But two days ago, just as Troy was on the verge of falling yet again—this time to a combined attack of infuriated Achaeans and the most powerful and ruthless gods and goddesses, Athena, Hera, Poseidon, and their ilk beating back Apollo and the other gods defending the city—Zeus reappeared.
Helen tells me that Zeus blasted Hera to bits, dropped Poseidon into the hellpit of Tartarus, and commanded the rest of the gods back to Olympos. She says that the once-mighty gods, scores and scores of them, in their flying golden chariots and in their fine golden armor, went obediently quantum teleporting back to Olympos like guilty children awaiting their father’s spankings.
And now the Greeks are getting their asses kicked. Zeus himself, rising taller, Helen says, than the towering stratocumulus, killed thousands of Argives, drove the rest back to the ships and then burned their ships with bolts of his lightning. Helen says that the Lord of Gods commanded a huge wave to roll in, a wave that sank the blackened hulks of the ships. Then Zeus himself disappeared and has not returned since.
Two weeks later—after both sides lit corpse fires for the thousands of their fallen and observed their nine-day funeral rituals—Hector led a successful counterattack that has driven the Greeks even farther back. It appears that about thirty thousand of the original hundred thousand or so Argive fighters have survived, many of them—like their king Agamem-non—wounded and dispirited. With no ships for escape and no way to get their axemen to the wooded slopes of Mount Ida to cut wood for new ships, they’ve done the best they could—digging deep trenches, lining them with stakes, throwing up wooden revetments, digging a series of connecting trenches within their own lines, building up sand berms, massing their shields and spears and deadly archers in a solid wall around this dwindling semicircle of death. It’s the Greeks’ last stand.
It is now the third morning since my arrival and I am standing in the Greek encampment, a trenched and walled arc little more than a quarter of a mile around with the thirty thousand miserable Achaeans massed and huddled here by the smoldering ruins of their ships. Their backs are to the sea.
Hector has every advantage—an almost four-to-one ratio of men who have better morale and adequate food—the Greeks are beginning to starve even while they can smell the pigs and cattle roasting over the Trojan siege fires. Helen and King Priam had been sure that the Greeks would be defeated two days ago, but desperate men are brave men—men with nothing to lose—and the Greeks have been fighting like cornered rats. They also have had the advantage of shorter interior lines and fighting from behind fixed defenses, although admittedly these advantages will be short-lived with food running out, no permanent supply of water here since the Trojans damned up the river a mile from the beach, and typhoid beginning to spread within the crowded and unsanitary Achaean encampment.
Agamemnon is not fighting. For three days the son of Atreus, king of Mycenae, and commander in chief of this once-huge expeditionary force, has been hiding in his tent. Helen reported to me that Agamemnon had been wounded during the general Greek retreat, but I hear from captains and guards here in the camp that it was only a broken left forearm, nothing life-threatening. It seems that it was Agamemnon’s morale that was critically wounded. The great king—Achilles’ nemesis—had not been able to recover Menelaus’ body when his brother was struck down by the arrow through the eye, and while Diomedes, Big Ajax, and the other fallen Greek heroes received proper funerals and cremations on their tall biers near the shore, Menelaus’ body was last seen being dragged behind Hector’s chariot around the cheering-crowded walls of Ilium. It seems to have been the last straw for the high-strung and arrogant Agamemnon. Rather than being enraged into a fury of fighting, Agamemnon has sunk into depression and denial.
The other Greeks have not needed his leadership to know that they have to fight for their lives. Their command structure has been sorely thinned—Big Ajax dead, Diomedes dead, Menelaus dead, Achilles and Odysseus both disappeared on the other side of the closed Brane Hole—but gabby old Nestor has led most of the fighting for the last two days. The once revered warrior has become revered once again, at least among the thinning ranks of Achaeans, appearing on his four-horsed chariot wherever the Greek lines appeared ready to give way, urging trench engineers to replace stakes and redig collapsed areas, improving the internal trenches with sand berms and firing slits, sending men and boys out as scouts at night to steal water from the Trojans, and always calling for the men to have heart. Nestor’s sons Antilochus and Thrasymedes, who had few valorous moments during the first ten years of the war or during the short war with the gods, have fought splendidly the last two days. Thrasymedes was wounded twice yesterday, once by a spear and again by an arrow in the shoulder, but he fought on, leading his Pylian brigades to push back a Trojan offensive that had threatened to cut the defensive semicircle here in half.
It’s just after sunrise here on the third day—quite possibly the last day, since the Trojans were moving, shifting forces, bringing up more troops, chariots, and trench-bridging equipment all during the night—and more than a hundred thousand relatively fresh Trojan troops are massing around the defensive perimeter even as I speak.
I’ve brought the recorder here to Agamemnon’s camp because Nestor has called a council of his surviving war chieftains. At least those that can be spared from their fighting positions. These tired and filthy men ignore my presence—or rather, they probably remember that I spent much time with and near Achilles during the eight-month war with the gods, so they accept my presence. And the sight of this wafer-sized recorder in my hand means nothing to them.
I no longer know for whom I’m observing and recording these things—I imagine that I would be the ultimate persona non grata if I were to show up on Olympos and hand this recording chip to one of the Muses who sought to kill me—so I will make these observations and record this recording only as the scholar I once was, not as the slavescholic they turned me into. And even if I am no longer a scholar, I can serve as a war correspondent in these last hours of the last stand of the Greeks and the end of this heroic era.
NESTOR What is the news? And do you think your men will hold the line today?
IDOMENEUS (Commander of the Crete contingent. The last time I saw Idomeneus, he had just killed the Amazon Bremusa with a spearcast. Moments later, the Brane Hole closed. Idomeneus was among the last to abandon Achilles.)
The news is bad from my part of the line, Noble Nestor. For every Trojan we’ve killed in the last two days, three more have taken his place in the night. They ready their trench-filling tools and spears for the attack. Their archers are still massing. It will be decisive today.
LITTLE AJAX (As different as the Aeantes—the two Ajaxes—had been, they had been as close as brothers. I have never seen this Ajax of Locris look so grim. The grooves and wrinkles on his face are so outlined in mud and blood that they resemble a kabuki mask.)
Nestor, son of Neleus, hero of these darkest of times, my Locris fighters engaged the enemy through much of the night as Deiphobus’ scouts tried to flank us on the north end of the perimeter. We fought them back until the surf ran red. Our section of trench is filling up with our own and the Trojan dead until they soon will be able to walk across on bodies heaped ten feet high. A third of my men are dead, the rest exhausted. Hector has sent new troops to replace his losses.
NESTOR Podalirius, how goes it with the remaining son of Atreus?
PODALIRIUS (The son of Asclepius is one of the last healers left to the Greeks. He is also co-commander, along with his brother Machaon, of the Thessalians from Tricca.)
Noble Nestor, Agamemnon’s arm has been set in a splint, he has taken no herbs for the pain, and he is awake and rational.