Ilium

23 Texas Redwood Forest

Odysseus didn’t tell the story of his travels that morning during breakfast in the green bubble atop the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. No one remembered to ask him. Ada thought that everyone seemed preoccupied, and she soon realized why.

Ada was preoccupied because she’d slept little, but spent the most wonderful night of her life with Harman. Ada’d “had sex” before—what woman her age had not?—but she realized that she’d never made love before. Harman had been exquisitely tender yet eagerly insistent, attentive to her needs and responses but not controlled by them, sensitive but forceful. They slept a little—coiled together on the narrow bed by the curving glass window—but woke often, their bodies renewing the lovemaking before their minds were fully engaged. When the sun rose over the spire to the east of Machu Picchu, Ada felt like a different person—no, that wasn’t right, she realized, she felt like a larger, fuller, more connected person.

Ada thought that Hannah was also acting strangely that morning—flushed, hyperalert, attentive to every comment the man who called himself Odysseus made, glancing at Ada occasionally and then looking away, almost blushing. My God, Ada realized just as breakfast was ending and they were ready to leave, to fly north together to Ardis Hall, Hannah slept with Odysseus.

For a minute, Ada couldn’t believe it, for never during their friendship had Hannah had ever commented on being with men or on sexual matters, but then she caught the glances Hannah was giving the bearded man, and the physical signs—the young woman sitting across from Odysseus but her body still reacting to every move the man made, hands nervous, leaning forward—and Ada realized it had been a busy night in the domis atop the Golden Gate.

Daeman and Savi were visibly the odd people out. The young man was in no better a mood than he’d been in the night before, barking questions about the Mediterranean Basin, eager to get going on his adventure with Harman and Savi, but obviously nervous about it. Savi seemed withdrawn, almost sorrowful, and in a hurry to leave.

Harman was quiet and—Ada thought—obviously still focused on Ada, although not obvious about it to the others. She caught his glance once or twice and something warm moved in her chest when he smiled at her. Once he put his hand on the outside of her leg under the table and patted twice.

“So what’s the plan?” Daeman asked as they were finishing their breakfast of hot croissants—Ada had watched in amazement as Savi had baked the bread earlier—and butter and berries and fresh-squeezed fruit juice and rich coffee.

“The plan is to fly Odysseus, Hannah, and Ada to Ardis Hall—we’re running late if we’re to get them there before dark—and then for you, Harman, and me to go on to the Mediterranean Basin,” said Savi. “Are you still game for that expedition, Daeman Uhr?”

“I’m still game.” Daeman did not sound game to Ada; he sounded tired or hung over or both.

“Then let’s get our gear in bags and our asses in gear and go,” said the ancient woman.

They flew out on the same sonie they’d flown in on, even though Hannah told Ada that there were other flying machines hangared in one of the rooms attached to the south tower of the bridge. The little sonie had a surprising number of compartments at the rear for Savi’s backpack and their other gear, but it was Odysseus who carried the most baggage—including a short sword in a scabbard, his shield, changes of raiment, and the two javelins he had used to hunt the Terror Birds. Savi lay in the front center depression, handling the glowing virtual controls, with Ada on her left and Harman on her right. Daeman, Odysseus, and Hannah filled the three concavities behind them, and Ada glanced back once to find her friend looking longingly at the bearded man.

They flew east over high mountains and then dropped lower and turned due north again, passing over thick jungle and a wide brown river that Savi said was called the Amazon. The jungle itself was solid rain forest canopy broken here and there only by a few blue glass pyramids whose apexes were a thousand feet high, parting low-moving rain clouds. Savi did not tell them what the pyramids might be and the others seemed too tired or preoccupied with their own thoughts to ask.

A half hour after the last of the pyramids had disappeared behind them, Savi banked the sonie hard left and they flew west by northwest across high mountains again. The air was so high and thin here that the forcefield bubble popped up even at their apparent low altitude of five hundred feet or so above the terrain, and the air in the bubble pressurized again to a higher oxygen content.

“Aren’t we going out of our way?” asked Harman after the long silence.

Savi nodded. “I had to give a wide berth to the Zorin Monoliths that run along the coastal shelf of what used to be Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia,” she said. “Some of them are still armed and automated.”

“What are the Zorin Monoliths?” asked Hannah.

“Nothing we have to worry about today,” said Savi.

“How fast are we traveling?” asked Ada.

“Slowly,” said Savi. She glanced at the virtual display surrounding her wrists and hands. “About three hundred miles per hour right now.”

Ada tried to imagine that speed. She couldn’t. She’d never traveled in anything faster than voynix-pulled droshky before their first trip in this sonie, and she had no idea how fast a droshky went. Probably not three hundred miles per hour, she thought. Certainly the mountains and ridges below were flicking past much faster than the familiar countryside had in the droshky or carriole ride between the fax portal and Ardis Hall.

They flew on another hour. At one point Hannah said, “I’m getting a sore neck craning to look over the edge of the sonie and the bubble’s too low to let me sit up. I wish . . .” She screamed. Ada, Daeman, and Harman let out similar yells.

Savi had moved her hand through the virtual control panel and the solid sonie under them had simply disappeared. In the brief seconds before Ada closed her eyes tight, she looked around at the perfect illusion of the six humans, their luggage, and Odysseus’ spears flying along in midair, unsupported by anything other than empty air.

“Warn us if you’re going to do something like that again,” Harman said shakily to Savi.

The old woman muttered something.

Ada spent a full minute or two touching the cold metal of the cowl ahead of her, feeling the soft leatherlike solidity of the contour couch beneath her legs and belly and chest, before daring to open her eyes again. I’m not falling, I’m not falling, I’m not falling, she told herself. Yes, you ARE falling, her eyes and inner ear told her. She closed her eyes again, opening them just as they came out of the highlands and followed a peninsula running northwest from the mainland.

“I thought you might want to see this,” Savi said to Harman, as if the rest of them wouldn’t know what they were talking about.

Ahead of them, the ocean sliced through the isthmus, open water visible for a gap of at least a hundred miles. Savi gained altitude and turned them north across open seas.

“The maps I’ve seen show old the isthmus connecting North and South America above sea level the whole way,” said Harman, straining up out of his couch to look behind them.

“The maps you’ve seen are useless,” said Savi. Her fingers moved and the sonie accelerated and gained more altitude.

It was past midday when another coastline came into sight. Savi dropped the sonie lower and they were soon flicking over swamps which quickly gave way to mile after mile of redwoods and sequoia—Savi named the trees—the tallest towering two or three hundred feet into the humid air.

“Anyone want to stretch their legs on solid ground while we stop for lunch?” asked Savi. “Or have some privacy in case nature is calling?”

Four of the five passengers loudly voted aye. Odysseus smiled slightly. He had been dozing.

They had lunch in a clearing on a small rise, surrounded by cathedral giants. The e- and p-rings moved palely through the bit of blue sky visible overhead.

“Are there dinosaurs around here?” Daeman asked, peering into the shadows beneath the trees.

“No,” said Savi. “They tend to prefer the middle and northern parts of the continent.”

Daeman relaxed against a fallen log and nibbled at his fruit, sliced beef, and bread, but sat straight up when Odysseus said, “Perhaps Savi Uhr is actually saying that there are more ferocious predators around here that keep the recombinant dinosaurs away.”

Savi frowned at Odysseus and shook her head, as if sighing over an incorrigible child. Daeman looked into the midday shadows under the trees again and moved closer to the sonie to finish his meal.

Hannah, rarely taking her gaze off Odysseus, did take time to pull her turin cloth from a pocket and set it over her eyes. She reclined for several minutes while the others ate silently in the shadowed heat and stillness. Finally Hannah sat up, removed the microcircuit-embroidered cloth, and said, “Odysseus, would you like to see what’s happening with you and your comrades in the war for the walled city?”

“No,” said the Greek. He tore off a strip of cold Terror Bird leftover with his white teeth and chewed slowly, then drank from the wineskin he’d brought with him.

“Zeus is angry and has tilted the balance toward the Trojans, led by Hector,” continued Hannah, ignoring Odysseus’ reticence. “They’ve driven the Greeks back through their defenses—the moat and the stakes—and they’re fighting around the black ships. It looks like your side is going to lose. All of the great kings—including you—have turned and run. Only Nestor stayed to fight.”

Odysseus grunted. “That garrulous old man. He stayed because his horse had been shot out from under him.”

Hannah glanced at Ada and grinned. It was obvious that Hannah’s goal had been to draw Odysseus into conversation and equally obvious that she thought she’d won. Ada still didn’t believe that this all-too-real man—sun-bronzed, wrinkled, scarred, so different than the firmary-renewed males of their experience—was the same person as the Odysseus of the turin drama. Like most intelligent people she knew, Ada believed that the turin cloth provided a virtual entertainment, probably written and recorded during the Lost Age.

“Do you remember that fight by the black ships?” prompted Hannah.

Odysseus grunted again. “I remember the feast the night before that miserable dog’s-ass day. Thirty ships arrived from the isle of Lemnos bringing wine—a thousand measures full, enough wine to drown the Trojan armies with, if we hadn’t had a better use for it. Euneus, Jason’s son, sent it as a gift for the Atrides—Agamemnon and Menelaus.” He squinted at Hannah and the others. “Now Jason’s voyage, there’s a story worth hearing.”

Everyone except Savi looked blankly at the barrel-chested man in his belted tunic.

“Jason and his Argonauts,” repeated Odysseus, looking from face to face. “Surely you’ve heard that tale.”

Savi broke the embarrassed silence. “They haven’t heard any tales, son of Laertes. Our so-called old-style humans here are without past, without myth, without stories of any sort—except for the turin cloth. They’re as perfectly postliterate as you and your comrades were preliterate.”

“We didn’t need scratches on bark or parchment or mud to make us men to be reckoned with,” growled Odysseus. “Writing had been tried in some age before ours and had been abandoned as a useless thing.”

“Indeed,” Savi said dryly. “ ‘Does an illiterate’s tool stand any less erect?’ I think Horace said that.”

Odysseus glared.

“Will you tell us about this Jason and his . . . his what?” asked Hannah, blushing in a way that convinced Ada that her friend had indeed slept with Odysseus the night before.

“Ar-go-nauts,” Odysseus said slowly, emphasizing each syllable as if speaking to a child. “And no, I won’t.”

Ada found her gaze wandering to Harman and her mind wandering to memories of the long night before. She wanted to walk off with Harman and talk to him in private about what they’d shared, or—failing that—just to close her eyes in the humid heat of the sun-dappled glade and nap, perhaps to dream about their lovemaking. Or better yet, thought Ada, peering at Harman through lowered lashes, we could just steal off into the forest dim and make love again, rather than just dream about it.

But Harman didn’t seem to notice her glances and obviously had his lover’s telepathy-receiver turned off. Ada’s beloved appeared to be amused and interested by Odysseus’ comments. “Will you tell us a story about your turin cloth war?” he asked the bearded man.

“It was called the Trojan War and fuck your turin rag,” said Odysseus, but he’d been drinking steadily from his wineskin and appeared to have mellowed. “But I can tell you a story that your precious diaper cloth doesn’t know.”

“Yes, please,” said Hannah, shifting closer to the warrior.

“The Lord deliver us from storytellers,” muttered Savi. She rose, packed away her lunch package in the boot of the sonie, and walked into the forest.

Daeman watched her go with visible anxiety. “Do you really think there are worse predators here than dinosaurs?” he asked no one in particular.

“Savi can take care of herself,” said Harman. “She has that gun-weapon.”

“But if something were to eat her,” said Daeman, still staring into the forest, “who would fly the sonie?”

“Hush,” said Hannah. She touched Odysseus’ wrist with her long tan fingers. “Tell us the story that the turin cloth doesn’t know. Please.”

Odysseus frowned, but Ada and Harman were nodding in agreement with Hannah’s request, so he flicked crumbs out of his beard and began.

“This experience wasn’t and won’t be shown in your turin-rag tale. The events I will share with you now happened after the death of Hector and Paris but before the wooden horse.”

“Paris dies?” interrupted Daeman.

“Hector dies?” asked Hannah.

“Wooden horse?” said Ada.

Odysseus closed his eyes, combed fingers through his short beard, and said, “May I continue without interruption?”

Everyone except the absent Savi nodded.

“The events I will describe to you now happened after the death of Hector and Paris, but before the wooden horse. It was true in those days that, among its most potent treasures, the city of Ilium possessed a divine image that had fallen from heaven—you would call it a meteorite—but a stone cast and formed by Zeus himself generations before our war as a sign of the Father of the Gods’ approval of the founding of the city itself. This metallic-stone figure was called a Palladion, because it was in the form of Pallas . . . not, I should explain, Pallas Athena, as we call our goddess, but Pallas, Athena’s companion in her youth. This other Pallas—the word itself can be accented to have a feminine or masculine meaning in our language, but here it is close to the Latin word virago, which means ‘strong virgin’—had been killed in a sham fight with Athena. And it was Ilios, sometimes called Ilus, father of Laomedon, who in turn would be father to Priam, Tithonus, Lampus, Clytius, and Hicetaon, who had found the star-stone in front of his tent one morning and who recognized it for what it was.

“This ancient Palladion, long a secret source of Ilium’s wealth and power, was three cubits in height, carried a spear in its right hand and a distaff and spindle in its left, and was associated with the goddess of death and fate. Ilios and the other ancestors of the current defenders of Troy had ordered made many replicas of the Palladion, in many different sizes, and hid and guarded these false statues as surely as they did the real one, since everyone knew that the continued survival of Ilium itself depended on their possession of the Palladion. It was the gods themselves who revealed this fact to me in dreams in those last weeks of the siege of Ilium, and so I told Diomedes of my plan to go into the city and locate the true Palladion so that he and I could return to the city, steal it, and seal Troy’s doom.

“First, I disguised myself in rags as a beggar and had my own servant whip me with a lash, thus disfiguring myself with stripes and welts. The citizens of Ilium, you see, were notoriously weak-stomached when it came to disciplining their servants—they tended to spoil slaves more often than punish them, and no Trojan servant serving a good family would be allowed to go abroad sporting torn clothes and flogging stripes—so I reasoned that rags and stench and, most important, the bloody whip-marks would make the citizens turn away in embarrassment upon seeing me—a perfect disguise for a spy, don’t you think?

“I chose myself for this task because I was the stealthiest and craftiest of all the Achaeans, and also, because I had been within the walls of Troy before, more then ten years earlier, sent there to lead a delegation tasked with peacefully negotiating the release of Helen before our black ships arrived in force and a war began. Obviously, those negotiations failed—all of us true Argives had hoped they’d fail, since we were spoiling for a fight and hungry for plunder—but I well remembered the layout of the city within those great walls and gates.

“In my dream, the gods—most likely Athena, since she favored our cause more than any of the others—had revealed to me that the Palladion and its many replicas were secreted somewhere in Priam’s royal palace, but did not tell me where in the palace it might be hidden, nor how I could tell the real Palladion from its many pretenders.

“I waited until the deepest hours of the night, when the rampart fires are at their lowest and the human senses are at their weakest, and then I used grapple and rope to go over the towering walls, killing a guard as I did so and hiding his body under fodder stacked high within the walls for the Thracian cavalry. Ilium was large—the largest city in the world—and it took me a while to navigate its streets and alleys to Priam’s palace. I was challenged twice by armed sentinels in the streets, but I grunted and made strangled sounds while gesturing meaninglessly with my whip-bloodied arms, and they judged me an idiot slave, well and truly whipped for his idiocy, and they let me pass.

“Priam’s palace was large—it had fifty bedrooms, one for each of Priam’s fifty sons—and it was well guarded by the most elite of Trojan’s elite troops, with alert guards at all the doors and outside each street-level window, with still more guards within the courtyards and on the palace walls—no sleepy sentinels would idly wave me on here, no matter how late the hour or how bloody my stripes or how idiotic my grunts—so I made my way south a few blocks to Helen’s home, which was also well guarded, but less so after I knifed my second Trojan of the night and hid his body as best I could.

“After Paris’s death in an archery duel, Helen had been given in marriage to another of Priam’s sons, Deiphobos, whom the people of Ilium called ‘the router of the enemy’ but whom we Achaeans referred to on the field as ‘oxen-buttocks,’ but her new husband was not at home this night and Helen slept alone. I woke her.

“I don’t believe I would have killed Helen if she had cried for help—I had known her for many years, you know, both in my role as guest in Menelaus’ noble house and, before that, as one of Helen’s first suitors when she became eligible for marriage, although this was just a formality, since I was happily married to Penelope even then. It was I who had counseled that Tyndareos should take an oath of the suitors to acquiesce to Helen’s choice, thus avoiding much bloodshed from the losers’ bad manners. I think Helen always appreciated that advice.

“Helen did not cry out for help that night I awakened her from her troubled sleep in her home in Ilium. She recognized me right away and hugged me and asked after the health of her true husband, Menelaus, and of her daughter so far away. I told her that all were well—although I did not tell her that at this point in the war, Menelaus had been seriously wounded twice on the battlefield and moderately wounded half a dozen times, including his recent arrow in the hip, and was in a surly mood. Instead, I expressed to her how much her husband and daughter and their family in Sparta missed her and wished her home and well.

“Helen laughed then. ‘My lord and husband Menelaus wishes me dead, and you know it, Odysseus,’ she said. ‘And I am sure that he will do the deed himself when the great walls and Scaean Gate of Ilium fall away soon, as Cassandra has prophesied.’

“I did not know this particular oracle—Delphi and Pallas Athena are the only seers of the future who have my ear—but I could not argue with her; it seemed probable that Menelaus would indeed slit her throat after all the bitter years of her disloyalty in the arms and beds of his enemies. But I did not tell Helen this. Instead, I told her that I would intercede with Menelaus, son of Atreus, convincing him to spare her life, if Helen would not betray me this night, but would help me find a way into Priam’s palace and instruct me on how to choose the true Palladion.

“ ‘I would not betray thee anyway, Odysseus, son of Laertes, true and crafty counselor,’ said Helen. And she told me how to pierce the palace defenses and how to know the real Palladion when I saw it amongst its imitators.

“But it was almost dawn. Too late to complete my mission that night. So I went out and down the streets and up and over and down the wall through the gaps I had left by killing the watchmen, and I slept late the next day, and bathed, and ate and drank, and had Machaon, the son of Asclepius and the finest healer in the army’s pay, dress my flog wounds and apply a healing salve.

“The next night, knowing that I would need an ally since I could not fight and carry the heavy Palladion stone at the same time, I enlisted Diomedes in my plan. Together in the deepest hour of the night, the son of Tydeus and I went up and over the wall—killing this sentinel with a well-placed arrow. Then we moved quickly down the streets and alleys—no dumb show as flogged slaves this night, but, rather, efficiently and silently killing any who challenged us—and made our way into Priam’s palace via a hidden sewer drain that Helen had told me how to find.

“Diomedes, a proud man like so many of those thick-skulled heroes from Argos, did not like wading through a sewer for any purpose, not even to ensure the downfall of Ilium. He grumbled and bitched and pissed and moaned and was in a truly foul mood by the time we added insult to injury by having to climb up through a hole in one of the ten-man crappers in the privies of the palace basement, where Priam’s treasure vaults were located in the midst of his elite guard’s barracks.

“We were stealthy, but our stench preceded us and we had to kill the first twenty guards we encountered in those corridors; the twenty-first showed us how to open the treasure-vault doors without tripping alarms or deadfalls, and then Diomedes cut that man’s throat as well.

“In addition to tons of gold, mountains of precious stones, deep pools of pearls, stacks of inlayed fabrics, chests of diamonds, and much of the rest of the wealth of the fabled East in those vaults, there were forty or so statues of the Palladion arrayed in niches. They were alike in everything except size.

“ ‘Helen said to take only the smallest,’ I said to Diomedes, and I did so, wrapping the Palladion in a red cape I had taken from the last guard we’d killed. We had the downfall of Ilium in our hands. All we had to do now was escape.

“This is the point when Diomedes decided that he wanted to loot Priam’s vaults then, that night, at once, immediately. The lure of all that plunder was too much for the greedy, brainless bastard. Diomedes would have traded ten years of our blood and toil for a few hundred pounds of gold.

“I . . . dissuaded him. I will not describe the fight we had when I set the red-wrapped Palladion on the floor and drew my sword to stop the son of Tydeus, king of Argos, from ruining our mission through his greed. The fight was over quickly, won by stealth. All right, if you insist, I’ll tell you—no noble combat here. No glorious aristeia here. I suggested that we remove our reeking tunics before fighting, and while the great lummox was disrobing, I threw a ten-weight lump of gold at the great ox and knocked him cold.

“In the end, I ended up fleeing Priam’s palace with the heavy Palladion in the crook of one arm and the heavier, naked Diomedes slung over my shoulder.

“I couldn’t carry him over the wall like that, so I was ready, willing, and on the verge of leaving him by the cesspool of sewage where the great drain let out near where the river ran under Ilium’s walls, but Diomedes regained consciousness right then and agreed to leave the city with me. We departed quietly. Very quietly. He did not speak to me again that day, nor again that week, nor after the fall and plunder of Ilium, nor during our preparations to sail for home.

“Nor have I spoken to Diomedes since that day.

“I should add that it was shortly after that, after I bore away the Palladion to our Argives’ camp where we hid it well, sure now that Troy was in its final hours, that we began work on the gigantic wooden horse. The horse had three purposes—first, as a ruse, of course, to carry me and a carefully chosen band of my staunchest fighters into the city; second, as a means to have the Trojans themselves remove the great stone lintel over the Scaean Gate in order to let the votive offering pass into their city, since prophecy said that these two things had to come to pass before Ilium would fall—the loss of the Palladion and the destruction of the Scaean lintel; and third, and finally, we crafted the great horse as a gift to Athena to make up for the loss of her Palladion, since she was also known as Hippia, ‘horse goddess,’ since it was she who had bridled and tamed Pegasus for Bellerophontes and she who took such pleasure in riding and exercising her own horses at every opportunity.

“And this, my friends, is my short tale of the theft of the Palladion and the downfall of Ilium. I hope the telling pleased you. Are there any questions?”

Ada caught Harman’s eye. This was his short tale ? she thought, and saw her lover catch her thought like a blown kiss.

“Yes, I have a question,” said Daeman.

Odysseus nodded.

“Why do you call it Troy some of the time and Ilium the rest of the time?” asked the pudgy young man.

Odysseus shook his head slightly, rose, took his scabbard and short sword from the sonie, and walked off into the forest.