by Dan Simmons
She stood there in the morning light, legs slightly apart, not covering her breasts or pubic region with her hands but just letting her arms hang naturally at her sides. Her head was high and there was the slightest line of blood visible under her chin. Her gaze seemed to mix calm defiance with a mild curiosity about what was going to happen next. Even now, filled with fury as he was, he saw how she could have set these hundreds of thousands of men to killing one another. And it was a revelation to him that he could be so angry—close-to-killing angry—and still feel sexual desire for a woman. After the seventeen days in the 1.28-Earth-gravity acceleration field, he felt strong here on Earth, muscular, powerful. He knew that he could lift this beautiful woman in one arm and carry her wherever he wanted to, do whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted.
Hockenberry threw her clothes back to her. “Get dressed.”
She watched him warily as she picked up her soft garments. From the wall and Scaean Gate below came shouts, applause, and the banging of wooden spear shafts on bronze-and-leather shields as Priam ended his speech.
“Tell me what’s happened in the seventeen days I’ve been gone,” he said gruffly.
“That’s all you’ve come back for, Hock-en-bear-eeee? To ask me about recent events?” She was securing the low bodice across her white breasts.
He gestured her to the fallen piece of stone and when she’d taken a seat, he found another slab for himself about six feet away. Even with a knife in his hand, Hockenberry did not want to get too close to her.
“Tell me about the last weeks since I left,” he said again.
“Don’t you want to know why I stabbed you?”
“I know,” Hockenberry said tiredly. “You’d had me QT Menelaus out of the city but you decided not to follow him. If I was dead, and the Achaeans overran the city—which you were sure they were going to do—you could always tell Menelaus I refused to take you with me. Or something like that. But he would have killed you anyway, Helen. Men—even Menelaus, who’s not the sharpest sword in the armory—can rationalize being betrayed once. Not twice.”
“Yes, he would have killed me. But I hurt you, Hock-en-bear-eeee, so that I would have no choice… so that I had to stay in Ilium.”
“Why?” This didn’t make any sense to the former scholic. And his head hurt.
“When Menelaus found me that day, I realized that I was happy to go with him. Happy almost to be killed by him, if that had been his pleasure. My years here in Ilium as a harlot, as Paris’s false wife, as the reason for all this death, had made me mean in every sense of the word. Base, brittle, empty inside—common.”
You’re many things, Helen of Troy, he was tempted to say, but common is not one of them.
“But with Paris dead,” continued Helen, “I had no husband, no master, for the first time since I was a young girl. My first reaction of being glad to see Menelaus here in Ilium that day, I soon recognized as a slave’s happiness at seeing his chains and shackles again. By the time you joined us here in this very tower that night, all I wanted to do was stay in Ilium, alone, not as Helen, wife of Menelaus, not as Helen, wife of Paris, but just as… Helen.”
“That doesn’t explain why you stabbed me,” said Hockenberry. “You could have just told me you were staying after I delivered Menelaus to his brother’s camp. Or you could have asked me to transport you anywhere in the world—I would have obeyed.”
“That is the real reason I tried to kill you,” Helen said softly.
Hockenberry could only frown at her.
“That day, I decided to wed my fate not to any man’s, but to the city’s… to Ilium,” she said. “And I knew that as long as you were here and alive, I could make you use your magic to carry me anywhere… to safety… even as Agamemnon and Menelaus entered the city and put it to flames.”
Hockenberry thought about this for a long minute. It made no sense. He knew it never would. He set it aside. “Tell me about the last couple of weeks and what has happened,” he said for the third time.
“The days after I left you here for dead were dark ones for the city,” said Helen. “Agamemnon’s attack almost overwhelmed us that very night. Hector had been sulking in his apartments since before the Amazons went out to their doom. After the Hole had closed and it was certain that it wasn’t opening again, Hector stayed in his apartment, his thoughts his own, closed even to Andromache—I know she considered telling him the secret that their son still lived, but held off, not knowing how to explain the deception in any way that would not cause her own life to be forfeit—and during the next days’ battles, Agamemnon’s armies and their supporting gods killed many Trojans. Only the city’s Protector—Phoebus Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow—firing his always unerring arrows into the Argive multitudes kept us from being overrun and destroyed on those dark days before Hector rejoined the fray.
“As it was, Hock-en-bear-eeee, the Argives, under Diomedes, did breach our walls at their lowest point—where the wild fig tree stands. Three times before in the ten years that did proceed our ill-fated war with the gods had the Argives tried that same spot, our weakness, perhaps revealed to them by some skilled prophet, but three times before, Hector, Paris, and our champions had beat them back—Great and Little Ajax in their attempts, then Atreus’ sons, the third time Diomedes himself—but this time, four days after I tried to kill you and left your body here for the carrion birds, Diomedes led his warriors from Argos on the fourth assault on the point where the wild fig tree stands. Even while Agamemnon’s ladders were rising to the western wall and battering rams the size of great trees were splintering the Scaean Gate in its huge hinges, Diomedes attacked the low point on our wall by stealth and strength, and by sunset that fourth day, the Argives were inside the wall.
“Only the courage of Deiphobus, Hector’s brother, Priam’s other son, the man who has been chosen by the royal family to be my next husband—only Deiphobus saved the city through his courage. Seeing the threat when others were despairing about Agamemnon’s ladders and rams, Deiphobus swept up survivors of his old battalion, and Helenus’, and the captain named Asisu, son of Hyrtacus, and a few hundred of Aeneas’ fleeing men, and with the combat veteran Asteropaeus at his side, Deiphobus formed a counterattack through the overrun city streets, turning the nearby marketplace into a second line. In terrible battle with the winning Diomedes, Deiphobus fought godlike—parrying even Athena’s spearcast, for the gods were battling here with as much violence as the men—more!
“At dawn that day, the Argive line was stopped temporarily—our wall by the wild fig tree breached, a dozen city blocks burned and occupied by the raging Argives, Agamemnon’s hordes still trying to scale our western and northern walls, the great Scaean Gate hanging by splinters and holding only by its iron bands—and that was the morning that Hector announced to Priam and the other despairing royals that he would re-enter the battle.”
“And did he?” asked Hockenberry.
Helen laughed. “Did he? Never has there been such a glorious aristeia, Hock-en-bear-eeee. On the first day of his wrath, Hector—protected by Apollo and Aphrodite from Athena’s and Hera’s bolts—met Diomedes in a fair fight and killed him, casting his finest spear all the way through the son of Tydeus and sending his Argus’ fighters fleeing. By sunset that day, the city was whole again and our masons were building up the wall by the old fig tree, making it as tall as the wall near the Scaean Gate.”
“Diomedes dead?” said Hockenberry. He was shocked. Ten years watching the fighting here and the scholic had begun to think that Diomedes was as invulnerable as Achilles or one of the gods. In Homer’s Iliad, Diomedes’ exploits—his excursus, his glorious single-combat or aristeia—had filled Book 5 and the beginning of Book 6, second only in length and ferocity in Homer’s tale to that of Achilles’ unleashed wrath in Books 20–22… a wrath that was never to be realized here now, thanks to Hockenberry’s own tampering with events.
“Diomedes is dead,” repeated Hockenberry, stunned.
“And Ajax as well,” said Helen. “For on the next day, Hector and Ajax met again—you remember that they had once fought in single combat but parted friends, so valiant was each of their struggles. But this time, Hector cut down the son of Telamon, using his sword to beat down the big man’s huge, rectangular shield, bending its metal back on itself, and when Great Ajax cried out ‘Mercy! Show mercy, son of Priam!,’ Hector showed him none, but drove his sword through the hero’s spine and heart, sending him down to Hades before the sun had risen a hand’s breadth above the horizon that morning. Ajax’s men, those famed fighters from Salamis, wept and rent their clothes in mourning that day, but they also fell back in confusion, crashing into Agamemnon and Menelaus’ armies as they surged over Thicket Ridge—you know that ridge just beyond the city to the west that the gods call the Amazon Myrine’s mounded tomb?”
“I know it,” said Hockenberry.
“Well, this is where the dead Ajax’s fleeing army crashed into the attacking men from Agamemnon and Menelaus’ corps. It was confusion. Pure confusion.
“And into the melee swept Hector, leading his Trojan and Allied captains—Deiphobus now following his brother, Acamas and old Pirous leading the Thracians close behind, Mesthles and Antiphus’ son driving the Maeonians on with shouts—all the remaining and surviving Trojan heroes, thought beaten just two days before, were part of that charge. I stood on the wall just below here that morning, Hock-en-bear-eeee, and for three hours none of us—Trojan women, old Priam, no longer able to walk but who had been carried there in his litter, we wives and daughters and mothers and sisters and the boys and old men—none of us could see a thing for three hours, so great was the dust cloud kicked up by the thousands of warriors and hundreds of chariots. Sometimes volleys of arrows from one side or the other would shield the sun.
“But when the dust settled and the gods retreated to Olympos after that morning’s fighting, Menelaus had joined Diomedes and Ajax in the House of Death, and…”
“Menelaus is dead? Your husband is dead?” said Hockenberry. Again, he was deeply shocked. These men had fought and prevailed for ten years against each other, another ten months against the gods.
“Didn’t I just say that he was?” asked Helen, irritated at being interrupted. “Hector didn’t kill him. He was brought down by an arrow in the air, an arrow shot by dead Pandarus’ son, young Palmys, Lycaon’s grandson, using the same god-blessed bow that Pandarus had used to wound Menelaus in the hip just a year ago. But this time, there was no invisible Athena to flick aside the shaft, and Menelaus received the arrow through the eye-circle in his helmet and it passed through his brain and out the back of the bronze head-sheath.”
“Little Palmys?” said Hockenberry, aware that he was repeating names like an idiot. “He can’t be more than twelve years old…”
“Not yet eleven,” said Helen with a smile. “But the boy used a man’s bow—his dead father’s, Pandarus, brought low by Diomedes a year ago—and the arrow settled all my husband’s debts and resolved all our marital doubts. I have Menelaus’ blood-splashed helmet in my rooms at the palace if you would like to see it—the boy Palmys kept his shield.”
“My God,” said Hockenberry. “Diomedes, Big Ajax, and Menelaus dead in a single twenty-four-hour period. No wonder you’ve driven the Argives back to their ships.”
“No,” said Helen, “the day might well still have gone to the Achaeans if Zeus had not appeared.”
“Zeus!”
“Zeus,” said Helen. “On the day that had begun with glorious victory, the gods and goddesses on the side of the Argives were so infuriated by the deaths of their champions that Hera and Athena alone murdered a thousand of our valiant Trojans with their fiery bolts. Poseidon, the old Earth-Shaker himself, bellowed so in anger that a score of strong buildings in Ilium crashed to the ground. Archers tumbled from our walls like falling leaves. Priam was thrown from his throne-litter.
“All our gains that day were lost in minutes—Hector falling back, still fighting, his men falling around him, Deiphobus wounded in the leg, finally having to be carried by his brother even while our Trojan men beat a retreat back to Thicket Ridge, then from Thicket Ridge to and through the Scaean Gates.
“We women actually rushed down to help set the great bar across the splintered gates, so wild was the fighting—scores of raging Argives had come through into the city with our retreating heroes—and again Poseidon shook the earth, knocking everyone to their knees even as Athena neutralized Apollo in their sky battles, their chariots whirling and flashing through the sky, while Hera herself cast explosive bolts of energy at our walls.
“Then Zeus appeared in the east. Larger and more impressive than any living mortal has ever seen…”
“More impressive than the day he appeared as a face in the atomic mushroom cloud?” asked Hockenberry.
Helen laughed. “Much more impressive, my Hock-en-bear-eeee. This Zeus was a colossus, his legs rising higher than Mount Ida’s snowy summit in the east, his huge chest above the clouds, his giant brow so high above us as to be almost invisible, taller than the tops of the tallest stratocumulus piled high, one upon another, on a summer day before a storm.”
“Whoa,” said Hockenberry, trying to imagine it. He’d once tussled with Zeus—well, not tussled exactly, more just a sort of general scuttling away from him during an earthquake on Olympos, culminating in sliding between the Lord of All Gods’ legs to grab the dropped QT medallion so he could teleport away right at the beginning of the human-god war—and the Father of the Gods had been wildly impressive when he was just his usual fifteen feet tall. He tried to imagine this ten-mile-high colossus. “Go on,” he said.
“So when this giant Zeus appeared, the armies stopped in their tracks, froze like statues, swords raised, spears poised back, shields high—even the chariots of the gods froze in the sky, Athena and Phoebus Apollo as motionless as all the thousands of mortals below—and Zeus thundered forth—I cannot imitate his voice, Hock-en-bear-eeee, for it was all thunder and all earthquake and volcanoes erupting at once—but Zeus thundered—UNCONTROLLABLE HERA—YOU AND YOUR TREACHERY YET AGAIN!—I WOULD BE SLEEPING YET HAD NOT YOUR CRIPPLED SON AND A MORTAL AWAKENED ME. HOW DARE YOU BETRAY ME WITH YOUR WARM EMBRACE, SEDUCE ME BLIND, SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE YOUR WAY, PURSUE YOUR WILL OF DESTROYING TROY IN DEFIANCE OF YOUR LORD’S COMMAND!”
“Your crippled son and a mortal?” repeated Hockenberry. The crippled son would be Hephaestus, god of fire. The mortal?
“That’s what he bellowed,” said Helen, rubbing her pale neck as if her imitation of the bass earthquake-rumble had hurt her throat.
“And then?” prompted Hockenberry.
“And then, before Hera could speak in her own defense, before any of the gods could move, Zeus, the King of the Black Cloud, struck her down with a thunderbolt. It must have killed her, immortal as we all thought she was.”
“The gods have a way of returning after they are ‘killed,’ ” muttered Hockenberry, thinking of the huge healing tanks and their roiling blue worms up in the great, white building on Olympos, tanks tended by the giant insectoid Healer.
“Yes, we all know that,” Helen said in a disgusted tone. “Didn’t our own Hector kill Ares half a dozen times in the past eight months? Only to face him again a few days later? But this was different, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”
“How so?”
“Zeus’s lighting bolt destroyed Hera—threw bits of her golden chariot for miles, raining melted gold and steel on the rooftops of Troy. And gibbets of the goddess herself fell in a swath from the ocean to dead Paris’s palace—scorched shards of pink flesh, which none of us were brave enough to touch, but which simmered and smoked for days.”
“Jesus,” whispered Hockenberry.
“And then the mighty Zeus struck down Poseidon, opening a great yawning pit under the fleeing Sea God and dropping him into it, screaming. The screams echoed for hours, until all mortals—Argives and Trojans alike—wept from the sound.”
“D
id Zeus say anything when he opened this pit?”
“Yes,” said Helen, “he cried—I AM ZEUS WHO DRIVES THE STORM CLOUDS, SON OF KRONOS, FATHER OF MEN AND GODS, MASTER OF PROBABILITY SPACE BEFORE YOU WERE CHANGED FROM YOUR PUNY POST-HUMAN FORMS! I WAS THE MASTER AND KEEPER OF SETEBOS BEFORE YOU DARED TO DREAM OF BEING IMMORTALS! YOU, POSEIDON, SHAKER OF THE EARTH, MY BETRAYER, DO YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT YOU PLOTTED WITH MY OX-EYED QUEEN FOR MY OVERTHROW? I BANISH YOU TO TARTARUS, DEEP BENEATH HADES ITSELF, I SEND YOU PLUNGING DOWN TO THE PIT OF EARTH AND SEA WHERE KRONOS AND IAPETOS MAKE THEIR BEDS OF PAIN, WHERE NOT A RAY OF THE SUN CAN WARM THEIR HEARTS, DOWN TO THE DEPTHS OF TARTARUS WALLED ALL AROUND BY THE BLACK-HOLED ABYSS ITSELF!”
Hockenberry waited while Helen paused to clear her throat again.
“Do you have any water, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”
He handed her the wineskin he’d filled with water from the plaza fountain and waited in silence while she drank.
“And this is what Zeus spoke as he opened up a pit beneath Poseidon and sent the Shaker of the Earth screaming into Tartarus. Those soldiers on the wall who saw into the pit could not speak for days, only mumble or scream.”
Hockenberry waited.
“And then the Father of the Gods ordered all the other gods back to Olympos to face their punishment—you will pardon me, Hock-en-bear-eeee, if I do not try to imitate Zeus’s bellow—and in an instant the flying chariots were gone, the Lord of the Silver Bow was gone, Athena was gone, red-eyed Hades was gone, that bitch Aphrodite was gone, bloodthirsty Ares was gone—all our Pantheon disappeared, QTing back to Olympos like guilty children waiting for their displeased father to use the rod on them.”
“Did Zeus disappear then, too?” asked Hockenberry.
“Oh, no, the Son of Kronos had just begun to play. His towering form strode over Ilium and walked across the miles between here and the shore like Astyanax playing in his sandbox, striding over his toy soldiers. Hundreds of Trojans and Argives died under the giant feet of Zeus that day, Hock-en-bear-eeee, and when he reached Agamemnon’s camp, Zeus reached out his palm and burned all the the hundreds of black ships pulled up on the sand there. And for those Argive ships still at anchor, or the convoy pulling in from Lemnos bringing wine sent across by Euneus, Jason’s son, carrying gifts to Atrides Agamemnon and the dead Menelaus, Zeus closed his flaming hand into a fist and a great wave rose up, dashing the Lemnos ships and the anchored Argive ships ashore—again like toys, like Astyanax splashing in his bath, sinking his slave-carved balsawood toy boats in petulance divine.”