by Dan Simmons
Harman tried to speak but found no words. He hugged her to him.
29
When Harman flew the sonie down from the jinker platform to let it hover three feet off the ground near Ardis Hall’s main back door, it was Petyr who met him there.
“I want to go,” said the younger man. He was wearing his travel cape and weapons belt—a short sword and killing knife were slung on the belt—and his handmade bow and arrow-filled quiver were slung over his shoulder.
“I told Daeman …” began Harman, propping himself on an elbow and looking up as he lay in the forward-center open niche on the surface of the oval flying machine.
“Yes. And that made sense… to tell Daeman. He’s still in shock from his mother’s death and organizing the messengers might help him come out of it. But you need someone with you on the Bridge. Hannah’s strong enough to carry the litter with Noman on it, but you need someone to cover both your backs while you do it.”
“You’re needed here…”
Petyr interrupted again. His voice was quiet, firm, calm, but his gaze was intense. “No, I’m not, Harman Uhr,” said the bearded man. “The flechette rifle’s needed here, and I’m leaving it with the few flechette magazines left to it, but I’m not needed here. Like you, I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours—I have a six-hour sleep period coming before I have to return to duty on the walls. I understand that you told Ada Uhr that you and Hannah will be back in a few hours.”
“We should be …” began Harman and stopped. Hannah, Ada, Siris, and Tom were carrying Odysseus-Noman’s stretcher out the door. The dying man was wrapped in thick blankets. Harman slid out of the hovering sonie and helped lift the old man into the cushioned rear-center niche. The sonie used directed forcefields as safety restraints for its passengers, but there was also a silk-webbed netting built into the periphery of each niche for gear or inanimate objects, and Harman and Hannah pulled this over the comatose Noman and secured it. Their friend might well be dead before they reached the Golden Gate and Harman didn’t want the body tumbling out.
Harman clambered forward and dropped into the piloting niche. “Petyr’s coming with us,” he told Hannah. Her gaze was on the dying Odysseus and she showed no flicker of interest at the news. “Petyr,” he continued, “left rear. And keep your bow and quiver handy. Hannah, right rear. Web in.”
Ada came around, leaned over the metal surface, and gave him a quick kiss. “Be back before dark or you’ll be in big trouble with me,” she said softly. She walked back into the manor house with Tom and Siris.
Harman checked to make sure that all were wearing their webnets, including himself, and then he thrust both palms under the sonie’s forward rim, activating the holographic control panel. He visualized three green circles set within three larger red circles. His left palm glowed blue and his vision was overlaid with impossible trajectories.
“Destination Golden Gate at Machu Picchu?” came the machine’s flat voice.
“Yes,” said Harman.
“Fastest flight path?” asked the machine.
“Yes.”
“Ready to initiate flight?”
“Ready,” said Harman. “Go.”
The restraint forcefields pressed down on all of them. The sonie accelerated over the palisade and trees, went nearly vertical, and broke the sound barrier before it reached two thousand feet of altitude.
Ada didn’t watch the sonie leave and when the sonic boom slammed the house—she’d heard hundreds of them during the meteor bombardment at the time of the Fall—her only reaction was to ask Oelleo, who was on housekeeping duty that week, to check for broken panes and mend them as needed.
She pulled a wool cape from her peg in the main hall and went out into the yard, then through the front gate of the palisade. The grass here—formerly her beautiful front lawn that ran downhill for a quarter of a mile, now Ardis’s pasture and killing ground—had been churned up by hooves and voynix peds and then refrozen. It was difficult to walk without spraining an ankle. Several oxen-pulled, long-bed droshkies rumbled along the edge of the tree line where men and women lifted voynix carcasses onto the cargo bed. The metal of their carapaces would be recycled into weapons. Their leatherish hoods would be cut and sewn into clothing and shields. Ada paused to watch Kaman, one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples last summer, use special tongs that Hannah had designed and forged to pull crossbow bolts out of voynix bodies. These went into buckets on the droshky and would be cleaned and re-sharpened. The droshky bed, Kaman’s gloved hands, and the frozen soil were blue with voynix blood.
Ada moved around the palisade, strolling in and out of the gates, chatting with other work groups, urging those who had been on the wall all morning to go in for breakfast, and finally climbing up on the furnace cupola to talk with Loes and watch the last preparations for the morning’s iron pour. She pretended not to notice Emme and three young men with crossbows casually walking thirty paces behind her all the way, watching the woods for movement, their crossbows cocked and double-loaded.
Ada came back into the house through the kitchen and checked her palm time function—thirty-nine minutes since Harman had left. If his silly sonie timetable was right—and she could hardly believe it, since she remembered so clearly the long, long day of flying up from the Golden Gate nine months ago, with the stop in what she now knew was a redwood forest in the area once called Texas—but if his timetable was right, they’d be there now. Assume an hour to find this mythical healing crèche, or at least to stow the dying Noman in one of the temporal sarcophagi, and her beloved would be home before lunch would be served. She reminded herself that tomorrow was her day on cooking duty for dinner.
She hung her shawl on its peg and went up to her room—the room she now shared with Harman—closing the door. She’d folded the turin cloth Daeman had brought back with him and slipped it into her largest tunic pocket during the conversations, and now she removed the cloth and unfolded it.
Harman had almost never gone under the turin. She remembered that Daeman also rarely indulged—seducing young women had been his idea of recreation before the Fall, although, to be fair, she also remembered that he had worked hard to collect butterflies in the fields and forests when he’d visited her at Ardis when she was a girl. They were technically cousins, although the phrase meant little in terms of blood relationship in that world that had ended nine months earlier. Like the term “sister,” the idea of “cousin” was an honorific given among female adults who had been friends for years, offering at least the idea of a special relationship between their children. Now, as an adult herself, and a pregnant one at that, Ada realized that the honorific “cousin” might have been a sign that her late mother and Daeman’s mother—also dead now, she realized with a pang—had chosen to be impregnated by the same father’s sperm packet at different times in their lives. She had to smile at that, and be thankful that the pudgy, lecherous young man Daeman had once been had never succeeded in seducing her.
No, Harman and Daeman had never spent much time under the turin cloth. But Ada had. She’d escaped to the gory images of the siege of Troy almost daily for the almost eleven years that the turins had functioned. Ada had to confess to herself that she had loved the violence and the energy of those imaginary people—at least they had been presumed to be imaginary until they met the older Odysseus at the Golden Gate—and even the barbaric language, somehow translated by the turin, had been like an intoxicating drug to her.
Now Ada lay back on the bed, lifted the turin cloth over her face, set the embroidered microcircuits against her forehead, and closed her eyes, not really expecting the turin to work.
It is night. She is in a tower in Troy.
Ada knows it’s Troy—Ilium—because she’s seen the nighttime silhouette of the city’s buildings and walls during her hundreds of times under the turin over the past decade, but she’s never seen it from this perspective before. She realizes that she’s in a shattered, circular tower with a wall missing on the sou
th side of the building and that two people are huddled a few feet away, holding a low blanket over a fire consisting of little more than embers. She recognizes them at once—Helen and her former husband Menelaus—but she has no idea of why they’re together here, inside the city, looking out over the wall and the Scaean Gate at a night battle in full progress. What’s Menelaus doing here and how can he be sharing a blanket—no, she realizes, it’s a red warrior’s cape—with Helen? For almost ten years, Ada has watched Menelaus and the other Achaeans battling to get inside the city, presumably to capture or kill this very woman.
It’s obvious that the Achaeans are battling to get inside the city at this very moment.
Ada turns her nonexistent head to change her field of vision—this turin-cloth experience is different from all her other ones—and stares in awe out toward the Scaean Gate and the high wall.
* * *
This is much like our battle last night here at Ardis, she thinks, but then almost laughs at the comparison. Instead of a twelve-foot-tall rickety wooden palisade, Ilium is surrounded by its hundred-foot-high, twenty-foot-thick wall, its defense further augmented by its many towers, sally ports, embrasures, trenches, rows of sharpened stakes, moats, and parapets. Instead of an attacking army of a hundred-some silent voynix, this great city is being attacked by tens of thousands of cheering, roaring, cursing Greeks—torches and campfires and flaming arrows illuminate mile upon mile of the surging horde of heroes—each group complete with its own kings, captains, siege ladders, and chariots, each group intent upon its own battle-within-the-larger-battle. Instead of Ardis Hall with its four hundred souls, the defenders here—she can see thousands of archers and spearmen on just the parapets and stairways of the long south wall visible from this tower—are defending the lives of more than a hundred thousand terrified kinsmen, including their children, wives, daughters, young sons, and helpless elders. Instead of Harman’s one silent sonie flying over a backyard battlefield, Ada sees the air here filled with dozens of flying chariots, each protected by its own force bubble, its divine occupants launching shafts of energy and bolts of lightning either into the city or out toward the attacking hordes.
In all of her previous times under the turin, Ada has never seen so many of the Olympian gods so personally involved in the fighting. Even from this distance she can make out Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Apollo flying and fighting in defense of Troy, and Hecuba, Athena, Poseidon, and other rarely seen gods raging on the side of the attacking Achaeans. There is no sign of Zeus.
Things have certainly changed during the nine months I’ve been away from the turin, thinks Ada.
“Hector has not come out of his apartments to lead the fight,” Helen whispers to Menelaus. Ada turns her attention back to the couple. They are huddled together over the tiniest of campfires up here on the broken, open-air platform, the red soldier’s cape shielding the embers from any-one’s view from below.
“He’s a coward,” says Menelaus.
“You know better than that. There has been no braver man in this mad war than Hector, son of Priam. He’s in mourning.”
“For whom?” laughs Menelaus. “Himself? His life span can now be counted in hours.” He gestures out toward the hordes of Achaeans attacking Troy from all directions.
Helen also looks. “Do you think this attack will succeed, my husband? It seems uncoordinated to me. And there are no siege engines.”
Menelaus grunts. “Yes, perhaps my brother led them to the attack too quickly—there is too much confusion. But if tonight’s attack fails, tomorrow’s will succeed. Ilium is doomed.”
“It seems so,” Helen says softly. “But it has always been, has it not? No, Hector is not grieving for himself, noble husband. He grieves for his murdered son, Scamandrius, and for the end of the war with the gods that might have avenged the baby.”
“The war was pure folly,” grumbles Menelaus. “The gods would have destroyed us or banished us from the earth, just as they stole our families back home.”
“You believe Agamemnon?” whispers Helen. “Everyone is gone?”
“I believe what Poseidon and Hera and Athena told Agamemnon—that our families and friends and slaves and everyone else in the world will be returned by the gods when we Achaeans put Ilium to the torch.”
“Could even the immortal gods do such a thing, my husband—remove all humans from our world?”
“They must have,” says Menelaus. “My brother does not lie. The gods told him it had been their work and lo, our cities are empty! And I’ve talked to the others who sailed with him. All of the farms and homes in the Peloponnesus are … shhh, someone’s coming.” He kicks the embers apart, rises, thrusts Helen into the deepest shadows of the broken wall, and stands in the blind side of the opening to the circular staircase, his sword out and ready.
Ada can hear the shuffle of sandals on the stairs.
A man Ada has never seen before—dressed in Achaean infantry armor and cape but less fit, milder-looking than any soldier she’s ever noticed while under the turin—steps up onto the open area where the stairway abruptly ends.
Menelaus springs, pins the man so he can’t raise his arms, and sets his blade across the startled intruder’s throat, ready to open his jugular with a single slash.
“No!” cries Helen.
Menelaus pauses.
“It is my friend Hock-en-bear-eeee.”
Menelaus waits a second, his expression set and forearm flexing as if still planning to cut the thinner man’s throat, but then he pulls the man’s sword out of its sheath and tosses it away. He shoves the thinner man down onto the floor and stands almost astride of him. “Hockenberry? The son of Duane?” growls Menelaus. “I’ve seen you with Achilles and Hector many times. You came with the machine-beings.”
Hockenberry? thinks Ada. She’s never heard a name like that in the turin tale.
“No,” says Hockenberry, rubbing both his throat and his bruised bare knee. “I’ve been here for years, but always observing until nine months ago when the war with the gods began.”
“You’re a friend of that dog-fucker Achilles,” snarls Menelaus. “You’re a lackey of my enemy, Hector, whose doom is sealed this day. And so is yours…”
“No!” Helen cries again and steps forward, grasping her husband’s arm. “Hock-en-bear-eeee is a favorite of the gods. And my friend. He is the one who told me of this tower platform. And you remember that he used to bear Achilles invisibly away, using the medallion at his throat to travel like the gods themselves.”
“I remember,” says Menelaus. “But a friend of Achilles and Hector is no friend of mine. He’s found us out. He’ll tell the Trojans where we’re hiding. He must die.”
“No,” says Helen a third time. Her white fingers look very small on Menelaus’ tanned and hairy forearm. “Hock-en-bear-eeee is the solution to our problem, my husband.”
Menelaus glares at her, not understanding.
Helen points to the battle going on out beyond the walls. The archers firing hundreds—thousands—of arrows in deadly volleys. The disorganized Achaeans first surging to the wall with ladders, then falling back as the archers’ crossfire thins their ranks. The last of the Trojan defenders outside the wall fighting valiantly on their side of the stakes and trenches—Achaean chariots crashing, wood splintering, horses screaming in the night as stakes pierce their lathered sides—and even the Achaean-loving goddesses and gods Athena, Hera, and Poseidon are falling back under the berserker counterassault of Troy’s principal defending gods, Ares and Apollo. The violet energy-arrows of the Lord of the Silver Bow are falling everywhere among the Achaeans and their immortal allies, dropping men and horses like saplings under the axe.
“I don’t understand,” growls Menelaus. “What can this scrawny bastard do for us? His sword doesn’t even have an edge.”
Still touching her husband’s forearm, Helen kneels gracefully and lifts the heavy gold medallion on its thick chain around Hockenberry’s neck. “He can carry us instan
tly to your brother’s side, my darling husband. He is our escape. Our only way out of Ilium.”
Menelaus squints, obviously understanding. “Stand back, wife. I’ll cut his throat and we’ll use the magic medallion.”
“It only works for me,” Hockenberry says softly. “Even the moravecs with their advanced engineering couldn’t duplicate it or make it work for them. The QT medallion is cued to my brainwaves and DNA.”
“It’s true,” says Helen, almost whispering. “This is why Hector and Achilles always held Hock-en-bear-eeee’s arm when they used the god magic to travel with him.”
“Stand up,” says Menelaus.
Hockenberry stands. Menelaus is not a tall man like his brother, nor a barrel-chested ox of a man like Odysseus or Ajax, but he is almost godlike in his muscle and mass compared to this thin, potbellied Hockenberry.
“Take us there now, son of Duane,” commands Menelaus. “To my brother’s tent on the sands.”
Hockenberry shakes his head. “For months I’ve not used the QT medallion myself, son of Atreus. The moravecs explained that the gods could track me through something called Planck space in the Calabi-Yau matrix—follow me through the void that the gods use for travel. I betrayed the gods and they would kill me if I quantum teleport again.”
Menelaus smiles. He lifts the sword, pokes it into Hockenberry’s belly until it draws blood through the tunic. “I’ll kill you now if you don’t, you pig’s arse. And draw your bowels out slow in the killing.”
Helen sets her free hand on Hockenberry’s shoulder. “My friend, look at the warring there—there beyond the wall. The gods are all engaged in bloodletting this night. There, see Athena falling back with a host of her Furies? See mighty Apollo in his chariot, firing down death into the retreating Greek ranks. No one will notice you if you QT this night, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”