“And now it’s time to see if it works,” announced Hannah, her voice revealing both exhaustion and exaltation.
Suddenly the guests had to stand back on the sandy river’s edge, Daeman retreating to the grassy sward near the tables, as all the young people—and that damnable Harman—leaped into a frenzy of action. Sparks flew higher. Hannah ran to the top of the so-called cupola while Harman peered into the clay-furnace-contained flames below and shouted for this and that. Emme worked the bellows until she fell over, and was relieved by the thin man named Loes. Daeman half listened to Ada breathlessly explaining even more details to huddled friends. He caught phrases like “blast pipe” and “blast gate” and “chilled slag” (even though the flames were raging hotter and higher than every before) and “blast pressure.” Daeman moved another fifteen or twenty feet further back.
“Tapping temp of twenty-three hundred degrees!” Harman shouted up to Hannah. The thin woman wiped sweat from her brow, made some adjustment to the cupola far above, and nodded. Daeman stirred his drink and wondered how long it would be before he could get Ada alone in a carriole on the way back to Ardis Hall.
Suddenly there was a commotion that made Daeman look up from his drink, sure that he would see the whole structure in flames, Hannah and Harman burning like straw figures. Not quite. While Hannah was using a blanket to swat out flames on the ladder below the top of the cupola—waving away helpful servitors and even a voynix that had come in close to protect the humans from harm—Harman and two others had finished poking inside the fiery furnace and had just opened a “taphole,” allowing what looked to be yellow lava to flow down wooden troughs to the beach.
Some of the guests surged forward, but Hannah’s shouts and the radiating heat from the flow of liquid metal forced them back.
The crudely carved and lined troughs smoked but did not burst into flame as the yellow-red metal flowed sluggishly from the cupola structure, past the ladders, spilling the last foot or two into a cross-shaped mold set in the sand.
Hannah rushed down a ladder and helped Harman seal off the taphole. They both peered through a peephole into the furnace, did something to—Ada was explaining to a guest—the “slag hole” (different from the taphole, Daeman vaguely noticed) and then the young woman and the older man—soon to be a dead older man, Daeman thought cruelly—leaped from the cupola structure onto the sand and rushed over to look at the mold.
More guests surged down the beach. Daeman wandered down, setting his drink on a passing servitor’s tray.
The air was very cool down here by the river, but the heat from the red-glowing mold in the sand struck Daeman’s face like a fiery fist.
The molten stuff was congealing into a red and gray cross-shaped mass.
“What is it?” Daeman asked loudly. “Some sort of religious symbol?”
“No,” said Hannah. She took off her bandana and wiped her sweaty, soot-streaked face. She was smiling like a crazy person. “It’s the first bronze cast in . . . what, Harman? A thousand years?”
“Probably three times that long,” the older man said quietly.
The guests muttered and applauded.
Daeman laughed. “What good is it?” he asked.
Harman looked up at him. “Of what good is a newborn baby?” said the sweating, bare-chested man.
“Precisely my point,” said Daeman. “Loud, demanding, smelly . . . useless.”
The others ignored him as Ada gave Hannah, Harman, and the other workers hugs, just as if they’d actually done something of worth. Guests milled. Harman and Hannah climbed ladders and started fussing, peering through peepholes and poking into the furnace with metal bars as if there was to be more of this lava production. Evidently, thought Daeman, this pyrotechnics show was to continue into the night.
Suddenly needing to urinate, Daeman wandered up past the tables, considered the tent-covered rest room pavilion, and decided—in the spirit of all this pagan nonsense—to respond to this call of nature al fresco. He climbed above the grassy shelf toward the dark line of trees, following a monarch butterfly that had fluttered past him. There was nothing unusual at seeing a monarch, but it was late in the day and season for it to be out and flying. He walked past the last voynix and moved under the high branches of elms and cycads.
Somebody, possibly Ada, shouted something from the river’s edge a hundred feet away, but Daeman had already unbuttoned his trousers and did not want to act the cad. Instead of turning back to respond, he moved another twenty feet or so into the concealing darkness of the forest. This would just take a minute.
“Ahhh,” he said, still watching the butterfly’s orange wings ten feet above him as the patter of his urine fell on a dark tree trunk.
The huge allosaurus, thirty feet long from snout to tail, pounded out of the darkness at twenty miles per hour, ducking under branches as it lunged.
Daeman had time to scream but chose to tuck himself back into his trousers rather than turn and run while thus exposed. For all his lechery, Daeman was a modest man. He raised his heavy wooden walking stick to fight off the beast.
The allosaurus took the cane and arm both, ripping the arm free at the shoulder. Daeman screamed again and pirouetted in a fountain of his own blood.
The allosaurus knocked him down and ripped his other arm off—tossing it into the air and catching it like a morsel—and then proceeded to hold Daeman’s armless but still thrashing torso down with one massive clawed foot until ready to lower its terrible head again. Casually, almost playfully, the monster bit Daeman in half, swallowing his head and upper torso whole. Ribs and spinal column crunched and disappeared into the thing’s maw. Then the allosaurus gobbled the man’s legs and lower body, flinging pieces of flesh around like a dog with a rat.
The fax buzz started then, even as two voynix rushed up and killed the dinosaur.
“Oh, my God,” cried Ada, stopping at the edge of the trees as the voynix finished their bloody rendering.
“What a mess,” said Harman. He waved the other guests back. “Didn’t you warn him to stay inside the voynix perimeter down here? Didn’t you tell him about the dinosaurs?”
“He asked about tyrannosauruses,” Ada said, her hand still over her mouth. “I told him there weren’t any around here.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” said Harman.
Behind them, the crucible continued to roar and shoot sparks into the darkening sky.
9
Ilium and Olympos
Aphrodite has turned me into a spy, and I know the punishment we mortals have always dealt out to spies. I can only imagine what the gods will do to me. On second thought, I’d rather not.
This morning, the day after I became a secret agent for the Goddess of Love, Athena quantum teleports herself down from Olympos and morphs into a Trojan, the spearman Laodocus. Obeying Zeus’s command that the warriors of Ilium should be made to break the current truce, she seeks out the archer Pandarus, son of Lycaon.
Using the cloaking Hades Helmet and private teleportation medallion that my Muse gave me, I QT after Athena, then morph into a Trojan captain named Echepolus, and follow the disguised goddess.
Why did I choose Echepolus? Why is this minor captain’s name familiar to me? I realize then that Echepolus has only hours to live; that if Athena is successful in using Laodocus to break the peace, this Trojan—at least according to Homer—is going to get an Argive spear through his skull.