“Are you worried about being seen with me?” I ask. “Want me to move on?”
Nightenhelser shrugs. “All of us scholics are on borrowed time anyway. What does it matter? Tempus edax rerum .”
I’ve been thinking in ancient Greek for so long that it takes me a second to translate the Latin. Time is a devourer. Perhaps so, but I want more of it. I break the fresh, hot bread and eat, marveling at the glorious taste of it and of the sweet breakfast wine. Everything looks, smells, and tastes crisper, cleaner, newer and more wonderful this morning. Perhaps it was the night’s rain. Perhaps it was something else.
“You smell suspiciously perfumed this morning,” says Nightenhelser.
At first my only response is a blush—can the other scholic smell the night’s revelries on me?—but then I realize what he’s talking about. Helen had insisted I bathe with her before leaving. The old female slave who had directed the carrying of the hot water to the bath, I’d learned, was Aithra, Pittheus’ daughter, wife of King Aigeus and mother of the famous Theseus—ruler of Athens and the man who had abducted Helen when she was eleven. I remembered the name Aithra from my graduate-school days, but my instructor, Dr. Fertig, a fine Homerian scholar, had insisted that the name had been drawn at random from the epic stock—“Aithra, daughter of Pittheus” must have sounded good to Homer or some poetic predecessor who needed a name for a mere slave, said Dr. Fertig, and that the noble Theseus’ mother couldn’t possibly be Helen’s servant in Troy. Well . . . wrong, Dr. Fertig. Just half an hour ago, lounging in the sunken marble tub with a naked Helen, she mentioned that the old slave-woman Aithra was, indeed, Theseus’ mum . . . that Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeukes, when they rescued her from Theseus’ captivity, had carried off the old lady as punishment, and Paris had brought her along to Troy with Helen.
“Thinking about something, Hockenberry?” asked Nightenhelser.
I blushed again. Right then I had been thinking about Helen’s soft breasts visible through the bubbles in the bath. I ate some fish and said, “I wasn’t on the field yesterday evening. Anything interesting happen?”
“Nothing much. Just Hector’s big duel with Ajax. Just the showdown we’ve been waiting for since the Achaean ships first touched their bows to shore down there. Just all of Book Seven.”
“Oh, that,” I said. Book Seven was an exciting duel between Hector and the Achaean giant, but nothing happened. Neither man hurt the other even though Ajax was obviously the better fighter, and when evening made it too dark to fight, Ajax and Hector called a truce, exchanged gifts of armor and weapons, and both sides went back to burn their dead. I hadn’t missed anything crucial; nothing to give up one minute with Helen.
“There was something odd,” said Nightenhelser.
I ate bread and waited.
“You know that Hector was supposed to come out of the city with his brother, Paris, and both were supposed to lead the Trojans back into battle. Homer says that Paris kills Menesthius at the beginning of the fight.”
“Yes?”
“And later, do you remember when King Priam’s counselor, Antenor, advises his fellow Trojans to give back Helen and all the treasures looted from Argos—give them back and let the Achaeans go away in peace?”
“That’s while Ajax and Hector are pals after they fail to kill each other, exchanging gifts on the field, right?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Well what about it?”
Nightenhelser sets his goblet down. “Well, it was Paris who was supposed to answer Antenor and urge his fellow Trojans to refuse to surrender Helen but offers to give up the treasures in exchange for peace.”
“So?” I say, realizing where this is going. My stomach suddenly feels queasy.
“Well, Paris wasn’t there last night—not to come out of the Scaean Gates with Hector, not to kill Menesthius, and not even to offer the peace proposal at dusk.”
I nod and chew. “So?”
“So that’s one of the largest discrepancies we’ve seen, isn’t it, Hockenberry?”
I have to shrug again. “I don’t know. Book Seven has the Achaeans building their defensive wall and trench near the shore, but you and I know that those defenses have been there since the first month after they arrived. Homer messes up the chronology sometimes.”
Nightenhelser looks at me. “Perhaps. But the absence of Paris to refute Antenor’s suggestion about giving up Helen was strange. Finally, King Priam spoke for his son—saying that he was sure that Paris would never surrender the woman, but that he might give up the treasure. But without Paris being there in person, a lot of the Trojans in the crowd were mumbling their agreement. It’s the closest thing to peace breaking out that I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been here, Hockenberry.”
My skin feels cold. My self-indulgence with Helen last night, my long impersonation of Paris, has already changed something important in the flow of things. If the Muse had known the details of the Iliad—which she didn’t—she would have known at once that I had taken Paris’s place in bed with Helen.
“Did you report the discrepancy to the Muse?” I ask softly. Nightenhelser would have gone off shift when darkness fell. Since I was missing, he was the only scholic on duty last evening. It was his duty to report such oddities.
Nightenhelser chews the last of his bread slowly. “No,” he says at last, “I didn’t dictate that to the word stone.”
I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.
“We’d better go,” says the other scholic. The restaurant is filling up with Trojan men and their wives waiting for a seat. As I drop coins on the table, Nightenhelser grips my forearm. “Do you know what you’re doing, Hockenberry?”
I look him in the eye. My voice is firm when I respond. “Absolutely not.”
Once on the street, I go the opposite direction from Nightenhelser. Stepping into an empty alley, I pull up the cowl of the Hades Helmet and touch the QT medallion.
It is sunrise on the summit of Mount Olympos. The white buildings and green lawns reflect the rich but lesser light here. I’ve always wondered why the sun seems smaller on and around Olympos than in the skies above Ilium.
I had envisioned the chariot stand near the Muse’s building, and that’s where I have arrived. I hold my breath as a chariot spirals down from the morning sky and lands not twenty feet from me, but Apollo steps out and strides away without noticing me. The Hades Helmet still works.
I step onto the chariot and touch the bronze plate near the front. I had watched the Muse carefully as she flew us across the caldera lake the other day. A glowing, transparent keyplate comes into existence inches above the brass. I touch the icons there in the sequence I’d watched the Muse use.
The chariot wobbles, rises, wobbles again, and steadies itself as I move the glowing, virtual energy controller next to the readouts. I twist it left and the chariot banks left fifty feet above the summit grass. I touch the forward-arrow icon and the chariot leaps ahead, flying south over the blue lake. To any god watching, it should look like an empty chariot flying itself, but no god is visible to watch.
Across the lake, I gain a bit of altitude and try to find the right building. There—just beyond the Great Hall of the Gods.
Some goddess—I do not recognize her—cries out from the front steps of the huge building and points toward my seemingly empty chariot, but it’s too late—I’ve identified the building I want: huge, white, with an open doorway.
I’m getting the knack of the chariot controls now and I dive within twenty feet of the ground and accelerate toward the building. I have to lift the left side of the chariot almost perpendicular to the ground—I do not fall, there is some artificial gravity in the machine—as I zip between the giant columns at forty or fifty miles per hour.