Well, that’s encouraging. I say nothing for a while. There is a drone from the open terrace doorways on the city side. “What’s that?” I ask.
“The Trojan women are still entreating Athena for mercy and divine protection, chanting and sacrificing at her temple, as Hector ordered,” says Helen. She turns away from me again and stares down into the interior courtyard as if trying to find that solitary singing bird.
Too late for Athena’s mercy, I think. Then, without thinking about it, I say, “Aphrodite wants me to kill Athena. She’s given me the Hades Helmet and other tools so I can do just that.”
Helen’s head snaps around and even in the dim light I can see the expression of shock on her face, the pallor. It’s as if she has finally reacted to all my terrible oracle news. Naked, she comes back and sits on the edge of the bed where I am propped up on one elbow.
“Did you say kill Athena?” she whispers, voice lower than at any time since we began speaking.
I nod.
“Can the gods be killed then?” asks Helen, her voice so soft I can barely hear it from a foot away.
“I think they can,” I say. “Only yesterday, I heard Zeus tell Ares that gods could die.” Then I tell her about Aphrodite and Ares, their wounds, the strange place where they are healing. I explain how Aphrodite will emerge from that vat today sometime—how it’s possible she already has, since Olympos is on the same day-night schedule as Ilium and it’s already “tomorrow” there as well.
“You’re able to travel to Olympos?” she whispers. Helen appears to be lost in thought. Her expression has slowly melted from shock to . . . what? “Travel back and forth from Ilium to Olympos whenever you please?” she asks.
I hesitate here. I know I’ve told too much already. What if this Helen is merely my Muse in morphed form? I know she isn’t. Don’t ask me how I know. And to hell with it if she is.
“Yes,” I say, also whispering now, although the household is not coming awake yet. “I can go to Olympos when I want and stay there unseen by the gods.” Except for the single bird deluded to think it’s almost dawn, the city and the palace are eerily silent. There are guards at the front entrance, I know, but I cannot hear their shuffle of their sandals or the scrape of their spear butts on stone. The streets of Ilium, never totally silent, seem hushed now. Even the women’s chanting from the Temple of Athena has ceased.
“Did Aphrodite give you the means to kill Athena, Hockenberry? Some weapon of the gods?”
“No.” I don’t tell her about the Hades Helmet of Death or the QT medallion or my taser baton. None of these things could kill a goddess.
Suddenly that short dagger is in her hand again, inches from my skin. Where does she keep that thing? How does she make it appear that way? We both have our little secrets, I guess.
The dagger moves closer. “If I kill you now,” whispers Helen, “will it change the song of Ilium you know? Change the future . . . this future?”
This isn’t the time to be honest, Tommy boy, warns the sane part of my brain. But I speak the truth anyway. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t see how it can. If it’s my . . . fate . . . to die today, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether it’s by your hand or Aphrodite’s. Anyway, I’m not an actor in this drama, only an observer.”
Helen nods but still appears distracted, as if her question about my death were of little consequence either way. She lifts the dagger until its point is almost touching the firm white flesh under her chin.
“If I take my own life right now, will it change the song?” she asks.
“I don’t see how it will save Ilium or change the outcome of the war,” I answer. This isn’t completely true. Helen is a central figure in Homer’s Iliad and I have no idea whether the Greeks would stay to finish the fight if she kills herself. What would they be fighting for with Helen dead? Glory, honor, plunder. But then again, with Helen removed as the prize for Agamemnon and Menelaus, and Achilles still sulking in his tent, would mere plunder be enough to keep the tens and tens of thousands of other Achaeans in the fight? They’ve been plundering islands and Trojan coastal cities for almost a decade now. Perhaps they’ve had enough and are looking for an excuse. Isn’t that why Menelaus accepted the one-on-one combat with Paris to decide it all, before Aphrodite whisked Paris away? Back to this bed, Helen and Paris having sex in this bed mere hours ago. Perhaps Helen’s suicide would end the war.
She lowers the dagger. “I’ve thought of this self-murder for ten years, Hock-en-bear-eeee. But I have too much lust to live and too little fondness for death, even though I deserve to die.”
“You don’t deserve to die,” I say.
She smiles. “Does Hector deserve to die? Does his baby? Does lordly Priam, the most generous of fathers to me? Do all those people you hear awakening out there in the city deserve to die? Do even the warriors—Achilles and all the rest who have already gone down to cold Hades—deserve to die because of one fickle woman who chose passion and vanity and abduction over fidelity? And what about all the thousands of Trojan women who have served their gods and husbands well, but who will be torn from their homes and children and be sold into slavery because of me? Do they deserve such a fate, Hock-en-bear-eeee, just because I choose to live?”
“You don’t deserve to die,” I say stubbornly. The scent of her is still on my skin, my fingers, and in my hair.
“All right,” says Helen and slides the dagger under the mattress. “Then will you help me live and stay free? Will you help stop this war? Or at least change its outcome?”
“What do you mean?” I’m suddenly wary. I have no interest in trying to help the Trojans win this battle. And I couldn’t do it if I tried. Too many forces are in play here, not to mention the gods. “Helen,” I say, “I was serious about not having any time left. Aphrodite will be free of her recovery vat today, and while I might hide for a while from the other gods, she has a way she can find me when she wants to. Even if she doesn’t kill me right away for disobeying her, I won’t be free to act in the short time I have left as a scholic.”
Helen slides the sheet off my lower body. The light is coming up now and I can see her better than any time since I watched her in her bath the night before. She swings her leg up and straddles me, one hand flat on my chest while her other hand goes lower, finding, encouraging.
“Listen to me,” she says, looking down over her breasts at me. “If you are going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.”
I take this as an invitation and try to move into her.
“No, not yet,” she whispers. “Listen to me, Hock-en-bear-eeee. If you’re going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum. And I don’t mean what you’re doing now.”
It’s difficult, but I pause long enough to listen.
An hour and a half later the city is coming alive and I am walking the streets, fully garbed in my usual scholic’s gear and morphed as a Thracian spearman. The sun has risen and the city is coming fully alive, with crowded streets, opening market stalls, driven animals, running children, and swaggering warriors breaking their fast before going out to kill.
Near the marketplace, I find Nightenhelser—morphed as a Dardanian watchman but visible as Nightenhelser through my lenses—eating breakfast in an outdoor restaurant we’ve both frequented. He looks up and recognizes me.
I don’t flee or use the Hades Helmet to disappear. I join him at the table under a low tree and order bread, dried fish, and fruit for breakfast.
“Our Muse was hunting for you at the barracks before dawn this morning,” says the portly Nightenhelser. “And again near the walls here this morning. She was asking after you by name. She seems eager to locate you.”
“Are you worried about being seen with me?” I ask. “Want me to move on?”
Nightenhelser shrugs. “All of us scholics are on borrowed time anyway. What does it matter? Tempus edax rerum.”
I’ve been thinking in ancient Greek for so long that it takes me a second to translate the Latin
. Time is a devourer. Perhaps so, but I want more of it. I break the fresh, hot bread and eat, marveling at the glorious taste of it and of the sweet breakfast wine. Everything looks, smells, and tastes crisper, cleaner, newer and more wonderful this morning. Perhaps it was the night’s rain. Perhaps it was something else.
“You smell suspiciously perfumed this morning,” says Nightenhelser.
At first my only response is a blush—can the other scholic smell the night’s revelries on me?—but then I realize what he’s talking about. Helen had insisted I bathe with her before leaving. The old female slave who had directed the carrying of the hot water to the bath, I’d learned, was Aithra, Pittheus’ daughter, wife of King Aigeus and mother of the famous Theseus—ruler of Athens and the man who had abducted Helen when she was eleven. I remembered the name Aithra from my graduate-school days, but my instructor, Dr. Fertig, a fine Homerian scholar, had insisted that the name had been drawn at random from the epic stock—“Aithra, daughter of Pittheus” must have sounded good to Homer or some poetic predecessor who needed a name for a mere slave, said Dr. Fertig, and that the noble Theseus’ mother couldn’t possibly be Helen’s servant in Troy. Well . . . wrong, Dr. Fertig. Just half an hour ago, lounging in the sunken marble tub with a naked Helen, she mentioned that the old slave-woman Aithra was, indeed, Theseus’ mum . . . that Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeukes, when they rescued her from Theseus’ captivity, had carried off the old lady as punishment, and Paris had brought her along to Troy with Helen.
“Thinking about something, Hockenberry?” asked Nightenhelser.
I blushed again. Right then I had been thinking about Helen’s soft breasts visible through the bubbles in the bath. I ate some fish and said, “I wasn’t on the field yesterday evening. Anything interesting happen?”
“Nothing much. Just Hector’s big duel with Ajax. Just the showdown we’ve been waiting for since the Achaean ships first touched their bows to shore down there. Just all of Book Seven.”
“Oh, that,” I said. Book Seven was an exciting duel between Hector and the Achaean giant, but nothing happened. Neither man hurt the other even though Ajax was obviously the better fighter, and when evening made it too dark to fight, Ajax and Hector called a truce, exchanged gifts of armor and weapons, and both sides went back to burn their dead. I hadn’t missed anything crucial; nothing to give up one minute with Helen.
“There was something odd,” said Nightenhelser.
I ate bread and waited.
“You know that Hector was supposed to come out of the city with his brother, Paris, and both were supposed to lead the Trojans back into battle. Homer says that Paris kills Menesthius at the beginning of the fight.”
“Yes?”
“And later, do you remember when King Priam’s counselor, Antenor, advises his fellow Trojans to give back Helen and all the treasures looted from Argos—give them back and let the Achaeans go away in peace?”
“That’s while Ajax and Hector are pals after they fail to kill each other, exchanging gifts on the field, right?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Well what about it?”
Nightenhelser sets his goblet down. “Well, it was Paris who was supposed to answer Antenor and urge his fellow Trojans to refuse to surrender Helen but offers to give up the treasures in exchange for peace.”
“So?” I say, realizing where this is going. My stomach suddenly feels queasy.
“Well, Paris wasn’t there last night—not to come out of the Scaean Gates with Hector, not to kill Menesthius, and not even to offer the peace proposal at dusk.”
I nod and chew. “So?”
“So that’s one of the largest discrepancies we’ve seen, isn’t it, Hockenberry?”
I have to shrug again. “I don’t know. Book Seven has the Achaeans building their defensive wall and trench near the shore, but you and I know that those defenses have been there since the first month after they arrived. Homer messes up the chronology sometimes.”
Nightenhelser looks at me. “Perhaps. But the absence of Paris to refute Antenor’s suggestion about giving up Helen was strange. Finally, King Priam spoke for his son—saying that he was sure that Paris would never surrender the woman, but that he might give up the treasure. But without Paris being there in person, a lot of the Trojans in the crowd were mumbling their agreement. It’s the closest thing to peace breaking out that I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been here, Hockenberry.”
My skin feels cold. My self-indulgence with Helen last night, my long impersonation of Paris, has already changed something important in the flow of things. If the Muse had known the details of the Iliad—which she didn’t—she would have known at once that I had taken Paris’s place in bed with Helen.
“Did you report the discrepancy to the Muse?” I ask softly. Nightenhelser would have gone off shift when darkness fell. Since I was missing, he was the only scholic on duty last evening. It was his duty to report such oddities.
Nightenhelser chews the last of his bread slowly. “No,” he says at last, “I didn’t dictate that to the word stone.”
I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.
“We’d better go,” says the other scholic. The restaurant is filling up with Trojan men and their wives waiting for a seat. As I drop coins on the table, Nightenhelser grips my forearm. “Do you know what you’re doing, Hockenberry?”
I look him in the eye. My voice is firm when I respond. “Absolutely not.”
Once on the street, I go the opposite direction from Nightenhelser. Stepping into an empty alley, I pull up the cowl of the Hades Helmet and touch the QT medallion.
It is sunrise on the summit of Mount Olympos. The white buildings and green lawns reflect the rich but lesser light here. I’ve always wondered why the sun seems smaller on and around Olympos than in the skies above Ilium.
I had envisioned the chariot stand near the Muse’s building, and that’s where I have arrived. I hold my breath as a chariot spirals down from the morning sky and lands not twenty feet from me, but Apollo steps out and strides away without noticing me. The Hades Helmet still works.
I step onto the chariot and touch the bronze plate near the front. I had watched the Muse carefully as she flew us across the caldera lake the other day. A glowing, transparent keyplate comes into existence inches above the brass. I touch the icons there in the sequence I’d watched the Muse use.
The chariot wobbles, rises, wobbles again, and steadies itself as I move the glowing, virtual energy controller next to the readouts. I twist it left and the chariot banks left fifty feet above the summit grass. I touch the forward-arrow icon and the chariot leaps ahead, flying south over the blue lake. To any god watching, it should look like an empty chariot flying itself, but no god is visible to watch.
Across the lake, I gain a bit of altitude and try to find the right building. There—just beyond the Great Hall of the Gods.
Some goddess—I do not recognize her—cries out from the front steps of the huge building and points toward my seemingly empty chariot, but it’s too late—I’ve identified the building I want: huge, white, with an open doorway.
I’m getting the knack of the chariot controls now and I dive within twenty feet of the ground and accelerate toward the building. I have to lift the left side of the chariot almost perpendicular to the ground—I do not fall, there is some artificial gravity in the machine—as I zip between the giant columns at forty or fifty miles per hour.
Inside, the space is as I remember it: the giant vats filled with bubbling, violet liquid, green worms roiling around the unconscious, floating, healing gods. The Healer—the giant centipede-thing with metallic arms and red eyes—is on the opposite side of Aphrodite’s reconstruction vat, preparing to remove her from it, I presume; his red eyes look my way and his many arms quiver as the chariot rushes into the quiet space, but he is not between me and my target and I accelerate forward before he or anything else can stop me.
It is only at the last second that I de
cide to jump rather than to stay with the chariot. It must be the memory of Helen, the night with Helen—the renewed pleasure of life in those hours with Helen.
The Hades Helmet still shielding me, I leap from the speading chariot, land hard, feel something bruise if not break in my right shoulder, and then I tumble to a stop on the floor as the chariot flies directly into the reconstruction vat, smashing plastic and steel, throwing violet liquid a hundred feet into the air of the giant room. Something—either part of the chariot or a huge shard of vat glass—slices the giant centipede Healer in two.
Aphrodite’s body rolls out onto the floor in a wave of violet liquid and a coiling mass of writhing green worms. The other vats—including the one holding Ares in his nest of worms—rock but do not break or tumble.
Claxons, alarms, and sirens go off, deafening me.
I try to rise, but my head, left leg and right shoulder ache terribly and I sink back to the floor. I crawl to one side of the room, trying to stay out of the violet goo. I’m afraid of what the chemicals will do to me, but more afraid that the outline of my body will be visible in the flood if I can’t get away from it. Black spots dance in my vision and I realize I’m going to pass out. Gods and floating robot-machines are rushing into the great healing chamber.
In the seconds before I lose consciousness, I see mighty Zeus stride in, his cloak billowing, his brow furrowed.
Whatever’s going to happen next will have to happen without me. I set my forehead against the cool floor, close my eyes, and let the blackness wash over me.
22
The Coast of Chryse Planitia
“I killed my friend, Orphu of Io,” Mahnmut told William Shakespeare.
The two were walking in neighborhoods along the bank of the Thames. Mahnmut knew that it was the late summer of 1592 a.d., although he did not know how he knew. The river was busy with barges, wherries, and low-masted rivercraft. Beyond the Tudor buildings and ramshackle tenements on the north bank rose a profusion of London’s steeples and a few contorted towers. A hot haze hung over the river and behind the slums on either side.