by Dan Simmons
“I did not love her when I killed her,” manages Achilles. He brushes at the muddy streaks on the dead Amazon’s fair face.
“No, and you have never loved thus before,” says Pallas Athena. “Never a woman.”
“I have bedded many a woman,” says Achilles, unable to take his eyes off Penthesilea’s dead face. “I have refused to fight for Agamemnon for the love of Briseis.”
Athena laughs. “Briseis was your slave, son of Peleus. All the women you have ever bedded—including the mother of your son, Pyrrhus, whom the Argives will someday call Neoptolemus—were your slaves. Slaves of your ego. You have never loved a woman before this day, fleet-footed Achilles.”
Achilles wants to stand and fight the goddess—she is, after all, his worst enemy, the murderer of his beloved Patroclus, the reason he led his people into war with the gods—but he finds that he cannot take his arms from around the corpse of Penthesilea. Her deadly spearcast had failed, but his heart has been pierced nonetheless. Never—not even at the death of his dearest friend Patroclus—has the mankiller felt such terrible sorrow. “Why… now?” he gasps between wracking sobs. “Why… her?”
“It is a spell put on you by the witch goddess of lust, Aphrodite,” says Athena, moving around him and the fallen horse and Amazon so that he can see her without moving his head. “It was always Aphrodite and her incestuous brother Ares who confounded your will, killed your friends, and murdered your joys, Achilles. It was Aphrodite who killed Patroclus and carried away his body these eight months past.”
“No… I was there… I saw…”
“You saw Aphrodite take my form,” interrupts Pallas Athena. “Do you doubt that we gods can take any form we wish? Shall I make myself into the form and shape of the dead Penthesilea so you can slake your lust with a living body rather than a dead one?”
Achilles stares up at her, his jaw hanging slack. “Aphrodite …” he says after a minute, his tone that of a deadly curse. “I will kill the cunt.”
Athena smiles. “An act most worthy and long overdue, fleet-footed mankiller. Let me give you this …” She hands him a small jewel-encrusted dagger.
Still cradling Penthesilea in his right arm, he accepts the thing with his left hand. “What is it?”
“A knife.”
“I know it’s a knife,” snarls Achilles, his tone showing no respect for the fact that he’s speaking to a goddess, third-born of all the gods sired by Zeus. “Why in Hades’ name would I want this girl’s toy of a blade when I have my own sword, my own gutting knife? Take this back.”
“This knife is different,” says the goddess. “This knife can kill a god.”
“I’ve cut down gods with my regular blade.”
“Cut them down, yes,” says Athena. “Killed them, no. This blade does for immortal flesh what your mere human sword does for your puny fellow mortals.”
Achilles stands, easily shifting the body of Penthesilea to his right shoulder. He holds the short blade in his right hand. “Why would you give me such a thing, Pallas Athena? We have opposed each other across this battlefield for months now. Why would you aid me now?”
“I have my reasons, son of Peleus. Where is Hockenberry?”
“Hockenberry?”
“Yes, that former scholic who became Aphrodite’s agent,” says Pallas Athena. “Does he still live? I have business with this mortal, but do not know where to seek him out. The moravec forcefields have clouded our godly vision of recent.”
Achilles looks around him, blinking as if noticing for the first time that he is the only living human being left on the red Martian plain. “Hockenberry was here only a few minutes ago. I spoke to him before I slew… her.” He begins weeping again.
“I look forward to meeting this Hockenberry again,” says Athena, muttering as if to herself. “Today is a time of reckonings, and his is long overdue.” She reaches out and takes Achilles’ chin in her powerful, slender hand, raising his face, locking her gaze to his. “Son of Peleus, do you wish this woman… this Amazon… alive again, to be your bride?”
Achilles stares. “I wish to be released from this spell of love, noble goddess.”
Athena shakes her golden-helmeted head. The red sun glints every where on her armor. “There is no release from this particular spell of Aphrodite—the pheromones have spoken and their judgment is final. Penthesilea will be your only love for this life, either as a corpse or as a living woman… do you want her alive?”
“Yes!!” cries Achilles, stepping closer with the dead woman in his arms and bright madness in his eyes. “Return her to life!”
“No god or goddess can do that, son of Peleus,” Athena says sadly. “As you once said to Odysseus—‘Of possessions cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life—nor a woman’s, Achilles—cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier. Not even Father Zeus has this power of resurrection, Achilles.”
“Then why the fuck did you offer it to me?” snarls the mankiller. He feels the rage flow in next to the love now—oil and water, fire and… not ice—but a different form of fire. He is very aware of both his rage and the god—and goddess-killing knife in his hand. To keep himself from doing something rash, he sets the blade in his broad warbelt.
“It is possible to return Penthesilea to life,” says Athena, “but I do not have that power. I will sprinkle her with a form of ambrosia which will preserve her from all decay. Her dead body will forevermore carry the blush on her cheeks and the hint of fading warmth you feel now. Her beauty will never depart.”
“What good does that do me?” snarls Achilles. “Do you really expect me to celebrate my love with an act of necrophilia?”
“That’s your personal choice,” says Pallas Athena with a smirk that almost makes Achilles pull the dagger from his belt. She continues, “But if you are a man of action, I expect you to carry your love’s body to the summit of Mount Olympos. There, in a great building near a lake, is our godly secret—a hall of clear, fluid-filled tanks where strange creatures tend to our wounds, repairing all damage, assuring that we return—as you put it so well—across the teeth’s barrier.”
Achilles turns and stares up at the endless mountain catching the sunlight. It rises forever. The summit is not in sight. The vertical cliffs at its base, a mere beginning to the giant massif, are more than fourteen thousand feet tall. “Climb Olympos …” he says.
“There was an escalator… a staircase,” says Pallas Athena, pointing with her long lance. “You see the ruins there. It is still the easiest way up.”
“I’ll have to fight my way up, every foot of the way,” says Achilles, grinning horribly. “I am still at war with the gods.”
Pallas Athena also grins. “The gods are now at war with each other, son of Peleus. And they know the Brane Hole has closed forever. Mortals no longer threaten the halls of Olympos. I would guess that you will climb undetected, unopposed, but once you are there they will surely sound the alarm.”
“Aphrodite,” whispers the fleet-footed mankiller.
“Yes, she will be there. And Ares. All the architects of your personal hell. You have my permission to kill them. I ask you only one favor in return for my ambrosia, my guidance, and my love.”
Achilles turns back to her and waits.
“Destroy the healing tanks after they have brought your Amazon love back to life. Kill the Healer—a great monstrous centipede thing with too many arms and eyes. Destroy everything in the Healer’s Hall.”
“Goddess, would that not destroy your own immortality?” asks Achilles.
“I will worry about that, son of Peleus,” says Pallas Athena. She extends her arms, palms downward, and golden ambrosia falls on the bloody, pierced body of Penthesilea. “Go now. I must return to my own wars. The issue of Ilium will be decided soon. Your fate will be settled there, on Olympos.” She points to the mountain risi
ng endlessly above them.
“You goad me as if I have the power of a god, Pallas Athena,” whispers Achilles.
“You have always had the power of a god, son of Peleus,” says the goddess. She raises her free hand in benediction and QT’s away. The air rushes into the vacuum with a soft thunderclap.
Achilles lays Penthesilea’s body down among the other corpses only long enough to wrap it in clean white cloth retrieved from his battle tent. Then he seeks out his own shield, lance, helmet, and a single bag of bread and wineskins he’d brought along so many hours earlier. Finally, his weapons securely lashed to him, he kneels, lifts the dead Amazon, and begins walking toward Mount Olympos.
“Holy shit,” says Daeman, pulling the turin cloth away from his face. Long minutes have passed. He checks his proxnet palm—no voynix nearby. They could have deboned him like a fish while he lay under the turin’s spell. “Holy shit,” he says again.
There is no reply except for the low waves lapping along the beach.
“Which is more important?” he mutters to himself. “Getting this working turin cloth back to Ardis as quickly as possible—and figuring out why Caliban or his master left it for me? Or going back to Paris Crater to see what the many-handed-as-a-cuttlefish is up to there?”
He stays on his knees in the sand for a minute. Then he pulls on his clothes, stuffs the turin cloth into his backpack, sets his sword back on his belt, lifts the crossbow, and slogs up the hill to the waiting fax pavilion.
27
Ada awoke in the dark to find three voynix in her room. One of them was holding Harman’s severed head in its long fingerblades.
Ada awoke in the diffused light just before dawn with her heart pounding. Her mouth was open as if already forming a scream.
“Harman!”
She rolled out of bed, sitting on the edge, her head in her hands, her heart still pounding so fiercely that it gave her vertigo. She couldn’t believe that she’d come up to her bedroom and fallen asleep while Harman was still awake. This pregnancy was a stupid thing, she thought. It made her body a traitor at times.
She’d slept in her clothes—tunic, vest, canvas trousers, thick socks—and she pressed her hair and long shirt down as well as she could to calm the worst of the wildness, considered using some of the precious hot water for a standing bath at the basin—her birdbath, Harman always called it—and rejected the idea. Too much might have happened in the hour or two since she fell asleep. Ada pulled on her boots and hurried downstairs.
Harman was in the front parlor where the wide window doors had been unshuttered, allowing a view down the south lawn to the lower palisade. There was no sunrise—the morning was too cloudy—and it had begun to snow. Ada had seen snow before in her life, but only once here at Ardis Hall, when she was very young. About a dozen men and women, including Daeman—who looked oddly flushed—were standing by the windows, watching the snow fall and talking softly.
Ada gave Daeman a quick hug and moved close to Harman, slipping her arm around him. “How is Ody …” she began.
“Noman’s still alive, but only barely,” Harman said softly. “He’s lost too much blood. His breathing is becoming more and more difficult. Loes thinks that he’ll die within the next hour or two. We’re trying to decide what to do.” He touched her lower back. “Ada, Daeman has brought us some terrible news about his mother.”
Ada looked at her friend, wondering if his mother had simply refused to come to Ardis. She and Daeman had visited Marina twice in the past eight months, and neither time had they come close to convincing the older woman.
“She’s dead,” said Daeman. “Caliban killed her and everyone else in the domi tower.”
Ada bit her knuckle until it almost bled and then said, “Oh, Daeman, I am so, so sorry …” And then, realizing what he’d said, she whispered, “Caliban?” She had convinced herself from Harman’s stories about Prospero’s Isle that the creature had died up there. “Caliban?” she repeated stupidly. Her dream was still with her like a weight on her neck. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” said Daeman.
Ada put her arms around him, but Daeman’s body was as tight and rigid as a rock. He patted her shoulder almost absently. Ada wondered if he was in shock.
The group resumed discussing the night’s defense of Ardis Hall.
The voynix had attacked just before midnight—at least a hundred of them, perhaps a hundred and fifty; it was hard to tell in the dark and rain—and they had rushed at least three out of the four sides of the palisade perimeter. It was the largest and certainly the most coordinated attack the voynix had ever carried out against Ardis.
The defenders had killed them until just before dawn—first setting the huge braziers alight, burning the precious kerosene and naphtha saved for that purpose, illuminating the walls and fields beyond the walls—and then showering volley upon volley of aimed bow-and-crossbow fire onto the rushing forms.
Arrows and bolts didn’t always penetrate a voynix’s carapace or leathery hood—more often than not they didn’t—so the defenders expended a huge percentage of their arrows and bolts. Dozens of the voynix had fallen—Loes reported that his team had counted fifty-three voynix corpses in the fields and woods at first light.
Some of the things had gotten to the walls and leapt to the ramparts—voynix could jump thirty feet and more from a standing start, like huge grasshoppers—but the mass of pikes and reserve fighters with swords had stopped any from getting to the house. Eight of Ardis’s people had been hurt, but only two seriously: a woman named Kirik with a badly broken arm, and Laman, a friend of Petyr’s, with four fingers lopped off—not by a voynix’s blades, but from a fellow defender’s ill-timed swing of a sword.
What had turned the tide was the sonie.
Harman launched the oval disk from the ancient jinker platform high on Ardis Hall’s gabled rooftop. He flew it from its center-forward niche.
The flying machine had six shallow, cushioned indentations for people lying prone, but Petyr, Loes, Reman, and Hannah had knelt in their niches, shooting down from the sonie, the three men wielding all of Ardis’s flechette rifles and Hannah firing the finest crossbow she’d ever crafted.
Harman couldn’t go lower than about sixty feet because of the voynix’s amazing leaping abilities. But that was close enough. Even in the dark and the rain, even with the voynix scuttling as fast as cockroaches and leaping like giant grasshoppers on a griddle, the sustained flechette and crossbow fire dropped the creatures in their tracks. Harman flew the sonie in among the tall trees at the bottom and top of the hill, the defenders on the palisade ramparts shot flaming arrows and catapult-launched balls of burning, hissing naphtha to illuminate the night. The voynix scattered, regrouped, and attacked six more times before finally disappearing, some toward the river far down the hill from Ardis and the rest into the hills to the north.
“But why did they stop attacking?” asked the young woman named Peaen. “Why’d they leave?”
“What do you mean?” said Petyr. “We killed a third of them.”
Harman crossed his arms and glared out at the softly falling snow. “I know what Peaen means. It’s a good question. Why did they break off the attack? We’ve never seen a voynix react to pain. They die… but they don’t complain about it. Why didn’t they all keep coming until they overran us or died?”
“Because someone or something recalled them,” Daeman said.
Ada glanced at him. Daeman’s face was almost slack, his voice dull, his eyes not quite focused on anything. For the last nine months, Daeman’s energy and determination had deepened and visibly increased daily. Now he was listless, seemingly indifferent to the conversation and the people around him. Ada felt sure that his mother’s death had almost undone him—perhaps it would yet do so.
“If the voynix were recalled, who recalled them?” asked Hannah.
No one spoke.
“Daeman,” Harman said, “please tell your story again, for Ada. And add any detail you l
eft out the first time.” More men and women had gathered in the long room. Everyone looked tired. No one spoke or asked questions as Daeman gave his story again, his voice a dull monotone.
He told of the slaughter at his mother’s domi, the stack of skulls, the presence of the turin cloth on the table—the only thing not splattered with blood—and how he activated it later when he’d faxed somewhere else; he didn’t specify where exactly. He told of the appearance of the hole above the city of Paris Crater and about his glimpse of something large emerging from it—something that seemed to scuttle about on impossible sets of giant hands.
He explained how he had faxed away to regain his composure, then faxed to the Ardis node—the guards at the small fort there told him of the movement of voynix they’d glimpsed all night, the torches were lit and every man was at the walls, and about the sounds of fighting and flashes of torches and naphtha they’d seen from the direction of Ardis Hall. Daeman had been tempted to start toward Ardis on foot but the men at the barricades there at the fax pavilion were positive it’d be certain death to try that walk in the dark—they’d counted more than seventy voynix slipping past across meadows and into the woods, headed toward the great house.
Daeman explained how he’d left the turin cloth with Casman and Greogi, the two captains of the guard there, and directed one of them to fax to Chom or somewhere safe with the turin if the voynix overran the fax pavilion before he got back.
“We plan to fax out if those bastards attack us,” said Greogi. “We’ve made plans on who goes when and in which order, while others provide covering fire until it’s their turn. We’re not planning to die to protect this pavilion.”
Daeman had nodded and faxed back to Paris Crater.
He told the others now that if he had chosen the closer-in Invalid Hotel node to the more distant Guarded Lion, he would have died. All the center of Paris Crater had been transformed. The hole in space was still there—weak sunlight streaming out—but the center of the city itself had been encased in a webbed glacier of blue ice.