Times had changed.
“How do we defend against thrown rocks?” asked Ada. Voynix had powerful arms.
Kaman, one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples, stepped forward, closer to the center of the circle that had formed here in the second-floor parlor. “I sigled a book last month that told of ancient siege engines and pre–Lost Era machines that could fling huge rocks, boulders, for miles.”
“Did the book have diagrams?” asked Ada.
Kaman chewed a lip. “One. It wasn’t all that clear how it worked.”
“That’s not a defense anyway,” said Petyr.
“It would allow us to throw rocks back at them,” said Ada. “Kaman, why don’t you find that book and get it to Reman, Emme, Loes, Caul, and some of the others who help Hannah with the cupola and who are especially good at building things…”
“Caul’s gone,” said the woman with the shortest hair at Ardis, Salas. “He left today with Daeman and that group.”
“Well, get it to everyone left good at building things,” Ada said to Kaman.
The thin, bearded man nodded and jogged toward the library.
“We going to throw their rocks back at them?” asked Petyr with a smile.
Ada shrugged. She wished Daeman and the nine others weren’t gone. She wished Hannah had come back from the Golden Gate. Most of all, she wished Harman were home.
“Let’s go finish our work, people,” said Petyr. The group broke up with Greogi leading some people upstairs to the jinker platform to relaunch the sonie. Others went off to bed.
Petyr touched Ada’s arm. “You have to get some sleep.”
“Stand guard …” mumbled Ada. There seemed to be a loud buzz in the air, as if the cicadas of summer had returned.
Petyr shook his head and led her down the hall toward her room. Harman and my room, she thought.
“You’re exhausted, Ada. You’ve been going for twenty hours straight. All the day-shift people are asleep now. We have extra people on the walls and watching from above. We’ve done all we can do for today. You need to get some sleep. You’re special.”
Ada pulled her arm away in shock. “I’m not special!”
Petyr stared at her. His eyes were dark in the flickering lantern light of the hallway. “You are, whether you acknowledge it or not, Ada. You’re part of Ardis. To so many of us, you’re the living embodiment of this place. You’re still our hostess, whether you admit it or not. People wait for your decision on things, and not just because Harman’s been our de facto leader for months. Besides, you’re the only pregnant woman here.”
Ada couldn’t argue with that. She allowed herself to be led off to her bedroom.
Ada knew she should sleep—she had to sleep if she was to be any good to Ardis or herself—but sleep evaded her. All she could do was worry about the defenses and think of Harman. Where was he? Was he alive? Was he all right? Would he return to her?
As soon as this current voynix threat was past, she was flying to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu—no one could stop her—and she would find her lover, her husband, if it was the last thing she ever did.
Ada got up in the dark room, crossed to her dresser, and withdrew the turin cloth, carrying it back to bed with her. She had no urge to use a function to interact with the images again—her memory of the dying man in the tower looking up at her, seeing her, was too terribly fresh—but she did want to see the images of ancient Troy again. A city under siege—someone’s home under siege. It might give her hope.
She lay back, set the embroidered microcircuits in the cloth to her forehead, and closed her eyes.
It is morning in Ilium. Helen of Troy enters the main hall of Priam’s temporary palace—Paris and Helen’s former mansion—and hurries to join Cassandra, Andromache, Herophile, and the huge Lesbos slave-woman Hypsipyle, who stand in a cluster of royal women to the left and rear of King Priam’s throne.
Andromache shoots Helen a glance. “We sent servants to search for you in your quarters,” she whispers. “Where have you been?”
Helen has just had time to bathe and put on clean clothes since she escaped Menelaus and left the dying Hockenberry in the tower. “I was walking,” she whispers back.
“Walking,” says beautiful Cassandra in the inebriated tone that often accompanies her trances. The blonde woman smirks. “Walking… with your blade, dear Helen? Have you wiped it off yet?”
Andromache hushes Priam’s daughter. The slave woman Hypsipyle leans closer to Cassandra and now Helen can see that Hypsipyle has a grip on the prophetess’s pale arm. Cassandra winces from the pressure—Hypsipyle’s fingers are sinking into the pale flesh upon the command of Andromache’s nod—but then Cassandra smiles again.
We’ll have to kill her, thinks Helen. It seems like months since she has seen the other two surviving members of the original Trojan Women, as they had called themselves, but it has been less than twenty-four hours since she said goodbye to them and was kidnapped by Menelaus. The fourth and final surviving secret Trojan Women—Herophile, “beloved of Hera,” the oldest sibyl in the city—is here now in the cluster of important women, but Herophile’s gaze is vacant and she looks to have aged twenty years in the past eight months. As with Priam, Helen realizes, Herophile’s day is done.
Returning her thoughts now to the mindset of Ilium’s internal politics, Helen is amazed that Andromache has allowed Cassandra to stay alive—if Priam and the people learn that Andromache and Hector’s baby, Astyanax, is still alive, that the death of the child had been only a ruse for war with the gods, Hector’s wife would be ripped limb from limb. In fact, Helen realizes, Hector would kill her.
Where is Hector? Helen realizes that this is whom everyone is waiting for.
Just as she is about to whisper the question to Andromache, Hector enters, accompanied by a dozen of his captains and closest comrades. Even though the king of Troy—ancient Priam—is sitting on his throne, Queen Hecuba’s throne empty next to him, it is as if the true king of all Ilium has just entered the room. The red-crested spearmen standing guard snap to even greater attention. The weary war captains and heroes, many still covered with dust and blood from the night’s battle, stand straighter. Everyone, even the women of the royal family, hold their heads up higher.
Hector is here.
Even after ten years of admiring his presence and heroism and wisdom, even after ten years of being a plant curling toward the sunshine that is Hector’s charisma, Helen of Troy feels her pulse race for the ten thousandth time as Hector, son of Priam, true leader of the fighters and people of Troy, enters the hall.
Hector is wearing his battle armor. He is clean—obviously risen from a bed rather than a battlefield, his armor is freshly polished, his shield unmarked, even his hair is freshly shampooed and plaited—but the young man looks tired, wounded by a pain of the soul.
Hector salutes his royal father and sits easily in his dead mother’s throne while his captains take their place behind him.
“What is the situation?” asks Hector.
Deiphobus, Hector’s brother, bloodied by the night’s fighting, answers, looking at King Priam as if reporting to him but actually speaking to Hector. “The walls and great Scaean Gate are secure. We were almost taken by surprise by Agamemnon’s sudden attack and we were undermanned with so many of the fighters away through the Hole fighting the gods, but we repulsed the Argives, drove the Achaeans back to their ships by dawn. But it was a close thing.”
“And the Hole is closed?” asks Hector.
“Gone,” says Deiphobus.