Ilium Read online

  Some of the guests surged forward, but Hannah’s shouts and the radiating heat from the flow of liquid metal forced them back.

  The crudely carved and lined troughs smoked but did not burst into flame as the yellow-red metal flowed sluggishly from the cupola structure, past the ladders, spilling the last foot or two into a cross-shaped mold set in the sand.

  Hannah rushed down a ladder and helped Harman seal off the taphole. They both peered through a peephole into the furnace, did something to—Ada was explaining to a guest—the “slag hole” (different from the taphole, Daeman vaguely noticed) and then the young woman and the older man—soon to be a dead older man, Daeman thought cruelly—leaped from the cupola structure onto the sand and rushed over to look at the mold.

  More guests surged down the beach. Daeman wandered down, setting his drink on a passing servitor’s tray.

  The air was very cool down here by the river, but the heat from the red-glowing mold in the sand struck Daeman’s face like a fiery fist.

  The molten stuff was congealing into a red and gray cross-shaped mass.

  “What is it?” Daeman asked loudly. “Some sort of religious symbol?”

  “No,” said Hannah. She took off her bandana and wiped her sweaty, soot-streaked face. She was smiling like a crazy person. “It’s the first bronze cast in . . . what, Harman? A thousand years?”

  “Probably three times that long,” the older man said quietly.

  The guests muttered and applauded.

  Daeman laughed. “What good is it?” he asked.

  Harman looked up at him. “Of what good is a newborn baby?” said the sweating, bare-chested man.

  “Precisely my point,” said Daeman. “Loud, demanding, smelly . . . useless.”

  The others ignored him as Ada gave Hannah, Harman, and the other workers hugs, just as if they’d actually done something of worth. Guests milled. Harman and Hannah climbed ladders and started fussing, peering through peepholes and poking into the furnace with metal bars as if there was to be more of this lava production. Evidently, thought Daeman, this pyrotechnics show was to continue into the night.

  Suddenly needing to urinate, Daeman wandered up past the tables, considered the tent-covered rest room pavilion, and decided—in the spirit of all this pagan nonsense—to respond to this call of nature al fresco. He climbed above the grassy shelf toward the dark line of trees, following a monarch butterfly that had fluttered past him. There was nothing unusual at seeing a monarch, but it was late in the day and season for it to be out and flying. He walked past the last voynix and moved under the high branches of elms and cycads.

  Somebody, possibly Ada, shouted something from the river’s edge a hundred feet away, but Daeman had already unbuttoned his trousers and did not want to act the cad. Instead of turning back to respond, he moved another twenty feet or so into the concealing darkness of the forest. This would just take a minute.

  “Ahhh,” he said, still watching the butterfly’s orange wings ten feet above him as the patter of his urine fell on a dark tree trunk.

  The huge allosaurus, thirty feet long from snout to tail, pounded out of the darkness at twenty miles per hour, ducking under branches as it lunged.

  Daeman had time to scream but chose to tuck himself back into his trousers rather than turn and run while thus exposed. For all his lechery, Daeman was a modest man. He raised his heavy wooden walking stick to fight off the beast.

  The allosaurus took the cane and arm both, ripping the arm free at the shoulder. Daeman screamed again and pirouetted in a fountain of his own blood.

  The allosaurus knocked him down and ripped his other arm off—tossing it into the air and catching it like a morsel—and then proceeded to hold Daeman’s armless but still thrashing torso down with one massive clawed foot until ready to lower its terrible head again. Casually, almost playfully, the monster bit Daeman in half, swallowing his head and upper torso whole. Ribs and spinal column crunched and disappeared into the thing’s maw. Then the allosaurus gobbled the man’s legs and lower body, flinging pieces of flesh around like a dog with a rat.

  The fax buzz started then, even as two voynix rushed up and killed the dinosaur.

  “Oh, my God,” cried Ada, stopping at the edge of the trees as the voynix finished their bloody rendering.

  “What a mess,” said Harman. He waved the other guests back. “Didn’t you warn him to stay inside the voynix perimeter down here? Didn’t you tell him about the dinosaurs?”

  “He asked about tyrannosauruses,” Ada said, her hand still over her mouth. “I told him there weren’t any around here.”

  “Well, that’s true enough,” said Harman.

  Behind them, the crucible continued to roar and shoot sparks into the darkening sky.

  9

  Ilium and Olympos

  Aphrodite has turned me into a spy, and I know the punishment we mortals have always dealt out to spies. I can only imagine what the gods will do to me. On second thought, I’d rather not.

  This morning, the day after I became a secret agent for the Goddess of Love, Athena quantum teleports herself down from Olympos and morphs into a Trojan, the spearman Laodocus. Obeying Zeus’s command that the warriors of Ilium should be made to break the current truce, she seeks out the archer Pandarus, son of Lycaon.

  Using the cloaking Hades Helmet and private teleportation medallion that my Muse gave me, I QT after Athena, then morph into a Trojan captain named Echepolus, and follow the disguised goddess.

  Why did I choose Echepolus? Why is this minor captain’s name familiar to me? I realize then that Echepolus has only hours to live; that if Athena is successful in using Laodocus to break the peace, this Trojan—at least according to Homer—is going to get an Argive spear through his skull.

  Well, Mr. Echepolus can have his body and identity back before that happens.

  In Homer’s Iliad, this breaking of the truce occurred just after Aphrodite had spirited Paris away from his one-on-one battle with Menelaus, but here in the reality of this Trojan War, that non-confrontation between Menelaus and Paris had happened years ago. This truce is a more mundane thing—some of King Priam’s representatives meeting with some of the Achaeans’ heralds, both sides working out some abtruse agreement about time off from the fighting for festivals or funerals or somesuch. If you ask me, one of the reasons this siege has dragged out for almost a decade is all this time off from the fighting; the Greeks and Trojans have as many religious celebrations as our Twenty-first Century Hindus had and as many secular holidays as an American postal worker. One wonders how they ever manage to kill each other amidst all this feasting and sacrificing to the gods and ten-day-funeral celebrations.

  What fascinates me now, so soon after I vowed to rebel against the gods’ will (only to find myself much more of a pawn to their will than ever before), is the question of how quickly and how sharply real events in this war can swerve from the details of Homer’s tale. Disparities in the past—the sequence of the Gathering of the Armies, for instance, or the timing of Paris’s aborted battle with Menelaus—have all been minor discrepancies, easily explained by Homer’s need to include certain past events in the short span of the poem set in the tenth year of the war. But what if events really take a different course? What if I were to walk up to—say—Agamemnon this morning and stick this spear (poor doomed Echepolus’ spear, to be sure, but still a working spear) through the king’s heart? The gods can do many things, but they can’t return dead mortals to life. (Or dead gods either, as oxymoronic as that sounds.)

  Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the will of the gods? queries a craven, professorial little pissant voice that I listened to and followed most of my real life.

  I am me, Thomas Hockenberry comes the reply from the contemporary me, as fragmented as he is, and right now I’m fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.

  Now, in my role as spy rather than scholic, I stand close enough to hear the dialogue between Athena—mo
rphed as Laodocus—and that buffoon (but fine archer) Pandarus. Speaking as one Trojan warrior to another, Athena/Laodocus appeals to the idiot’s vanity, tells him that Prince Paris will shower him with gifts if he kills Menelaus, and even compares him to the ultimate archer—Apollo—if he has the skill to bring off this shot.

  Pandarus falls for the ruse hook, line, and sinker—“Athena fired the fool’s heart within him” was the way one fine translator described this moment—and has some of his pals hide him from view with their shields while he prepares his long bow and chooses the perfect arrow for this assassination. For centuries, scholics—Iliad scholars—have argued the issue of whether or not the Greeks and Trojans used poison on their arrows. Most scholics, myself included, argued the negative—such behavior simply did not seem to meet these heroes’ high standards of honor in battle. We were wrong. They sometimes do use poison. And a lethal, fast-acting poison it is. This explains why so many of the wounds listed in the Iliad were so quickly fatal.

  Pandarus lets fly. It’s a brilliant shot. I track the arrow as it flies hundreds of yards, arcing and then hurtling directly toward Agamemnon’s redheaded brother. The shaft will skewer Menelaus as he stands at the forefront of his fighters watching the heralds jabbering away in no-man’s-land. That is, it will skewer him if no Greek-friendly god intervenes.

  One does. With my enhanced vision, I see Athena abandon Laodocus’ body and QT to Menelaus’ side. The goddess is playing a double game here—tricking the Trojans into breaking the truce and then rushing to make sure that one of her favorites, Menelaus, is not actually killed. Cloaked head to toe, invisible to friend and foe but visible to this scholic, she slaps the arrow aside the way a mother flicks a fly from her sleeping son. (I think I stole that imagery, but it’s been so long since I actually read the Iliad, in translation or the original, that I can’t be sure.)

  Still, despite her protective and deflective slap, the arrow hits home. Menelaus shouts in pain and goes down, the arrow protruding from his midsection, just above the groin. Has Athena failed?

  Confusion ensues. Priam’s heralds flee back behind the Trojan lines and the Achaean negotiators scurry back behind the protection of Greek shields. Agamemnon, who has been using the truce time to inspect his troops lined up row upon row (perhaps the inspection is timed to show his leadership this first morning after Achilles’ mutiny), arrives to find his brother writhing on the ground, captains and lieutenants huddled around him.

  I aim a short baton. Although the baton looks like the kind of swagger stick a minor Trojan commander might carry, this is not Captain Echepolus’ property; it is mine, standard issue for us scholics. The baton is actually a taser and a shotgun microphone, picking out and amplifying sound from as much as two miles away, feeding the pickup to the hearplugs I wear whenever I’m on the plains of Ilium.

  Agamemnon is giving his dying brother one hell of a eulogy. I see him cradle Menelaus’ head and shoulders in his arms and hear him go on about the terrrible vengeance he—Agamemnon—will wreak on the Trojans for the murder of noble Menelaus, after which he laments about how the Achaeans will—despite Agamemnon’s bloody vengeance—lose heart, give up the war, and take their black ships home after Menelaus dies. After all, what’s the use of rescuing Helen if her cuckolded husband is dead? Holding his moaning brother, Agamemnon plays the prophet—“But the plowlands here in Priam will feed your flesh to the worms and rot your bones, O My Brother, as you lie dead before the unbreached walls of Troy, your mission failed.” Cheery stuff. Just the kind of thing a dying man wants to hear.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” grunts Menelaus through gritted teeth. “Don’t bury me so fast, big brother. The arrowhead’s not lodged in a mortal spot. See? It penetrated my bronze war-belt and got me in the love handle I’ve been meaning to lose, not in the balls or belly.”

  “Ahh, yes,” says Agamemnon, frowning at the wound where the arrow has only lightly penetrated. He almost, not quite, sounds disappointed. The whole eulogy is moot now and it sounded as if he’d worked on it for a while.

  “But the arrow is poisoned,” gasps Menelaus as if trying to cheer his brother up. Menelaus’s red hair is matted with sweat and grass, his golden helmet having rolled away when he fell.

  Standing, dropping his brother’s shoulders and head so quickly that Menelaus would have crashed back to the ground if his captains had not caught him, Agamemnon shouts for Talthybius, his herald, and orders the man to find Machaon, Asclepius’ son, Agamemnon’s own doctor and a damned good one, too, since Machaon is supposed to have learned his craft from Chiron, the friendly centaur.

  Now it looks like any battlefield from any age—a fallen man screaming and cursing and crying as the pain begins to flow through the initial shock of injury, friends on one knee gathered around, helpless, useless, then the medic and his assistants arriving, giving orders, pulling the barbed bronze head out of ripping flesh, sucking out poison, packing clean dressings on the wound even while Menelaus continues to scream like the proverbial stuck pig.

  Agamemnon leaves his brother to Machaon’s ministrations and goes off to rouse his men to combat, although the Achaeans—even without Achilles in their ranks today—seem hung over and angry and surly and in little need of a rousing to get them to fight.

  Within twenty minutes of Pandarus’s ill-conceived arrow shot, the truce is over and the Greeks attack Trojan lines along a two-mile stretch of dust and blood.

  It’s time for me to get out of Echepolus’ body before the poor son of a bitch catches a spear in the forehead.

  I don’t remember much of my real life on Earth. I don’t remember if I was married, if I had children, where I lived—except for murky images of a book-lined study where I read my books and prepared my lectures—nor all that much about the university I taught at in Indiana, except images of stone and brick buildings on a hill with a wonderful view to the east. One of the odd things about being a scholic is that fragments of non-scholic-essential memories do return after months and years, which may be one of the reasons the gods don’t allow us to live that long. I am the oldest exception.

  But I remember classes and my students’ faces, my lectures, some discussions around an oval table. I remember a fresh-faced young woman asking, “But why did the Trojan War go on so long?” I also remember being tempted to point out to her that she had been raised in an era of fast food and fast wars—McDonald’s and the Gulf War, Arby’s and the war on terrorism—but that in ancient days, the Greeks and their foes would no more think of hurrying a war than of rushing through a fine meal.

  Instead of insulting my students’ attention spans, I explained to the class how these heroes had welcomed battle—how one of their words for combat was charme, which came from the same root as charo—“rejoice.” I read to them a scene in which two warriors facing one another were described as charmei gethosunoi—“rejoicing in battle.” I explained the Greek concept of aristeia—warrior-to-warrior or small-group combat in which an individual can show his valor—and how important it was to these ancients and how the larger battle would often pause so that the soldiers on each side could witness such examples of aristeia.

  “So like, you mean, like,” stammered one fresh-faced female student, her brain running in place, her stammer illustrating that irritating speech and thought defect that spread like a virus among young Americans during the end of the Twentieth Century, “like the war would have, like, been over a lot sooner if they hadn’t kept, like, stopping for this ariste-whatchamacallit?”

  “Precisely,” I had said with a sigh, looking at the old Hamilton clock on the wall in the hope of deliverance.

  But now, after more than nine years watching aristeia in action, I can say in certainty that these one-on-one combats so beloved by both Trojans and Argives are one of the reasons for this prolonged, endless, slow-as-molasses siege. And like even the most sophisticated Middle American traveling too long in France, one of my urges now was to get back to fast food—or, in this case, fast war. A litt
le bombing, a little airborne invasion, bim, bang, thank you ma’am, home to Penelope.

  But not this day.

  Echepolus is the first Trojan captain to die in the Achaean attack.

  Perhaps it is because the man is still groggy and disoriented after my borrowing of his body, but as his group of Trojan fighters closes with a Greek group led by Nestor’s son Antilochus, a good friend of Achilles, poor Echepolus is slow to raise his long spear, so Antilochus thrusts first. The bronze spearpoint hits Echepolus’ horsehair helmet right at the ridge and drives down through his skull, popping one eye out and driving the man’s brains out between his teeth. Echepolus goes down, as Homer likes to say, like a toppled tower.

  Now begins a dynamic I’ve seen all too often, but which never ceases to fascinate me. The Greeks and Trojans fight for reasons of honor first, it is true, but booty comes in a close second. These men are professional warriors; killing is their work and plunder is their pay. A large part of both honor and plunder is the elaborate, beautifully tooled armor—shield, breastplate, greaves, war belt—of their fallen foes. Capturing an enemy’s gear is the heroic Greek equivalent of a Sioux warrior’s counting coup on an opponent, and much more lucrative. At the very least, a captain’s protective gear is made of precious bronze, and—for the more important officers—it is often hammered out of gold and decorated with jewels.

  And thus the fight begins for dead Captain Echepolus’ gear.

  An Achaean commander named Elephenor rushes in, grabs Echepolus’ ankles, and begins dragging the gory corpse back through the melee of spears and swords and crashing shields. I’ve seen Elephenor around the Achaean camp over the years, watched him fight in lesser skirmishes, and I have to say that the man’s name suits him—he’s huge, with gigantic shoulders, powerful arms, heavy thighs—not the sharpest knife in Agamemnon’s drawer of fighters, but a big, strong, brave and useful brawler. Thus Elephenor, Chalcodon’s son, thirty-eight years old this past June, commander of the Abantes and Lord of Euboea, drags Echepolus’ corpse behind the screen of thrusting Achaean attackers and begins stripping the body.