passes through and out his right temple, knocking him off his feet and pinning his shattered skull to the side of an overturned chariot. Democoon literally never knew what hit him.

The Trojans are retreating all along the line now, falling back before the fury of Odysseus and Big Ajax, trying to haul their noble dead when possible, abandoning them when not.

Hector, Ilium’s greatest fighter and most honest man, leaps off his command chariot and wades into the retreat, trying to bring his spear and sword to bear, urging the Trojans to hold fast, but the Achaean attack is too strong at this salient, and even Hector gives ground, all the while urging the men to discipline. The Trojans fight and hack and cast spears as they retreat.

Morphed as a minor Trojan spearman, I fall back faster than most, staying out of spear range, not afraid to be a coward. Earlier, I had cloaked myself from mortal view and started to move forward to where I could see Athena behind Achaean lines—soon joined by Hera, both goddesses invisible to men—but the fighting had erupted too quickly and escalated too fiercely, so I’d left the front lines after Echepolus fell, trusting to my enhanced vision and shotgun microphone to keep me in touch with events.

Suddenly everything freezes. The air thickens. Spears stop in midair, blood ceases to flow. Men seconds away from dying get a reprieve they will never know about as all sound ceases, all motion stops.

The gods are playing games with time again.

Apollo arrives first, his chariot QTing into existence not far from Hector. Then the war god Ares flicks into sight, talks to Athena and Hera an angry minute, and uses his own chariot to fly over the battle lines, landing near Apollo. Aphrodite joins them, glancing my way—to where I pretend to be frozen in place like the other mortals—for only an instant before smiling and talking to her two Trojan-loving allies, Ares and Apollo. I watch her out of the corner of my eye as the goddess stands there, pointing and gesturing toward the battlefield like a big-breasted George Patton.

The gods are here to fight.

Apollo raises his hand, sound crashes in, time begins again like a tsunami of dust and motion, and the killing resumes in earnest.

10

Ada, Harman, and Hannah waited the two days usually observed as a minimum decent interval after a firmary visit, and then faxed to Paris Crater to find Daeman. It was late and dark and chilly there and—they discovered as soon they stepped out from under the Guarded Lion faxnode roof—raining. Harman found them a covered barouche and a voynix pulled them northwest along a dried riverbed filled with white skulls, past miles of tumbledown buildings.

“I’ve never been to Paris Crater,” said Hannah. The young woman, just two months shy of her First Twenty, did not like big cities. PC was one of the most populated faxnodes on Earth, with some 25,000 semipermanent residents.

“It’s one reason I faxed us to the Guarded Lion node rather than a port called Invalid Hotel that’s closer to where Daeman lives on the rim,” said Ada. “Everything about this town is ancient. It’s worth taking one’s time to look around.”

Hannah nodded, but doubtfully. The row upon row of stone and steel buildings, most sheathed in shiny everplas, looked empty and dark and cheaply slick in the rain. Servitors and glow globes floated purposefully here and there down the dark streets, voynix stood silent and still on corners, but very few humans were visible. Then again, as Harman pointed out, it was after 10 p.m. Even a city as cosmopolitan as Paris Crater had to sleep.

“
That’s
interesting,” said Hannah, pointing to the structure rising a thousand feet above the city.

Harman nodded. “It’s early Lost Age. Some say it’s as old as Paris Crater, maybe even as old as the city that was here before the crater. It’s a symbol of the city and the people who built it long ago.”

“Interesting,” Hannah said again. A thousand feet tall, the rough representation of a naked woman appeared to be made of some clear polymer. The head was sometimes obstructed by low clouds, then briefly visible, and Hannah could see that the face was featureless except for a gaping grin between red lips. Black coiled springs fifty feet long spiraled like curls from the spherical head. The legs were spread wide, feet hidden from view behind the dark buildings to the west, but the thighs bunched as thick and wide as Ardis Hall. The breasts were huge, globular, absurd, alternately filling and emptying with broiling, photoluminescent red liquid, levels now rising, now filling, now waterfalling down the insides of the belly and legs, then sometimes rising again all the way to the raised arms and smiling face. The light from the glowing belly and breasts and massive buttocks painted the tops of taller structures around the crater a ruby red.

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“La putain enormé,”
said Ada.

“What does it mean?”

“No one knows,” said Harman. He instructed the voynix to turn left onto a rickety bridge and they clip-clopped onto what had once been an island when water flowed in the river of dry skulls, toward the ruins of a building that once must have been quite large. Now a low dome glowing with a purple light sat inside the tumbled walls like a strange egg in a nest of scattered stones.

“Wait here,” Harman told the voynix and led the two women through the overgrown ruins and into the translucent dome.

A slab of white stone about four feet high sat in the center of the space. There were gutters at the base of the slab and drains in the stone floor. Behind and above the slab rose a crude statue of a naked man carved from the same white rock. The man held a bow and a notched arrow.

“This is marble,” said Hannah, running her hand over the surface of the block. She knew stone. “What is this place?”

“A temple to Apollo,” said Harman.

“I’ve heard of these new temples,” said Ada, “but I’ve never seen one before. I thought it was rare—a few altars in the forest done as a gag, that sort of thing.”

“There are temples like this all over Paris Crater and in the other big cities,” said Harman. “Temples to Athena, Zeus, Ares . . . all the gods in the turin tale.”

“The drains and gutters . . .” began Hannah.

“To drain the blood of the animals sacrificed,” said Harman. “Mostly sheep and cattle.”

Hannah stepped back from the slab and crossed her arms over her chest. “The people wouldn’t . . . kill the animals?”

“No,” said Harman. “They have the voynix do that. So far.”

Ada stood at the open doorway. Rain dripped down the glowing portal, turning it into a purple-tinted waterfall. “What was this place . . . before? The ruins?”

“I’m pretty sure it was a Lost Age temple,” said Harman.

“To Apollo?” Hannah’s body was rigid, her arms folded tight against her body.

“I don’t think so. In the rubble here are bits and pieces of statuary—not gods, not people, not voynix . . . not quite . . . demons, I think. An old word for them was ‘gargoyle’—but I’m not sure what they signify.”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Ada.

Across the river of skulls and west again toward the crater, the broad boulevards ended where the Lost Age buildings became crowned with newer, taller structures—some very new, probably less than a thousand years old—a rising latticework of black buckylace and rain-glistening bamboo-three. Hannah called up a function to find Daeman, and the rectangle of light floating above her left palm glowed now amber, now red, then green again as they took stairways and lifts from street level to mezzanine level, from mezzanine level to the hanging esplanade fifteen stories above the old rooftops, then up from esplanade level to the residential stacks. Hannah paused at the esplanade rail to look down, mesmerized as most first-time viewers are as they stare into the unblinking red eye miles and miles below in the bottomless black circle of the crater; Ada had to pull her away with a hand on Hannah’s elbow and lead her to the next lift and stairway.

Surprisingly, it was a person, not a servitor, who answered the door at Daeman’s domi. Ada introduced her group, and the woman, who looked to be in her mid-forties as all three and four Twenties did, identified herself as Marina, Daeman’s mother. She led the way down warmly painted hallways and up interior staircases and through common rooms to the private areas on the crater-side of the domi complex.

“The servitor brought the message you were coming, of course,” said Marina, pausing outside a beautifully carved mahogany door, “but I haven’t told Daeman. He is still . . . perturbed . . . by the accident.”

Harman said, “But he doesn’t remember it?”

“Oh, no, of course not,” said Marina. She was an attractive woman and Ada could see the resemblance to her son in her red hair and pleasantly stocky build. “But you know what they say about such things . . . the cells remember.”

But they’re not the same cells,
thought Ada. She said nothing.

“Will it upset Daeman to see us?” asked Hannah. To Ada’s ear, the young woman sounded more curious than concerned.

Marina made a graceful shrugging motion with her hand, as if to say “We shall see.” She knocked on the door and opened it when Daeman’s muffled voice bid them enter.

The room was large and draped with richly colored fabrics, floating silk tapestries, and lace curtains around Daeman’s sleeping area, but the far wall was all glass opening onto a private porch. Lamps in the large room were set low, but the brightly lighted city’s edge beyond the balcony curved away on both sides, and more constellations of lanterns, glow globes, and soft electric lights were visible half a mile away across the dark crater. Daeman was sitting in a nesting chair by the rain-streaked window, staring out as if pondering the lights. He blinked at the sight of Ada, Harman, and Hannah, but then waved them over to the circle of soft furniture. Marina excused herself and closed the door behind her as the three took their seats. The glass doors had been opened and the cool air coming through the screens smelled of rain and wet bamboo.

“We wanted to see you how you were doing,” Ada said. “And I wanted to apologize in person for the accident . . . for not taking better care of my guest.”

Daeman smiled and shrugged, but his hands were trembling slightly. He set them on his silk-robed knees. “All I remember is something large crashing through the trees—and the smell of carrion, I remember that—and then waking up in the firmary crèche-tank. The servitors here told me what happened, of course. It would be amusing if the idea weren’t so . . . revolting.”

Ada nodded, leaned closer, and took his hand. “I do apologize, Daeman
Uhr
. The allosauruses have come onto the estate only very rarely in recent decades and the voynix are always there to protect us . . .”

Daeman frowned but did not remove his hand from hers. “Evidently they didn’t do a very good job protecting me.”

“That
is
strange,” said Harman, crossing his legs and tapping the corrugated-paper arms of his chair. “Very strange. I can’t remember the last time a voynix failed to protect a human in such a situation.”

Daeman looked at the older man. “You’re used to situations where recombinant animals eat people, Harman
Uhr
?”

“Not at all. I meant situations where human beings are in jeopardy.”

“I apologize again,” said Ada. “The security failure on the part of the voynix was inexplicable, but my own carelessness was inexcusable. I’m sorry that your weekend at Ardis Hall was ruined and that your sense of harmony was perturbed.”

“Perturbed, yes . . . perhaps an inadequate word to describe being devoured by a six-ton carnivore,” said Daeman, but he smiled slightly and bowed his head even more slightly to acknowledge his acceptance of the apology.

Harman leaned closed and clasped his hands, bobbing them up and down for emphasis as he spoke. “We had an unfinished item for discussion, Daeman
Uhr
. . .”

“The spaceship.” Now Daeman’s tone of irony had dripped into sarcasm.

Harman was not deterred. His clasped hands rose and fell with the syllables. “Yes. But not just a spaceship . . . that’s the ultimate goal, of course . . . but any form of flying machine. Jinker. Sonie. Ultralight. Anything to allow us to explore between faxports . . .”

Daeman sat back, away from Harman’s intensity, and folded his arms. “Why do you persist with this? Why do you bother me about this?”

Ada touched his arm. “Daeman, Hannah and I had both heard, from different people, that at a recent party in Ulanbat—about a month ago, I believe—you told some acquaintances of ours there that you’d once met someone who mentioned seeing a spaceship . . . and someone who spoke of flying between nodes . . .”

Daeman managed to look both blank and irritated for a moment, but then he laughed and shook his head. “The witch,” he said.

“Witch?” said Hannah.

Daeman opened his hands in an echo of his mother’s graceful shrugging gesture. “We called her that. I forget her real name. A crazy woman. Obviously in her last Twenty . . .” He shot a glance toward Harman. “People begin losing touch with reality in their later years.”

Harman smiled and ignored the gibe. “You don’t remember this woman’s name?”

Daeman gestured again, less gracefully this time. “No.”

“Where did you meet her?” asked Ada.

“The last Burning Man. A year and a half ago. I forget where it was held . . . somewhere cold. I just followed friends from Chom when they faxed there. Lost Age ceremonies never interested me very much, but there were many fascinating young women at this gathering.”

“I was there!” Hannah said, her eyes bright. “About ten thousand people came.”

Harman pulled a much-folded sheet of paper from a tunic pocket and began spreading it on the padded ottoman between them. “Do you remember which node?”

Hannah shook her head. “It was one of the half-forgotten nodes. One of the empty ones. The organizers sent the node code around the day before the ceremony began. No one lived there, I think. It was a rocky valley surrounded by snow. I remember that it was light all day, all night, for the five days of Burning Man. And cold. The servitors had set up a Planck field over the whole valley and heaters here and there in the valley itself, so it wasn’t uncomfortable, but no one was allowed beyond the edges of the valley.”

Harman looked at his faded and folded sheet of microvellum. The page was covered with squiggly lines, dots, and arcane runes like those found in books. He stabbed a finger down on a dot near the bottom. “Here. In what used to be Antarctica. A node called ‘The Dry Valley.’ “

Daeman looked at him blankly.

“This is a map I’ve been working on for fifty years,” said Harman. “A two-dimensional representation of the Earth with all the known faxnodes mapped on it, along with their codes. Antarctica was a Lost Age name for one of the seven continents. I have seven Antarctic faxnodes recorded, but only one of them—this dry valley that I’ve heard of but never visited—is free of snow and ice.”

This obviously did nothing to enlighten Daeman. Even Ada and Hannah looked confused.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Harman. “But if the sun was out all day and all night, this dry valley is the probable faxport. During the polar summers, there are days when the sun doesn’t set there.”

“The sun doesn’t set in June in Chom,” Daeman said, obviously bored. “Is that near your dry valley?”