Mountain of Black Glass (92 page)

Paul's existence had devolved into a constant rhythm of stabbing and retreating, taking lives to preserve his own. This ancient warfare was not like anything he had seen, no measured attack and counterattack of trained swordsmen. When the arrows and the long spears had hissed out and fallen, the survivors charged forward, shouting. Shields were locked so the combatants could stab at each other with their short blades. It was maddening, everyone so close in the thickest clinches that Paul could feel other men leaning on him as they fought, and there was little way to distinguish friend from enemy. He was himself injured several times, the worst a long bleeding runnel on his arm, an aching but fairly shallow wound from a spear that had partially pierced his shield. He wanted nothing more than to be off the wall and out of harm's way, but as the sun rose blood-red over the plain, it was clear that the Trojans smelled victory, and with Hector in his glinting armor savaging hapless Greeks like a jungle beast turned loose at a children's party, Paul began to feel his own weakness and weariness mirrored in the other defenders. It would all be over soon. He would finally get the black peace he had often wished for, now when he least desired it.

Trojans were massing again at the gate for another push. Paul stood, gasping for air, and watched them jostling up the gulley toward him and the other exhausted Greeks. With their shields above their heads, the invaders looked more like insects than men—Paul almost seemed to be looking down on a horde of cockroaches. Only one face could be seen: black-haired Hector stood in their midst like a warrior god, unafraid of Greek arrows, his blood-slicked spear held high in one hand as he used the other to shove his countrymen toward the vulnerable gate. Diomedes had dropped down from the wall in an effort to engage Hector, but the Greek hero had instead been hemmed in by other Trojan fighters; although he had killed several of them, he was still beset, several dozen meters away.

Just as Paul felt himself slipping into a sort of doomed feverdream, hypnotized by the wave of shields slowly rising toward him, there was a heavy thump near his feet, then a hand like an industrial vise tightened on his ankle. He raised his stabbing-sword with exhausted languor, realizing only after a long instant that he had been grabbed from behind—from the Greek side of the wall.

The giant Ajax stood on the ground below him. He lifted the hand that had clutched Paul's leg.

“Help me up, Odysseus.”

Paul braced himself, then reached down so Ajax could grip his wrist and found that it was all he could do even to bear a portion of the massive hero's weight. Ajax pulled himself up onto the wall, then took a moment to catch his breath, looking down with distant malice on the swarming Trojans.

“I would have returned sooner,” he rumbled, “but that pretty-boy Paris got over the wall with some of his men. We chased him back out quick enough.” Ajax was red-faced and sweating, clearly exhausted, but his presence was still startling. If Hector was a warrior god, this was some older, less subtle deity, a god of mountains, of earth, of . . . stone.

Paul stared in amazement as Ajax bent and lifted the boulder he had set down on the wall by Paul's feet, then gulped air and straightened. “I wouldn't have wanted to carry this much farther,” he rasped, the tendons on his neck swelling and stretching tight. The stone looked like it weighed as much as a small car.

Heroes,
Paul thought.
They're bloody heroes, and meant to be so. That's what it said all through
The Iliad—
“a stone that ten men of our day could not lift.”

“Now, where is that bastard Hector?” rasped Ajax. It took him only a moment to find Priam's mighty son, who was shoving his way to the front of the assault. “Ah,” the giant grunted, then with a creaking of muscles so loud Paul winced and shied away, he heaved the boulder up above his head and held it there, tree-trunk arms trembling. “Hector!” he shouted. “I bring you a gift from the Greeks!”

Hector's handsome face turned upward just as Ajax hurled the great stone down at him. The hero of Troy had time only to jerk his shield up above his head and brace himself before the stone smashed him to the ground. Rolling away, it killed three men, and the Trojan line fell apart, bellowing in surprise and fear. A few of them had the presence of mind to pull Hector's limp body back with them as they retreated into the mass of the Trojan forces.

“You killed him!” Paul said, stunned.

Ajax was slumped, bent almost double with his forearms on his thighs, trembling all over. He shook his head. “Great Hector still moves—that I saw as they dragged him away. He is too strong for one rock to kill him. But he will not fight again beneath today's sun, I think.”

Paul watched, amazed, as defeat eddied out through the Trojan ranks like the smell of a brushfire through a herd of deer. The soldiers assaulting the walls pulled back, and although arrows continued to fly, the great number of Trojans retreated with Hector's senseless body to the far side of the ditch. The gods, it seemed, had withdrawn their favor from Priam's forces . . . at least for a while.

 

“C
ODE Delphi.
Start here.

“The sun is up, and all the royal household are atop the watchtower trying to make sense of what is happening in the battle by the Greek camp, which to those on the wall, at such a distance, can be little more than a scurrying of ants. The fighting has been going on for hours. Everyone knows that there must already be many dead on both sides. What a dreadful thing, to wait helplessly to find out who has survived, who has not! And I understand Priam and Hecuba and all the others only too well, for my own friends are somewhere on that field of slaughter. Even in this imaginary world humankind seems to be a machine built solely to damage itself. If the hand of evolution is at work, if somehow violent death serves some greater purpose, I cannot see it.

“Of course, I cannot see anything. What a fool I was, to think that these new senses, my new adaptation, made me any less blind. I am lost in the dark.

“No. Order, I must have some order. I do not know how long before something momentous happens—the Trojans parading back in victory or hurrying toward the gates in defeat. My own friends may need help when they return. If they return. No. I will make some order.

“I could sleep only a little after I last made a journal entry. As dawn approached, I woke from an unsettling dream where I was again lost in the blackness of the Pestalozzi Institute with the voices of lost children moaning down the hallways. I could not get back to sleep, nor did I try to for long. There is little enough I can do now, since I have cast the dice and sent my friends off to war, but there are things I can accomplish that are certainly better than lying on my back in the last hours of night, sleepless and brooding.

“Emily awoke when I got up. She was fractious, like a very young child, but perhaps some of the dream was still with me, because for the first time my heart truly went out to her. Whatever she is, she clearly did not ask to be drawn into our troubles and she is suffering because of it. In fact, she is suffering in ways that perhaps mean something important . . . but I am ahead of myself again. Order, Martine.

“Florimel was still sleeping, thank God—she needs rest badly—and the girl was afraid to stay by herself in the women's quarters, so I took her with me. I had no idea where I was going, but was determined to learn something of this famous city. We are here for a reason, I must believe that. The manifestation—the Lady of the Windows, as the monk named her—could not have been just a part of the House world, since she spoke of this simulation. Someone communicated with us, or tried to. Someone wanted us here. But who . . . and why? And where in this vast place, exactly, are we meant to go?

“As we went out from the women's quarters and through the palace, I heard voices in many of the rooms—prayers, quiet arguments, even weeping. Emily and I were not the only ones waiting uncomfortably for the dawn. Several times we were stopped by men of the palace, some armed, some apparently hurrying to King Priam's chambers with messages, but they were all distracted and seemed to want little more than to make certain we knew to stay away from the gates where the men were mustering. I had wondered if Priam himself might somehow be the focal point of our assignation from the Lady of the Windows, but could not see why. In any case, I had decided to wait to explore the king's quarters until daylight, when he and his advisers would be distracted by the battle on the plain, since this night it would be full of Troy's male leadership.

“Outside, all of the fabled city seemed to lie still but rigid with tension, like someone feigning sleep. As we went out across the great square, with even my expanded senses blurred by the mists that would disappear with dawn, the palace behind us seemed a dream-object, something that would not be as easy to return to as it had been to leave.

“Emily was quiet but watchful beside me, anxious as a cat stepping into an unfamiliar room. ‘Do you feel something?' I asked her.

“She nodded, but almost reluctantly. I could . . . there is no word—smell, hear, see, all are misleading . . . I could
sense
a certain contraction of her attention, as though circumstance forced her to retreat into herself. ‘Something . . . I feel . . . something.'

“Leading her like a horse that might bolt at any moment, I tried to distract her with small talk and little touches while slowly heading in the very direction which seemed to trouble her most. I have an idea, one that I cannot explain any more than I can name the senses that have been given to me in place of my sight, that Emily might somehow be sensitive to anomalies in the system, or at least to the particular anomaly which led us here. Renie has told me that the appearance of the Lady of the Windows struck Emily almost like a physical shock. I hoped that her discomfort was more than general, that perhaps now it meant we were near some similar locus.

“It was cruel. I do not like what I have had to do, and I fear that I will have worse things on my conscience before the end of all this, but I also know that we are desperate—that our ignorance has wasted time and lives.

“Long before we left the center of Troy, Emily's discomfort was so strong that I felt certain we were near something significant. We crossed through the market, the empty stalls like eye sockets, a few cloth banners still flapping, forgotten in the confusion of war. At one point, when she was shaking like a palsy victim and crying to go back to the palace, I perceived that a large building of some sort lay at the end of the street where we had stopped. I urged her forward, promising that soon we would turn back, and although her fear had almost overwhelmed her, managed to lead her to the steps of the huge, columned box. I had an idea what it was, but I wanted to be certain.

“ ‘I know you're afraid, Emily,' I said. ‘Let me go and see what this is, then I'll come back to you.' But to my astonishment, she insisted on going with me, more afraid of being alone than of her own internal agonies.

“Robed men stepped up to meet me as I entered through the great bronze doors. They were priests, and as I had suspected, this was the famous Temple of Athena. When they recognized me—I have not chosen to be Priam's daughter Cassandra out of pride or a desire for luxury, but for relative freedom—they stepped aside and let me enter.

“Despite the curtains that hid it, my senses told me that the shape at the back of the tall-roofed chamber was the huge wooden statue of Athena known as the Palladium. Recollections of the role of Athena in
The Iliad,
coupled with my guess at Emily's sensitivities, suggested that this might be the place for a nexus, or at least where a presence like the Lady of the Windows might make an appearance—there is a strong sense of the metaphorical in this Otherland network, perhaps part of the original design, perhaps what Kunohara referred to as our ‘story.' But to my surprise, even when we neared the shrouded altar, Emily did not experience any greater degree of unease—if anything, the solid stone walls of the temple seemed to reassure her. She stood and waited almost patiently as I surveyed the room, trying to detect any sign of a hidden entrance that might lead to the maze Kunohara had mentioned, but without success.

“I led her out again, deciding that I must come back again in the daytime, when I could explore at leisure without inflicting pain on Emily and thus distracting myself. But to my further astonishment, her discomfort appeared again after we left the Temple of Athena, until by the time our circuitous route had almost brought us back to the palace she was not only shaking again, but weeping quietly. At last it got so bad that I had to let her sit on a low stone wall to try to compose herself. We were in what must have been, in Trojan terms, a relatively old and undesirable part of the acropolis. The temples and other buildings were small and, as best I could tell, in poor repair. The trees that lined the little street had grown until they almost completely blocked the sky. Water dripped somewhere onto stone, making a solemn, lonely sound.

“ ‘Is she ill?' someone asked me—a sound so unexpected in the last hour before dawn that I jumped. ‘I can offer you shelter. Or did you wish to make an offering?'

“The stranger seemed to be a man bent with age, leaning on a staff, wrapped in a heavy if threadbare wool cloak. I could not see his face, of course, not as a sighted person would, but the information it gave me suggested he was not just old but very old, with no hair but a wisp of beard on his chin, and the way he held his head suggested he might be blind. The irony was not lost on me as I thanked him and told him we were almost home.

“He nodded. ‘You will be from the palace, then,' he said. ‘I can hear it in your voice. A few others have wandered down from there in the last weeks, seeking otherwise forgotten gods and goddesses.'