Ilium (41 page)

Where’s Phoenix during this walk from Agamemnon’s camp to Achilles’ part of the encampment? Is he somehow already in Achilles’ tent waiting for the embassy? That makes little sense.

A lot of scholars, before and during my time on earth, argued that Phoenix was a clumsy addition to the tale, a character added centuries later, which explains the dual verb form, but this theory ignores the fact that Phoenix will give the longest and most complex argument of the three ambassadors. His speech is so wonderfully digressive and complicated that it reeks of Homer.

It’s as if the blind poet himself had been confused about whether there were two or three emissaries to Achilles and what, exactly, Phoenix’s role was in the conversation that would decide all the players’ fates.

I have a few hours to think about this.

If you want to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.

But that’s hours in my future. It’s still mid-afternoon here, and the Trojans are pausing on the Ilium-side of the Achaeans’ moat while the Greeks mill around like ants behind their wall of rocks and sharpened stakes. Still morphed as a sweaty Achaean spearman, I manage to get close to Agamemnon as the king first berates his men and then pleas for Zeus’s aid in their darkest hour.

“Shame on all of you!” shouts the son of Atreus at his bedraggled army. Only a hundredth of the men can hear him, of course, ancient acoustics being what they are, but Agamemnon has a powerful voice and those in the back pass the message on to others.

“Shame! Disgrace! You dress like splendid warriors, but it’s pure sham! You vowed to burn this city and you gorged yourself on cattle—bought at my expense!—and drank to the full those brimming bowls of wine—bought and shipped here at my expense!—and now look at you! Beaten rabble! You bragged that each of you could stand up to a hundred Trojans—two hundred!—and now you’re no match for one mortal man—Hector.

“Any minute Hector will be here with his hordes, gutting our ships with blazing fire, and this vaunted army of . . .
heroes
. . .”—Agamemnon all but spits the word—“will be fleeing home to wife and kids . . .
at my expense!
”

Agamemnon gives up on the army and lifts his hands to the southern sky, toward Mount Ida, from where the storms and thunder and lightning bolts have come. “Father Zeus, how can you tear away my glory so? How have I offended thee? Not once—I swear, not a single time!—have I passed a shrine of yours, not even on our ocean voyage here, but did I stop and burn the fat and thighs of oxen to
your
glory. Our prayer was simple—to raze Ilium’s walls to its roots, kill its heroes, rape its women, enslave its people. Is that too much to ask?

“Father, fulfill this prayer for me: let my men escape with their lives—at least that. Don’t let Hector and these Trojans beat us like rented mules!”

I’ve heard Agamemnon give more eloquent speeches—hell,
all
of the speeches I’ve heard from him have been more eloquent than this, and I understand Homer’s need to rewrite all this—but at that second a miracle occurs. Or at least the Achaeans take it as a miracle.

Out of nowhere, an eagle appears, flying from the south, a huge eagle, carrying a fawn in its talons.

The mob who had been surging toward their ships and safety on the seas and who paused only briefly for Agamemnon’s speech freeze in place and point at the sight of this.

The eagle soars, circles, dips lower, and drops the still-kicking fawn a hundred feet to a sandy bump right at the base of the stone altar the Achaeans had raised to Zeus upon their landing so many years ago.

That does it. After fifteen seconds of stunned silence, a roar goes up from the men—men beaten into cowardice ten minutes earlier, but a fighting mob now, hearts and hands strengthened by this clear sign of forgiveness and approval from Zeus—and without further ado, fifty thousand Achaeans and Argives and all the rest surge back into formation behind their captains, horses are re-tethered to chariots, chariots are driven out across the earth-bridges still spanning the defensive trenches, and the battle is on again.

It becomes the hour of the archer.

Although Diomedes leads the counterattack, followed closely by the Atrides, Agamemnon and Menelaus, followed in turn by Big Ajax and Little Ajax, and although these heroes take their toll on the Trojans in spearcasts and shortsword clashes, the fighting now is centered around the Achaean archer Teucer, bastard son of Telamon and half-brother to Big Ajax.

Teucer has always been considered a master-archer, and I’ve seen him shoot dozens of Trojans over the years, but this is his day in the limelight. He and Ajax get into a rhythm whereby Teucer crouches under the wall of his half-brother’s shield—Big Ajax uses a giant rectangular shield that military historians say wasn’t even in use during the time of the Trojan War—and when Ajax lifts the shield, Teucer fires from beneath it into the Trojan ranks some sixty yards away. On this day he can’t seem to miss his mark.

First he kills Orsilochus, putting a barbed arrow in the short man’s heart. Then he kills Ophelestes, putting a point through the captain’s right eye when the Trojan peeks above his rawhide shield. Then Daetor and Chromius fall mortally wounded from two fast, perfectly placed shots. Each time Teucer fires, the Trojans unleash their own arrows and spears in a vain attempt to kill the archer, but Big Ajax crouches over both of them and his massive shield deflects every missile.

The Trojan volleys pause, Ajax lifts his shield, and Teucer shoots Lycophontes, prince of his distant city, but just wounds the man. As Lycophontes’ captains rush to his aid, Teucer puts a second arrow into the fallen man’s liver.

Polymaeon’s son, Amopaon, falls next, Teucer’s shaft through his throat. Blood fountains five feet high and the powerful Amopaon tries to rise, but the arrow has pinned him to the ground, and he bleeds out in less than a minute, his body kicking and spasming ever more weakly. The Achaeans cheer. I know . . . knew . . . Amopaon. The Trojan used to eat in the little open restaurant where Nightenhelser and I liked to meet, and we’d spoken many a time of trivial things. He told me once that his father, Polymaeon, had known Odysseus in friendlier times, and once, when traveling to Ithaca and joining the friendly Greeks on a hunt, Polymaeon had killed a wild boar that had deeply gored Odysseus’ leg and would have killed him if Polymaeon’s spearcast had missed its mark. Amopaon told me that Odysseus bears the scar to this day.

Ajax crouches, holding his massive metal shield over him and his half-brother like a roof, and Trojan arrows rattle against it. Ajax rises, lifts the shield, and Teucer kills Melanippus—eighty yards away—with a shot that enters the man’s groin and protrudes from his anus as the Trojan falls. His comrades step away and grimace as Melanippus writhes on the ground and dies. The Achaeans cheer again.

Agamemnon swings down off his chariot and shouts encouragement at Teucer, promising the archer second choice of tripods or purebred teams of horses—if Zeus and Athena ever allow him to plunder the treasure troves of Troy, he says—and then promises Teucer a beautiful Trojan woman to bed as well, perhaps Hector’s wife, Andromache.

Teucer is angered by Agamemnon’s offer. “Son of Atreus, do you think I’ll try any harder than I already am, spurred on by your talk of plunder? I’m firing as fast and accurately as I can. Eight arrows—eight kills.”

“Shoot at Hector!” cries Agamemnon.

“I
have
been shooting at Hector,” screams Teucer, his face red. “All this time—Hector’s been my target. I just can’t hit the son of a bitch!”

Agamemnon falls silent.

As if responding to the challenge, Hector suddenly urges his chariot to the front of the Trojan ranks, trying to rally his men who’ve lost heart because of the archer’s slaughter.

Ajax doesn’t bother to lift his shield this time, because Teucer stands, goes to full draw, takes careful aim at Hector, and lets fly.

The shaft misses Hector’s heart by a hand’s breadth, striking Gorgythion as that son of Priam steps behind Hector’s chariot. The big man stops, looks surprised, stares down at the protruding shaft and feathers as if he is the butt of some barracks joke, but then Gorgythion’s head appears to become too heavy for his massive neck and falls limp to his shoulder as the weight of his helmet pulls it down; then Gorgythion falls dead in the blood-muddied sand.

“Damn!” says Teucer and fires again. Hector is the closest of all the Trojans now, turned full-torso toward Teucer.

This arrow catches Archeptolemus, Hector’s driver, full in the chest. The horses—war-trained as they are—rear and leap ahead as Archeptolemus’ blood geysers onto their flanks, and the young man pitches backward and off and into the dust.

“Cebriones!” cries Hector, grabbing the reins and calling to his brother—another bastard son of profligate Priam—to be his driver. Cebriones leaps up onto the chariot just as Hector jumps down. Enraged, beside himself with fury and grief at the death of his faithful Archeptolemus, Hector runs into no-man’s-land—a clear target for Teucer—and grabs the largest, sharpest rock he can lift in one hand.

Hector seems to have forgotten all the finesse of warfare he’s bragged about so many times and has reverted to caveman tactics, lifting the rock and cocking his left arm far back, looking like nothing so much—I think—as Sandy Koufax preparing to unleash a pitch. I haven’t noticed until today that Hector is ambidextrous.

Teucer sees his chance, grabs another arrow from his quiver, and draws full back, aiming at Hector’s heart, sure he can get off a shot, perhaps two, before Hector throws.

He’s wrong. Hector pitches hard, fast, flat, and accurately.

The rock hits Teucer in the collarbone, just beside the throat, an instant before the archer releases the arrow. Bones crack. Tendons rip. Teucer’s hand goes limp, the bowstring snaps, and the arrow buries itself in the ground between the archer’s sandaled feet.

Hector rushes forward, scattering Achaeans like chaff, and the Trojan archers fire arrow after arrow at the fallen Teucer, but Big Ajax doesn’t abandon his brother; he covers him with his wall of a shield while other Achaeans fight off the Trojan infantry. At Ajax’s call—bellow, really—Mecisteus and Alastor rush forward and carry the moaning, semiconscious Achaean archer back across the trench-bridge to relative safety in the shadow of the hollow ships.

But Teucer’s fifteen minutes of fame are up.

Things get worse for the Greeks very fast after this. Hector sees his survival as another sign of Zeus’s love and approval and leads his men in charge after charge against the dispirited, retreating Achaeans.

Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the other lords who’d led their men into joyous combat just hours before are truly beaten now. The Achaeans are too routed at first even to man their defenses along the trench and stakes and makeshift wall, and the only thing that stops the Trojans from burning the ships right now is the setting sun and the sudden fall of darkness.

While the Achaeans mill about in confusion, some of the men already readying their ships for departure, others sitting shell-shocked and vacant-eyed, Hector does his
Henry V
thing, roaming tirelessly up and down the Trojan ranks, urging his men on to more carnage come the dawn, sending men back to the city to herd cattle out for slaughter and sacrifice and feasting, ordering in rations of honeyed wine, calling up the wagons of fresh-baked bread that the ravenous Trojans attack as if it were Agamemnon himself, and giving the command to set hundreds of watchfires just beyond the Achaean defenses, so the fearful Greeks will get no sleep this night. I don my Hades Helmet and walk invisible among the Trojans.

“Tomorrow,” cries Hector to his cheering men, “I’ll gut Diomedes like a flopping fish in front of his men if he doesn’t choose to flee tonight. I’ll break his spine with the tip of my spear and we’ll nail the braggart’s head above the Scaean Gates!”

The Trojans roar. The watchfires send sparks flying up toward the hard-burning stars. Invisible to gods and men, I recross the trench bridge, wind my way through the sharpened stakes, and walk again amongst the dispirited Greeks.

For me, it’s time for truth or consequences. Agamemnon’s already called the meeting of his captains and they’re arguing courses of immediate action—flee or send an embassy to Achilles?

There’s no turning back now. I morph into the form of Phoenix, Achilles’ faithful Myrmidon tutor and friend, and walk across the cooling sand to join the council.

If you’re going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.

28

Savi followed the Atlantic Breach across the ocean, sometimes flying lower than the surface, hopping and dipping the sonie every few miles to avoid the connecting current cones that crisscrossed the Breach like transparent pipes in a long green hallway.

Lying prone to the left of Savi—seeing Harman lying in his spot to her right—Daeman was aware of the older man’s grim expression and of the empty passenger slots behind them. Daeman was thinking about the last twenty-four hours.

Harman and Ada had seemed at odds when they’d flown away from the big-tree place. At first that had pleased Daeman. He didn’t know what the falling-out had been about, of course, but it had been obvious that both were agitated after their walk in the woods—Ada looking cool and distant but inwardly seething, Harman visibly confused. But after the hours of flying to Ardis and the events there—and Daeman’s decision to continue with this nonsense quest—the tension between Harman and Ada seemed like just another thing to worry about.

It had been late afternoon when they’d arrived at Ardis. The estate and grounds looked different from the air, at least to Daeman, although the layout of the hills and forest and meadows and river were just as he remembered. Whenever he thought of their picnic down to the river—to Hannah’s silly metal-pouring exhibition—he thought of the attacking dinosaur and his heart began to pound.

“This area used to be called Ohio in the last part of the Lost Age,” said Savi as they circled and then flew lower. “I think.”

“I thought it was called North America,” said Harman.

“That, too,” said the old woman. “They had a surplus of names for places.”

They landed about a quarter of a mile from Ardis Hall, in a pasture north of a line of screening trees. Daeman still had to use the toilet, but he was damned if he’d walk all that way to the estate if there was any chance of dinosaurs being in the area.

“It’s safe,” Ada said brusquely when she saw him hesitate, the only one still lying on the sonie. “The voynix patrol a perimeter within two or three miles of the hall.”

“How far from the house was Hannah’s hot-metal picnic?” asked Daeman.

“Three and a half miles,” said Hannah. The young woman was standing near Odysseus behind the sonie.

Ada turned to Savi. “Are you sure you won’t come up to the house?”

“I can’t,” said the old woman. She extended her hand and after a second, Ada took it. Daeman had never seen women shake hands before. “I’ll wait here for Harman and Daeman to return,” said Savi.

Ada looked at Harman. “You’re coming up to Ardis for a minute, aren’t you?”

“Just to say good-bye.” The two held their intense gaze.

“Can we just
go
?” said Daeman, hearing the whine in his own voice. He didn’t care. He had to
go
.

Everyone except Savi had started walking toward the distant house then, through the field of waist-high grass, past the occasional head of cattle—Daeman gave each of the cows a wide berth, since he wasn’t comfortable around large animals—when suddenly a lone voynix stepped out of the treeline ahead of them.

“It’s about time,” said Daeman. “This walking is ridiculous.” He gestured to the iron-and-leather form. “You! Go back to the hall and bring back two large carrioles to transport us there!”

Incredibly, the voynix ignored Daeman and kept walking toward the five humans—or to be more precise, toward Odysseus.

The old bearded man pushed Hannah away from him as the eyeless voynix slowly approached.

“It’s just curious,” said Ada, although her voice lacked conviction. “It’s probably never . . .”

The voynix was five feet from Odysseus when the man swept his sword from his belt, activated the humming blade with his thumb, and swung the sword with both hands, slicing down and across the voynix’s presumably impenetrable chest shell and left arm. For a second, the voynix just stood there, apparently as shocked at Odysseus’ behavior as the four humans were, but then the top half of the creature’s body slid, tilted, and fell to the ground, arms spasming. The lower half of the voynix’s torso and its legs continued standing for several more seconds before tumbling over into the grass.

For a minute there was no sound except for the wind in the tall grass. Then Harman shouted, “Why in the hell did you do that?” Blue fluid, as thick as blood, was everywhere.

Odysseus pointed at the voynix’s right arm, still attached to the lower torso. As he wiped his sword on the grass, he said, “It had its killing blades extended.”

It was true. As the four gathered around the fallen voynix, each could see the blades—used for defending humans against such threats as dinosaurs—extended where the manipulator pads usually were.

“I don’t understand,” said Ada.

“It didn’t recognize you,” said Hannah, taking another step away from the bearded man. “Maybe it thought you were a threat to us.”

“No,” said Odysseus, sliding his short sword back into its scabbard.

Daeman was staring with appalled fascination at the cross section of the voynix—soft white organs, a profusion of blue tubules, clusters of what looked to be pink grapes, certainly not the clockwork mechanism and gears he’d always imagined to be the interior of a service voynix. The speed of the violence and now the white gore visible had almost made Daeman lose control of his anxious bowels.

“Come on,” he’d said, and started walking quickly toward Ardis Hall. The others had mistaken this for leadership and followed.

It was after Daeman had used the toilet, taken time to shower, shaved, ordered the nearest Ardis servitor to fetch him clean new clothes, and then wandered into the kitchen hunting for something to eat that he realized that it was insane to go any further with Harman and the crazy old woman. To what purpose?

Ardis Hall, despite Ada’s absence—or perhaps because of it—had filled with friends faxed in to visit and party. The servitors kept them happy with food and drink. Young people—including several beautiful young women Daeman knew from other parties, other places, from his happy life before Harman and all this nonsense—were playing lawnball-and-hoop games on the broad, sloping lawn. The evening was lovely, shadows long on the grass, laughter in the air like the sound of chimes, and dinner being prepared by servitors at the long table under the giant elm tree.

Daeman realized that he could stay here and have a proper meal and a good night’s sleep, or—better yet—summon a voynix for the short carriole ride to the fax portal and sleep in his own bed in Paris Crater this night after a late dinner prepared by his mother. Daeman missed his mother; he’d been completely out of touch with her for more than two days. He looked at the voynix in the curved driveway at the side of the large house and felt a pang of anxiety—Odysseus’ destruction of that voynix had been unwarranted and insane. One didn’t damage or destroy vonixes, any more than one would set fire to a droshky or trash one’s own domi. It didn’t make any sense, and it was another reason he should get away from these people at once.

As he came out onto the drive, he saw Harman and Ada speaking softly but urgently to one side. Farther down the hilly lawn, he could see Hannah introducing Odysseus to several curious guests. The voynix were staying far away from the bearded man, but Daeman had no idea whether that was by coincidence or design. Did voynix communicate with one another? And if so, how? Daeman had never heard one utter a sound.

He gestured to a voynix to bring a carriole around just as Ada and Harman’s conversation came to an end—Ada stalking into the house, Harman turning on his heel and heading back across the drive toward the fields and the waiting sonie. Harman walked up to Daeman and the older man’s expression was so grim that Daeman took a half-step back.

“Are you coming with us?”

“I . . . ah . . . no,” stammered Daeman. The voynix trotted up with the single-wheeled carriole behind it, upholstery gleaming in the evening light, gyroscopes humming.

Harman turned without saying another word and walked off into the field behind the house.

Daeman climbed into the conveyance, said “Fax portal” to the voynix, and sat back as the carriole hummed around the driveway, white shells crunching under the wheel. One of the young women on the lawn—Oelleo, he thought her name was—cried a good-bye to him. The carriole rolled down toward the road with the silent voynix trotting between its stays.

“Stop,” said Daeman. The voynix halted in its tracks, still holding the cart shafts. The internal gyro hummed softly to itself.

Daeman looked back behind Ardis Hall but Harman was already out of sight through the trees. For no reason in particular, he tried to remember where he had met Oelleo—at a party in Bellinbad two summers ago? At Verna’s Fourth Twenty in Chom only a few months before? At one of his own sleepover parties in Paris Crater?

He couldn’t remember. Had he slept with Oelleo? He had an image of the girl naked, but that could have been from one of the swimming parties or one of the living art displays that had been in vogue last winter. He couldn’t remember if he’d gone to bed with the woman. There were so many.

Daeman tried to remember Tobi’s Second Twenty celebration in Ulanbat only three days ago. It was a blur—a smear of laughter and sex and drink blending into all the other parties near all the other faxnodes. But when he tried to remember the Dry Valley in . . . what was it called? Antarctica? . . . or the iceberg, or the Golden Gate Bridge above Machu Picchu, or even the stupid redwood forest . . . everything was clear, distinct, sharp.

Daeman climbed down from the carriole and began walking toward the fields.
This is crazy,
he thought.
Crazy, crazy, crazy.
Halfway to the treeline, he broke into a lumbering, clumsy run.

He was out of breath and sweating heavily by the time he reached the far side of the field. The sonie was gone, only a depression in the high grass near a stone wall where it had been.

“God
damn
it,” said Daeman, looking up at the evening sky, empty except for the turning equatorial-ring and polar-ring. “Damn it.” He sat down heavily on the moss-slick stone wall. The sun was setting behind him. For some reason, he felt like crying.

The sonie came in low over the trees to the north, swooped, and hovered ten feet off the ground.

“I thought you might change your mind,” called down Savi. “Want a ride?”

Daeman stood.

They had flown east into darkness, climbing high enough that the stars and the orbital rings illuminated the tops of clouds already glowing from lightning rippling like visible peristalsis through milky interiors. They stopped near the coast that night and slept in a strange treehouse made up of separate little domi-houses connected by platforms and winding staircases. The place had plumbing, but no servitors or voynix, and there were no other people or dwellings nearby.

“Do you have many places like this where you stay?” Harman asked Savi.

“Yes,” said the old woman. “Away from your three hundred faxnodes, most of the Earth is empty, you know. At least empty of people. I have favorite places here and there.”

They were sitting outside on a sort of dining platform halfway up the tall tree. Below them, fireflies winked on and off in a grassy glade that held an array of huge, ancient, rusted machines that had been mostly reclaimed by the grass and ferns and hillside. Ringlight fell down between the leaves and painted the high grass a soft white. The storms they’d flown over had not reached this far east yet, and the night was warm and clear. Although there were no servitors here, there were freezers with food, and Savi had supervised the cooking of noodles, meat, and fish. Daeman was almost getting used to this odd idea of fixing the food one ate.

Suddenly Harman asked Savi, “Do you know why the post-humans left the Earth and haven’t come back?”

Daeman remembered the strange data-vision he’d suffered in the redwood clearing earlier that day. Just the memory made him a bit nauseated.

“Yes,” said Savi, “I think I do.”

“Are you going to tell us?” asked Harman.

“Not right now,” said the old woman. She rose and walked up the winding stairs to a lighted domi ten meters higher up the trunk.

Harman and Daeman looked at each other in the soft light, but they had nothing to say to each other and eventually went off to their own domis to sleep.

They followed the Breach across the Atlantic at high speed, swooped south before reaching land, and paralleled something that Savi called the Hands of Hercules.

“Amazing,” said Harman, rising almost to his knees to look to their left as they flew south.

Daeman had to agree. Between a big, slab-sided mountain on the north—which Savi called Gibraltar—and a lower mountain some nine miles to the south, the ocean simply stopped, held out of the deep basin stretching away to the east by a series of huge golden human hands rising from the seabed. Each hand was over five hundred feet tall and the splayed fingers held back the wall of the Atlantic from the dry Mediterranean Basin dropping like a deepening valley into clouds and fogs to the east.

“Why the hands?” asked Daeman as they reached land on the south side of the fog-shrouded Basin and turned east again. “Why didn’t the post-humans just use forcefields to hold back the sea, the way they did in the Breach?”