“Oh, in the anteroom of the Temple of Apollo, but Hock-en-bear-eeee, why do you…”
Keeping my grip firm on her upper arm, I visualize the steps of Apollo’s Temple here in Ilium and QT us there an instant before the guards and one big, angry woman from Lesbos can grab me.
Helen gasps as we pop into solidity on the white steps, but I drag her up into the anteroom. There are no guards here. Everyone in the city seems to be on the walls or in a high place to watch the end of the war play out on the beach to the west.
The equipment is here, in the small acolytes’ changing room next to the main temple anteroom. The air raid siren warning had been automatic, triggered by the moravecs’ antiaircraft missile and radar sites—now gone—that had been stationed outside the city—but, just as I remembered, the moravec engineers had put a microphone with the other electronic gear here, just in case King Priam or Hector had wanted to address the entire Trojan population through the thirty huge air-raid-siren loudspeakers set around the walled city.
I study the equipment for just a few seconds—it had been made simple enough for a child to use so that the Trojans could manage it themselves, and child-simple technology is exactly the kind Dr. Thomas Hockenberry can manage.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee….”
I flip the switch that says PA SYSTEM ON, throw the toggle that reads LOUDSPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT, lift the archaic-looking microphone, and begin babbling, hearing my own words echoing back from a hundred buildings and the great walls themselves—
“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL PEOPLE OF ILIUM… KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE WARNING… EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS… NOW! GET OFF THE WALLS… NOW!! RUN FROM THE CITY INTO OPEN COUNTRY IF YOU CAN. IF YOU ARE IN A TOWER, EVACUATE IT… NOW!! AN EARTHQUAKE WILL HIT ILIUM AT ANY SECOND. AGAIN, KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE EVACUATION ORDER EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY … LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS AND SEEK OPEN SPACE NOW!!”
I echo on for another blaring minute, then switch off, grab the staring, open-mouthed Helen, and drag her out of the Temple of Apollo into the central marketplace.
People are milling and talking, staring at the various speaker locations from where my blaring announcement had come, but no one seems to be evacuating. A few people wander out of the large buildings that adjoin this central open plaza, but almost no one is running for the open Scaean Gate and the countryside as my announcement had commanded them to.
“Shit,” I say.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee, you are very worked up. Come to my chambers and we shall have some honeyed wine and…”
I tug her along behind me. Even if no one else is headed through the open gate and out away from the buildings, I sure as hell am. And I’m going to save Helen whether she wants me to or not.
I slide to a stop just before entering the narrowing avenue at the west end of the huge plaza. What am I doing? I don’t have to run like an idiot. I just have to visualize Thicket Ridge way out beyond the walls and QT us there…
“Oh, shit,” I say again.
Above us, horizontal, seemingly miles wide, descending rapidly, is the kind of Brane Hole I’d seen above Olympos earlier—a flat circle rimmed by flames. Through the Hole I can see dark sky and stars.
“Damn!” I decide at the last second not to quantum teleport—the chances of us getting caught in quantum space just as the Brane Hole hits us is too great.
I tug the staring, horrified Helen a dozen yards back toward the center of the huge plaza. With any luck we’ll be out of the range of the falling walls and buildings.
The hoop of fire falls around us past Ilium, falls past the surrounding hills, plains, marshes, and beaches for a circle of at least two miles, and the instant after it falls, we fall. There is a sensation of the entire city of ancient Troy being on an elevator suddenly cut free of its cables, and two seconds later all hell breaks loose.
Much later, the moravec engineers would tell me that the entire city of Ilium fell a literal five feet and two inches before landing on the soil of the present-day Earth. All of those fighting on the beach—more than one hundred fifty thousand struggling, screaming, sweating men—also suddenly dropped five feet two inches, and not onto soft beach sand, but onto the rock and tangled scrub brush that had taken the sand’s place after the coastline had retreated almost three hundred yards to the west.
For Helen and me in Ilium’s great city square, those last minutes of Ilium were almost our last minutes as well.
It was the topless tower near the wall beyond the southeast corner of that square—the same damaged, topless tower where Helen had stabbed me in the heart in what seemed like ages ago—that came falling over lower buildings, toppling and collapsing like some giant factory smokestack, crashing directly at us as we cowered in the open square near the fountain.
It was the fountain itself that saved our lives. The multistepped structure with its pool and central obelisk—no more than twelve feet tall—was just large enough to part the path of the tower’s tumbling debris, leaving us coughing in a cloud of dust and smaller pieces, but sending the larger stone blocks careering elsewhere across the marketplace.
We were stunned. The huge paving stones of the plaza itself had been shattered by the five-foot fall. The fountain obelisk was tilting at a thirty-degree angle and the fountain itself had stopped forever. The entire city was lost in a cloud of dust that did not fully clear away for more than six hours. By the time Helen and I picked ourselves up and started dusting ourselves off, coughing and trying to clear our nose and throats of all the terrible white powder, other people were already running—most randomly, in pure panic, now that it was too late to run—while a few had even begun digging in the ruins and rubble, trying to find and help others.
More than five thousand people died in the Fall of the City. Most had been trapped in the larger buildings—both the Temple of Athena and the Temple of Apollo had collapsed, their many pillars cracking and flying apart like broken sticks. Paris’s palace, now the home of Priam, was rubble. No one on the terrace of Athena’s temple survived except for Hypsipyle, who was still hunting for me when her part of the wall collapsed. Many of the people had been on the main west and southwest ramparts, which did not collapse in their entirety, but which tumbled outward or inward in many places, sending bodies flying out and down to the rocks on the Plain of Scamander or into the city and down onto the rubble. King Priam was one of those who died that way, along with several other members of the royal family, including the ill-fated Cassandra. Andromache—Hector’s wife and a survivor if ever there was one—survived without a scratch.
The city of Troy was as much in an earthquake zone in the ancient days as that part of Turkey is now, people knew how to react to quakes then much as they do now, and my announcement probably saved many. Many people did run to solid doorways or escaped to open spaces to avoid the collapsing buildings. It was later estimated that several thousand ran out onto the plain itself before the city fell, the towers tumbled, and the walls came down.
For my part, I stared around in stunned disbelief. The noblest of cities, this survivor of ten years of siege by the Achaeans and months more war with the gods themselves, was now mostly rubble. Fires burned here and there—not the omnipresent flames of a modern city of my era after an earthquake, for there were no ruptured gaslines here—but fires enough from braziers and hearths and cooking kitchens and simple torches in windowless halls that were now open to the sky. Fires enough. The smoke mixed with the roiling dust to keep the many hundreds of us milling in the plaza coughing and dabbing at our eyes.