by Dan Simmons
It’s no good. The guards are all around us now, ready to protect Helen, King Priam, and the other royal family members here by killing me or dragging me off in an instant. I’ll never convince Helen or Priam to warn the city in time.
Panting, aware of Hypsipyle’s heavy running footsteps coming down the rampart toward us, I gasp, “The sirens. Where did the moravecs put the air raid sirens?”
“Sirens?” says Helen. She looks alarmed now, as if my madness must be dealt with quickly.
“The air raid sirens. The ones that used to wail months ago when the gods attacked the city by air. Where did the moravecs—the machine-toy people—put the equipment for the air raid sirens?”
“Oh, in the anteroom of the Temple of Apollo, but Hock-en-bear-eeee, why do you…”
Keeping my grip firm on her upper arm, I visualize the steps of Apollo’s Temple here in Ilium and QT us there an instant before the guards and one big, angry woman from Lesbos can grab me.
Helen gasps as we pop into solidity on the white steps, but I drag her up into the anteroom. There are no guards here. Everyone in the city seems to be on the walls or in a high place to watch the end of the war play out on the beach to the west.
The equipment is here, in the small acolytes’ changing room next to the main temple anteroom. The air raid siren warning had been automatic, triggered by the moravecs’ antiaircraft missile and radar sites—now gone—that had been stationed outside the city—but, just as I remembered, the moravec engineers had put a microphone with the other electronic gear here, just in case King Priam or Hector had wanted to address the entire Trojan population through the thirty huge air-raid-siren loudspeakers set around the walled city.
I study the equipment for just a few seconds—it had been made simple enough for a child to use so that the Trojans could manage it themselves, and child-simple technology is exactly the kind Dr. Thomas Hockenberry can manage.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee….”
I flip the switch that says PA SYSTEM ON, throw the toggle that reads
LOUDSPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT, lift the archaic-looking microphone, and begin babbling, hearing my own words echoing back from a hundred buildings and the great walls themselves—
“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL PEOPLE OF ILIUM…KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE WARNING…EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS…NOW! GET OFF THE WALLS…NOW!! RUN FROM THE CITY INTO OPEN COUNTRY IF YOU CAN. IF YOU ARE IN A TOWER, EVACUATE IT…NOW!! AN EARTHQUAKE WILL HIT ILIUM AT ANY SECOND. AGAIN, KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE EVACUATION ORDER EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY…LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS AND SEEK OPEN SPACE NOW!!”
I echo on for another blaring minute, then switch off, grab the staring, open-mouthed Helen, and drag her out of the Temple of Apollo into the central marketplace.
People are milling and talking, staring at the various speaker locations from where my blaring announcement had come, but no one seems to be evacuating. A few people wander out of the large buildings that adjoin this central open plaza, but almost no one is running for the open Scaean Gate and the countryside as my announcement had commanded them to.
“Shit,” I say.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee, you are very worked up. Come to my chambers and we shall have some honeyed wine and…”
I tug her along behind me. Even if no one else is headed through the open gate and out away from the buildings, I sure as hell am. And I’m going to save Helen whether she wants me to or not.
I slide to a stop just before entering the narrowing avenue at the west end of the huge plaza. What am I doing? I don’t have to run like an idiot. I just have to visualize Thicket Ridge way out beyond the walls and QT us there…
“Oh, shit,” I say again.
Above us, horizontal, seemingly miles wide, descending rapidly, is the kind of Brane Hole I’d seen above Olympos earlier—a flat circle rimmed by flames. Through the Hole I can see dark sky and stars.
“Damn!” I decide at the last second not to quantum teleport—the chances of us getting caught in quantum space just as the Brane Hole hits us is too great.
I tug the staring, horrified Helen a dozen yards back toward the center of the huge plaza. With any luck we’ll be out of the range of the falling walls and buildings.
The hoop of fire falls around us past Ilium, falls past the surrounding hills, plains, marshes, and beaches for a circle of at least two miles, and the instant after it falls, we fall. There is a sensation of the entire city of ancient Troy being on an elevator suddenly cut free of its cables, and two seconds later all hell breaks loose.
Much later, the moravec engineers would tell me that the entire city of Ilium fell a literal five feet and two inches before landing on the soil of the present-day Earth. All of those fighting on the beach—more than one hundred fifty thousand struggling, screaming, sweating men—also suddenly dropped five feet two inches, and not onto soft beach sand, but onto the rock and tangled scrub brush that had taken the sand’s place after the coastline had retreated almost three hundred yards to the west.
For Helen and me in Ilium’s great city square, those last minutes of Ilium were almost our last minutes as well.
It was the topless tower near the wall beyond the southeast corner of that square—the same damaged, topless tower where Helen had stabbed me in the heart in what seemed like ages ago—that came falling over lower buildings, toppling and collapsing like some giant factory smokestack, crashing directly at us as we cowered in the open square near the fountain.
It was the fountain itself that saved our lives. The multistepped structure with its pool and central obelisk—no more than twelve feet tall—was just large enough to part the path of the tower’s tumbling debris, leaving us coughing in a cloud of dust and smaller pieces, but sending the larger stone blocks careering elsewhere across the marketplace.
We were stunned. The huge paving stones of the plaza itself had been shattered by the five-foot fall. The fountain obelisk was tilting at a thirty-degree angle and the fountain itself had stopped forever. The entire city was lost in a cloud of dust that did not fully clear away for more than six hours. By the time Helen and I picked ourselves up and started dusting ourselves off, coughing and trying to clear our nose and throats of all the terrible white powder, other people were already running—most randomly, in pure panic, now that it was too late to run—while a few had even begun digging in the ruins and rubble, trying to find and help others.
More than five thousand people died in the Fall of the City. Most had been trapped in the larger buildings—both the Temple of Athena and the Temple of Apollo had collapsed, their many pillars cracking and flying apart like broken sticks. Paris’s palace, now the home of Priam, was rubble. No one on the terrace of Athena’s temple survived except for Hypsipyle, who was still hunting for me when her part of the wall collapsed. Many of the people had been on the main west and southwest ramparts, which did not collapse in their entirety, but which tumbled outward or inward in many places, sending bodies flying out and down to the rocks on the Plain of Scamander or into the city and down onto the rubble. King Priam was one of those who died that way, along with several other members of the royal family, including the ill-fated Cassandra. Andromache—Hector’s wife and a survivor if ever there was one—survived without a scratch.
The city of Troy was as much in an earthquake zone in the ancient days as that part of Turkey is now, people knew how to react to quakes then much as they do now, and my announcement probably saved many. Many people did run to solid doorways or escaped to open spaces to avoid the collapsing buildings. It was later estimated that several thousand ran out onto the plain itself before the city fell, the towers tumbled, and the walls came down.
For my part, I stared around in stunned disbelief. The noblest of cities, this survivor of ten years of siege by the Achaeans and months more war with the gods themselves, was now mostly rubble. Fires burned here and there—not the omnipresent flames of a modern city of my era after an earthquake, for there were no ruptured g
aslines here—but fires enough from braziers and hearths and cooking kitchens and simple torches in windowless halls that were now open to the sky. Fires enough. The smoke mixed with the roiling dust to keep the many hundreds of us milling in the plaza coughing and dabbing at our eyes.
“I have to find Priam…Andromache…” said Helen between coughs. “I have to find Hector!”
“You go look after your people here, Helen,” I said between coughs. “I’ll go down to the beach in search of Hector.”
I turned to go but Helen grabbed my arm to stop me. “Hock-en-bear-eeee…what did this? Who did this?”
I told her the truth. “The gods.”
It had long been prophesied that Troy could not fall until the stone above the huge Scaean Gate was dislodged, and as I pushed my way out with fleeing crowds, I noticed that the wooden gates had splintered and that the great lintel had fallen.
Nothing was as it had been ten minutes earlier. Not only had the city been destroyed in an instant of encircling fire, but the surrounding area had changed, the sky had changed, the weather had changed. We weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I had taught the Iliad for more than twenty years at Indiana University and elsewhere, but I had never thought to go to Troy—to the ruins of Troy along the coast of Turkey. But I’d seen photos enough of the place at the end of the Twentieth Century and beginning of the Twenty-first Century. This place where Ilium had crash-landed like Dorothy’s house looked more like the ruins of Troy in the Twenty-first Century—a small area named Hisarlik—than like the busy center of empire that had been Ilium.
As I looked at the changed scenery—and changed sky, since it had been early afternoon when the Greeks were fighting their last stand, and it was now twilight—I remembered a Canto of Don Juan by Byron, written when the poet had visited this place in 1810 and had felt both the connection here to heroic history and the distance from it—
High barrows without marble or a name,
A vast, untilled and mountain-skirted plain
And Ida in the distance, still the same,
And old Scamander (if ’tis he) remain;
The situation seems still formed for fame—
A hundred thousand men might fight again
With ease; but where I sought for Ilion’s walls,
The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.
I saw no sheep, but when I looked back at the toppled city, the ridge-line was much the same—although obviously five feet two inches lower where the city had just fallen onto the rubble of amateur archaeologist Schliemann’s ruins. A memory struck me that the ancient Romans had sheared off yards of the top of that ridgeline to build their own city of Ilion more than a millennium after the original Ilium disappeared, and I realized that we’d all been lucky to fall just five feet two inches. If it hadn’t been for Roman rubble on top of Greek ruins, the fall would have been much worse.
To the north where the Plain of Simois had stretched for many miles, a low grassland perfect for pasturing and running the famous Trojan horses, there now grew a forest. The smooth Plain of Scamander, the area between the city and the shoreline to the west, the plain where I’d watched most of the fighting take place during the last eleven years, was now a gully-riddled riot of scrub oak, pine, and swampy marsh. I headed for that beach, climbing what the Trojans had called Thicket Ridge without even recognizing where I was, but as soon as I reached the low ridgeline I stopped in amazement.
The Sea was gone.
It’s not just the mile or so of receded shoreline that I knew about from the memories of my Twenty-first Century previous life, the entire fucking Aegean Sea was gone!
I sat down on the highest boulder I could find on Thicket Ridge and thought about this. I wondered not only where Nyx and Hephaestus had sent us, but when. All I could tell right now in the failing twilight was that there were no electric lights visible anywhere inland or along the coast and that the bottom of what should be the Aegean here was overgrown with mature trees and shrubs.
Toto, we’re not only not in Kansas anymore, we’re not even in Oz anymore.
The evening sky was completely covered over by clouds, but it was still light enough that I could see the thousands upon thousands of men packed together in a half-mile arc along what had been the beach just fifteen minutes earlier. At first I was sure that they were still fighting—I could see thousands more fallen on each side—but then I realized that they were just milling around, all lines of combat, trenches, defenses, communication, and discipline lost. Later I’d discover that almost a third of the men down there, Trojans and Achaeans alike, had broken bones—mostly leg bones—from the five-foot fall onto rock and into gullies that hadn’t been there a second earlier. In places, I’d soon learn, men who had been trying to slash each other’s guts and skulls to bits a few minutes earlier were now lying moaning together or trying to help each other up.
I hurried to get down the hill and to cross the mile of alluvial plain that had been so much easier to cross when it had been so worn-down and bare from battle. By the time I reached the rear of the Trojan lines—such as they were—it was almost dark.
I started asking for Hector immediately, but it was another half hour before I found him, and by then everything was being done by torch-light.
Hector and his wounded brother Deiphobus were conferring with the temporary commander of the Argives—Idomeneus, son of Deucalion and commander of the Crete heroes, and Little Ajax of Locris, son of Oileus. Little Ajax had been carried to the conference on a litter, since he’d been slashed to the bone on both shins earlier in the day. Also there conferring with Hector was Thrasymedes, Nestor’s brave son whom I’d thought had been killed earlier in the day—he’d gone missing in the battle for the last trench and had been presumed dead down among the corpses there, but as I’d discover in a minute, he had only been wounded a third time, but it had taken him hours to dig his way out of the corpse-filled trench, then only to find himself among the Trojans. They’d taken him prisoner—one of the few acts of mercy this day or any day of the almost eleven years of war between the two groups—and now he was using a broken lance as a crutch as he negotiated with Hector.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” said Hector, apparently and oddly happy to see me. “Son of Duane! I am glad you survived this madness. What caused this? Who caused this? What has happened?”
“The gods caused this,” I said truthfully. “To be specific, the fire god Hephaestus and Night—Nyx—the mysterious goddess who lives and works with the Fates.”
“I know you were close to the gods, Hock-en-bear-eeee, son of Duane. Why have they done this thing? What do they want us to do?”
I shook my head. The torches were ripping and tearing at the night in the strong breeze coming in from the west—coming from the direction of what had once been the Mediterranean but which now bore smells of vegetation on the wind. “It doesn’t matter what the gods want,” I said. “You’ll never see the gods again. They’re gone forever.”
The hundred or two hundred packed men around us said nothing and for a minute there came only the sound of the torches and the moans of the many injured in the dark.
“How do you know this?” asked Little Ajax.
“I just came from Olympos,” I said. “Your Achilles killed Zeus in hand-to-hand combat.”
The murmurs would have grown to a roar if Hector had not silenced everyone. “Continue, son of Duane.”
“Achilles killed Zeus and the Titans returned to Olympos. Hephaestus will rule eventually—Night and the Fates have decided this already—but for the next year or so, your Earth would have been a battlefield on which no mere mortal could have survived. So Hephaestus sent you—the city, its survivors, you Achaeans, you Trojans—here.”
“Where is here?” asked Ideomeneus.
“I have no idea.”
“When will we be allowed to return?” asked Hector.
“Never,” I said. I was sure of this and my voice reflected that certainty. I�
��m not sure I ever spoke two syllables with such certainty before or since.
At that moment, the second of the three impossible things of the day occurred—the first being, by my count, the falling of Ilium into a different universe.
It had been cloudy since the city landed on the ridgeline—solid clouds spread from east to west—and the twilight darkness had come more quickly because of the cloud cover. But now the wind that had borne the smell of vegetation was moving the entire cloud mass from west to east, clearing the early night sky above us.
We heard the men—Achaeans and Trojans both—exclaiming for long seconds before we realized that they were looking and pointing sky-ward.
I became aware of the strange light even before I looked up at the skies. It was brighter than any night under a full moon that I’d ever experienced and it was a richer, milkier, and strangely more fluid sort of light. I found myself looking down at our multiple, moving shadows on the rock beneath us—shadows no longer thrown by torchlight—when Hector himself prodded my arm to make me look up.
The clouds had all but passed. The night sky was still Earth’s night sky; I could see Orion’s Belt, the Pleiades, Polaris, and the Big Dipper low in the north, all more or less in their proper places, but that familiar late winter sky and the crescent moon rising above tumbled Troy to the east were paled to insignificance by this new source of light.
Two broad and moving bands of stars were moving and crossing above us, one band in our south and obviously moving quickly west to east, the other ring directly above us and moving north to south. The rings were bright and milky but not indistinct—I could make out thousands upon thousands of bright individual stars in each ring even as some long-lost memory from a science column in some newspaper reminded me that on the clearest night from most places on Earth, only about three thousand separate stars were visible up there. Now there were tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual stars visible—all moving together and crossing in two bright rings above us, easily illuminating everything around us and giving us a sort of half-evening-light, the kind of half-light I’d always imagined they played softball by at midnight in Anchorage, Alaska. This may have been the most beautiful thing I’d seen in two lifetimes.