by Dan Simmons
Hephaestus moans and shouts a truly obscene curse.
Knowing that the god’s next move will be to teleport away, Achilles throws himself on the shorter, bulkier figure, wrapping his legs around Hephaestus’s waist in a rib-crunching scissors hold, setting his left arm around the bearded god’s neck, and pulling the short god-killing knife from his belt and holding it under the fire god’s chin.
“You fly away, I go with you and kill you at the same time,” hisses Apollo in the artificer’s hairy ear.
“You…can’t…kill…a fucking…god,” gasps Hephaestus, using his blunt, calloused god-fingers to try to pry Achilles’ forearm away from his throat.
Achilles uses the Athena-blade to draw a three-inch cut—long but shallow—under Hephaestus’ chin. Golden ichor spills onto the ratty beard. At the same instant, Achilles closes his legs tighter around the god’s creaking ribs.
The god shoots electricity through his body and into Achilles’ thighs. Achilles grimaces at the high voltage but does not release his grip. The god exerts superhuman strength to escape—Achilles counters with even more superhuman strength and holds him tight, increasing the pressure of his scissoring legs. Achilles brings the blade up more sharply under the red-faced god’s chin.
Hephaestus grunts, woofs, and goes limp. “All right…enough,” he gasps. “You win this match, son of Peleus.”
“Give me your word that you will not flick away.”
“I give you my word,” gasps Hephaestus. He groans as Achilles tightens his powerful thighs.
“And know that I will kill you when you break your word,”growls Achilles. He rolls away, aware that the air is too thin for him to stay conscious more than a few more seconds. Grabbing the fire god by his tunic and tangled hair, he drags him through the forcefield into the warmth and thick air of the enclosed crystal staircase.
Once inside, Achilles throws the god down on the metal steps and wraps his legs around Hephaestus’ ribs again. He knows through watching Hockenberry and the gods themselves that when they QT away to wherever they’re going, they transport with them anyone who is in physical contact.
Wheezing, moaning, Hephaestus glances at the linen-wrapped body of Penthesilea and says, “What brings you up to Olympos, fleet-footed Achilles? Bringing your laundry up to be washed?”
“Shut up,” gasps Achilles. The three days without food and the exertions of climbing sixty thousand feet on an airless mountain have taken too much out of him. He can feel his superhuman strength ebbing like water out of a sieve. Another minute and he’ll have to release Hephaestus—or kill him.
“Where did you get that knife, mortal?” asks the bearded and ichor-bleeding god.
“Pallas Athena entrusted me with it.” Achilles sees no reason to lie and unlike some—crafty Odysseus for one—he never lies anyway.
“Athena, eh?” grunts Hephaestus. “She is the goddess I love above all others.”
“Yes, I have heard this,” says Achilles. Actually, what Achilles has heard is that Hephaestus pursued the virgin goddess for centuries, trying to have his way with her. At one point he came close enough that Athena was batting Hephaestus’ turgid member away from her thighs—and Greeks coyly used the word for “thighs” to mean a woman’s pudenda—when, dry humping for all he was worth, the bearded cripple of a god ejaculated all over her upper legs just as the more powerful goddess shoved him away from her. As a child, Achilles’ stepfather, the centaur Chiron, had told him many tales in which the wool, erion, that Athena used to wipe away the semen, or the dust in which that semen fell, all played interesting roles. As a man and the world’s greatest warrior, Achilles had heard the poet-minstrels sing of “bridal dew”—herse or drosos in the language of his home isle—but these words also meant a newborn child itself. It was said that various human heroes—some included Apollon—had been born of this semen-impregnated wool or dust.
Achilles decides not to mention either tale right now. Besides, he’s almost out of strength—he needs to conserve his breath.
“Release me and I will be your ally,” says Hephaestus, gasping again. “We are like brothers anyway.”
“How are we like brothers?” manages Achilles. He has decided that if he has to release Hephaestus, he will drive the god-killing Athena dagger up through the god’s underjaw and into his skull, skewering the artificer’s brain and pulling it free like spearing a fish from a stream.
“When I was flung into the sea not long after the Change, Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, and your mother, Thetis, received me on their laps,” gasped the god. “I would have drowned had not your mother—dearest Thetis, daughter of Nereus—caught me up and cared for me. We are like brothers.”
Achilles hesitates.
“We are more than brothers,” gasps Hephaestus. “We are allies.”
Achilles does not speak because to do so would be to reveal his approaching weakness.
“Allies!” cries Hephaestus, whose ribs are snapping one after the other, like saplings in the cold. “My beloved mother, Hera, hates the immortal bitch Aphrodite, who is your enemy. My adored beloved, Athena, sent you on this task, you say, so it is my will to aid you in your quest.”
“Take me to the healing tanks,” manages Achilles.
“The healing tanks?” Hephaestus breathes deeply as Achilles relinquishes the pressure a bit. “You’ll be found out there now, son of Peleus and Thetis. Olympos is in the thrall of kaos and civil war this day—Zeus has disappeared—but there are still guards at the healing tanks. It is not yet dark. Come to my quarters, eat, drink, refresh yourself, and I will then take you directly to the healing tanks in the dead of night, when only the monstrous Healer and a few sleepy guards are there.”
Food? thinks Achilles. It’s true, he realizes, that he will hardly be able to fight—much less command others to bring Penthesilea back to life—unless he gets something to eat soon.
“All right,” grunts Achilles, pulling his legs from around the bearded god’s middle and pushing the Athena-blade back in his belt. “Take me to your quarters on the summit of Olympos. No tricks, now.”
“No tricks,” growls Hephaestus, scowling and feeling his bruised and broken ribs. “But it is an ill day when an immortal can be treated this way. Take hold of my arm and we will QT there now.”
“A minute,” says Achilles. He can barely lift Penthesilea’s body to his shoulder, he is so weak. “All right,” he says, grabbing the god’s hairy forearm, “we can go now.”
34
The voynix attacked a little after midnight.
After helping to make and serve dinner to the Ardis Hall multitudes, Ada had joined in the evening heavy outside work of reinforcing Ardis’s defenses. Despite requests from Peaen, Loes, Petyr, and Isis—all of whom knew she is pregnant—she stayed outside in the cold and light snow, helping to dig the ditches about a hundred feet inside the fences of the palisade. It had been Harman and Daeman’s idea—fire ditches, filled with their precious lantern oil and ignited if the voynix managed to break through the palisade—and Ada wished that Harman and Daeman were there that night to help dig.
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 ba
gs 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 from 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 re-launch 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 d
ark 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?”