by Dan Simmons
The earth was frozen and Ada found that she was too weary to break through the soil, even though she had one of the sharper shovels. This frustrated her so much that she had to wipe away the tears and snot as she waited for Greogi and Emme to break through the frozen dirt before she could lift and shovel it away. Luckily, it was dark and no one was looking at her. The embarrassment of being seen crying would have made her blubber harder. When Petyr came from where he was working in the hall to finish first-floor defenses and asked her again to come in the house, at least, she told him truthfully that she loved working on the line out here with the hundreds of other laborers. The manual labor and the proximity of so many made her feel better and kept her from thinking about Harman, she said. It was the truth.
Some time after ten p.m., the ditches were finished. They were crude things, at best—five feet across, less than two feet deep, lined with plastic bags scavenged from Chom in previous weeks. Cans of the precious lamp oil—kerosene, Harman had called it—were in the hallway, ready to be carried out, poured, and ignited if the palisade defenders had to fall back.
“What happens after we use a year’s worth of lighting fuel in a few minutes?” Anna had asked.
“We sit in the dark,” had been Ada’s response. “But we’ll be alive.”
In truth, she had reservations about that assessment. If the voynix got past the outer perimeter, she doubted if a little wall of flame—if they even had time to ignite it—could hold them back. Harman and Daeman had helped draw up the plans for reinforcing Ardis’s doorways and attaching the heavy shutters on the inside of all the first—and second-floor windows—the work had been going on for three days and was almost completed, according to Petyr—but Ada had her doubts about that line of defense as well.
When the ditches were finished, guards doubled on the palisades, cans of kerosene set in the outer hall and people assigned to deliver them to the trenches in case of attack, the new flechette rifles and pistols distributed—there were enough to arm one out of every six persons at Ardis, a far cry from the two flechette rifles they’d had before—and Greogi was circling overhead in the sonie, keeping watch, Ada went inside to help Petyr with the interior defenses.
The heavy shutters were almost finished—large, solid planks of wood set deep into the ancient oak frames of Ardis Hall’s windows and ready to be swung shut and latched with iron locks forged in Hannah’s cupola out back. It looked so ugly that Ada just nodded her approval and then turned away to weep.
She remembered how beautiful and gracious Ardis Hall had been less than a year ago—part of a tradition that stretched back almost two thousand years. It had always been a wonderful place to live and to entertain—sophisticated, gracious, elegant. Less than a year ago they had celebrated Harman’s ninety-ninth birthday here in comfort with a huge feast out under the spreading elm and oak trees—lighted lanterns in the trees, food from all over the planet being served by floating servitors, docile voynix pulling carrioles and droshkies up the crushed-stone drive to the lighted front porch, with men and women from everywhere showing up in their finest robes and linens and elegant hairdos. Looking around at the scores of people in rough tunics milling in the cluttered main parlor, lanterns hissing and spitting in the dark, bedrolls on the floor and flechette rifles and crossbows stacked close to hand, fires burning in the fireplace not for ambience but for survival warmth with a score of exhausted and grimy men and women snoring near the hearth, muddy bootprints everywhere and heavy wooden shutters where her mother’s beautiful drapes once hung, Ada thought Has it come to this?
It had.
There were four hundred people living in and around Ardis now. It was no longer Ada’s home. Or rather, now it was the home to everyone willing to live here and fight for it.
Petyr showed her the shutters and other additions—slits cut into the first—and second-floor window shutters through which the defenders could continue to fire arrows, crossbow bolts, and flechettes at the voynix if they made it through the palisade, into the grounds—boiling water in huge vats on the third floor and raised by winches to the high gable terraces above, from which last-ditch defenders could pour the hot liquid down on the voynix. Harman had sigled that idea from one of his old books. Now the large vats of water and oil bubbled and boiled on makeshift stoves hauled up into Ada’s family’s former private quarters. It was all ugly, but it looked as if it might work.
Greogi came in.
“The sonie?” asked Ada.
“Up on the jinker platform. Reman and the others are preparing to take it up with archers.”
“What did you see?” asked Petyr. They’d quit sending reconnaissance parties out into the forest after sunset—the voynix could see better than humans in the dark and it was just too risky on such a cloudy night without moonlight or ringlight—so the sonie forays had become their eyes.
“It’s hard to see in the dark and sleet,” said Greogi. “But we dropped flares into the woods. There are voynix everywhere—more than we’ve ever seen before…”
“Where do they come from?” asked the older woman named Uru, rubbing her own elbows as if cold. “They’re not faxing in. I was on guard duty yesterday and…”
“That’s not our worry right now,” interrupted Petyr. “What else did you see, Greogi?”
“They’re still carrying rocks up from the river,” said the short, redheaded man.
Ada winced at this. The foot patrols had reported that as early as midday, voynix were seen carrying heavy stones and stacking them in the woods. It was a behavior the people of Ardis had never seen before, and any new behavior from the voynix made Ada sick with anxiety.
“Do they seem to be building something?” asked Casman. His voice sounded almost hopeful. “A wall or something? Shelters?”
“No, just stacking the rocks in rows and heaps near the edge of the woods,” said Greogi.
“We have to assume they’ll use them as missiles,” Siris said quietly.
Ada thought of all the years—centuries—that the voynix were powerful but passive, silent servants, doing all the tasks that old-style humans had abandoned—herding and slaughtering their animals for them, standing guard against ARNied dinosaurs and other dangerous replicant creatures, pulling droshkies and carrioles like beasts of burden. For centuries before the Final Fax fourteen hundred years earlier, it was said that voynix were everywhere but were immobile, unresponsive—simply headless statues with leathery humps and metal carapaces. Until the Fall nine months earlier, when Prospero’s Isle came flaming down from the e-ring in ten thousand meteoric pieces, no one in living memory had ever seen a voynix do something unexpected, much less act on its own initiative.
Times had changed.
“How do we defend against thrown rocks?” asked Ada. Voynix had powerful arms.
Kaman, one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples, stepped forward, closer to the center of the circle that had formed here in the second-floor parlor. “I sigled a book last month that told of ancient siege engines and pre–Lost Era machines that could fling huge rocks, boulders, for miles.”
“Did the book have diagrams?” asked Ada.
Kaman chewed a lip. “One. It wasn’t all that clear how it worked.”
“That’s not a defense anyway,” said Petyr.
“It would allow us to throw rocks back at them,” said Ada. “Kaman, why don’t you find that book and get it to Reman, Emme, Loes, Caul, and some of the others who help Hannah with the cupola and who are especially good at building things…”
“Caul’s gone,” said the woman with the shortest hair at Ardis, Salas. “He left today with Daeman and that group.”
“Well, get it to everyone left good at building things,” Ada said to Kaman.
The thin, bearded man nodded and jogged toward the library.
“We going to throw their rocks back at them?” asked Petyr with a smile.
Ada shrugged. She wished Daeman and the nine others weren’t gone. She wished Hannah had come back fr
om the Golden Gate. Most of all, she wished Harman were home.
“Let’s go finish our work, people,” said Petyr. The group broke up with Greogi leading some people upstairs to the jinker platform to relaunch the sonie. Others went off to bed.
Petyr touched Ada’s arm. “You have to get some sleep.”
“Stand guard …” mumbled Ada. There seemed to be a loud buzz in the air, as if the cicadas of summer had returned.
Petyr shook his head and led her down the hall toward her room. Harman and my room, she thought.
“You’re exhausted, Ada. You’ve been going for twenty hours straight. All the day-shift people are asleep now. We have extra people on the walls and watching from above. We’ve done all we can do for today. You need to get some sleep. You’re special.”
Ada pulled her arm away in shock. “I’m not special!”
Petyr stared at her. His eyes were dark in the flickering lantern light of the hallway. “You are, whether you acknowledge it or not, Ada. You’re part of Ardis. To so many of us, you’re the living embodiment of this place. You’re still our hostess, whether you admit it or not. People wait for your decision on things, and not just because Harman’s been our de facto leader for months. Besides, you’re the only pregnant woman here.”
Ada couldn’t argue with that. She allowed herself to be led off to her bedroom.
Ada knew she should sleep—she had to sleep if she was to be any good to Ardis or herself—but sleep evaded her. All she could do was worry about the defenses and think of Harman. Where was he? Was he alive? Was he all right? Would he return to her?
As soon as this current voynix threat was past, she was flying to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu—no one could stop her—and she would find her lover, her husband, if it was the last thing she ever did.
Ada got up in the dark room, crossed to her dresser, and withdrew the turin cloth, carrying it back to bed with her. She had no urge to use a function to interact with the images again—her memory of the dying man in the tower looking up at her, seeing her, was too terribly fresh—but she did want to see the images of ancient Troy again. A city under siege—someone’s home under siege. It might give her hope.
She lay back, set the embroidered microcircuits in the cloth to her forehead, and closed her eyes.
It is morning in Ilium. Helen of Troy enters the main hall of Priam’s temporary palace—Paris and Helen’s former mansion—and hurries to join Cassandra, Andromache, Herophile, and the huge Lesbos slave-woman Hypsipyle, who stand in a cluster of royal women to the left and rear of King Priam’s throne.
Andromache shoots Helen a glance. “We sent servants to search for you in your quarters,” she whispers. “Where have you been?”
Helen has just had time to bathe and put on clean clothes since she escaped Menelaus and left the dying Hockenberry in the tower. “I was walking,” she whispers back.
“Walking,” says beautiful Cassandra in the inebriated tone that often accompanies her trances. The blonde woman smirks. “Walking… with your blade, dear Helen? Have you wiped it off yet?”
Andromache hushes Priam’s daughter. The slave woman Hypsipyle leans closer to Cassandra and now Helen can see that Hypsipyle has a grip on the prophetess’s pale arm. Cassandra winces from the pressure—Hypsipyle’s fingers are sinking into the pale flesh upon the command of Andromache’s nod—but then Cassandra smiles again.
We’ll have to kill her, thinks Helen. It seems like months since she has seen the other two surviving members of the original Trojan Women, as they had called themselves, but it has been less than twenty-four hours since she said goodbye to them and was kidnapped by Menelaus. The fourth and final surviving secret Trojan Women—Herophile, “beloved of Hera,” the oldest sibyl in the city—is here now in the cluster of important women, but Herophile’s gaze is vacant and she looks to have aged twenty years in the past eight months. As with Priam, Helen realizes, Herophile’s day is done.
Returning her thoughts now to the mindset of Ilium’s internal politics, Helen is amazed that Andromache has allowed Cassandra to stay alive—if Priam and the people learn that Andromache and Hector’s baby, Astyanax, is still alive, that the death of the child had been only a ruse for war with the gods, Hector’s wife would be ripped limb from limb. In fact, Helen realizes, Hector would kill her.
Where is Hector? Helen realizes that this is whom everyone is waiting for.
Just as she is about to whisper the question to Andromache, Hector enters, accompanied by a dozen of his captains and closest comrades. Even though the king of Troy—ancient Priam—is sitting on his throne, Queen Hecuba’s throne empty next to him, it is as if the true king of all Ilium has just entered the room. The red-crested spearmen standing guard snap to even greater attention. The weary war captains and heroes, many still covered with dust and blood from the night’s battle, stand straighter. Everyone, even the women of the royal family, hold their heads up higher.
Hector is here.
Even after ten years of admiring his presence and heroism and wisdom, even after ten years of being a plant curling toward the sunshine that is Hector’s charisma, Helen of Troy feels her pulse race for the ten thousandth time as Hector, son of Priam, true leader of the fighters and people of Troy, enters the hall.
Hector is wearing his battle armor. He is clean—obviously risen from a bed rather than a battlefield, his armor is freshly polished, his shield unmarked, even his hair is freshly shampooed and plaited—but the young man looks tired, wounded by a pain of the soul.
Hector salutes his royal father and sits easily in his dead mother’s throne while his captains take their place behind him.
“What is the situation?” asks Hector.
Deiphobus, Hector’s brother, bloodied by the night’s fighting, answers, looking at King Priam as if reporting to him but actually speaking to Hector. “The walls and great Scaean Gate are secure. We were almost taken by surprise by Agamemnon’s sudden attack and we were undermanned with so many of the fighters away through the Hole fighting the gods, but we repulsed the Argives, drove the Achaeans back to their ships by dawn. But it was a close thing.”
“And the Hole is closed?” asks Hector.
“Gone,” says Deiphobus.
“And all of our men made it back through the Hole before it disappeared?”
Deiphobus glances at one of his captains, receives some subtle signal. “We believe so. There was much confusion as thousands retreated back to the city, the moravec artifices fled in their flying machines, and Agamemnon launched his sneak attack—many of our bravest fell outside the walls, caught between our archers and the Achaeans—but we believe that no one was left behind on the other side of the Hole except Achilles.”
“Achilles did not return?” asks Hector, raising his head.
Deiphobus shakes his head. “After slaying all the Amazon women, Achilles stayed behind. The other Achaean captains and kings fled back to their own ranks.”
“Penthesilea is dead?” asks Hector. Helen realizes now that Priam’s greatest son has been out of touch for more than twenty hours, sunk in his own misery and disbelief that his war with the gods had ended.
“Penthesilea, Clonia, Bremusa, Euandra, Thermodoa, Alcibia, Dermachia, Derione—all thirteen of the Amazons were slaughtered, my lord.”
“What now of the gods?” asks Hector.
“They war amongst themselves most fiercely,” says Deiphobus. “It is like the days before… before our war against them.”
“How many are here?” asks Hector.
“For the Achaeans,” says Deiphobus, “Hera and Athena are their principal allies and patrons. Poseidon, Hades, and a dozen more of the immortals have been seen on the battlefield this night, urging on Agamemnon’s hordes, casting bolts and lightning at our walls.”
Old Priam clears his throat. “Then why do our walls still stand, my son?”
Deiphobus grins. “As in the old days, my father, for every god who wishes us ill, we have our protectors. Apoll
o is here with his silver bow. Ares led our counterattack at dawn. Demeter and Aphrodite…” He stops.
“Aphrodite?” says Hector. His voice is cold and flat, like a knife dropped on marble. Here was the goddess Andromache had said had killed Hector’s babe. Here was the name that forged the alliance between the greatest enemies in history—Hector and Achilles—and began their war against the gods.
“Yes,” says Deiphobus. “Aphrodite fights alongside the other gods who love us. Aphrodite tells us that it was not she who slayed our beloved Scamandrius, our Astyanax, our young lord of the city.”
Hector’s lips are white. “Continue,” he says.
Deiphobus takes a breath. Helen looks around the great hall. The scores of faces are white, intense, rapt with the force of the moment.
“Agamemnon and his men and their immortal allies are regrouping near their black ships,” says Hector ‘s balding brother. “They got close enough in the night to throw their ladders against our walls and send many a brave son of Ilium down to Hades, but their attacks were not well coordinated and came too soon—before the bulk of their captains and men were back through the Hole—and with Apollo’s help and Ares’ leadership, we threw them back beyond Thicket Ridge, back beyond their own old trenches and the abandoned moravec revetments.”
For a long moment there is total silence in the hall as Hector sits there, gaze lowered, seemingly lost in thought. His polished helmet in the crook of his arm gleams and throws a distorted reflection of the nearest watching faces.
Hector stands, walks to Deiphobus, clasps his brother’s shoulder a second, and turns to his father.
“Noble Priam, beloved Father, Deiphobus—dearest of all my brothers—has saved our city while I sulked in my apartments like an old woman lost in sour memories. But I ask now that I may be forgiven and that I might enter the ranks again in the defense of our city.”
Priam’s rheumy eyes seem to gain a faint glimmer of life. “You would put aside your fight with the gods who help us, my son?”