Ilium (13 page)

“I don’t . . .” began Ada.

“I know. But just this once. I think that something important’s about to happen. Let us share this.”

She lay back on the soft cushion and let Harman adjust the turin across her eyes. She felt him lie back next to her, his right hand lying loosely across her left hand.

The images and sounds and sensations flowed in.

11

The gods have come down to play. More precisely, they have come down to kill.

The battle has been raging for some time now with the god Apollo lashing on the Trojans, with Athena spurring on the Argives, and other gods lounging in the shade of a tree on the nearest hill, sometimes laughing, Iris and their other servants pouring them wine. I’ve watched the Thracian chief Pirous, a bold Trojan ally, kill gray-eyed Diores with a rock. Diores, co-commander of the Epean contingent of the Greeks, went down with only a broken ankle after battled-maddened Pirous threw the rock, but most of Diores’ comrades fell back, Pirous hacked his way through the few who had stayed to guard their fallen captain, and—helpless now, his ankle smashed—poor Diores had to lie there while Pirous rushed in, speared the Thracian in the belly with his long casting spear, and pulled the man’s bowels out, hooking them on the barbed spearpoint and twisting more out while while Diores screamed.

This was the flavor of the last half-hour’s battle and it was a relief when Pallas Athena raised her hand, received nodded permission from other watching gods, and stopped time and motion in their tracks.

Now with my enhanced vision—enhanced by the contact lenses from the gods—I can see Athena across the milling no-man’s-land of lances, preparing Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, as a killing machine. I mean this almost literally. Like the gods themselves, and like me, Diomedes the man will now be part machine, his eyes and skin and very blood enhanced by nanotechnologies from some future age far beyond my short life span. In frozen time, Athena sets contact lenses similar to mine in the Achaean’s eyes, allowing him to see both the gods and, somehow, to slow time a bit when he concentrates in the thick of the action, thus—to the unenhanced onlooker’s view—increasing his reaction time threefold. Homer had written that Athena had “set the man ablaze,” and now I understand the metaphor; using the nanotechnology embedded in her palm and forearm, Athena is busy turning the neglible, latent electromagnetic field around Diomedes’ body into a serious forcefield. In the infrared, Diomedes’ body and arms and shield and helmet suddenly blazed “with tireless fire like the star that flames at harvest.” I realize now, watching Diomedes glow in the thick amber of god-frozen time, that Homer must have been referring to Sirius, the Dog Star, rising as the brightest star in the Greek (and Trojan) sky in late summer. It is in the eastern sky this night.

As I watch, she also injects billions of nanotech molecular machines into Diomedes’ thigh. As always with such a nano-invasion, the human body deals with it as an infection and Diomedes’ temperature goes up at least five degrees. I can watch the invading army of molecular machines moving up his thigh to his heart, from his heart to his lungs and arms and legs again, the heat making his body glow even more brightly in my infrared vision.

All around me, battlefield death is held in abeyance these stretched minutes. Ten yards to my left, I see a chariot frozen in a bubble of dust and human sweat and equine saliva. The Trojan charioteer—a short, even-tempered man named Phegeus, son of Troy’s foremost priest to the god Hephaestus and brother to stout Idaeus; in my morphed disguises, I had broken bread and drunk wine with Idaeus a dozen times in the past few years—is petrified in the act of leaning over the front of his chariot, the chariot rim in his left hand, a long throwing spear in his right. Ideaus stands next to his brother, frozen in the act of whipping on the motion-halted horses while clutching the rigid reins in his other hand. The chariot has been halted in the act of bearing down on Diomedes, all the human players here unaware that the goddess Athena has stopped everything while she plays dolls with her chosen champion, dressing Diomedes in forcefields and thru-view contact lenses and nano-augmenters like some pre-teen girl playing with her Barbie. (I remember a small girl playing with Barbie dolls, perhaps a sister from my own childhood. I don’t believe I had a daughter of my own. I’m not sure, of course, because the memories returning over the past months are like shards of glass with clouded reflections in them.)

I am close enough to the chariot to see the exultation of combat chiseled into Phegeus’ tanned face, and the fear frozen into his unblinking brown eyes. If Homer reported all this correctly, Phegeus will be dead in less than a minute.

I see other gods flocking to the battle site now like carrion crows to slaughter. There is Ares, god of war, flicking into solidity on my side of the battle lines, stepping close to the time-halted chariot holding Idaeus and his doomed brother. Ares palms open his own forcefield behind the frozen chariot carrying the two brothers toward death.

Why does Ares care what happens with these two?
True, Ares is no lover of the Greeks—he has obviously learned to hate them in this war and kills them through his instruments or his own agency when he can—but why this obvious concern about Phegeus or his brother Idaeus? Is it just a countermove to Athena’s strategy of enabling Diomedes? This chess game with real human beings falling and screaming and dying has grown old to me, an obscenity. But the strategy still intrigues me.

Then I remember that the god of war is half-god-brother to Hephaestus, the god of fire, also born to Zeus’s wife, Hera. Phegeus’ and Idaeus’ father, Dares, has performed long and faithful service to the fire god within Troy’s walls.

This idiot war is more complicated and senseless than the Vietnam War I half remember from my youth.

Suddenly Aphrodite, my new spymaster and boss, QT’s into existence thirty yards to my left. She’s also here to help the Trojans and to enjoy the slaughter. But—

In the last slowed seconds before real-time resumes, I remember that if the actual fighting goes the way of the old poem, Aphrodite herself will be injured by Diomedes in the coming hour.
Why would she come down to the fray knowing that a mortal will wound her?

The answer is the same that I’ve been reminded of so forcibly over the past nine years, but now the fact of it hits me with the force and flash of a nuclear explosion—
The gods don’t know what will happen next!
None but Zeus, it seems, is allowed to peer ahead at Fate’s checklist.

All of us scholics are aware of this—we are not allowed, by Zeus’s prohibition, to discuss future events with the gods and they are forbidden to ask us about the future books of the
Iliad
. Our task is only to confirm after the fact that Homer’s
Iliad
has been truthful to the events of the day we are tasked to observe and record. Many’s the time that Nightenhelser and I, while watching the little green men haul their face-stones toward the shore as the sun sets behind the sea to the west, have commented on this paradox of the gods’ own blindness to coming events.

I know that Aphrodite will be injured this day, but the goddess herself does not.
How can I use this information? If I were to tell Aphrodite, Zeus would know—I don’t know how he would know, but I know he would—and I would be atomized and Aphrodite punished in some lesser way.
How can I use the information that Aphrodite, the goddess giving me these gifts to spy with, will be—may be—injured by Diomedes this day?

I don’t have time to find the answer. Athena finishes her fussing with Diomedes and releases her grip on space and time.

Real light and terrible noise and violent motion resumes. Diomedes steps forth, body and face and shield blazing, the light evidently apparent even to the other mortals, visible to his fellow Achaeans and the opposing Trojans.

Idaeus completes the motion of lashing his horses forward. The chariot roars and rumbles toward the Greek line, directly at the startled Diomedes.

Phegeus hurls his spear at Diomedes. The spear misses by an inch, the spearpoint passing over the son of Tydeus’ left shoulder.

Diomedes, skin flushed, forehead blazing with fever-sweat and battle heat, hurls his own spear. It flies true, catching Phegeus dead-center in the chest—“between the nipples,” I think Homer had sung it in Greek—and Phegeus is flung backward off the chariot, striking the ground and cartwheeling several times, the spear breaking off and splintering as the corpse tumbles to a stop in the dust of the chariot he had been riding five seconds before. Death, when it comes, comes fast on the plains of Ilium.

Idaeus leaps off the chariot, rolls, and struggles to his feet, sword in hand, prepared to protect his brother’s body.

Diomedes snatches up another spear and rushes forward again, obviously ready to spit Idaeus the way he has just slaughtered the young man’s brother. The Trojan turns to flee—leaving his brother’s body behind in the dust in his panic—but Diomedes throws strong and true, casting the long spear at the center of the running man’s back.

Ares, the god of war, flies forward—
literally
flies forward, using the same type of levitation harness the gods have issued me—and pauses time again, protecting Idaeus from a flying spear now frozen not ten feet from the running man’s back. Then Ares extends his forcefield around Idaeus, resuming time long enough for the energy field to deflect Diomedes’ spear. Then Ares quantum teleports the terrified man off the battlefield completely, sending him somewhere safe. To the shocked and terrified Trojans, it is as if a blink of black night has snatched their comrade away.

So that Ares’ brother Hephaestus, the fire god, will not have lost both his future priests,
I think, but then lurch backward to safety as the battle resumes and more Greeks follow Diomedes into the breach created by the killing of Phegeus. The empty chariot bounces across the rocky plain, and is captured by cheering Achaeans.

Ares is back now, QTing into semisolidity, a tall godshape as he tries to rally the Trojans, shouting in a godvoice for them to regroup and fend off Diomedes. But the Trojans are split—some running in terror at the approach of blazing Diomedes, some turning in obedience to the war god’s booming voice. Suddenly Athena levitates across the heads of Greeks and Trojans, seizes Ares’ wrist, and whispers urgently to the furious god.

The two QT away.

I look to my left again and the goddess Aphrodite—invisible to the Greeks and Trojans struggling and cursing and dying around her—motions with her hand for me to follow them.

I pull down Death’s Helmet and become invisible to all the gods except Aphrodite. Then I trigger the medallion around my neck and QT after Athena and Ares, following their passage through space-time as easily as I would follow footprints in wet sand.

It’s easy being a god. If you have the right equipment.

They have not teleported far, only about ten miles, to a shaded place along the banks of the Scamander, the gods call it the Xanthus—the broad river that runs across the plains of Ilium. When I QT into solidity about fifteen paces from them, Ares’ head snaps around and he stares right at me. For an instant I know that the Hades Helmet has failed, they see me, and I am dead.

“What is it?” asks Athena.

“I thought I . . . felt something. A stir. A quantum stir.”

The goddess turns her gray eyes in my direction. “There’s nothing there. I can see in all the phase-shift spectra.”

“I can as well,” snaps Ares and turns his gaze away from me. I let out a shaky breath as silently as I can; the Hades Helmet still cloaks me. The god of war begins pacing up and down the river’s edge. “Zeus is everywhere these days.”

Athena walks beside him. “Yes, Father is angry at us all.”

“Then why do you provoke him?”

The goddess stops. “Provoke him how? By defending my Achaeans from slaughter?”

“By preparing Diomedes to
do
slaughter,” says Ares. I notice for the first time the reddish tint to the tall, perfectly muscled god’s curly hair. “This is a dangerous thing you do, Pallas Athena.”

The goddess laughs softly. “We’ve been intervening in this battle for nine years. It’s the Game, for God’s sake. It’s what we
do
. I know that you plan to intervene on your beloved Ilium’s behalf this very day, slaughtering my Argives like sheep. Is this not dangerous—this active participation by the god of war?”

“Not as dangerous as arming one side or the other with nanotech. Not as dangerous as retrofitting them with phase-shift fields. What are you thinking, Athena? You’re trying to turn these mortals into us—into gods.”

Athena laughs again but puts on a serious expression when she notices that her laughter only makes Ares more angry. “Brother, my augmentation of Diomedes is short-lived, you know that. I want only for him to survive this encounter. Aphrodite, your darling sister, has already urged on the Trojan archer Pandarus to wound one of my favorites—Menelaus—and even as we speak, she’s whispering in the archer’s ear—
Kill Diomedes.
”

Ares shrugs. I know that Aphrodite is his ally and his instigator. Like a pouting little boy—an eight-foot-tall pouting little boy with a pulsing energy field—he finds a smooth stone and skips it across the water. “What does it matter if Diomedes dies today or next year? He’s mortal. He’ll die.”

Now Athena laughs without embarrassment. “Of
course
he will die, my dear brother. And
of course
a single mortal’s life or death is of no consequence to us . . . to me. But we must play the
Game.
I’ll not let that bitch-whore Aphrodite change the will of the Fates.”