Servants are wailing and screaming in the background, but Andromache is speaking, her voice stunned but almost frighteningly calm. “It was the goddesses, Athena and Aphrodite, who did this, my lord and husband.”
Hector looks up and his face under his helmet is a terrible mask of shock and horror. His mouth hangs open, spittle dangling. His eyes are wide and red-rimmed. “Athena? Aphrodite? How can this be?”
“I came to the door from my chamber just an hour ago when I heard them talking to the nurse,” says Andromache. “Pallas Athena herself said to me that this sacrifice of our beloved Scamandrius is the will of Zeus. ‘A yearling heifer for sacrifice slaughter’ is the phrase the goddess used. I tried to argue, weeping, begging, but goddess Aphrodite willed me into silence, saying that Zeus’s will on this shall not be denied. Aphrodite said that the gods were ill pleased with the way of the war and with your failure to burn the black ships last night. And that they would take this sacrifice as warning.” She gestures to the butchered child on the floor. “I sent the fleetest servants to recall you from the battlefield, and called these women, my friends, to see me through my grief until you arrived, O Husband. We have not reentered this room until you came.”
Hector turns his wild face on us, but his gaze passes right over the silent Achilles. I don’t think he would have seen a cobra at his feet this moment. He’s blind with shock. All he can see is Scamandrius’ corpse—headless, bloodied, one little fist closed. Then Hector chokes out, “Andromache, wife, beloved, why aren’t you dead on the floor next to the nurse, fallen likewise in an attempt to save our child from the wrath of the immortals?”
Andromache lowers her face and weeps silently. “Athena kept me at the doorway behind an invisible wall of force while their divine power did this deed,” she says, tears falling on the bodice of her gown. I see now that her gown is bloodied where she must have knelt and hugged to her the remains of her slaughtered child. Irrelevant as it is right now, I think of watching television and seeing Jackie Kennedy on that distant day in November when I was a teenager.
Hector does not move to hug or console his wife. The servants’ wailings rise in pitch, but Hector remains silent a minute until he raises his scarred and muscled arm, closes a mighty fist, and snarls at the ceiling, “Then I defy you gods! From this moment on, Athena, Aphrodite, Zeus—all those gods I’ve served and honored, even to my life all these years—thou art my enemy.” He shakes his fist.
“Hector,” says Achilles.
Every head turns. Servants wail in terror. Helen throws her hands to her mouth in a perfect simulation of surprise. Hecuba screams.
Hector pulls his sword free and snarls with an expression almost resembling relief. Here is someone to vent my fury on. Here is someone to kill. I can read his thoughts on his face.
Achilles holds both palms up. “Hector, brother in grief. I come here today to share your grief and to offer you my right arm in battle.”
Hector has tensed to rush the man-killer but now the Trojan hero freezes, his face turning into a mask of confusion.
“Last night,” says Achilles, his callused palms still raised to show his empty hands, “Pallas Athena came to my tent in the Myrmidon encampment and killed my dearest friend—Patroclus dead by her hand—his body taken to Olympos to be fed to the carrion birds there.”
Still holding his sword, Hector says, “You saw this?”
“I spoke to her and witnessed it myself,” says Achilles. “It was the goddess. She cut down Patroclus then just as she has your son today—and for the same reasons. She told me these herself.”
Hector looks down at his sword hand as if his weapon and his arm have betrayed him.
Achilles strides forward. The crowd of women parts for him. The Achaean man-killer extends his right hand so that it is almost touching the tip of Hector’s sword.
“Noble Hector, enemy, brother in blood,” Achilles says softly, “will you join me in this new battle we must fight to avenge our loss?”
Hector drops his sword so that the bronze echoes on the marble floor, its hilt ending up in a pool of Scamandrius’ blood. The Trojan cannot speak. He steps forward almost as if attacking, but then grips Achilles’ forearm fiercely—if it had been my arm, he would have torn it off—and continues gripping the other man’s arm as if hanging on to keep from falling.
All through this, I confess, I keep flicking my gaze to Andromache, still weeping silently, even while the other faces register more shock and amazement.
You did this? I think at Hector’s wife. You did this to your own son to get your way on this war?
Even as I think of it, stepping further back from Andromache in revulsion, I know it was the only way. The only way. But then I look down at the butchered remnants of Astyanax, “Lord of the City,” the murdered Scamandrius, and I take another step back. If I live to be a thousand years old, ten thousand, I will never understand these people.
At that instant, the real goddess Athena, accompanied by my Muse and the god Apollo, QT into the empty half of the nursery.
“What is happening here?” demands Pallas Athena, eight feet tall and arrogant in posture, tone, and gaze.
The Muse points to me. “There he is!” she cries.
Apollo draws his silver bow.
46
The Equatorial Ring
Caliban’s lair was dark and moist and warm, hidden as it was amidst the old pipes and septic system beneath the city’s surface, the grotto warmed to tropical temperatures by biotic decay and populated with scuttling eft-things and pompion plants. Caliban cracked thin ice, swam through a pipe in the asteroid’s soil, emerged into a long, narrow grotto, hung his netful of captives by a hook, slashed the net, set the three stunned and unresisting humans on three rocks ten feet above a bubbling pool, and stretched out on a licheny pipe overgrown with ferns. The creature kicked both feet in the slush, and propped his chin on his huge clenched fists to inspect Savi, Harman, and Daeman.
Daeman had pissed himself when the monster seized them. The thermskin absorbed the moisture and dried itself almost immediately, leaving no stain, but his cheeks reddened even through his terror when he thought of it.
There was air in Caliban’s lair, and more gravity than in the city proper, and the creature ripped off their osmosis masks so quickly, his long arm striking forward so rapidly and clawed fingers grasping with such speed that none of the three, even the last, had time to duck or back away. Their rocks rose like slimy columns above the black pool. The air around them smelled foul and thick and sewage-rich. Caliban breathed it in as if it were ambrosial, showing his yellow smile from time to time as if to taunt them. Part of the fishy smell in the grotto came from the creature itself.
Daeman had thought the calibani in the Mediterranean Basin were scary, but knew now that they were shadowy duplicates of the awfulness of this real and original Caliban, if that’s what this thing was. This creature was no larger than the calibani, but was infinitely more obscene in all his toothed and testicled fleshiness. At first glance Caliban seemed ungainly, almost clumsy, but he’d swum through the cold, thin air of the dead city easily enough, using his huge webbed feet and webbed hands as effective paddles. He’d gripped the gathered end of their net in his oversized mouth, the sharp teeth there holding it fast even as Savi, Harman, and Daeman struggled and kicked against the net.
“What do you want with us?” demanded Savi as the three of them were perched on their stones above the underground pond and Caliban lay studying them. Daeman could see that she’d retrieved the gun that had fallen into the net with them and that it was in her hand, but it wasn’t aimed. Shoot it! Daeman thought at the old woman. Kill this thing!