by Dan Simmons
“Sister, brothers, cousins all,” she began, “stop this show of petulance and pride before we harm ourselves and our mortal children, and fatally offend our Almighty Father, who will return—no matter where he is, he will return—carrying the wrath at our defiance on his noble brow and death-dealing lightning in his hands.”
“Oh, shut up,” cried Ares, shifting the long killing spear in his right hand to throwing position. “If you hadn’t dipped your wailing, mortal brat in the sacred river to make him near-immortal, Ilium would have triumphed ten years ago.”
“I dipped no one in the river,” said Thetis, drawing herself up to her full height and folding her slightly scaly arms across her breasts. “My darling Achilles was chosen by the Fates for his great destiny, not by me. When he was newborn—and following the Fates’ imperious advice sent through thoughts alone—I nightly laid the infant in the Celestial Fire itself, purging him, through his own pain and suffering—(but even then, though only a baby, my Achilles did not cry out!)—of his father’s mortal parts. By night I scarred and burned him terribly. By day I healed his scorched and blackened baby flesh with the same ambrosia we use to freshen our own immortal bodies—only this ambrosia was made more effective by the Fates’ secret alchemy. And I would have made my babe immortal, succeeded in insuring Achilles’ pure divinity, had I not been spied on by my husband, the mere human man Peleus, who, seeing our only child twitching and searing and writhing in the flames, seized him by the heel and pulled him free from the Celestial Fire only minutes before my process of deification would have been finished and done with.
“Then, ignoring my objections as all husbands will, the well-meaning but meddling Peleus carried our babe off to Chiron, the wisest and least man-hating of all the centaur race, rearer of many heroes himself, who tended Achilles through childhood, healing him by herbs and salves known only to the centaur savants, then growing him strong by nourishing him with the livers of lions and the marrow of bears.”
“Would that the little bastard had died in the flames,” said Aphrodite.
Thetis lost her mind at that and rushed at the goddess of love, wielding no weapons but the long fishbone-nails at the ends of her fingers.
As calmly as if shooting for a prize during a friendly picnic game, Aphrodite raised her bow and shot an arrow through Thetis’ left breast. The Nereid fell lifeless to the grass and the black pregoddess essence of her whirled around her corpse like a swarm of black bees. No one rushed to claim and capture the body for repair by the Healer in the blue-wormed vats.
“Murderess!” cried a voice from the depths, and Nereus himself—the Old Man of the Sea—rose from the trackless depths of Olympos’ Caldera Lake, the self-same lake he’d banished himself to eight months earlier when his earthly oceans had been invaded by moravecs and men.
“Murderess!” boomed the giant amphibian again, looming fifty feet above the water, his wet beard and braided locks looking like nothing so much as a mass of writhing, slithering eels. He cast a bolt of pure energy at Aphrodite.
The goddess of love was thrown a hundred feet backward across the lawn, her god-blood-generated forcefield saving her from total destruction, but not from flames and bruises as her lovely body smashed through two huge pillars in front of the Hall of the Gods and then through the thick granite wall itself.
Ares, her loving brother, cast his spear through Nereus’ right eye. Roaring so loudly that his pain could be heard in Ilium an infinite distance below, the Old Man of the Sea pulled out both spear and eyeball and disappeared beneath the red-frothed waves.
Phoebus Apollo, realizing that the Final War had begun, raised his bow before Hera or Athena could react and fired two heat-seeking arrows that honed on their hearts. His drawing and firing were faster than even immortal eye could follow.
The arrows—unbreakable titanium both, coated with their own quantum fields to penetrate other forcefields—nonetheless stopped in midflight. And then melted.
Apollo stared.
Athena threw back her helmeted head and laughed. “You’ve forgotten, upstart, that when Zeus is well and truly gone, the aegis is programmed to obey our commands, Hera’s and mine.”
“You started this, Phoebus Apollo,” white-armed Hera said softly. “Now feel the full force of Hera’s curse and Athena’s anger.” She gestured ever so slightly and a boulder weighing at least a half a ton, lying at water’s edge, tore itself loose from Olympos’ soil and hurtled at Apollo at such speeds that it twice broke the sound barrier before striking the archer in the side of his head.
Apollo flew backward with a great crash and clatter of gold and silver and bronze, tumbling head over heel for seven rods in his fall, his tightly curled locks now covered with dust and soiled with lake mud.
Athena turned, cast a war lance, and when it fell some miles across the Caldera Lake, Apollo’s white-columned home there exploded in a mushroom of fire, the million bits of marble and granite and steel rising two miles toward the humming forcefield above the summit.
Demeter, Zeus’s sister, cast a shock wave at Athena and Hera that only folded air and blast around their pulsing aegis, but which lifted Hephaestus a hundred yards into the air and slammed him far across the summit of Olympos. Red-armored Hades answered back with a cone of black fire that obliterated all temples, ground, earth, water, and air in its wake.
The nine Muses screamed and joined Ares’ rallying pack. Lightning leaped down from chariots that QT’d in from nowhere and the shimmering aegis lashed up from Athena. Ganymede, the cup bearer and only nine-tenths immortal, fell in the no-man’s-land and howled as his divine flesh burned away from mortal bones. Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, cast her lot with Athena but was immediately set upon by a dozen Furies, who flapped and flocked around her like so many huge vampire bats. Eurynome screamed once and was borne away over the battlefield and beyond the burning buildings.
The gods ran for cover or for their chariots. Some QT’d away, but most massed in war groups on one side of the great Caldera or the other. Energy fields flared in red, green, violet, blue, gold, and a myriad of other colors as individuals melded their personal fields into focused fighting shields.
Never in the history of these gods had they fought like this—with no quarter, no mercy, no professional courtesy of the sort one god always gave another, with no assurance of resurrection at the many, many hands of the Healer or hope of the healing vats—and worst of all, with no intervention from Father Zeus. The Thunderer had always been there to restrain them, cajole them, threaten them into something less than a killing rage against their fellow immortals. But not this day.
Poseidon QT’d down to Earth to oversee the Achaean destruction of Troy. Ares rose, trailing bloody golden ichor, and rallied threescore of outraged gods—Zeus loyalists all, Trojan supporters all—to his side. Hephaestus QT’d back from where he had been blasted and spread a poison black fog across the battlefield.
The War between the Gods began that hour and spread to all Olympos and down to Ilium in the hours that followed. By sunset, the summit of Olympos was on fire and parts of the Caldera Lake had boiled away to be replaced by lava.
18
Riding out to meet Achilles, Penthesilea knew without doubt that every year, month, day, hour, and minute of her life up to this second had been nothing more than prelude to today’s sure pinnacle of glory. Everything that had come before, each breath, every bit of training, each victory or loss on the battlefield, had been but preparation. In the coming hours her destiny would be fulfilled. Either she would be triumphant and Achilles dead, or she would be dead and—infinitely worse—cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.
The Amazon Penthesilea did not plan on being cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.
When she awoke from her nap in Priam’s palace, Penthesilea had felt strong and happy. She had taken time to bathe, and when she was dressing—standing in front of the polished metal mirror in her guest quarters—she paid attention to her own face and body
in a way she rarely if ever did.
Penthesilea knew that she was beautiful as judged by the highest standards of men, women, and gods. She did not care. It simply was not important to her warrior soul. But this day, while unhurriedly donning her cleaned garments and shining armor, she allowed herself to admire her own beauty. After all, she thought, she would be the last thing that fleet-footed mankilling Achilles would ever see.
In her midtwenties, the Amazon had a child-woman’s face and her large green eyes seemed even larger when framed, as they were now, by her short blond curls. Her lips were firm and rarely given to smiling, but they were also full and rosy. The body reflected in the burnished metal was muscled and tanned from hours of swimming, training, and hunting in the sun, but not lean. She had a woman’s full hips and behind, which she noticed with a slight pout of disapproval as she buckled her silver belt around her thin waist. Penthesilea’s breasts were higher and rounder than most women’s, even those of her fellow Amazons, and her nipples were pink rather than brown. She was still a virgin and planned to stay that way for the rest of her life. Let her older sister—she winced at the thought of Hippolyte’s death—be seduced by men’s tricks and carried away to captivity to be used as breeding stock by some hairy man; this would never be Penthesilea’s choice.
As she dressed, Penthesilea removed the magical perfumed balm from a silver, pomegranate-shaped vase and rubbed it above her heart, at the base of her throat, and above the vertical line of golden hair that rose from her sex. Such were the instructions of the goddess Aphrodite, who had appeared to her the day after Pallas Athena had first spoken to her and sent her on this mission. Aphrodite had assured her that this perfume—more powerful than ambrosia—had been formulated by the goddess of love herself to affect Achilles—and only Achilles—driving him into a state of overwhelming lust. Now Penthesilea had two secret weapons—the spear Athena had given her, which could not miss its mark, and Aphrodite’s perfume. Penthesilea’s plan was to deliver Achilles’ death blow while the mankiller stood there overcome with desire.
One of her Amazon comrades, probably her faithful captain Clonia, had polished her queen’s armor before allowing herself to nap, and now the bronze and gold gleamed in the metal mirror. Penthesilea’s weapons were at hand: the bow and quiver of perfectly straight arrows with their red feathers, the sword—shorter than a man’s, but perfectly balanced and just as deadly at close quarters as any man’s blade—and her double-bladed battle-axe, usually an Amazon’s favorite weapon. But not this day.
She hefted the spear Athena had given her. It seemed almost weightless, eager to fly to its target. The long, barbed killing tip was not bronze, nor even iron, but some sharper metal forged on Olympos. Nothing could dull it. No armor could stop it. Its tip, Athena had explained, had been dipped in the deadliest poison known to the gods. One cut in Achilles’ mortal heel and the poison would pump its way to the hero’s heart, dropping him within seconds, sending him down to Hades a few heartbeats after that. The shaft hummed in Penthesilea’s hand. The spear was as eager as she was to pierce Achilles’ flesh and bring him down, filling his eyes and mouth and lungs with the blackness of death.
Athena had whispered to Penthesilea about the source of Achilles’ near-invulnerability—had told her all about Thetis’ attempt to make the baby an immortal, thwarted only by Peleus pulling the infant from the Celestial Fire. Achilles’ heel is mortal, whispered Athena, its quantum probability set hasn’t been tampered with…whatever that meant. To Penthesilea, it meant that she was going to kill the mankiller Achilles—and womankiller and rapist as well, she knew, a scourge of women in his conquest of almost a score of cities taken by Achilles and his rampaging Myrmidons while the other Achaeans rested on their laurels and asses here on the coast. Even in her distant Amazon lands to the north, the young Penthesilea had heard how there had been two Trojan Wars—the Achaeans with their single-minded fighting here at Ilium, followed by long periods of sloth and feasting, and Achilles with his city-destroying, decade-long swath of destruction around all of Asia Minor. Seventeen cities had fallen to his relentless attacks.
And now it is his turn to fall.
Penthesilea and her women rode out through a city filled with confusion and alarms. Criers were calling out from the walls that the Achaeans were gathering behind Agamemnon and his captains. The rumor was that the Greeks were planning a treacherous assault while Hector slept and brave Aeneas was at the front on the other side of the Hole. Penthesilea noticed groups of women in the streets wandering aimlessly in ragtag bits of men’s armor, as if pretending to be Amazons. Now the watchmen on the walls were blowing trumpets and the great Scaean Gates were slammed shut behind Penthesilea and her warriors.
Ignoring the scurrying Trojan fighters falling into ranks on the plain between the city and the Achaean camps, Penthesilea led her dozen women east toward the looming Hole. She’d seen the thing during her ride in, but it still made her heart pound with excitement. More than two hundred feet tall, it was a perfect three-quarters circle sliced out of the winter sky and anchored in the rocky plains east of the city. From the north and east—she knew, since they’d approached from that direction—there was no Hole. Ilium and the sea were both visible and there was no hint of this sorcery. Only when approached from the southwest did the Hole become visible.
Achaeans and Trojans—staying separate but not fighting—were scurrying out through the Hole on foot and in chariots in long columns, as if some evacuation had been ordered. Responding to messages from Ilium and from Agamemnon’s camp, Penthesilea imagined, ordered to leave their front lines against the gods and to make haste home to prepare for renewed hostility against one another.
It did not matter to Penthesilea. Her goal was Achilles’ death and woe to any Achaean—or Trojan—who made the mistake of getting between her and that goal. She had sent legions of men in battle down to Hades before, and she would do it again today if she had to.
She actually held her breath as she led her double column of Amazon cavalry through the Hole, but all she felt upon emerging on the other side was a strange sense of lightness, some subtle shift in the light itself, and a momentary shortness of breath—when she did bother to inhale again—as if she were suddenly on a mountaintop where the air was thinner. Penthesilea’s horse also seemed to sense the change and pulled hard against the reins, but she forced him to his course.
She could not take her eyes off Olympos. The mountain filled the western horizon…no, it filled the world…no, it was the world. Straight ahead of her, beyond the small bands of men and moravecs and what looked like bodies on the red ground to the Amazon who had suddenly lost all interest in anything that was not Olympos, rose first the two-mile-high vertical cliffs at the base of the home of the gods, and then ten miles more of mountain, its slopes rising up and up and up…
“My Queen.”
Penthesilea heard the voice only distantly, recognized it at last as belonging to Bremusa, her second lieutenant after faithful Clonia, but ignored it as surely as she did the sight of the limpid ocean to their right or the great stone heads that lined the shore. These things meant nothing when compared to the looming reality of Olympos itself. Penthesilea leaned back in her thin saddle to follow the line of the shoulder of the mountain higher and then higher and then endlessly higher as it rose into and above the light blue sky…
“My Queen.”
Penthesilea swiveled to rebuke Bremusa only to find that the other women had reined their horses to a stop. The Amazon queen shook her head as if emerging from a dream and rode back to them.
She realized now that all the time she had been enraptured by Olympos, they had been passing women on this side of the Hole—women running, screaming, bleeding, stumbling, weeping, falling. Clonia had dismounted and had propped the head of such a wounded woman on her knee. The woman appeared to be wearing a bizarre crimson robe.
“Who?” said Penthesilea, looking down as if from a great height. She realized now that they had b
een following a trail of abandoned and bloody armor for the last mile or so.
“The Achaeans,” rasped the dying woman. “Achilles…” If she had been wearing armor, it had not helped. Her breasts has been cut off. She was almost naked. The crimson robe was actually her own blood.
“Take her back to…” began Penthesilea but stopped. The woman had died.
Clonia mounted and fell in to the right and rear of Penthesilea, where she always rode. The queen could feel the rage coming off her old comrade like heat from a bonfire.
“Forward,” said Penthesilea and spurred her war mount. Her war axe was strapped balanced across her pommel. Athena’s spear was in her right hand. They galloped the last quarter mile to the band of men ahead. The Achaeans were standing and bending over more bodies—looting them. The sound of the Greeks’ laughter was clear in the thin air.
Perhaps forty women had fallen here. Penthesilea slowed her steed to a walk, but the two lines of Amazon cavalry had to break ranks. Horses—even warhorses—do not like to step on human beings, and the bloodied corpses here—women all—had fallen so close that the horses had to pick their way carefully, setting their heavy hooves down in the few open spaces between the bodies.
The men looked up from their looting and pawing. Penthesilea estimated that there were about a hundred Achaeans standing around the women’s bodies, but none of these men was recognizable. There were none of the Greek heroes there. She looked five or six hundred yards farther on and saw a nobler group of men walking back to the main Achaean army.
“Look, more women,” said the mangiest of the men stripping the female corpses of their armor. “And this time they brought us horses.”
“What is your name?” asked Penthesilea.
The man grinned, showing missing and rotted teeth. “My name is Molion and I’m trying to decide whether to fuck you before or after I kill you, woman.”