Ilium (35 page)

“Savi can take care of herself,” said Harman. “She has that gun-weapon.”

“But if something were to eat her,” said Daeman, still staring into the forest, “who would fly the sonie?”

“Hush,” said Hannah. She touched Odysseus’ wrist with her long tan fingers. “Tell us the story that the turin cloth doesn’t know. Please.”

Odysseus frowned, but Ada and Harman were nodding in agreement with Hannah’s request, so he flicked crumbs out of his beard and began.

“This experience wasn’t and won’t be shown in your turin-rag tale. The events I will share with you now happened after the death of Hector and Paris but before the wooden horse.”

“Paris dies?” interrupted Daeman.

“Hector dies?” asked Hannah.

“Wooden horse?” said Ada.

Odysseus closed his eyes, combed fingers through his short beard, and said, “May I continue without interruption?”

Everyone except the absent Savi nodded.

“The events I will describe to you now happened after the death of Hector and Paris, but before the wooden horse. It was true in those days that, among its most potent treasures, the city of Ilium possessed a divine image that had fallen from heaven—you would call it a meteorite—but a stone cast and formed by Zeus himself generations before our war as a sign of the Father of the Gods’ approval of the founding of the city itself. This metallic-stone figure was called a Palladion, because it was in the form of Pallas . . . not, I should explain, Pallas Athena, as we call our goddess, but Pallas, Athena’s companion in her youth. This other Pallas—the word itself can be accented to have a feminine or masculine meaning in our language, but here it is close to the Latin word
virago,
which means ‘strong virgin’—had been killed in a sham fight with Athena. And it was Ilios, sometimes called Ilus, father of Laomedon, who in turn would be father to Priam, Tithonus, Lampus, Clytius, and Hicetaon, who had found the star-stone in front of his tent one morning and who recognized it for what it was.

“This ancient Palladion, long a secret source of Ilium’s wealth and power, was three cubits in height, carried a spear in its right hand and a distaff and spindle in its left, and was associated with the goddess of death and fate. Ilios and the other ancestors of the current defenders of Troy had ordered made many replicas of the Palladion, in many different sizes, and hid and guarded these false statues as surely as they did the real one, since everyone knew that the continued survival of Ilium itself depended on their possession of the Palladion. It was the gods themselves who revealed this fact to me in dreams in those last weeks of the siege of Ilium, and so I told Diomedes of my plan to go into the city and locate the true Palladion so that he and I could return to the city, steal it, and seal Troy’s doom.

“First, I disguised myself in rags as a beggar and had my own servant whip me with a lash, thus disfiguring myself with stripes and welts. The citizens of Ilium, you see, were notoriously weak-stomached when it came to disciplining their servants—they tended to spoil slaves more often than punish them, and no Trojan servant serving a good family would be allowed to go abroad sporting torn clothes and flogging stripes—so I reasoned that rags and stench and, most important, the bloody whip-marks would make the citizens turn away in embarrassment upon seeing me—a perfect disguise for a spy, don’t you think?

“I chose myself for this task because I was the stealthiest and craftiest of all the Achaeans, and also, because I had been within the walls of Troy before, more then ten years earlier, sent there to lead a delegation tasked with peacefully negotiating the release of Helen before our black ships arrived in force and a war began. Obviously, those negotiations failed—all of us true Argives had hoped they’d fail, since we were spoiling for a fight and hungry for plunder—but I well remembered the layout of the city within those great walls and gates.

“In my dream, the gods—most likely Athena, since she favored our cause more than any of the others—had revealed to me that the Palladion and its many replicas were secreted somewhere in Priam’s royal palace, but did not tell me where in the palace it might be hidden, nor how I could tell the real Palladion from its many pretenders.

“I waited until the deepest hours of the night, when the rampart fires are at their lowest and the human senses are at their weakest, and then I used grapple and rope to go over the towering walls, killing a guard as I did so and hiding his body under fodder stacked high within the walls for the Thracian cavalry. Ilium was large—the largest city in the world—and it took me a while to navigate its streets and alleys to Priam’s palace. I was challenged twice by armed sentinels in the streets, but I grunted and made strangled sounds while gesturing meaninglessly with my whip-bloodied arms, and they judged me an idiot slave, well and truly whipped for his idiocy, and they let me pass.

“Priam’s palace was large—it had fifty bedrooms, one for each of Priam’s fifty sons—and it was well guarded by the most elite of Trojan’s elite troops, with alert guards at all the doors and outside each street-level window, with still more guards within the courtyards and on the palace walls—no sleepy sentinels would idly wave me on here, no matter how late the hour or how bloody my stripes or how idiotic my grunts—so I made my way south a few blocks to Helen’s home, which was also well guarded, but less so after I knifed my second Trojan of the night and hid his body as best I could.

“After Paris’s death in an archery duel, Helen had been given in marriage to another of Priam’s sons, Deiphobos, whom the people of Ilium called ‘the router of the enemy’ but whom we Achaeans referred to on the field as ‘oxen-buttocks,’ but her new husband was not at home this night and Helen slept alone. I woke her.

“I don’t believe I would have killed Helen if she had cried for help—I had known her for many years, you know, both in my role as guest in Menelaus’ noble house and, before that, as one of Helen’s first suitors when she became eligible for marriage, although this was just a formality, since I was happily married to Penelope even then. It was I who had counseled that Tyndareos should take an oath of the suitors to acquiesce to Helen’s choice, thus avoiding much bloodshed from the losers’ bad manners. I think Helen always appreciated that advice.

“Helen did not cry out for help that night I awakened her from her troubled sleep in her home in Ilium. She recognized me right away and hugged me and asked after the health of her true husband, Menelaus, and of her daughter so far away. I told her that all were well—although I did not tell her that at this point in the war, Menelaus had been seriously wounded twice on the battlefield and moderately wounded half a dozen times, including his recent arrow in the hip, and was in a surly mood. Instead, I expressed to her how much her husband and daughter and their family in Sparta missed her and wished her home and well.

“Helen laughed then. ‘My lord and husband Menelaus wishes me dead, and you know it, Odysseus,’ she said. ‘And I am sure that he will do the deed himself when the great walls and Scaean Gate of Ilium fall away soon, as Cassandra has prophesied.’

“I did not know this particular oracle—Delphi and Pallas Athena are the only seers of the future who have my ear—but I could not argue with her; it seemed probable that Menelaus would indeed slit her throat after all the bitter years of her disloyalty in the arms and beds of his enemies. But I did not tell Helen this. Instead, I told her that I would intercede with Menelaus, son of Atreus, convincing him to spare her life, if Helen would not betray me this night, but would help me find a way into Priam’s palace and instruct me on how to choose the true Palladion.

“ ‘I would not betray thee anyway, Odysseus, son of Laertes, true and crafty counselor,’ said Helen. And she told me how to pierce the palace defenses and how to know the real Palladion when I saw it amongst its imitators.

“But it was almost dawn. Too late to complete my mission that night. So I went out and down the streets and up and over and down the wall through the gaps I had left by killing the watchmen, and I slept late the next day, and bathed, and ate and drank, and had Machaon, the son of Asclepius and the finest healer in the army’s pay, dress my flog wounds and apply a healing salve.

“The next night, knowing that I would need an ally since I could not fight and carry the heavy Palladion stone at the same time, I enlisted Diomedes in my plan. Together in the deepest hour of the night, the son of Tydeus and I went up and over the wall—killing this sentinel with a well-placed arrow. Then we moved quickly down the streets and alleys—no dumb show as flogged slaves this night, but, rather, efficiently and silently killing any who challenged us—and made our way into Priam’s palace via a hidden sewer drain that Helen had told me how to find.

“Diomedes, a proud man like so many of those thick-skulled heroes from Argos, did not like wading through a sewer for any purpose, not even to ensure the downfall of Ilium. He grumbled and bitched and pissed and moaned and was in a truly foul mood by the time we added insult to injury by having to climb up through a hole in one of the ten-man crappers in the privies of the palace basement, where Priam’s treasure vaults were located in the midst of his elite guard’s barracks.

“We were stealthy, but our stench preceded us and we had to kill the first twenty guards we encountered in those corridors; the twenty-first showed us how to open the treasure-vault doors without tripping alarms or deadfalls, and then Diomedes cut that man’s throat as well.

“In addition to tons of gold, mountains of precious stones, deep pools of pearls, stacks of inlayed fabrics, chests of diamonds, and much of the rest of the wealth of the fabled East in those vaults, there were forty or so statues of the Palladion arrayed in niches. They were alike in everything except size.

“ ‘Helen said to take only the smallest,’ I said to Diomedes, and I did so, wrapping the Palladion in a red cape I had taken from the last guard we’d killed. We had the downfall of Ilium in our hands. All we had to do now was escape.

“This is the point when Diomedes decided that he wanted to loot Priam’s vaults then, that night, at once, immediately. The lure of all that plunder was too much for the greedy, brainless bastard. Diomedes would have traded ten years of our blood and toil for a few hundred pounds of gold.

“I . . . dissuaded him. I will not describe the fight we had when I set the red-wrapped Palladion on the floor and drew my sword to stop the son of Tydeus, king of Argos, from ruining our mission through his greed. The fight was over quickly, won by stealth. All right, if you insist, I’ll tell you—no noble combat here. No glorious
aristeia
here. I suggested that we remove our reeking tunics before fighting, and while the great lummox was disrobing, I threw a ten-weight lump of gold at the great ox and knocked him cold.

“In the end, I ended up fleeing Priam’s palace with the heavy Palladion in the crook of one arm and the heavier, naked Diomedes slung over my shoulder.

“I couldn’t carry him over the wall like that, so I was ready, willing, and on the verge of leaving him by the cesspool of sewage where the great drain let out near where the river ran under Ilium’s walls, but Diomedes regained consciounsess right then and agreed to leave the city with me. We departed quietly. Very quietly. He did not speak to me again that day, nor again that week, nor after the fall and plunder of Ilium, nor during our preparations to sail for home.

“Nor have I spoken to Diomedes since that day.

“I should add that it was shortly after that, after I bore away the Palladion to our Argives’ camp where we hid it well, sure now that Troy was in its final hours, that we began work on the gigantic wooden horse. The horse had three purposes—first, as a ruse, of course, to carry me and a carefully chosen band of my staunchest fighters into the city; second, as a means to have the Trojans themselves remove the great stone lintel over the Scaean Gate in order to let the votive offering pass into their city, since prophecy said that these two things had to come to pass before Ilium would fall—the loss of the Palladion and the destruction of the Scaean lintel; and third, and finally, we crafted the great horse as a gift to Athena to make up for the loss of her Palladion, since she was also known as Hippia, ‘horse goddess,’ since it was she who had bridled and tamed Pegasus for Bellerophontes and she who took such pleasure in riding and exercising her own horses at every opportunity.

“And this, my friends, is my short tale of the theft of the Palladion and the downfall of Ilium. I hope the telling pleased you. Are there any questions?”

Ada caught Harman’s eye.
This was his
short
tale
? she thought, and saw her lover catch her thought like a blown kiss.

“Yes, I have a question,” said Daeman.

Odysseus nodded.

“Why do you call it Troy some of the time and Ilium the rest of the time?” asked the pudgy young man.

Odysseus shook his head slightly, rose, took his scabbard and short sword from the sonie, and walked off into the forest.

24

Zeus is angry. I’ve seen Zeus angry before, but this time he is very, very, very angry.

When the Father of the Gods sweeps into the ruins of the healing chamber on Olympos, surveys the damage, stares at Aphrodite’s body lying pale amidst a nest of writhing green worms on the wet floor, and then turns to look in my direction, I am sure that Zeus
sees
me—that he looks right through whatever cloaking device powers the Hades Helmet and
sees
me. But although he stares directly at me for several seconds and blinks those glacially cold gray eyes of his as if coming to some decision—he looks away again, and I, Thomas Hockenberry, formerly of Indiana University and, more recently, of Helen of Troy’s bed, am allowed to continue living.

My right arm and left leg are badly bruised, but nothing is broken, and—still cloaked by the Hades Helmet from the sight of the scores of gods rushing into the healing room—I escape the building and QT to the only place I can think of, other than Helen’s bedroom, where I can rest and recuperate—the scholics’ barracks at the foot of Olympos.

Out of old habit, I go to my own cubicle, my own bare bed, but I keep the Hades Helmet cowl pulled up and activated as I flop on it and doze fitfully. It has been one hell of a long day and night and morning. The Invisible Man sleeps.

I awake to the sound of screams and thunderclaps on the floor below. By the time I rush out to the hallway, the scholic named Blix runs by—almost runs into me actually, since I’m invisible to him—and explains breathlessly to another scholic named Campbell, “The Muse is here and she’s killing everybody!”

It’s true. I cower in the corner of a stairway as the Muse—our Muse, the one Aphrodite had called Melete—strikes down the few fleeing scholics left alive in the blazing barracks. The goddess is using bolts of pure energy from her hands—corny, clichéd, but horribly effective on mere human flesh. Blix is doomed, but there’s nothing I can think of to do for him or the others.

Nightenhelser
. The stolid scholic has been my one real friend the last years. Panting, I run to his room in the barracks. The marble is scarred, the wood is ablaze, the window glass has melted, but there’s no charred corpse here as there are littering the hallways and lounges. None of those burned bodies had looked large enough to be the burly Nightenhelser. Suddenly there come final screams from the third floor, then silence except for the increasing roar of flames. I look out a window and see the Muse flit by in her chariot, holographic horses in full stride. Near panic, choking audibly on the smoke—if the Muse was still in the barracks she would hear me now—I force myself to visualize Ilium and the restaurant where I’d last seen Nightenhelser. Then I grasp and twist the QT medallion, and escape.

He’s not at the restaurant where I’d seen him early that morning. I flick to the battlefield; he’s not in his usual spot on the ridge above the Trojan lines. I take just enough time to notice that Hector and Paris are leading the Trojan troops in a successful attack against the fleeing Argives, and then I QT to a shady place behind Greek lines, near their moat and line of stakes, where I’ve bumped into Nightenhelser in the past.

He’s there, disguised as Dolops, son of Clytius, who has some days left before being killed by Hector if Homer is right. Not bothering to morph into into any shape other than gawky Hockenberry, I pull off the Hades Helmet cowl and run to the other scholic.

“Hockenberry, what . . .” Nightenhelser is shocked by my unprofessional behavior and by the reaction of other Achaeans nearby. Drawing attention to oneself is the last thing a scholic wants. Except, perhaps, to be burned to cinders by a vengeful Muse. I have no idea why our Muse is wiping out all the scholics this day, but my guess is that I’ve somehow caused this slaughter of the innocents.

“We have to get out of here,” I say, shouting over the din of rushing reinforcements, neighing horses, and rumbling chariots. It looks from this dusty vantage point that the entire center of the Greek lines has given way.

“What are you talking about? This is an important day. Hector and Paris are . . .”

“Fuck Hector and Paris,” I say in English.

The Muse has QT’d into solidity high above the Trojan lines where Nightenhelser and I often station ourselves, another muse driving her flying chariot as she leans over the side and scans the troops with her enhanced vision. Morphing will not save us mortal scholics this day.

As if to demonstrate this, the Muse named Melete—“my” Muse—raises her palms and fires a coherent beam of energy earthward, striking a Trojan foot soldier named Dius, who should be alive to be bossed around in Book 24 according to Homer, but who dies this day in a flash of flame and a whirlwind of smoke and heat. Other Trojans flinch away, some fleeing back toward the city, not understanding this goddess’s wrath on a day of victory ordained by Zeus, but Hector and Paris are a quarter of a mile to the southeast, leading their charge, and don’t even look back.

“That wasn’t Dius,” gasped Nightenhelser. “It was Houston.”

“I know,” I say, returning my enhanced vision to normal scope. Houston was the youngest and newest of the scholics. I’d barely spoken to him. He was probably on the Trojan lines today because I’d gone missing.

The Muse’s chariot banks sharply and flies directly toward us. I don’t think the bitch-Muse has seen us yet—we’re standing amidst hundreds of milling men and horses—but she will in a few seconds.

What do I do?
I can pull the Hades Helmet on and run like a coward again, leaving Nightenhelser to die just as I failed Blix and the others. There’s no way this single cowl can hide us both from the goddess’s divine vision.
Or we can run—toward the black ships.
We won’t get twenty yards.

The chariot drops lower and cloaks itself so that it’s hidden from the view of the surging Greeks and Trojans below. With our nano-altered vision, Nightenhelser and I can still see it coming on.

“What the hell?” cries Nightenhelser, almost dropping his recording wand as I embrace him, throwing both arms and one leg around him like a skinny foot soldier trying to rape this burly bear of a man.

Arm around the big scholic’s neck, I grab the QT medallion and twist.

I have no idea if this will work. It shouldn’t. The medallion is obviously designed to transport just the person wearing it. But my clothes come with me when I QT, and more than once I’ve carried something else from place to place through Planck space, so perhaps the quantum field established for teleportation includes things my body is in touch with or that my arms surround.

What the hell indeed.
It’s worth a try.

We pop into existence in darkness, tumble down a hill, and roll apart. I look around wildly, trying to determine where we are. I hadn’t had time to visualize a destination properly—I’d simply willed myself elsewhere and quantum-teleported us both . . . somewhere.

Where?

There’s moonlight, so it’s just light enough for me to see Nightenhelser staring at me in alarm, as if I might jump him again at any second. Ignoring that, I look at the sky—stars, sliver of moon, Milky Way—and then at the land: tall trees, a grassy hillside, a river running by.

We’re definitely on the Earth—the ancient Earth of Ilium at least—but it doesn’t feel like the Peloponnese or Asia Minor.

“Where are we?” asks Nightenhelser, getting to his feet and brushing himself off. “What’s going on? Why is it night?”

The opposite side of the ancient world,
I think. I say, “I think we’re in Indiana.”

“
Indiana
?” Nightenhelser takes another step away from me.

“The Indiana of 1200-plus b.c.,” I say. “Give or take a century or so.” I’ve hurt my arm and leg again rolling down the hill.

“How’d we get here?” Nightenhelser has always been a mellow sort, mildly grumpy in his rambling, rumbling, ursine way, but never really angry about anything. He sounds angry now.

“I QT’d us.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Hockenberry? We were nowhere near the QT portal.”

I ignore him and sit on a small rock, rubbing my arm. There aren’t many hills in Indiana, even in my other life there, but there were hilly, wooded, rocky areas around Bloomington, where Susan and I lived. I believe that, in my panic, I visualized . . . well,
home
. I wish to hell the QT medallion had moved us through time as well as space and plunked us down into late Twentieth Century Indiana, but something about the pure darkness of the night sky and the purely clean smell of the air here tells me otherwise.

Who’s here in
1200
b.c.?
Indians. It would be ironic if the QT medallion had whisked us away from imminent death by our Muse’s hand—literally—only to bring us to the New World where we’ll be scalped by Indians.
Most of the tribes didn’t scalp their victims before the white men arrived,
drones on the pedantic part of my professor’s brain.
Although I seem to remember reading somethere that sometimes they took ears as proof of their kill.

Well, that makes me feel better. You can always trust a murderer to have a good prose style, so the saying goes, and a professor to come up with something depressing when you’re already depressed.

“Hockenberry?” demands Nightenhelser, sitting on a nearby footstool-sized rock—not too close to me, I notice—and rubbing his own elbows and knees.

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I say in my best Jack Benny voice.

“Well, when you’re finished thinking,” says Nightenhelser, “maybe you could tell me why the Muse just killed young Houston.”

This sobers me, but I’m not sure how to respond. “There are things going on with the gods,” I say at last. “Plots. Intrigues. Pacts.”

“Tell me about it,” says Nightenhelser, meaning it both in irony and as a serious request.

I raise both hands, palms up. “Aphrodite was trying to use me to assassinate Athena.”

Nightenhelser stares. He manages—barely—not to drop his jaw.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. “Why me? Why use Hockenberry? Why give him the power to QT by himself and the Hades Helmet to hide under? And I agree—it doesn’t make any sense.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” says Nightenhelser. A meteorite slices across the star-filled sky above us. Somewhere in the forest beyond the hill, an owl makes its not-quite-hooting noise. “I was just wondering what your first name was.”

It’s my turn to stare. “Why?”

“Because the gods discouraged use of first names and we were afraid of getting to know each other well because scholics were always being . . . disappeared and replaced by the gods,” says the big man, bearlike even in shadow-darkness. “So I want to know your first name.”

“Thomas,” I say after a second. “Tom. Yours?”

“Keith,” says the man I’ve known slightly for four years. He stands up and looks at the dark woods. “Well, what now, Tom?”

Insects, frogs, and other night critters are making noise in those black woods. Unless they’re really Indians sneaking up on us.

“Do you know how to . . . I mean, have you camped a lot . . . I mean . . .” I begin.

“You mean, will I die if you leave me here alone?” asks Nightenhelser . . . Keith.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Probably. But I suspect my chances are a hell of a lot better here than back on the plains of Ilium. At least while the Muse is on the warpath . . .”

I guess that Keith is fixated on Indians right now as well.

“Plus I have all my little scholic tech-toys and gear. I can make fire, use the levitation harness to fly if I have to, morph into an Indian if necessary, even use the weapon taser. So I guess you should QT back to wherever you have to go and do whatever you have to do,” says Nightenhelser. “Fill me in later on the details . . . if there is a later.”

I nod and stand. It seems strange . . . wrong . . . to leave the other scholic here alone, but I don’t see any choice.

“Can you find your way back?” he asks. “
Here,
I mean. To fetch me.”

“I think so.”

“Think so?
Think
so?” Nightenhelser rubs his hand through his wild hair. “I hope you weren’t the chairman of your department, Hockenberry.”

I guess the era of first names is over.

There’s no place in the universe that I’d less rather be than Olympos. When I arrive, the inhabitants of this mountaintop are gathered in the Great Hall of the Gods. Making sure that the cowl of the Hades Helmet is pulled on tight and that I throw no shadow, I slip into the huge Parthenon-style building.

In my nine-plus years as scholic, I’ve never seen so many gods in one place. On one side of the long hologram pool sits Zeus, high on his golden throne, larger than I have ever seen him. As I’ve mentioned, the gods are usually eight or nine feet tall except when they take mortal form, and Zeus usually towers over them by three or four feet, a divine adult to their cosmic children. But today Zeus is twenty-five feet tall or taller, each of his muscled forearms as long as my torso. I fleetingly wonder what this does to that conservation of mass and energy the other scholic tried to teach me about years ago, but that’s not important now. Staying back against the wall, away from the milling gods, and not making any noise or movement or sneeze that will betray me to all these refined superhero senses—
that’s
important.