Leucus dies at last, his eyes glazing over, one hand still tight around Antiphus’ spear and the other still clinging to Odysseus’ wrist. Odysseus breaks the dead man’s grip and whirls around, dark eyes blazing under the rim of his bronze helmet, seeking out a target—any target. Odysseus hurls his spear and rushes after it. More Achaeans follow him into the gap he creates in the Trojan lines.
Odysseus’ first spearshot kills Democoon, a bastard son of Ilium’s King Priam. I was in the city nine years ago on the morning Democoon arrived to help defend Priam’s Ilium. It was common knowledge that Priam had put the young man in charge of his famed racing stables in Abydos, a city northeast of Troy on the southern shore of the Hellespont, to keep him out of sight of Priam’s wife and legitimate sons. The horses stabled in Abydos were the fastest and finest in the world, and it was said that Democoon considered it an honor to be named stablemaster at so young an age. Now that young Trojan is in the act of turning his head toward Odysseus’ maddened war cry when the bronze spearpoint hits him in his left temple and passes through and out his right temple, knocking him off his feet and pinning his shattered skull to the side of an overturned chariot. Democoon literally never knew what hit him.
The Trojans are retreating all along the line now, falling back before the fury of Odysseus and Big Ajax, trying to haul their noble dead when possible, abandoning them when not.
Hector, Ilium’s greatest fighter and most honest man, leaps off his command chariot and wades into the retreat, trying to bring his spear and sword to bear, urging the Trojans to hold fast, but the Achaean attack is too strong at this salient, and even Hector gives ground, all the while urging the men to discipline. The Trojans fight and hack and cast spears as they retreat.
Morphed as a minor Trojan spearman, I fall back faster than most, staying out of spear range, not afraid to be a coward. Earlier, I had cloaked myself from mortal view and started to move forward to where I could see Athena behind Achaean lines—soon joined by Hera, both goddesses invisible to men—but the fighting had erupted too quickly and escalated too fiercely, so I’d left the front lines after Echepolus fell, trusting to my enhanced vision and shotgun microphone to keep me in touch with events.
Suddenly everything freezes. The air thickens. Spears stop in midair, blood ceases to flow. Men seconds away from dying get a reprieve they will never know about as all sound ceases, all motion stops.
The gods are playing games with time again.
Apollo arrives first, his chariot QTing into existence not far from Hector. Then the war god Ares flicks into sight, talks to Athena and Hera an angry minute, and uses his own chariot to fly over the battle lines, landing near Apollo. Aphrodite joins them, glancing my way—to where I pretend to be frozen in place like the other mortals—for only an instant before smiling and talking to her two Trojan-loving allies, Ares and Apollo. I watch her out of the corner of my eye as the goddess stands there, pointing and gesturing toward the battlefield like a big-breasted George Patton.
The gods are here to fight.
Apollo raises his hand, sound crashes in, time begins again like a tsunami of dust and motion, and the killing resumes in earnest.
10
Paris Crater
Ada, Harman, and Hannah waited the two days usually observed as a minimum decent interval after a firmary visit, and then faxed to Paris Crater to find Daeman. It was late and dark and chilly there and—they discovered as soon they stepped out from under the Guarded Lion faxnode roof—raining. Harman found them a covered barouche and a voynix pulled them northwest along a dried riverbed filled with white skulls, past miles of tumbledown buildings.
“I’ve never been to Paris Crater,” said Hannah. The young woman, just two months shy of her First Twenty, did not like big cities. PC was one of the most populated faxnodes on Earth, with some 25,000 semipermanent residents.
“It’s one reason I faxed us to the Guarded Lion node rather than a port called Invalid Hotel that’s closer to where Daeman lives on the rim,” said Ada. “Everything about this town is ancient. It’s worth taking one’s time to look around.”
Hannah nodded, but doubtfully. The row upon row of stone and steel buildings, most sheathed in shiny everplas, looked empty and dark and cheaply slick in the rain. Servitors and glow globes floated purposefully here and there down the dark streets, voynix stood silent and still on corners, but very few humans were visible. Then again, as Harman pointed out, it was after 10 p.m. Even a city as cosmopolitan as Paris Crater had to sleep.
“That’s interesting,” said Hannah, pointing to the structure rising a thousand feet above the city.
Harman nodded. “It’s early Lost Age. Some say it’s as old as Paris Crater, maybe even as old as the city that was here before the crater. It’s a symbol of the city and the people who built it long ago.”
“Interesting,” Hannah said again. A thousand feet tall, the rough representation of a naked woman appeared to be made of some clear polymer. The head was sometimes obstructed by low clouds, then briefly visible, and Hannah could see that the face was featureless except for a gaping grin between red lips. Black coiled springs fifty feet long spiraled like curls from the spherical head. The legs were spread wide, feet hidden from view behind the dark buildings to the west, but the thighs bunched as thick and wide as Ardis Hall. The breasts were huge, globular, absurd, alternately filling and emptying with broiling, photoluminescent red liquid, levels now rising, now filling, now waterfalling down the insides of the belly and legs, then sometimes rising again all the way to the raised arms and smiling face. The light from the glowing belly and breasts and massive buttocks painted the tops of taller structures around the crater a ruby red.
“What’s it called?” she asked.
“La putain enormé,” said Ada.
“What does it mean?”
“No one knows,” said Harman. He instructed the voynix to turn left onto a rickety bridge and they clip-clopped onto what had once been an island when water flowed in the river of dry skulls, toward the ruins of a building that once must have been quite large. Now a low dome glowing with a purple light sat inside the tumbled walls like a strange egg in a nest of scattered stones.
“Wait here,” Harman told the voynix and led the two women through the overgrown ruins and into the translucent dome.
A slab of white stone about four feet high sat in the center of the space. There were gutters at the base of the slab and drains in the stone floor. Behind and above the slab rose a crude statue of a naked man carved from the same white rock. The man held a bow and a notched arrow.
“This is marble,” said Hannah, running her hand over the surface of the block. She knew stone. “What is this place?”
“A temple to Apollo,” said Harman.
“I’ve heard of these new temples,” said Ada, “but I’ve never seen one before. I thought it was rare—a few altars in the forest done as a gag, that sort of thing.”
“There are temples like this all over Paris Crater and in the other big cities,” said Harman. “Temples to Athena, Zeus, Ares . . . all the gods in the turin tale.”