Olympos

by Dan Simmons

  Odysseus shakes his head. “There must be two hundred of these women, all dressed out in ill-fitting armor, son of Peleus. No Amazons these. They are too fat, too short, too old, some almost lame.”

  “Every day,” grumbles dour Diomedes, son of Tydeus, lord of Argos, “it seems we descend into another level of madness.”

  Teucer, the bastard master-archer and Big Ajax’s half brother, says, “Shall I advance the camp pickets, noble Achilles? Have them intercept these women, whatever the folly of their mission here, and frog-march them back to their looms?”

  “No,” says Achilles. “Let’s go out and meet them, see what brings the first women to venture through the Hole to Olympos and an Achaean camp.”

  “Perhaps they’re looking for Aeneas and their Trojan husbands leagues to our left,” says Big Ajax, son of Telamon, leader of the Salamis army supporting the Myrmidons’ left flank this Martian morning.

  “Perhaps.” Achilles sounds amused and mildly irritated, but not convinced. He walks out into the weaker Olympian sunlight, leading the group of Achaean kings, captains, subcaptains, and their most loyal fighting men.

  It is indeed a rabble of Trojan women. When they are within a hundred yards, Achilles stops with his contingent of fifty or so heroes, and waits for the clanking band of shouting women to come on. It sounds like a gaggle of geese to the fleet-footed mankiller.

  “Do you see any high-born among the women?” Achilles asks sharp-eyed Odysseus as they stand waiting for the rattling horde to cross the last hundred yards of red-gorse soil that separates them. “Any wives or daughters of heroes? Andromache or Helen or wild-eyed Cassandra or Medesicaste or venerable Castianira?”

  “None of those,” Odysseus responds quickly. “No one of worth, either born to or married into. I recognize only Hippodamia—the big one with the spear and the ancient long shield, like that which Great Ajax chooses to carry—and her only because she visited me in Ithaca once with her husband, the far-traveling Trojan Tisiphonus. Penelope took her for a tour of our gardens, but said later that the woman was as sour as a pre-season pomegranate and would take no pleasure in beauty.”

  Achilles, who can see the women clearly enough now, says, “Well, she herself is certainly no beauty to take pleasure in. Philoctetes, go forward, halt them, ask them what they are doing here on the our battleground with the gods.”

  “Must I, son of Peleus?” whines the older-archer. “After the libel spread about me yesterday at Paris’s funeral, I hardly think that I should be the one…”

  Achilles turns and silences the man with an admonishing glance.

  “I’ll go with you to hold your hand,” rumbles Big Ajax. “Teucer, come with us. Two archers and a master spearman should answer for this prickless rabble, even if they turn uglier than they already are.”

  The three men walk forward from Achilles’ contingent.

  What happens next happens very quickly.

  Philoctetes, Teucer, and Big Ajax stop some twenty paces from the obviously winded and gasping, loose-formed lines of armored women, and the former commander of the Thessalians and former castaway steps forward, holding Herakles’ fabled bow in his left hand while he holds his right palm up in peace.

  One of the younger women to the right of Hippodamia casts her spear. Incredibly, astonishingly, it catches Philoctetes—ten-year survivor of poison snakebite and the ire of the gods—full in the chest, just above his light archer’s armor, and passes clean through, severing his spine and dropping him lifeless to the red soil.

  “Kill the bitch!” screams Achilles, outraged, running forward and pulling his sword from its scabbard.

  Teucer, under fire now from wild-cast women’s spears and a hail of ill-aimed arrows, needs no such prompting. Faster than most mortal eyes can follow, he notches an arrow, goes to full pull, and sets a yard-long shaft through the throat of the woman who has cut Philoctetes down.

  Hippodamia and twenty or thirty women close with Big Ajax, thrusting spears tentatively and trying to swing their husbands’ or fathers’ or sons’ massive swords in awkward two-handed blows.

  Ajax, son of Telamon, looks back at Achilles for just an instant, giving the other men a glance of something like amusement, and then he pulls his long blade, slams Hippodamia’s sword and shield aside with an easy shrug, and lops off the woman’s head as if he were cutting weeds in his yard. The other women, maddened beyond fear now, rush at the two standing men. Teucer puts arrow after arrow into their eyes, thighs, flopping breasts, and—within a few seconds—fleeing backs. Big Ajax finishes the rest who are foolish enough to linger, wading through them like a tall man among children, leaving corpses in his wake.

  By the time Achilles, Odysseus, Diomedes, Nestor, Chromius, Little Ajax, Antilochus, and the others arrive, forty or so women are dead or dying, a few screaming their death agonies on the red-soaked red soil, and the rest are fleeing back toward the Hole.

  “What in Hades’ name was that all about?” gasps Odysseus as he comes up to Big Ajax and steps among the bodies thrown down in all the graceful and graceless—but all too familiar to Odysseus—attitudes of violent death.

  The son of Telamon grins. His face is spattered and his armor and sword run red with Trojan-women blood. “That’s not the first time I’ve killed women,” says the mortal giant, “but by the gods, it was the most satisfying!”

  Calchas, son of Thestor and their most able soothsayer, hobbles up from behind. “This is not good. This is bad. This is not good at all.”

  “Shut up,” says Achilles. He shields his eyes and looks toward the Hole where the last of the women are disappearing, only to be replaced by a small group of larger figures. “What now?” says the son of Peleus and the goddess Thetis. “Those look like centaurs. Has my old friend and tutor Chiron come to join our effort?”

  “Not centaurs,” says sharp-eyed, keen-witted Odysseus. “More women. On horseback.”

  “Horseback?” says Nestor, his old eyes squinting to see. “Not in chariots?”

  “Riding horses like the fabled cavalries of ancient days,” says Diomedes, who sees them now. No one rides horses in these modern days, using them only to pull chariots—although both Odysseus and Diomedes himself escaped a Trojan camp on a midnight raid some months earlier, before the truce, by riding bareback on untethered chariot horses through Hector’s half-awakened army.

  “The Amazons,” says Achilles.

  15

  Athena’s Temple. Menelaus advancing, red-faced, breathing hard—Helen on her knees, pale face lowered, paler breasts bared. He looms over her. He raises his sword. Her pale neck seems thin as a reed, offered. The endlessly sharpened blade will not even pause as it slices through skin, flesh, bone.

  Menelaus pauses.

  “Do not hesitate, my husband,” whispers Helen, her voice quavering only slightly. Menelaus can see her pulse beating wildly at the base of her heavy, blue-veined left breast. He seizes the hilt in both hands.

  He does not yet bring the blade down. “Damn you,” he breathes. “Damn you.”

  “Yes,” whispers Helen, face still downcast. The golden idol of Athena looms over them both in the incense-thick darkness.

  Menelaus grips the sword hilt with a strangler’s fervor. His arms vibrate with the twin strain of preparing to behead his wife while simultaneously stopping the action.

  “Why shouldn’t I kill you, you faithless cunt?” hisses Menelaus.

  “No reason, husband. I am a faithless cunt. It and I have both been faithless. Finish it. Carry out your rightful sentence of death.”

  “Don’t call me husband, damn you!”

  Helen lifts her face. Her dark eyes are precisely the eyes Menelaus has dreamt of for more than ten years. “You are my husband. You always were. My only husband.”

  He almost kills her then, so painful are these words. Sweat falls from his brow and cheeks and spatters on her simple robe. “You deserted me—you deserted me and our daughter,” he manages, “for that…that…boy. That popin
jay. That pair of spangled leotards with a dick.”

  “Yes,” says Helen and lowers her face again. Menelaus sees the small, familiar mole on the back of her neck, right at the base, right where the edge of the blade will strike.

  “Why?” manages Menelaus. It is the last thing he will say before he kills her or forgives her…or both.

  “I deserve to die,” she whispers. “For sins against you, for sins against our daughter, for sins against our country. But I did not leave our palace in Sparta of my own free will.”

  Menelaus grinds his teeth so fiercely that he can hear them cracking.

  “You were gone,” whispers Helen, his wife, his tormenter, the bitch who betrayed him, the mother of his child. “You were always gone. Gone with your brother. Hunting. Warring. Whoring. Plundering. You and Agamemnon were the true couple—I was only the breed sow left at home. When Paris, that trickster, that guileful Odysseus without Odysseus’ wisdom, took me by force, I had no husband home to protect me.”

  Menelaus breathes through his mouth. The sword seems to be whispering to him like a living thing, demanding the bitch’s blood. So many voices rage in his ears that he can barely hear her soft tones. The memory of her voice has tormented him for four thousand nights; now it drives him beyond madness.

  “I am penitent,” she says, “but that cannot matter now. I am suppliant, but that cannot matter now. Shall I tell you of the hundred times in the last ten years that I have lifted a sword or fashioned a noose from rope, only to have my tirewomen and Paris’s spies pull me back, urging me to think of our daughter if not of myself? This abduction and my long captivity here have been Aphrodite’s doing, husband, not my own. But you can free me now with one blow of your familiar blade. Do so, my darling Menelaus. Tell our child that I loved her and love her still. And know yourself that I loved you, and love you still.”

  Menelaus screams, drops the blade clattering to the temple floor and falls to his knees next to his wife. He is sobbing like a child.

  Helen removes his helmet, puts her hand on the back of his head, and draws his face to her bare breasts. She does not smile. No, she does not smile, nor is she tempted to. She feels the scratch of his short beard and his tears and the heat of his breath on her breasts that have held the weight of Paris, Hockenberry, Deiphobus, and others since Menelaus last touched her. Treacherous cunt, yes, thinks Helen of Troy. So are we all. She does not consider the last minute a victory. She was ready to die. She is very, very tired.

  Menelaus gets to his feet. He angrily wipes tears and snot from his red mustache, reaches down for his sword, and slides it back into his strap ring. “Wife, lay aside your fear. What’s done is done—Aphrodite’s and Paris’s evil, not yours. On the marble over there is a temple-virgin’s cloak and veil. Put them on and we’ll leave this doomed city forever.”

  Helen rises, touches her husband’s shoulder under the odd lion skin she once saw Diomedes wear while slaying Trojans, and silently dons the white cloak and laced white veil.

  Together they go out into the city.

  Helen cannot believe she is leaving Ilium like this. After more than ten years, to walk out through the Scaean Gate and put all this behind her forever? What of Cassandra? What of her plans with Andromache and the others? What of her responsibility for the war with the gods she—Helen—has helped start through their machinations? What, even, of poor sad Hockenberry and their little love?

  Helen feels her spirits soar like a released temple dove as she realizes that none of these things are her problem anymore. She will sail home to Sparta with her rightful husband—she has missed Menelaus, the…simplicity…of him—and she will see their daughter, grown into a woman now, and will view the last ten years as a bad dream as she ages into the last quarter of her life, her beauty undimmed, of course, thanks to the will of the gods, not hers. She has been reprieved in every way possible.

  The two are out in the street, walking as if both still in a dream, when the city bells ring, the great horns on the watchwalls blare, and criers begin to call. All of the city’s alarums are sounding at once.

  The shouts sort themselves out. Menelaus stares at her through the gap in his absurd boar-tusk helmet and Helen stares back through the thin slit of her temple-virgin veil and turban. In those seconds, their eyes somehow manage to convey terror, confusion, and even grim amusement at the irony of it all.

  The Scaean Gate is closed and barred. The Achaeans are attacking again. The Trojan War has begun anew.

  They are trapped.

  16

  “Could I see the ship?” asked Hockenberry. The hornet had emerged from the blue bubble in Stickney Crater and was climbing toward the red disk of Mars.

  “The Earth-ship?” said Mahnmut. At Hockenberry’s nod, he said, “Of course.”

  The moravec broadcast commands to the hornet and it came around and circled the Earth-ship gantry, then rose until it docked with a port on the upper reaches of the long, articulated spacecraft.

  Hockenberry wants to tour the ship, Mahnmut tightbeamed to Orphu of Io.

  There was only a second of background static before—Well, why not? We’re asking him to risk his life on this voyage. Why shouldn’t he see all of the ship? Asteague/Che and the others should have suggested it to him.

  “How long is this thing?” Hockenberry asked softly. Through the holographic windows, the ship seemed to drop away beneath them for miles.

  “Approximately the height of your Twentieth Century Empire State Building,” said Mahnmut. “But a little rounder and lumpier in places.”

  He’s certainly never been in zero-g, sent Mahnmut. Phobos gravity will just disorient him.

  The displacement fields are ready, tightbeamed Orphu. I’ll set them to point-eight-g on ship lateral and go to Earth-normal internal pressure. By the time you two get in the forward airlock, everything will be breathable and comfortable for him.

  “Isn’t this too large for the mission they were talking about?” said Hockenberry. “Even with hundreds of rockvec soldiers aboard, this seems like overkill.”

  “We may want to bring things back with us,” said Mahnmut. Where are you? he sent to Orphu.

  I’m on the lower hull now, but I’ll meet you in the Big Piston Room.

  “Like rocks? Soil samples?” said Hockenberry. He’d been a young man the week human beings had first set foot on the moon. Memories came back now of him sitting in the backyard of his parents’ house and watching the ghostly black-and-white images from the Sea of Tranquility on a small TV on the picnic table, extension cord running to the summerhouse, while the half-full moon itself was visible above through the leaves of the oak tree.

  “Like people,” said Mahnmut. “Perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of people. Hang on, we’re docking.” The moravec silently commanded the holoports off; attaching at right angles more than one thousand feet up the vertical hull of a spacecraft was a view that would give anyone vertigo.

  Hockenberry asked little and said less during his tour of the ship. He’d imagined technology beyond his imagining—virtual control panels that disappeared at the flick of a thought, more energy-field chairs, an environment built for zero-g with no sense of up or down—but what he saw felt like some gigantic Nineteenth or early-Twentieth Century steamship. What it felt like, he realized, was a tour of the RMS Titanic.

  Controls were physical, made of metal and plastic. Couches were clunky, physical things—enough, it looked like, for a crew of about thirty moravecs—the couch proportions were never really right for humans—along with long storage bins with metal-and-nylon bunks along bulkheads. Entire levels were set aside with high-tech-looking racks and sarcophagi for a thousand rockvec troopers, Mahnmut explained, who would make the trip in a state somewhere above death but below consciousness. Unlike their trip to Mars, the moravec explained, this time they were going armed and ready for battle.

  “Suspended animation,” said Hockenberry, who’d not avoided all sci-fi movies. He and his wife had had cable the
re toward the end.

  “Not really,” said Mahnmut. “Sort of.”

  There were ladders and broad stairways and elevators and all sorts of anachronistic mechanical devices. There were airlocks and science rooms and weapons’ lockers. The furniture—there was furniture—was large and clunky, as if weight were no problem. There were astrogation bubbles looking out toward the rim walls of Stickney and up toward Mars and down toward the gantry lights and moravec bustle. There were mess halls and cooking galleys and sleeping cubbies and bathrooms, all of which, Mahnmut hurriedly explained, were for human passengers, should they have any coming or going.

  “How many human passengers?” asked Hockenberry.

  “Up to ten thousand,” said Mahnmut.

  Hockenberry whistled. “So is this a sort of Noah’s ark?”

  “No,” said the little moravec. “Noah’s boat was three hundred cubits long by fifty cubits wide by thirty cubits tall. That translates to about four hundred fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in width, and forty-five feet high. Noah’s ark had three decks comprising a volume of about one million four hundred thousand cubic feet and a gross tonnage of thirteen thousand nine hundred and sixty tons. This ship is more than twice that long, half again that width in diameter—although you saw that some sections, like the habitation cylinders and holds, are more bulbous—and masses more than forty-six thousand tons. Noah’s ark was a rowboat compared to this craft.”

  Hockenberry found that he had no response to this news.