Odysseus grunted. “That garrulous old man. He stayed because his horse had been shot out from under him.”
Hannah glanced at Ada and grinned. It was obvious that Hannah’s goal had been to draw Odysseus into conversation and equally obvious that she thought she’d won. Ada still didn’t believe that this all-too-real man—sun-bronzed, wrinkled, scarred, so different than the firmary-renewed males of their experience—was the same person as the Odysseus of the turin drama. Like most intelligent people she knew, Ada believed that the turin cloth provided a virtual entertainment, probably written and recorded during the Lost Age.
“Do you remember that fight by the black ships?” prompted Hannah.
Odysseus grunted again. “I remember the feast the night before that miserable dog’s-ass day. Thirty ships arrived from the isle of Lemnos bringing wine—a thousand measures full, enough wine to drown the Trojan armies with, if we hadn’t had a better use for it. Euneus, Jason’s son, sent it as a gift for the Atrides—Agamemnon and Menelaus.” He squinted at Hannah and the others. “Now Jason’s voyage, there’s a story worth hearing.”
Everyone except Savi looked blankly at the barrel-chested man in his belted tunic.
“Jason and his Argonauts,” repeated Odysseus, looking from face to face. “Surely you’ve heard that tale.”
Savi broke the embarrassed silence. “They haven’t heard any tales, son of Laertes. Our so-called old-style humans here are without past, without myth, without stories of any sort—except for the turin cloth. They’re as perfectly postliterate as you and your comrades were preliterate.”
“We didn’t need scratches on bark or parchment or mud to make us men to be reckoned with,” growled Odysseus. “Writing had been tried in some age before ours and had been abandoned as a useless thing.”
“Indeed,” Savi said dryly. “ ‘Does an illiterate’s tool stand any less erect?’ I think Horace said that.”
Odysseus glared.
“Will you tell us about this Jason and his . . . his what?” asked Hannah, blushing in a way that convinced Ada that her friend had indeed slept with Odysseus the night before.
“Ar-go-nauts,” Odysseus said slowly, emphasizing each syllable as if speaking to a child. “And no, I won’t.”
Ada found her gaze wandering to Harman and her mind wandering to memories of the long night before. She wanted to walk off with Harman and talk to him in private about what they’d shared, or—failing that—just to close her eyes in the humid heat of the sun-dappled glade and nap, perhaps to dream about their lovemaking. Or better yet, thought Ada, peering at Harman through lowered lashes, we could just steal off into the forest dim and make love again, rather than just dream about it.
But Harman didn’t seem to notice her glances and obviously had his lover’s telepathy-receiver turned off. Ada’s beloved appeared to be amused and interested by Odysseus’ comments. “Will you tell us a story about your turin cloth war?” he asked the bearded man.
“It was called the Trojan War and fuck your turin rag,” said Odysseus, but he’d been drinking steadily from his wineskin and appeared to have mellowed. “But I can tell you a story that your precious diaper cloth doesn’t know.”
“Yes, please,” said Hannah, shifting closer to the warrior.
“The Lord deliver us from storytellers,” muttered Savi. She rose, packed away her lunch package in the boot of the sonie, and walked into the forest.
Daeman watched her go with visible anxiety. “Do you really think there are worse predators here than dinosaurs?” he asked no one in particular.
“Savi can take care of herself,” said Harman. “She has that gun-weapon.”
“But if something were to eat her,” said Daeman, still staring into the forest, “who would fly the sonie?”
“Hush,” said Hannah. She touched Odysseus’ wrist with her long tan fingers. “Tell us the story that the turin cloth doesn’t know. Please.”
Odysseus frowned, but Ada and Harman were nodding in agreement with Hannah’s request, so he flicked crumbs out of his beard and began.
“This experience wasn’t and won’t be shown in your turin-rag tale. The events I will share with you now happened after the death of Hector and Paris but before the wooden horse.”
“Paris dies?” interrupted Daeman.
“Hector dies?” asked Hannah.
“Wooden horse?” said Ada.
Odysseus closed his eyes, combed fingers through his short beard, and said, “May I continue without interruption?”
Everyone except the absent Savi nodded.
“The events I will describe to you now happened after the death of Hector and Paris, but before the wooden horse. It was true in those days that, among its most potent treasures, the city of Ilium possessed a divine image that had fallen from heaven—you would call it a meteorite—but a stone cast and formed by Zeus himself generations before our war as a sign of the Father of the Gods’ approval of the founding of the city itself. This metallic-stone figure was called a Palladion, because it was in the form of Pallas . . . not, I should explain, Pallas Athena, as we call our goddess, but Pallas, Athena’s companion in her youth. This other Pallas—the word itself can be accented to have a feminine or masculine meaning in our language, but here it is close to the Latin word virago, which means ‘strong virgin’—had been killed in a sham fight with Athena. And it was Ilios, sometimes called Ilus, father of Laomedon, who in turn would be father to Priam, Tithonus, Lampus, Clytius, and Hicetaon, who had found the star-stone in front of his tent one morning and who recognized it for what it was.
“This ancient Palladion, long a secret source of Ilium’s wealth and power, was three cubits in height, carried a spear in its right hand and a distaff and spindle in its left, and was associated with the goddess of death and fate. Ilios and the other ancestors of the current defenders of Troy had ordered made many replicas of the Palladion, in many different sizes, and hid and guarded these false statues as surely as they did the real one, since everyone knew that the continued survival of Ilium itself depended on their possession of the Palladion. It was the gods themselves who revealed this fact to me in dreams in those last weeks of the siege of Ilium, and so I told Diomedes of my plan to go into the city and locate the true Palladion so that he and I could return to the city, steal it, and seal Troy’s doom.
“First, I disguised myself in rags as a beggar and had my own servant whip me with a lash, thus disfiguring myself with stripes and welts. The citizens of Ilium, you see, were notoriously weak-stomached when it came to disciplining their servants—they tended to spoil slaves more often than punish them, and no Trojan servant serving a good family would be allowed to go abroad sporting torn clothes and flogging stripes—so I reasoned that rags and stench and, most important, the bloody whip-marks would make the citizens turn away in embarrassment upon seeing me—a perfect disguise for a spy, don’t you think?
“I chose myself for this task because I was the stealthiest and craftiest of all the Achaeans, and also, because I had been within the walls of Troy before, more then ten years earlier, sent there to lead a delegation tasked with peacefully negotiating the release of Helen before our black ships arrived in force and a war began. Obviously, those negotiations failed—all of us true Argives had hoped they’d fail, since we were spoiling for a fight and hungry for plunder—but I well remembered the layout of the city within those great walls and gates.
“In my dream, the gods—most likely Athena, since she favored our cause more than any of the others—had revealed to me that the Palladion and its many replicas were secreted somewhere in Priam’s royal palace, but did not tell me where in the palace it might be hidden, nor how I could tell the real Palladion from its many pretenders.