But it appears that our LGM do, responded Orphu. Ask about the dwellers on Olympus.
“Who are the chariot people on Olympus?” Mahnmut asked dutifully, feeling that he was asking all the wrong questions. But he could think of none better to pose.
MERE GODS,
responded the little green man through bursts of nanobyte images decohering to words.
HELD IN THRALL HERE
BY A BITTER HEART THAT BIDES ITS TIME AND BITES.
“Who is . . .” began Mahnmut but too late—the little green man had suddenly toppled backward, the moravec’s hand holding nothing but a desiccated wrapper instead of a pulsing heart now. The LGM began to wither and contract as soon as his body hit the deck. Clear fluid ran across the boards as the little person’s anthracite eyes sank into its collapsing green face, then brown face as the skin changed color and wrinkled inward and ceased to be the shape of a man. Other LGM came closer and carried the shriveled brown skin-envelope away.
Mahnmut began shivering uncontrollably.
“We have to find another communicator and finish this conversation,” said Orphu.
“Not now,” said Mahnmut between shudders.
“ ‘ A bitter heart that bides its time and bites, ’ “ quoted Orphu. “You must have recognized that.”
Mahnmut shook his head dully, remembered his friend’s blindness, and said, “No.”
“But you’re the Shakespeare scholar!”
“That’s not from Shakespeare,” said Mahnmut.
“No,” agreed Orphu. “Browning. ‘Caliban upon Setebos.’ “
“I’ve never heard of it,” said Mahnmut. He managed to get to his feet—two feet—and stagger to the rail. The water curling back alongside the felucca now was more blue than red. Mahnmut knew that if he were human, he’d be vomiting over the side now.
“Caliban!” Orphu all but shouted over the tightbeam line. “ ‘A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.’ The deformed creature, part sea-beast, part man, had a mother who was a witch—Sycorax—and her god was Setebos.”
Mahnmut remembered the dying LGM using those words, but he couldn’t concentrate on their meaning now. The entire conversation had been like stringing bloody beads on a sinew of living tissue.
“Could the LGM have heard us reciting from The Tempest three days ago when you first regained control of the felucca?” asked Orphu.
“Heard us?” echoed Mahnmut. “They don’t have ears.”
“Then it’s us, not them, echoing to this strange new reality,” rumbled the Ionian, but with a rumble more ominous than his usual laughter.
“What are you talking about?” asked Mahnmut. Red cliffs had become visible to the west. They rose seven or eight hundred meters above the water of the widening delta of Candor Chasma.
“We seem to be in some mad dream,” said Orphu. “But the logic here is consistent . . . in its own mad way.”
“What are you talking about?” repeated Mahnmut. He was in no mood for more games.
“We know the identity of the stone face now,” said Orphu.
“We do?”
“Yes. The magus. He of the books. Lord of the son of Sycorax.”
Mahnmut’s mind wouldn’t work to connect these obvious dots. His system was still filled with the alien surge of nanobytes, a peaceful but dying clarity that was alien to Mahnmut but welcome . . . very welcome. “Who?” he said to Orphu, not caring if his friend thought him dull.
“Prospero,” said Orphu.
30
Achaean Compound, Coast of Ilium
So far this evening’s gone just as Homer said it would.
The Trojans have built their hundreds of watchfires just beyond the Achaean trench—the Greeks’ last line of defense down here on the beach—but the Achaeans, beaten so soundly through the long day and evening into night, have forgone even cooking fires in their milling confusion. I’ve morphed into the form of Old Phoenix and joined the gathering near Agamemnon’s tent where the weeping son of Atreus—weeping! This king of Greek kings weeping!—is urging his commanders to take their men and flee.
I’ve seen Agamemnon use this strategy before—pretending to want to run away so as to rally his men to defiance—but this time, it’s obvious, the older king is in earnest. Agamemnon, hair wild, armor bloody, muddy cheeks rivuleted with tears, wants his men to flee for their lives.
It’s Diomedes who challenges Agamemnon, all but calling their king a coward and promising, with Sthenelus alone if all the others flee, to “fight on alone until we see the fixed fate of Ilium.” The other Achaeans shout support for this bluster, and then it is Old Nestor, citing his years as his passport to speak, who suggests that everyone calm down, have something to eat, post sentries, send men to watch the trench and ramparts, and talk this over before stampeding for the ships, the sea, and home.
And this, just as Homer described, is what they do.
Then the seven chiefs of the guard, led off by Nestor’s middle-aged son, Thrasymedes, each take their hundred fighters out to set up new defensive positions between trench and rampart and to light their dinner fires. The handful of Greek fires—joined soon by Agamemnon’s feast fire—seems pitiful set against the hundreds of Trojan watchfires just beyond the trench, their sparks leaping high toward the lowering thunderclouds.
Here at Agamemnon’s council feast, attended by all the assembled Achaean lords and commanders, the dialogue continues just as Homer reported it. Nestor speaks first, praising Agamemnon’s courage and sagacity but telling him, essentially, that he really screwed the pooch when he chose to steal the slave girl Briseis from Achilles.
“You’re not lying there, old man,” is Agamemnon’s honest response. “I was insane. Insane and blind to offend Achilles so.”
The great king pauses, but no one of the dozens of chiefs hunkered around the central cooking fire rises to argue with him.
“Mad blind I was,” continues Agamemnon, “and not even I would deny it. Zeus loves that young man so that Achilles is worth an entire battalion . . . no, an entire army!”
Still no one argues the point.
“And since I was made mad and blind by my own rage, I’ll set things right now by paying a king’s ransom to bring him back to Achaean ranks.”
Here the assembled chieftains, Odysseus included, make grumbling sounds of agreement around their mouthfuls of beef and chicken.
“Here before you all assembled, I will count off my gifts in their splendor to purchase young Achilles’ love,” cries Agamemnon. “Seven tripods untouched by flame, ten talents’ weight of gold, twenty servant-shined and new-burnished cauldrons, twelve great stallions, fleet of foot, who’ve won races and prizes for me . . .”
And blah and blah and blah. Just as Homer wrote. Just as I predicted to you earlier. And, also as I predicted, Agamemnon vows to return Briseis, unbedded, as well as twenty Trojan women—if and after the walls of Ilium fall, of course—and, as a sort of pièce de résistance, the pick of Agamemnon’s own three daughters, Chrysothemis, Laodike, and Iphianassa—and as an inveterate scholic, I note the continuity error here with earlier and later tales, especially the absence of Elektra and the possible confusion of Iphigeneia’s name, but that’s not important right now—and then, for dessert, Agamemnon throws in the “seven citadels,” strongly settled.
And, just as Homer has reported, Agamemnon offers these things in lieu of an apology. “All this, I will offer him if he will end his wrath,” cries the son of Atreus to his listening commanders. Thunder rumbles and lightning flickers overhead as if Zeus is impatient. “But let Achilles submit to me! Only Hades, the god of death, is as pitiless and relentless as this upstart. Let Achilles yield place and bow to me! I am the elder-born and the kinglier king. I am—I claim—the greater man!”