Ilium

The boy screamed and cowered against his mother’s breast, afraid of his father.

At such a moment, one would expect Hector to be devastated—no final hug from his son?—but the warrior laughed, threw back his head and laughed again, heartily and long. After a minute, Andromache laughed as well.

Hector swept the battle helmet off his head and set it atop the wall, where it blazed in the light of the setting sun. Then Hector swept his son up as well, hugging him and tossing him and catching him until the boy shrieked not in terror but delight. Holding his son in the crook of his strong right arm, Hector hugged Andromache to him with his left arm.

Still grinning, Hector raised his face to the sky. “Zeus, hear me! All you immortals, hear me!”

All the guards and women on the wall had fallen silent. The streets hushed in an eerie calm. I could hear Hector’s strong voice from blocks away.

“Grant this boy, my son, with whom I am well pleased, that he may be like me—first in glory among Trojans and men! Strong and brave like me, Hector, his father! And grant, oh gods, that Scamandrius, son of Hector, may rule all Ilium in power and glory some day and that all men shall say, ‘He is a better man than his father!’ This is my prayer, oh gods, and I ask no other boon from thee.”

And with that, Hector handed the child back to Andromache, kissed both of them, and left the wall for the battlefield.

I admit that the hours right after Hector bid good-bye to his wife were a low point for me. It didn’t help my mood to know that in the next year, Andromache would, indeed, be driven from the burning city to the land where she would be an expensive slave for other men. Nor did it help to know that the Achaean who will capture her—Pyrrhos, destined to become ancestor to the kings of the Eperiote tribe of the Molossians and to be given a hero’s tomb at Delphi—would rip Hector’s child, Scamandrius (called Astyanax, “Lord of the City,” by the residents of Ilium), from his nurse’s breast and will fling the child from the high walls to his bloody death. The same Pyrrhos will murder Hector’s and Paris’s father, King Priam, at the altar of Zeus in his own palace. The House of Priam will become all but extinct in one night. The thought is depressing.

This is not a defense for what I did next, but I offer it as a partial explanation.

I wandered the streets of Ilium until nightfall and after, feeling more alone and depressed than any time in my nine years as a scholic there. No longer morphed as Dolon, I was still dressed as a Trojan spearman—with the Hades Helmet ready for donning at a second’s notice, the QT medallion at the ready for instant escape—and soon found myself back near Helen’s compound. I confess that I had come here often over the years, stealing time between my scholic observations, coming secretly to the city and to this place just on the off chance of seeing her . . . of seeing Helen, the most beautiful and alluring woman in the world. How many times had I stood across the street from this multistory compound, staring up like a lovestruck boy and waiting until the lights were lit in the upper apartments and terraces, hoping against hope for just a glimpse of the woman?

Suddenly my moonstruck reverie was broken by a more chilling sight—a flying chariot trolling slowly above the streets and rooftops, cloaked to mortal eyes but quite visible to my enhanced vision. Leaning over the railing, scanning the streets, was my Muse. I had never seen the Muse fly so low above the city or plains of Ilium before. I knew she was looking for me.

I pulled up the Hades Helmet in an instant, hiding myself—I hoped—from gods and man. The technology must have worked. The Muse’s chariot floated less than a hundred feet overhead and never slowed.

When the chariot had passed, circling over the central marketplace a dozen blocks to the east, I activated the studs on my levitation harness. All of the scholics are outfitted with these harnesses, but we use them only rarely. Often, after a day’s confused fighting on the field, I had used the levitation harness to lift over the battlefield, to get a larger picture of the tactical situation, and then I would fly to Ilium—here to Helen’s house, to be honest—for a few minutes of hopeful gazing before QTing back to Olympos and my barracks.

Not now. I lifted above the street, invisible as I flew above the spearmen standing guard at the main entrance to Paris’s and Helen’s compound, crossed the high wall, and landed on one of the balconies of the inner courtyard outside the couple’s private apartments. Heart pounding, I entered the open doorway through blowing curtains. My sandals were almost silent on the stone floor. The compound’s dogs would have detected me—the Hades Helmet was no disguiser of scent—but the dogs were all on the ground floor and in the outer courtyard, not up here where the royal couple lived.

Helen was in her bath. Three female servants attended her, their bare feet leaving moist tracks as they carried warm water up and down marble steps leading to the sunken tub. Gauzy curtains surrounded the bath itself, but since the brazier tripods and the hanging lamps were inside the bathing area, the flimsy curtain material provided no obstacle to sight. Still invisible, I stood just outside the softly stirring fabric and stared at Helen in her bath.

So these are the boobs that launched a thousand ships, I thought, and immediately cursed myself for being such a jerk.

Shall I describe her to you? Shall I explain why the heat of her beauty, her naked beauty, can move men across three thousand years and more of cold time?

I think not—and not out of discretion or decorum. Helen’s beauty is beyond my poor powers of description. Having seen so many women’s breasts, was there anything unique about Helen’s soft, full breasts? Or something more perfect about the triangle of dark hair between her thighs? Or more exciting about her pale, muscled thighs? Or more amazing about her milky white buttocks and strong back and small shoulders?

Of course there was. But I’m not the man to tell you the difference. I was a minor scholar and—in my fantasies in my lost life—perhaps a novelist. It would take a poet beyond Homer, beyond Dante, even beyond Shakespeare to do justice to Helen’s beauty.

I stepped out of the bathing room, into the coolness of an empty terrace outside her bedroom, and touched the thin bracelet that allowed me to morph into other forms. The control panel of the bracelet only glowed when I called on it, but it spoke to my thumb with symbols and images. On it were stored the morphing data for all the men I had recorded in the past nine years. Theoretically, I could have morphed into a woman, but I had never found reason to do so and I certainly didn’t this night.

You have to understand something about morphing; it is not a reshaping of molecules and steel and flesh and bone into another shape. I don’t have a clue how morphing works, although a short-lived Twenty-first Century scholic named Hayakawa tried to explain his theory to me five or six years ago. Hayakawa kept stressing the conservation of matter and energy—whatever that is—but I paid little attention to that part of his explanation.

Evidently, morphing works on the quantum level of things. What doesn’t with these gods? Hayakawa asked me to imagine all the human beings here, including him and me, as standing probability waves. On the quantum level, he said, human beings—and everything else in the physical universe—exist from instant to instant as a sort of collapsing wavefront—molecules, memory, old scars, emotions, whiskers, beer breath, everything. These bracelets the gods gave us recorded probability waves and allowed us to interrupt and store the originals—and, for a short time, merge our own probability waves with the stored ones, take our own memories and will along into a new body when we morphed. Why this didn’t violate Hayakawa’s beloved conservation of mass and energy, I don’t know . . . but he kept insisting it did not.

This usurpation of another’s form and action is why we scholics almost always morphed into minor figures in the battle for Troy; literal spear carriers like the unnamed bodyguard whose form I had assumed after Dolon’s. If we were to become Odysseus, say, or Hector or Achilles or Agamemnon, we would look the part but the behavior would be our own—far inferior to the heroic character of the real person—and every minute we inhabited his form, we would carry actual events further and further from this unfolding reality that so paralleled the Iliad.