Olympos

by Dan Simmons

  “Yes, this was my lament ten months ago, two weeks ago…but look at the world born anew this morning, my beloved Trojans. Zeus took away all the gods—those who wished to save us, those who wished to destroy us. The Father of the Gods struck down his own Hera in a blast of his thunder. Mighty Zeus has burned the Argives’ black ships and ordered all immortals to return to Olympos to face his punishment for disobedience. With the gods no longer filling the days and nights with fire and noise, my son Hector led our troops to victory after victory. Without Achilles to stop the noble Hector, the Achaean pigs have been driven back to the burned hulls of their black ships, their southern camps shredded, their northern camps put to the torch. And now they are bound in tight from the west by Hector and our Ilium-born, by Aeneas and his Dardanians, by Antenor’s two surviving sons, Acamas and Archelochus.

  “To the south, they are shut off from retreat by the shining sons of Lycaon and our faithful allies from Zelea, under the foot of Ida where Zeus oft makes his throne.

  “To the north, the Greeks are stymied by Adrestus and Amphius, trim in their linen corsets, leading the Apaesians and the Adestrians, marvelous in their new-acquired gold and bronze, wrenched from the dead Achaeans who fell in their panicked flight.

  “Our beloved Hippothous and Pylaeus, who survived the ten years of carnage and were ready to die this month with us, with their Trojan friends and brothers, but instead, this day, who lead their dark-skinned Plasgian warriors alongside the captains of Abydos and gleaming Arisbe. Instead of ignoble death and defeat this day, our sons and allies are but hours away from seeing the head of our enemy, Agamemnon, lifted high on a spike, while our Thracians and Trojans and Pelasgians and Cicones and Paeonians and Paphlagonians and Halizonians have lived to watch the end of this long war at last, and soon will be raking up the gold of defeated Argives, soon will be sweeping up the well-earned armor of Agamemnon and his men. This day, unable to flee to their black ships, all the Greek kings who came to kill and loot will be killed and looted.

  “This day, all the gods willing—and Zeus has already spoken it into being—let my friends and family—and our foes—witness our final victory. Let us see the end to this war. Let us prepare now—before this beginning day ends—to welcome home Hector and Deiphobus in a victory celebration that will last a week—no, a month!—a party of celebration and deliverance that will let your faithful servant Priam of Ilium die a happy man!”

  So spake Priam, King of Ilium, Father of Hector, and Hockenberry couldn’t believe his ears.

  Helen slipped away from the side of Andromache and the other women, then descended the wide steps back down to the city, with only Andromache’s warrior slave-woman, Hypsipyle, at her side. Hockenberry hid behind the broad back of an imperial spearman until Helen was out of sight on the steps, and then he followed.

  The two women turned down a narrow alley almost in the shadow of the west wall, then east up an even more narrow lane, and Hockenberry knew where they were going. Months ago, during his jealous phase after Helen had quit seeing him, he’d trailed Andromache and her here, discovering their secret. This was where Hector’s wife, Andromache, kept her secret apartment where Hypsipyle and another nurse watched over Andromache’s son, Astyanax. Not even Hector knew that his son was alive, that the baby’s murder by the hands of Aphrodite and Athena was a ruse by the few Trojan Women to end the war between the Argives and Trojans, turning Hector’s wrath toward the gods themselves.

  Well, Hockenberry thought now, staying back at the head of the smaller alley so the two women would not notice they were being followed, that ruse had worked wonderfully well. But now the war with the gods was over and it looked as if the Trojan War was in its final hour.

  Hockenberry didn’t want them to reach the apartment itself; there had been male Cicilian guards there as well. Now he bent and lifted a heavy, smooth, oval stone, just the size of his palm, and curled his fist around it.

  Am I really going to kill Helen? He had no answer to that. Not yet.

  Helen and Hypsipyle were pausing at the gate that led into the courtyard to the secret house when Hockenberry moved up quietly behind them and tapped the big Lesbos slave-woman on her brawny shoulder.

  Hypsipyle whirled.

  Hockenberry hit her in the jaw with a roundhouse uppercut. Even with the heavy rock in his fist, the big woman’s bony jaw almost broke his fingers. But Hypsipyle went backward like a toppled statue, her head striking the courtyard door on the way down. She stayed down, clearly unconscious, her big jaw looking broken.

  Great, thought Hockenberry, after ten years in the Trojan War, you finally joined the fighting—by suckerpunching a woman.

  Helen stepped back, the little hidden dagger that had once found Hockenberry’s heart already sliding down from her sleeve into her right hand. Hockenberry moved fast, clutching Helen’s wrist, forcing her hand and arm back against the rough-hewn door, and—his bleeding, bruised right hand barely working—pulling his own long knife from his belt and thrusting the point of it into the softness under her chin. She dropped her knife.

  “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she said, her head back but his knife drawing blood already.

  He hesitated. His right arm was shaking. If he was going to do this, he needed to do it quickly, before the bitch began to speak. She had betrayed him, stabbed him in the heart and left him for dead, but she had also been the most amazing lover he’d ever had.

  “You are a god,” whispered Helen. Her eyes were wide, but she showed no fear.

  “Not a god,” gritted Hockenberry. “Just a cat. You took one of my lives. I’d already been given one extra. I must have seven left.”

  Despite the knife point cutting into her underjaw, Helen laughed. “A cat having nine lives. I like that conceit. You always did have a way with words…for a foreigner.”

  Kill her or not, but decide now…this is absurd, thought Hockenberry.

  He pulled the point of the blade away from her throat, but before Helen of Troy could move or speak, he grabbed a fistful of her black hair in his left hand, held the dagger to her ribs, and pulled her down the alley with him, away from Andromache’s apartment.

  They’d come full circle—back to the abandoned tower overlooking the Scaean Gate wall where he’d discovered Menelaus and Helen hiding, where Helen had stabbed him after he’d QT’d her husband to Agamemnon’s camp. Hockenberry shoved Helen up the narrow, winding staircase all the way to the top, to the mostly open level now atop the tower that had been shattered by the gods’ bombing months ago.

  He pushed her toward the open edge, but out of view of anyone on the wall below. “Strip,” he said.

  Helen brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Are you going to rape me before you throw me over the edge, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

  “Strip.”

  He stood back with his knife ready as Helen slipped out of her few layers of silky garments. This morning was warmer than the day on which he’d left—the wintry day when she’d stabbed him—but the breeze up this high was still cool enough to cause Helen’s nipples to stand on end and to bring out goosebumps on her pale arms and belly. As she let each layer fall away, he told her to kick them over to him. Watching her carefully, he felt through the soft robes and silky under-shift. No other hidden daggers.

  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 whe
rever 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.”