by John Dolan
Agamemnon slaps him on the back and yells, “Yes! That’s the spirit! I’m just inspiring you, Odysseus! Motivating you!” And he runs further down the line, while Odysseus grinds his teeth.
Agamemnon runs to Diomedes, standing in his chariot, waiting for the order to charge. Agamemnon starts in again, “What are you waiting for? Oh, you’re not your father’s equal, Diomedes! He’d be charging the Trojans already!”
Diomedes’ young cousin starts to object, but Diomedes pushes him back until Agamemnon has run off down the line. Then he tells his cousin, “Never mind; let him rant. At least he’s acting like a king for once. Maybe it’ll help.”
Now the Greeks advance in total silence, no sound but the clang of their armor. They’re one people, one language, the whole host moving like a huge beast. Athena inspires them; they breathe her spirit as they move, and she’s silent as a chess champion looking at the board.
The Trojans are waiting, but not in silence. Their allies are barbarians from all over the East, and the orders are flying in a dozen weird languages. It sounds like an aviary on their side of the line, as all the different contingents chatter in their languages, one like crows, another like sparrows, a third like screaming hawks. The only god on their side now is Ares, the filthy spirit of slaughter, decay, and burned cities.
Ares has brought a friend with him: Fear, who turns the stomachs of the Trojans, wobbles their knees, squeezes sweat out on their foreheads. They don’t want this fight.
The Greek horde runs at them in silence.
There’s a moment when the two shield walls face each other, near enough to see each others’ faces. They know each other by now. They’ve been facing off for nine long years. They stare at the enemy, seeing who they’ll have to face. Then with a rush, the Greeks slam against the Trojan shields.
That’s when the noise starts. The slap of ox-hide shields, the clang of bronze on bronze, and the screams that follow. You can tell the kind of wound from the different screams.
For now, the Trojans’ big shields are holding. A few of their men are down, but as long as the shield wall holds, the Greeks can’t do much damage. The Greeks need someone to charge, break that wall. Antilokas tries first. He runs at the Trojan shields and slams his spear right into the forehead of Ekepolas, who’s holding his shield a little low. Antilokas’ spear point goes through the thin metal of the helmet (metal is expensive, and bronze is heavy, so helmets are thin), then through skin, skull, brain. The world goes dark for Ekepolas.
Once you’ve killed a man, your next move is to grab the body, strip the metal off it.
Antilokas’ friend Elfenar makes a grab for Ekepolas’ corpse. But when you bend down to grab an enemy’s body, your side is wide open to a spear-thrust. And sure enough, Agnar, a Trojan, sees his chance, shoves his spear right into Elfenar’s side.
Now there are two bodies to fight over, and it’s a swarm of spearheads, shields banging against each other, and screaming. Ajax, the biggest Greek on the field, sees an opening and slams his spear right through the right nipple of young Antemyon, a boy from the mountains. The spear-point slides easily through Antemyon’s shirt, through his body, and out the other side.
Lukas, one of Odysseus’ men, hoping for a quick profit, stoops to grab the Trojan’s body—and gets a spear right in the balls. Lukas goes down screaming. It’s dangerous, trying to grab these corpses. Leaves you wide open every time.
Odysseus groans, seeing his man go down in agony. It’s been a long, miserable day for him. First he had to deal with Agamemnon’s idiotic scheme, then be scolded as a slacker, and now he sees one of his vassals writhing in the dust. He’s had enough.
Odysseus steps out from the shield wall, spear held loose, sidearm, looking for a target. The Trojans scatter, nobody wanting to be an easy target. Odysseus sees a worthy target at last: Demokoan, one of Priam’s bastard sons. Not as good as killing a legitimate Trojan prince, but better than wasting his spear on a commoner. He throws.
Demokoan never knows what hit him. The spear punches through the thin metal of his helmet, right through his left temple, plows through his brains, with enough energy left to punch through the other side. It’s one of the all-time great throws, and the Greeks roar with delight. They grab all the dead bodies, all that precious armor, as the Trojans back away, badly rattled.
Apollo has been watching, and he is not pleased. His pushy sister Athena is animating her Greeks, as usual. Apollo is not as human-friendly as his little sister; he doesn’t like dealing with these creatures, but he can’t let the Greeks win so easily. Grudgingly, he radiates. A brave warmth suffuses the shaky Trojan host. Suddenly, each one of them can see spaces between the Greeks’ helmets and shields, gaps where a spear would go nicely. How sweet it would be to stick a spear point through that gap! It’s suddenly obvious to every Trojan fighter that they can win, that these Greeks are not so big. Athena feels her brother’s energy infusing the Trojans, and doubles her efforts among the Greeks. The two armies stare each other down for a few seconds, and then both charge at once. The deaths come so fast now that it’s hard to keep track. Pyeraws, Imraws’ son, a Trojan ally from the wild hills, picks up a stone and throws it at Dyorez. It hits the Greek in the ankle, and you can hear the bones crunch. Dyorez goes down screaming, and Pyeraws jumps on him like a big cat, jamming his spear into Dyorez’s belly, slashing it around so the Greek’s guts come rolling out onto the dust. The Trojans cheer. But Pyeraws is bent over, a perfect target. Thoyas spears him in the chest, holds the spear in place to keep Pyeraws upright, and calmly takes out his sword, opening up Pyeraws’ belly so the guts pour out while Pyeraws is still upright. That was a great kill, and the Greeks cheer. But Thoyas can’t get the barbarian’s armor, because Pyeraws’ comrades, their hair all in tufts the way barbarians wear it, cluster around their chief as the Greeks try to strip the body.
And now everyone is stabbing, screaming, bleeding, making deals with any god who’ll listen, praying to kill someone without being killed.
5
GODS
ATHENA NEEDS A HERO to lead the Greeks. Akilles is sulking in his tent, so she picks Diomedes, the second-best man they’ve got. She lights him up like a torch, suffusing every cell in his body with her relentless will. His spear leaves a wake of light like a ship moving through the night sea, his shield flashes like a sun.
He kills anyone he chooses. First a rich Trojan in his fancy chariot goes down, with Diomedes’ spear right through his chest. The Trojan’s brother, who was driving for him, jumps down and runs off as the Greeks hoot at him.
Now Athena flies over to Ares, the only god who’s helping the Trojans today, to talk him out of the fight. She despises Ares, god of massacre and rape, but he’s so stupid she can make him do anything. So she puts on a worried look and says, “Ares, I’ve heard that Zeus, our father, is angry at us for meddling in human fights. I think we’d better get out of here.”
Ares turns from watching the battle, staring at her for a long time with his huge, brutal face, trying to think. Finally he nods, afraid of his father’s anger, and his strength leaves the Trojans. In an instant, every man in the Trojan force feels as if the blood has drained out of his body. All they feel is fear. They turn to run, their chariots wheeling back toward the city in a cloud of dust.
That’s a fatal move. As long as you’re facing front with a shield up, your eye on the enemy, friends beside you, you’re fairly safe. When you turn and run, you’re a target. Fleeing men are easy kills.
Even Agamemnon gets a kill, his spear slamming into a chariot-driver’s back. His brother Menelaos, healed by the magic herbs, lets fly and brings down another running Trojan. It’s a good day for the Atreus-sons.
The most gratifying kill so far is Fereklas, the Trojan shipwright who made the boat that took Paris to Sparta—and took him home to Troy with Menelaos’ rightful wife on his arm. All the Greeks want him dead.
Fereklas dies trying to run away. A Greek spear hits him right on the ass, b
ites deep into the bladder, and he falls on his knees, screaming like a rabbit, thrashing in the dust in a fountain of his own blood and piss.
Pedeaus, a high-born Trojan bastard, gets a spear in the back of the neck as he tries to run. The spear goes up through his palate, smashes out through his teeth. Pedeaus dies with the taste of bronze in his mouth.
Khipsenar, a priest of the river that flows past Troy, has his hand lopped off and dies staring at it, lying on the ground as his life squirts out in pulses from his wrist.
And still Diomedes sweeps the field, with Athena’s actinic light around him. The Trojans can’t match his spear; they need to use the bow, the favorite weapon of the East.
Pandarus, the archer who shot Menelaos, takes out his ibex-horn bow and aims for the center-of-mass in that glob of killing light that is Diomedes. Takes aim, holds for a second, allows for forward motion, lets go.
The arrow speeds toward Diomedes, hits him in the meat of the shoulder, sticks. Diomedes can hardly believe it; this is his day! He can’t be hurt!
He calls his cousins to pull the arrow out, and the blood comes with it in a gush. He’s furious, and screams to Athena: “Daughter of Zeus, let me find the coward Trojan who shot me from far away! Give me strength to slam my spear right through him!”
Athena is there, the flat, sizzling god-world smell. In a second, Diomedes is healed, and she holds him in her world for an unmeasurable moment, whispering to him, “You’re healed, Diomedes, and I’ve given you something else: Today you’ll be able to see the gods. Soon you’ll see my little sister Afroditi. She’ll come down to the battlefield to rescue her son Aeneas. Now listen carefully: You can’t kill her, but you can hurt her. I want you to hurt her, Diomedes.”
She flips worlds, and Diomedes is back on the dust plain—healed, furious, fuming with Athena’s will. He sweeps the field again, a joy to watch. First the spear: a Trojan gets it right in the nipple, goes down. Then the sword, a beautiful sweep of his goddess-lit arm down into a Trojan’s collarbone, so the whole haunch of shoulder comes off and dangles like a pork leg at a butcher’s stall.
Next he chases down two Trojans, the two sons of a famous fortune-teller. People say these two inherited their father’s talent and can read dreams, but their last vision was of Diomedes’ flaring shield, the spearhead, and the dust. They didn’t predict that one!
Diomedes runs head-on at a chariot with two of Priam’s sons in it. One man against three horses? It’s madness. He should end up dead under their hooves. But somehow he’s through the horses, jumping onto the car, killing the two Trojan princes and throwing their bodies to his followers, roaring, “Strip their armor and I’ll drive the horses back to our line!”
And all in less time than it takes to tell it.
The bow is still the Trojans’ only chance against Diomedes. So Aeneas, who’s half-Trojan and half god, finds Pandarus and yells, “Pandarus, what’s wrong with you? You can’t even hit Diomedes well enough to bring him down!”
Pandarus, a talkative boy, whines, “I swear, Aeneas, it’s this bow. If only I had my chariot, my spear! But I didn’t want to bring my horses with me, because these Trojans are city people, they don’t know a thing about care and feeding, and I love my horses.”
Aeneas yells, “Never mind all that! We need you to stop Diomedes!”
But Pandarus is on a talking jag. “So I thought I’d just bring my bow, leave the chariot and the horses at home, but this stupid bow of mine, I think there’s something wrong with it. I can’t shoot straight with it; first I wing Menelaos and he’s already healed, which was bad enough but there’s Diomedes, I hit him and he didn’t even seem to feel it. I don’t know what’s wrong …”
Aeneas tries to shout some sense into him: “Be quiet!”
But Pandarus can’t stop: “I’d like to take this bow here and throw it on a nice hot fire! The thing just won’t shoot straight! If I had my spear, now, and my horses …” Aeneas shouts him down: “Fine! You can use a spear! We’ll take my chariot! I’ll drive! We need to kill Diomedes before he wipes out our whole army! In fact, I’m not sure it’s him. He’s so strong today, I wonder if it’s some god pretending to be Diomedes.”
Pandarus has a marksman’s eye, and says, “No, it’s Diomedes all right; I can tell. But he’s got god-light flickering around him. I think you should drive, Aeneas, because they’re your horses, and you know how horses are; they don’t like to have a stranger holding the reins.”
Aeneas cuts him off: “Fine, I’ll drive; take the spear. I’m going to drive straight at Diomedes. This time throw hard, and hit him somewhere fatal!”
Diomedes’ men see them coming and tell him, “That’s Aeneas and Pandarus coming at us, lord. Aeneas is half-god and Pandarus is a good shot. Let’s get out of here while we can!”
Diomedes laughs. “I don’t run from anyone. I’m going to kill them and take their horses. Aeneas is half-god, true, but his mother is Afroditi. She’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ve got Athena firing my blood today.”
Aeneas has wheeled the chariot into throwing range. Pandarus leans out and throws hard into the middle of Diomedes’ shield.
It’s a perfect throw, but the spear spends all its momentum punching through the shield. There’s just a little scratch on Diomedes’ breastplate.
But Pandarus thinks he’s killed Diomedes. He leans out of the chariot to gloat: “Ha! You survived my arrow, but not my spear! Got you right in the liver!”
Diomedes yells back, “The shield stopped it, fool! Now the dogs will lap your blood!”
Diomedes throws fast, straight at Pandarus’ foolish face leaning out of the car. The spearhead crunches into Pandarus’ cheekbone and smashes his teeth into white slivers scattered through the red chaos of what used to be his mouth.
As he dies, Pandarus sees the horses rear up, horrified at the smell of his blood. He always loved horses so much, and now they’re deserting him as his life pours out from the ruin of his face.
Aeneas sees the boy tumble out of the chariot and stops the team, stakes them to the spot, jumps out to protect Pandarus’ body. His duty is to hold off Diomedes’ men, keep them from stealing the corpse.
Diomedes’ followers come at a run, then stop short, seeing Aeneas ready to fight. They circle like hunting dogs, taunting Aeneas, pointing to his friend’s mangled corpse.
None of them want to close with Aeneas. He’s half-god, and he looks dangerous, crouching over Pandarus’ bloody body like a big cat. They back off to wait for their chief.
Diomedes trots up and decides not to bother with a spear-fight. He picks up a boulder, so big that three of us weaklings today couldn’t lift it. Diomedes picks it up with one hand and throws it as easily as a boy tossing a rock at a stray dog.
The boulder hits Aeneas with the speed of a meteor, right in the groin. He goes down in agony, writhing in the dust, too brave to cry out.
Diomedes’ men rush in whooping, ready to drive their spears into Aeneas.
But Afroditi, seeing her son about to be killed, flies howling with grief down to the battlefield. She throws her god-body over her son, grasps him tight and begins lifting him from the dirt and pain of our world to the overworld. Diomedes looks on, astonished. He just smashed Aeneas’ hip with a boulder the size of a bull’s head, yet now Aeneas is wound up in some sort of glittering dust cloud, and the whole swirl is rising to the sky.
Diomedes gets a glimpse of Afroditi, there in the swirl. And he remembers his orders from Athena: She wants him to wound Afroditi. It’s a dangerous move, raising a weapon against a god, but when you have to choose between offending Athena or her soft, sweet little sister … well, that’s an easy one: make sure you do what Athena wants. That’s where Paris went wrong, pleasing Afroditi instead of Athena.
So Diomedes stares into the glittering cloud, waiting for a chance to give Afroditi a light wound. There! Her soft, white hand, flashing for a moment in the swirl—and Diomedes stabs up into the cloud with his spear.
H
e hears a huge, world-breaking scream. A scream like every girl who ever had to endure being sold to the wrong man, every daughter raped when her town was taken, every woman who died in childbirth, all screaming at once.
The cloud vanishes. Aeneas is falling back to earth now, easy prey for Diomedes.
Apollo, who’s been watching the whole inept affair, grimaces in annoyance, but acts. He catches Aeneas and hides him in darkness, like a squid’s ink-cloud in mid-air.
Afroditi flees upward. She’s lost interest in her son, the war—everything except her throbbing, dripping wrist. Oh, the pain! Goddesses don’t know much about pain, so this is a new horror for soft, sweet Afroditi, getting hurt like a mere mortal. Diomedes’ spear-point grazed her wrist, and the cut is oozing golden ichor.
The gods don’t bleed red blood like we do. Their veins run with the golden essence of the nectar they drink, so when they’re wounded it’s golden liquid that flows out, sweet and glittering like late-summer sunlight. And of all the gods, Afroditi’s ichor is the sweetest, stronger than any wine. Just the scent of it, a few drops, will make a man dizzy.
Diomedes inhales that delicious taint of ichor, fading as Afroditi flies off. He’s drunk with pride, and shouts out at Afroditi, “Now you know not to get mixed up in warfare! That’s a man’s job! Stick to love affairs!”
Afroditi flies to her half-brother Ares. She needs help now, even from a filthy beast like Ares: “Brother! Lend me your chariot! I’m hurt! I’m hurt by a mortal!”