Ilium

by Dan Simmons

  Stumbling with words, I say, “I tried to find the fulcrum,” and go on to explain my useless charade with Achilles, the kidnap of Patroclus, my plan to turn the heroes of the war against the gods to save . . . everyone, everything.

  “But you did not kill Patroclus?” says Helen, her dark eyes intense.

  “No. I just took him . . . elsewhere.”

  “Using the gods’ method of travel,” says Helen.

  “Yes.”

  “But you could not spirit away Astyanax, Hector’s son, this way?”

  I shake my head dumbly.

  I see Helen thinking, her beautiful dark eyes lost in reverie. How can she believe my explanations? Who in the hell does she think I am? Why had she befriended me before—“befriended” being somewhat of a euphemism for that long night of passion—and what will she do with me now?

  As if to answer that last question, Helen rises with a grim look in her eye and goes out of the bathing room. I hear her calling names in the hallway and know that the guards will be back with her in less than a minute, so I raise my hand to the heavy QT medallion.

  I can’t think of anywhere to go.

  I have charge left in my taser baton, but I don’t reach for it as Helen returns with several others. But not guards—serving girls. Slaves.

  A minute later they are undressing me, stacking my filthy garments by the wall as other young women bring in tall pitchers of steaming hot water for the bath. I let them take the morphing bracelet off me, but I cling to the QT medallion. I shouldn’t get it wet, but I don’t want it out of my reach.

  “You are going to bathe, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” says Helen of Troy. She lifts a short, gleaming razor blade. “And then I am going to shave you myself. Here, drink this. It will restore your energy and spirits.” She hands me a goblet with a thick liquid inside.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Nestor’s favorite drink,” laughs Helen. “Or it was when the old fool used to visit my husband, Menelaus. It restores.”

  I sniff it, knowing that I’m being boorish. “What’s in it?”

  “Wine, grated cheese, and barley,” says Helen, lifting the goblet closer to my lips by moving my cupped hands upward. Her fingers look very white against my sun-darkened and dirty skin. “But I also add honey to sweeten it.”

  “So does Circe,” I say, laughing stupidly.

  “Who, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

  I shake my head. “Never mind. It’s in the Odyssey. Doesn’t matter. Irreli . . . irrele . . . irrelevant and immaterial.” I drink. The liquid has the punch of a Missouri mule. I wonder idly if there any mules in Missouri circa 1200 b.c.

  The young servant girls have stripped me naked, having me stand to pull off my tunic and underthings. I don’t even think to be embarrassed. I’m too tired and the drink has given my brain a distinct buzz.

  “Bathe, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” says Helen and offers me her arm to hold as I step into the deep and steaming bath. “I will shave you in the bath.”

  The water’s so hot that I cringe like a child, lowering myself carefully, hesitating to let the steaming water touch my scrotum. But I do—I’m too tired to fight gravity—and when I lean back against the slanted marble back of the tub, Helen’s servants lathering my whisker-stubbled cheeks and neck, I don’t even worry about Helen handling the razor’s blade so close to my eyes and jugular. I trust her.

  Feeling Nestor’s drink giving me energy again, deciding that if Helen offers me her bed I’ll definitely ask her to share it with me in this last hour or so before dawn, I close my eyes for just a moment. Just a few seconds.

  When I awake it’s mid-morning, at least, with heavy light coming through small windows high on the wall. I’m shaved and clean, even perfumed. I’m also lying on a cold, stone floor in an empty room, not in Helen’s high bed. And I’m naked—completely naked, not even the QT medallion in sight. As real awareness flows into my brain like reluctant water into a leaky basin, I notice that I’m tied with multiple leather straps to iron rings in the wall and floor. Leather restraints run from my wrists—knotted together over my head—to the wall. Straps from my bound ankles, legs spread apart, run a few inches to two other iron rings in the floor.

  This posture and situation would be embarrassing and alarming even if I were alone, but I’m not. Five women are standing over me, staring down at me. None of them look amused. I tug at the leather reins as I instinctively try to cover my genitals, but the straps are short and my hands don’t even lower to the level of my shoulders. Nor do the straps on my ankles allow me to close my legs. I see now that all of the women are carrying daggers, although some of the blades seem long enough to be called swords.

  I know the women. Besides Helen in the center, there is Hecuba, King Priam’s queen, Hector’s and Paris’s gray-haired but attractive mother. Next to Hecuba is Laodice, the queen’s daughter and the warrior Helicaon’s wife. To the left of Helen is Theano, Cisseus’ daughter, the Trojan horseman Antenor’s wife, but—and possibly more relevant to my current situation—Ilium’s primary priestess serving the goddess Athena. I can’t imagine that Theano will be happy to hear that this mere mortal man has taken the form and used the voice of the goddess she’s served her entire life. I look at Theano’s grim expression and guess that she’s already heard the news.

  Finally there is Andromache, Hector’s wife, the woman whose child I was going to kidnap and carry away to exile in Indiana. Her expression is the sternest of all the women’s. She is tapping a long, razor-sharp dagger against her palm and she looks impatient.

  Helen sits on a low couch near me. “Hock-en-bear-eeee, you need to tell us all the story you have told me. Who you are. Why you have been watching the war. What the gods are like and what you tried to do during the night.”

  “Will you release me first?” My tongue feels thick. She drugged me.

  “No. Speak now. Tell only the truth. Theano has been given the gift from Athena of telling truth from lies, even from someone whose accent is as barbaric as yours. Speak now. Leave nothing out.”

  I hesitate. Perhaps my best bet here might be to keep my mouth shut.

  Leano goes to one knee next to me. She’s a lovely young woman with pale gray eyes, like her goddess. Her dagger blade is short, broad, double-edged, and very cold. I know the cold part because she’s just laid the blade under my testicles, lifting them like an offering on a silver serving knife. The dagger’s point draws blood in my sensitive perineum and my whole body tries to contract and rise away, even as I just succeed in not crying out.

  “Tell everything, lie about nothing,” whispers Athena’s high priestess. “At your first lie, I will feed you your left stone. Your second lie, you eat the right one. Your third lie and I will be feeding my hounds whatever is left.”

  So, all right, I tell everything. Who I am. How the gods have revived me for scholic duty. My impressions of Olympos. My revolt against my Muse, my attack on Aphrodite and Ares, my plot to turn Achilles and Hector against the gods . . . everything. The point of her dagger never moves and the metal under me never warms.

  “You took the form of the goddess Athena?” whispers Theano. “You have this in your power?”

  “The tools I carry do,” I say. “Or they did.” I actually close my eyes and grit my teeth, waiting for the cut, slash, plop.

  Helen speaks. “Tell Hecuba, Laodice, Theano, and Andromache about your view of the near future. Our fates.”

  “He is no seer granted such vision by the gods,” says Hecuba. “He is not even civilized. Listen to his speech. Bar bar bar bar.”

  “He admits to coming from far away,” says Helen. “He can’t help being a barbarian. But listen to what he sees in our future, noble daughter of Dymas. Tell us, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  I lick my lips. Theano’s eyes are the transparent, North Sea gray of a true believer, a Waffen SS man’s eyes. Hecuba’s eyes are dark and don’t show as much intelligence as Helen’s. Laodice’s gaze is hooded; Andromache’s bright and fierce and d
angerously strong.

  “What do you want to know?” I say. Anything I say will be about the fate of these people’s lives and husbands and city and children.

  “Everything that is true. Everything that you think you know,” says Helen.

  I hesitate only a second then, trying to pay no attention to Theano’s feminist blade against my nether regions.

  “This is not a vision of the future,” I say, “but rather my memory of a tale that is told of your future, which is my past.”

  Knowing that what I just said can’t make any sense to any of them, and wondering if it even came through my barbarous accent—accent? I don’t think I speak this Greek with an accent—I tell them about the days and months to come.

  I tell them that Ilium will fall, that blood will run in the streets, and that all their homes will be put to the torch. I tell Hecuba that her husband, Priam, will be murdered at the foot of Zeus’s statue in their private temple. I tell Andromache that her husband, Hector, will be cut down by Achilles when no one from the city has the nerve to go out and fight alongside her love, and that Hector’s body will be dragged around the city behind Achilles’ chariot and then be dragged back to the Achaean camp to be pissed on by the soldiers and worried by the Greek dogs. Then I tell her that in just a few weeks, her son, Scamandrius, will be thrown down from the highest point on the city’s wall, his brains dashed out on the rocks below. I tell Andromache that her pain will not be over then, because she will be condemned to live and to be dragged back to the Greek isles as a slave, how she will end her days serving meals to the men who killed Hector and burned her city and killed her son. That she will end her days listening to their jokes and sitting silently while the aging Achaean heroes tell stories about these glorious days of rape and plunder.

  I describe to Laodice and Theano the rape of Cassandra, and the rape of thousands of the Trojan women and girls and how thousands more will choose the sword rather than such shame. I tell Theano of how Odysseus and Diomedes will steal the sacred Palladion stone from Athena’s secret temple and then return in conquest to desecrate and destroy the temple itself. I tell the priestess with the blade at my balls how Athena does nothing—nothing—to stop this rape and plunder and desecration.

  And I repeat to Helen the details of Paris’s death and her own enslavement at the hands of her former husband, Menelaus.

  And then, when I’ve told everything I know from the Iliad and explain again how I don’t know that all of this will come to pass, but explain how so much from the poem has come to pass during my nine years of duty here, I stop. I could tell them about Odysseus’ wanderings, or about Agamemnon’s murder after his homecoming, or even about Virgil’s Aenead with the ultimate triumph of Troy in the founding of Rome, but they wouldn’t care about any of that.

  When I finish my litany of doom, I fall silent. None of the five women are crying. None of the five shows any expression that wasn’t on her face when I’d begun my descriptions of their fate.

  Exhausted, depleted, I close my eyes and await my own fate.

  They allow me to dress, although Helen has the servants bring me fresh undergarments and tunic. Helen holds up each tool—the QT medallion, the taser baton, the Hades Helmet, and the morphing bracelet—and asks if it is part of my “power borrowed from the gods.” I consider lying—I especially want the Hades Helmet back—but in the end I tell the truth about each item. “Will it work for one of us if we try to use it?” asks Helen.

  Here I hesitate, because I really don’t know. Did the gods make the baton and morphing bracelet fingerprint-dependent to keep the weapon out of Greek and Trojan hands if we fell on the battlefield? Quite possibly. None of us scholics ever asked. The morphing device and the QT medallion, at least, will require some training, and I tell the women that. The Hades Helmet will almost certainly work for anyone, since it is a stolen artifact. Helen keeps all of the tools, leaving me only the impact armor that is woven into my cape and leather breastplate. She puts the priceless gifts from the gods in a small embroidered bag, the other women nod, and we leave.

  We leave Helen’s house—the five women and me—and walk through the mid-morning city streets to the Temple of Athena.

  “What’s going to happen?” I ask as we hurry through the crowded lanes and alleys, five grim-faced women in black robes not dissimilar from Twentieth Century Muslim burkas and one confused man. I keep looking above the rooftops, expecting the Muse to appear in her chariot at any moment.

  “Silence,” hisses Helen. “We’ll speak when Theano casts silence around us so even the gods cannot hear.”

  Before we enter the temple, Theano produces a black robe and insists I pull it on. Now we all look like robed women entering the temple through a back door, moving down empty corridors, although one of the six women is wearing combat sandals.

  I’ve never been in the temple, and my glimpse into the main hall through open doors is not disappointing. The space is huge, mostly dark, lighted by hanging braziers and votive candles. It smells and feels most like a Catholic church to me—the scent of incense in a cavernous space where even the echoes are hushed. But instead of a Catholic altar and statues of the Virgin Mary and Child, this space is dominated by a huge central statue to Athena—thirty feet tall, at least, carved of white stone but garishly painted with red lips, blushing cheeks, pink skin—the goddess’s gray eyes look to be made of mother of pearl stone—and she is brandishing an elaborate shield of real gold, a breastplate of burnished copper inlaid with gold, a sash of lapis lazuli, and a forty-foot spear of real bronze. It’s impressive and I pause at the open door, staring into the sanctuary. There, right there by Athena’s sacred sandaled feet, will Ajax the Great trap and rape Cassandra, Priam’s daughter.

  Helen comes back, seizes my arm, and roughly pulls me along the corridor. I wonder if I’m the first man ever to see into the inner sanctuary of Athena’s Temple in Ilium. Isn’t the Palladion statue and the temple itself watched over by young virgins? I look up to see the priestess Theano glaring at me and I hurry to catch up. Theano’s no virgin—she’s fierce Antenor’s wife and a piece of tempered work to be reckoned with.

  I follow the women down a shadowed staircase to a broad basement, lit only with a few candles. Here Theano looks around, moves a tapestry aside, removes an oddly shaped key from a pocket in her robe, slides it into a seemingly solid wall, and the slab of wall pivots, opening onto a steeper staircase lighted with torches. Theano hurries us all through.

  There is a corridor leading to four rooms in this basement under the basement, and I’m herded into the final room, a small place by temple standards—little more than twenty feet by twenty feet, furnished only by a central wooden table, four fire tripods barely glowing—one in each corner—and a single statue of Athena, cruder and smaller than all of the sculptures above. This Athena is less than four feet tall.

  “This is the real Palladion, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” whispers Helen, referring to the sacred sculpture carved from a stone which fell from heaven one day, thus showing Athena’s blessing over the city of Ilium. When the Palladion is stolen, so the century-old story goes, Troy will fall.

  Theano and Hecuba stare Helen into silence. My former lover—well, my former one-night stand—dumps the contents of her bag on the table and we all sit on the wooden stools, staring at the Hades Helmet, morphing bracelet, taser baton, and QT medallion. Only the medallion looks like it might be worth anything. The rest of the stuff I’d probably pass over at a garage sale.

  Hecuba speaks to Helen. “Tell this . . . man . . . that we must see if his story can be true. If these toys of his have any power.” Hector’s and Paris’s mother lifts the morphing bracelet.

  I know she can’t activate it, but I still say, “That has only minutes of power in it. Don’t fool around with it.”

  The old woman shoots me a scathing glance. Laodice picks up the taser baton and turns it in her pale hands. “This is the weapon you used to stun Patroclus?” she asks. It is the first time
she’s spoken in my presence.

  “Yes.”

  “How does it work?”

  I tell her the three spots I have to tap and twist to activate the wand. I’m certain that the thing is designed to work only when I’m holding it. Certainly the gods wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave the weapon usable for others if I lost it, even though the double tap and single twist are a safety mechanism of sorts. I start to explain to Laodice and the others that only I can use the gods’ tools.

  Laodice aims the taser at my chest and taps the shaft of the wand again.

  Once, when I was hiking with Susan in Brown County, Indiana, we were crossing a hilltop meadow when lightning struck just ten paces from me, knocking me off my feet, blinding me, and leaving me semiconscious for several minutes. We used to joke about that—about the odds against it—but the memory of the jolt used to make my mouth go dry.

  This blast is worse.

  It feels as if someone has hit me in the chest with a hot poker. I fly off my stool, land numbly on the stone floor, and remember spasming like an epileptic—my arms and legs kicking wildly—before I lose consciousness.

  When I come to, hurting, my ears buzzing, my head aching, the four women are ignoring me, looking into the corner at nothing.

  Four women? I thought there were five. I sit up and shake my head, trying to get my vision back in focus. Andromache’s missing. Perhaps she went for help, to find a healer. Maybe the women thought I was dead.

  Suddenly Andromache flickers into visibility in the empty space where the others are looking. Hector’s wife pulls the Hades Helmet cowl from her shoulders and holds it out.

  “The Helmet of Death works, just as the old tales say,” says Andromache. “Why would the gods give it to such as he?” She nods in my direction and drops the leather and metal cowl-helmet onto the table.

  Theano holds up the QT medallion. “We can’t make this work,” she says. “Show us.” It takes me a fuzzy moment to realize that the priestess is speaking to me.