No, Harman and Daeman had never spent much time under the turin cloth. But Ada had. She’d escaped to the gory images of the siege of Troy almost daily for the almost eleven years that the turins had functioned. Ada had to confess to herself that she had loved the violence and the energy of those imaginary people—at least they had been presumed to be imaginary until they met the older Odysseus at the Golden Gate—and even the barbaric language, somehow translated by the turin, had been like an intoxicating drug to her.
Now Ada lay back on the bed, lifted the turin cloth over her face, set the embroidered microcircuits against her forehead, and closed her eyes, not really expecting the turin to work.
It is night. She is in a tower in Troy.
Ada knows it’s Troy—Ilium—because she’s seen the nighttime silhouette of the city’s buildings and walls during her hundreds of times under the turin over the past decade, but she’s never seen it from this perspective before. She realizes that she’s in a shattered, circular tower with a wall missing on the south side of the building and that two people are huddled a few feet away, holding a low blanket over a fire consisting of little more than embers. She recognizes them at once—Helen and her former husband Menelaus—but she has no idea of why they’re together here, inside the city, looking out over the wall and the Scaean Gate at a night battle in full progress. What’s Menelaus doing here and how can he be sharing a blanket—no, she realizes, it’s a red warrior’s cape—with Helen? For almost ten years, Ada has watched Menelaus and the other Achaeans battling to get inside the city, presumably to capture or kill this very woman.
It’s obvious that the Achaeans are battling to get inside the city at this very moment.
Ada turns her nonexistent head to change her field of vision—this turin-cloth experience is different from all her other ones—and stares in awe out toward the Scaean Gate and the high wall.
This is much like our battle last night here at Ardis, she thinks, but then almost laughs at the comparison. Instead of a twelve-foot-tall rickety wooden palisade, Ilium is surrounded by its hundred-foot-high, twenty-foot-thick wall, its defense further augmented by its many towers, sally ports, embrasures, trenches, rows of sharpened stakes, moats, and parapets. Instead of an attacking army of a hundred-some silent voynix, this great city is being attacked by tens of thousands of cheering, roaring, cursing Greeks—torches and campfires and flaming arrows illuminate mile upon mile of the surging horde of heroes—each group complete with its own kings, captains, siege ladders, and chariots, each group intent upon its own battle-within-the-larger-battle. Instead of Ardis Hall with its four hundred souls, the defenders here—she can see thousands of archers and spearmen on just the parapets and stairways of the long south wall visible from this tower—are defending the lives of more than a hundred thousand terrified kinsmen, including their children, wives, daughters, young sons, and helpless elders. Instead of Harman’s one silent sonie flying over a backyard battlefield, Ada sees the air here filled with dozens of flying chariots, each protected by its own force bubble, its divine occupants launching shafts of energy and bolts of lightning either into the city or out toward the attacking hordes.
In all of her previous times under the turin, Ada has never seen so many of the Olympian gods so personally involved in the fighting. Even from this distance she can make out Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Apollo flying and fighting in defense of Troy, and Hecuba, Athena, Poseidon, and other rarely seen gods raging on the side of the attacking Achaeans. There is no sign of Zeus.
Things have certainly changed during the nine months I’ve been away from the turin, thinks Ada.
“Hector has not come out of his apartments to lead the fight,” Helen whispers to Menelaus. Ada turns her attention back to the couple. They are huddled together over the tiniest of campfires up here on the broken, open-air platform, the red soldier’s cape shielding the embers from any-one’s view from below.
“He’s a coward,” says Menelaus.
“You know better than that. There has been no braver man in this mad war than Hector, son of Priam. He’s in mourning.”
“For whom?” laughs Menelaus. “Himself? His life span can now be counted in hours.” He gestures out toward the hordes of Achaeans attacking Troy from all directions.
Helen also looks. “Do you think this attack will succeed, my husband? It seems uncoordinated to me. And there are no siege engines.”
Menelaus grunts. “Yes, perhaps my brother led them to the attack too quickly—there is too much confusion. But if tonight’s attack fails, tomorrow’s will succeed. Ilium is doomed.”
“It seems so,” Helen says softly. “But it has always been, has it not? No, Hector is not grieving for himself, noble husband. He grieves for his murdered son, Scamandrius, and for the end of the war with the gods that might have avenged the baby.”
“The war was pure folly,” grumbles Menelaus. “The gods would have destroyed us or banished us from the earth, just as they stole our families back home.”
“You believe Agamemnon?” whispers Helen. “Everyone is gone?”
“I believe what Poseidon and Hera and Athena told Agamemnon—that our families and friends and slaves and everyone else in the world will be returned by the gods when we Achaeans put Ilium to the torch.”
“Could even the immortal gods do such a thing, my husband—remove all humans from our world?”
“They must have,” says Menelaus. “My brother does not lie. The gods told him it had been their work and lo, our cities are empty! And I’ve talked to the others who sailed with him. All of the farms and homes in the Peloponnesus are … shhh, someone’s coming.” He kicks the embers apart, rises, thrusts Helen into the deepest shadows of the broken wall, and stands in the blind side of the opening to the circular staircase, his sword out and ready.
Ada can hear the shuffle of sandals on the stairs.
A man Ada has never seen before—dressed in Achaean infantry armor and cape but less fit, milder-looking than any soldier she’s ever noticed while under the turin—steps up onto the open area where the stairway abruptly ends.
Menelaus springs, pins the man so he can’t raise his arms, and sets his blade across the startled intruder’s throat, ready to open his jugular with a single slash.
“No!” cries Helen.
Menelaus pauses.
“It is my friend Hock-en-bear-eeee.”
Menelaus waits a second, his expression set and forearm flexing as if still planning to cut the thinner man’s throat, but then he pulls the man’s sword out of its sheath and tosses it away. He shoves the thinner man down onto the floor and stands almost astride of him. “Hockenberry? The son of Duane?” growls Menelaus. “I’ve seen you with Achilles and Hector many times. You came with the machine-beings.”
Hockenberry? thinks Ada. She’s never heard a name like that in the turin tale.