by Dan Simmons
“Ithaca,” says Achilles. “A rugged, rocky isle, but a good nurse to boys who would be men.”
“It looks and smells more like a hot, stinking shithole to me,” says the god of fire, limping along the dusty, rock-strewn trail that leads up a steep slope past meadows filled with goats and cattle to where the red tiles of several buildings glare in the merciless sun.
“I’ve been here before,” says Achilles, “the first time when I was a boy.” The hero’s heavy shield is strapped to his back, his sword secure in its scabbard on a belt hanging over his shoulder. The blond young man is not sweating from the climb or heat, but Hephaestus, limping along behind him, is huffing and pouring sweat. Even the immortal Artificer’s beard is wet with sweat.
The steep but narrow trail ends on top of the hill and in sight of several large structures.
“Odysseus’ palace,” says Achilles, jogging the last fifty yards.
“Palace,” gasps the god of fire. He limps into the clearing in front of the high gates, sets both hands on his crippled leg, and bends over as if he is going to be sick. “It’s more like a fucking vertical pigsty.”
The remnant of a small, abandoned fortress rises like a squat stone stump fifty yards to the right of the main house on the promontory overlooking the cliff. The home itself—Odysseus’ palace—is made of newer stone and newer wood, although the main doors—open—are comprised of two ancient stone slabs. Terra-cotta paving tiles on the terrace are made of expensive tile set neatly in place, obviously the work of the best craftsmen and stone masons—although equally obviously not dusted or swept recently—and all the outside walls and columns are brightly painted. Faux painted vines filled with images of birds and their nests spiral around the white columns on either side of the entry, but real vines have also grown there, their tangle inviting real birds and becoming home to at least one visible nest. Achilles can see colorful frescoes gleaming from the walls of the shadowy vestibule beyond the main doors, which have been left ajar.
Achilles starts forward but halts when Hephaestus grabs his arm. “There’s a forcefield here, son of Peleus.”
“I don’t see it.”
“You wouldn’t until you walked into it. I’m sure it would kill any other mortal man, but even though you’re the fleet-footed mankiller with what Nyx called your singularity probability quotient, the field would knock you on your ass. My instruments measure at least two hundred thousand volts in it and enough amperage to do real damage. Stand back.”
The bearded dwarf-god fiddles with boxes and corkscrewed metallic shapes hanging from the various leather straps and chest bands on his heavy vests, checks little dials, uses a short wand with alligator clip jaws to attach something that looks like a dead metallic ferret to some terminus in the invisible field, then links four rhomboid devices together with colored wire before pushing a brass button.
“There,” says Hephaestus, god of fire. “Field’s down.”
“That’s what I like about high priests,” says Achilles, “they do nothing and then brag about it.”
“You wouldn’t have fucking thought it was fucking nothing if you’d walked into that forcefield,” growls the god. “It was Hera’s work based on my machines.”
“Then I thank you,” says Achilles and strides through the archway, between the stone slabs of the open doorway, and into the vestibule and Odysseus’ home.
Suddenly there is a growling noise and a dark animal lunges snarling from the shadows.
Achilles’ sword is in his hand in an instant, but the dog has already collapsed on the dusty tiles.
“This is Argus,” says Achilles, patting the head of the prostrate and panting animal. “Odysseus trained this hound from a pup more than ten years ago, but told me that he had to leave for Troy before he ever took Argus hunting for boar or wild deer. Our crafty friend’s son, Telemachus, was supposed to be his master in Odysseus’ absence.”
“No one’s been his master for weeks,” says Hephaestus. “The mutt has all but starved to death.” It is true; Argus is too weak to stand or move his head. Only his large, imploring eyes follow Achilles’ hand as the hero pets the animal. The dog’s ribs stand out against his slack, lusterless hide like the hull timbers of an unfinished ship against old canvas.
“He can’t get outside Hera’s forcefield,” mutters Achilles. “And I’ll wager that there was nothing to eat inside. He’s probably had water from the rains and gutters, but no food.” He pulls several biscuits from the small bag he’s been carrying with his shield—biscuits purloined from the Artificer’s home—and feeds two to the dog. The animal can just barely chew them. Achilles sets three more biscuits next to the dog’s head and stands.
“Not even a corpse to feed on,” says Hephaestus. “What with the humans gone everywhere on your Earth now except around Ilium…just disappeared like fucking smoke. “
Achilles rounds on the limping god. “Where are our people? What have you and the other immortals done with them?”
The Artificer holds both palms high. “It wasn’t our doing, son of Peleus. Not even great Zeus’s. Some other force emptied out this Earth, not us. We Olympian gods need our worshipers. Living without our mortal grovelers, idolators, and altar-builders would be like narcissists—and I know Narcissus well—living in a world without mirrored surfaces. This wasn’t our deed.”
“You expect me to believe there are other gods?” asks Achilles, sword still half-raised.
“Big fleas have little fleas, and little fleas have littler fleas to bite ’em, and littler fleas have even smaller fleas, and so on ad infinitum, or some doggerel like that,” says the bearded immortal.
“Be silent,” says Achilles. He pats the now actively chewing dog on the head one last time and turns his back on Hephaestus.
They pass through the vestibule into the main hall—the throne room as it were—where Achilles had been received years earlier by Odysseus and his wife Penelope. Odysseus’ son Telemachus had been a shy boy of six then, barely up to the task of bowing to the assembled Myrmidons and then hurriedly being led away by his nurse. The throne room is now empty.
Hephaestus is consulting one of his instrument-boxes. “This way,” he says, leading Achilles from the throne room back across the brightly frescoed vestibule to a longer, darker room. It is the banquet hall, dominated by a low table thirty feet long.
Zeus is sprawled supine on the table, his arms and legs thrown akimbo. He is naked and he is snoring. The banquet hall is a mess—cups, bowls, and utensils thrown everywhere, arrows spilled out all over the floor from where a great quiver had fallen from the wall, another wall missing a tapestry that was bunched up under the snoring Father of the Gods.
“It’s Absolute Sleep, all right,” grumbles Hephaestus.
“It sounds like it,” says Achilles. “I’m surprised the timbers don’t collapse from the snores and snorts.” The mankiller is stepping carefully over the heads of barbed arrows that are scattered on the floor. Although few Greek warriors admit it, most use deadly substances for poison on their speartips and arrowheads, and the only thing Achilles, son of Peleus, knows from the Oracle’s and his mother Thetis’s predictions of his own death is that a poisoned arrowhead piercing the only mortal part of his body will be the cause of his demise. But neither his immortal mother nor the Fates had ever told him exactly where or when he will die, or who will fire the deadly arrow. It would be too absurdly ironic, Achilles thinks now, to prick a toe on one of Odysseus’ ancient fallen arrows and die in agony even before he can waken Zeus to demand that Penthesilea be saved.
“No, I mean Absolute Sleep was the fucking drug Hera used to knock him out,” says the Artificer. “It was a potion I helped develop into aerosol form, although Nyx was the original chemist.”
“Can you wake him?”
“Oh, I think so, yes, yes, I think so,” says Hephaestus, pulling small bags and boxes off the ribbons laced to his leather vest and harnesses, peering into the boxes, rejecting some things, setting ot
her vials and small devices on the tapestry-rumpled table next to Zeus’s giant thigh.
While the bearded dwarf-god fusses and assembles things, Achilles takes his first close-up gaze at Zeus the Father of All Gods and Men, He Who Marshals the Storm Clouds.
Zeus is fifteen feet tall, impressive even as he sprawls on his back, spraddle-legged on the tapestry and table, heavily muscled and perfectly formed, even his beard oiled into perfect curls, but other than the minor matters of size and physical perfection, he is just a big man who has enjoyed a great fuck and gone to sleep. The divine penis—almost as long as Achilles’ sword—still lies swollen, pink, and flaccid on the Lord God’s oily divine thigh. The God Who Gathers Storms is snoring and drooling like a pig.
“This should wake him up,” says Hephaestus. He holds up a syringe—something Achilles has never seen before—ending in a needle more than a foot long.
“By the gods!” cries Achilles. “Are you going to stick that into Father Zeus?”
“Straight into his lying, lusting heart,” says Hephaestus with a nasty cackle. “This is one thousand cc’s of pure divine adrenaline mixed with my own little recipe of various amphetamines—the only antidote to Absolute Sleep.”
“What will he do when he wakes?” asks Achilles, pulling his shield in front of him.
Hephaestus shrugs. “I’m not going to hang around to find out. I’m QTing out of here the second I inject this cocktail. Zeus’s response to being wakened with a needle in his heart is your problem, son of Peleus.”
Achilles grabs the dwarf-god by the beard and pulls him closer. “Oh, I guarantee it will be our problem if it is a problem, Crippled Artificer.”
“What do you want me to do, mortal? Wait here and hold your hand? It was your fucking idea to wake him up.”
“It’s also in your interest to awaken Zeus, god of one short leg,” says Achilles, not relinquishing his grip on the immortal’s beard.
“How so?” Hephaestus squints out of his good eye.
“You help me with this,” whispers Achilles, leaning closer to the grungy god’s misshapen ear, “and in a week it could be you who sits on the golden throne in the Hall of the Gods, not Zeus.”
“How can that be?” asks Hephaestus, but he is also whispering now. He still squints, but suddenly there is an eagerness in that squinting.
Still whispering, still holding Hephaestus’s beard in his fist, Achilles tells the Artificer his plan.
Zeus awakens with a roar.
As good as his word, Hephaestus has fled the instant he injected the adrenaline into the Father of the Gods’ heart, pausing only to pull the long needle free and fling the syringe from him. Three seconds later Zeus sits up, roars so loudly that Achilles has to clasp his hands over his ears, and then the Father leaps to his feet, overturns the thirty-foot-long heavy wooden table, and smashes out the entire south wall of Odysseus’ house.
“HERA!!!!” booms Zeus. “GOD DAMN YOU!”
Achilles forces himself not to cringe and cower, but he does step back while Zeus rips out the last of the wall, uses a timber to smash the overhanging chariot-wheel candle-chandelier to a thousand pieces, destroys the heavy, tumbled table with one smash of his giant fist, and paces wildly back and forth.
Finally the Father of All Gods seems to notice Achilles standing in the doorway to the vestibule. “YOU!”
“Me,” agrees Achilles, son of Peleus. His sword is in its belt loop, his shield politely strapped over his shoulder rather than on his forearm. His hands are empty and open. The god-killing long knife that Athena had given him for use in murdering Aphrodite is in his broad belt, but out of sight.
“What are you doing on Olympos?” growls Zeus. He is still naked. He holds his forehead with his huge left hand and Achilles can see the headache pain throbbing through Zeus the Father’s bloodshot eyes. Evidently Absolute Sleep leaves a hangover.
“You are not on Olympos, Lord Zeus,” Achilles says softly. “You’re on the isle of Ithaca—under a golden cloud of concealment—in the banquet hall of Odysseus, son of Laertes.”
Zeus squints around him. Then he frowns more deeply. Finally he looks down on Achilles once again, “How long have I been asleep, mortal?”
“Two weeks, Father,” says Achilles.
“You, Argive, fleet-footed mankiller, you couldn’t have awakened me here from whatever potion-charm white-armed Hera used to drug me. Which god revived me and why?”
“O Zeus Who Marshals the Thunderheads,” says Achilles, lowering his head and eyes almost meekly, as he has seen the meek do so many times, “I will tell you all you seek to know—and it is true that while most of the immortals on Olympos abandoned you, at least one god remained your loyal servant—but first I must ask for a boon.”
“A boon?” roars Zeus. “I’ll give you a boon you won’t forget if you speak again without permission. Stand there and be silent.”
The huge figure gestures and one of the three remaining walls—the one that had held the quiver of poison arrows and the outline of a great bow—mists into a three-dimensional vision surface much like the holopool in the Great Hall of the Gods.
Achilles realizes that he is looking at an aerial view of this very house—Odysseus’ palace. He can see the dog Argus outside. The starved hound has eaten the biscuits and revived enough to crawl into the shade.
“Hera would have left a forcefield beneath my cloaking golden cloud,” mutters Zeus. “The only one who could have lifted it is Hephaestus. I will deal with him later.”
Zeus moves his hand again. The virtual display shifts to the summit of Olympos, empty homes and halls, the abandoned chariots.
“They have gone down to play with their favorite toys,” mumbles Zeus.
Achilles sees a daylight battle in front of the walls of Ilium. Hector’s forces seem to be pushing the Argives and their siege machines back to Thicket Ridge and beyond. The air is filled with volleys of arrows and a score or more of flying chariots. Thunderbolts and bright red beams lash back and forth above the mortal battlefield. Explosions ripple across the battlefield and fill the sky as the gods do battle with each other even as their champions fight to the death below.
Zeus shakes his head. “Do you see them, Achilles? They are as addicted as cocaine addicts, as gamblers at their tables. For more than five hundred years since I conquered the last of the Titans—the original Changelings—and threw Kronos, Rhea, and the other monstrous Originals down into the gaseous pit of Tartarus, we have been evolving our godly, Olympian powers, settling into our divine roles…for WHAT???”
Achilles, who has not been explicitly asked to speak, keeps his mouth shut.
“DAMNED CHILDREN AT THEIR GAMES!!” bellows Zeus and again Achilles has to cover his ears. “Useless as heroin junkies or Lost Era teenagers in front of their videogames. After this long decade of their conniving and conspiring and secret fighting though I forbid it, and slowing time so they can arm their pet heroes with nanotech powers, they simply have to see it all to the bitter end and make sure their side wins. AS IF IT MAKES ONE GODDAMNED BIT OF DIFFERENCE!!”
Achilles knows that a lesser man—and all men are lesser men in Achilles’ view—would be on his knees screaming from the pain of the divine bellow by now, but the ultrasonic boom and roar of it still makes him weak inside.
“Addicts all,” says Zeus, his roar more bearable now. “I should have made them all sign up for Ilium Anonymous five years ago and avoided this terrible reckoning which now must come. Hera and her allies have gone too far.”
Achilles is watching the carnage on the wall. The image is so deep, so three-dimensional, that it is as if the wall has opened onto the crowded killing fields of Ilium itself. The Achaeans under Agamemnon’s clumsy leadership are visibly falling back—Apollo of the Silver Bow is obviously the most lethal god on the field, driving the flying chariots of Ares, Athena, and Hera back toward the sea—but it is not a rout, not yet, neither in the air nor on the ground. The view of the fighting gets Achilles’ bloo
d up and makes him want to rush into the fighting, leading his Myrmidons in a swath of counterattack and killing that would end only with Achilles’ chariot and horses scarring the marble in Priam’s palace, preferably with Hector’s body being dragged behind it, leaving a bloody smear.
“WELL??” roars Zeus. “Speak up!”
“About what, O Father of All Gods and Men?”
“What is this…boon…you want from me, son of Thetis?” Zeus has been pulling on his garments as he’s watched the events on the vision wall.
Achilles steps closer. “In exchange for finding you and awakening you, Father Zeus, I would ask that you restore the life of Penthesilea in one of the Healing vats and…”
“Penthesilea?” booms Zeus. “That Amazon tart from the north regions? The blond bitch who murdered her sister Hippolyte to gain that worthless Amazon throne? How did she die? And what does she have to do with Achilles or Achilles with her?”
Achilles ground his molars but kept his gaze—now murderous—turned downward. “I love her, Father Zeus, and…”
Zeus bellows in laughter. “Love her, you say? Son of Thetis, I’ve watched you on my vision walls and floors and in person since you were a baby, since you were a snot-nosed youth being tutored by the patient centaur Chiron, and never have I seen you love a woman. Even the girl who fathered your son was left behind like excess baggage whenever you felt the urge to go off to war—or whoring and rape. You love Penthesilea, that brainless blond pussy with a spear. Tell me another tale, son of Thetis.”
“I love Penthesilea and wish her restored to health,” grits Achilles. All he can think of at this second is the god-killing blade in his belt. But Athena has lied to him before. If she lied about the abilities of that knife, he would be a fool to move against Zeus. Achilles knows that he is a fool at any rate, coming here to beseech the Father for this gift. But he perseveres, eyes still lowered but his hands balled into powerful fists. “Aphrodite gave the Amazon queen a scent to wear when she went into combat with me…” he begins.