Mountain of Black Glass (82 page)

“And stalwart Eurylochus, too, if I remember correctly,” the old man said to Azador, giving him a nod that seemed little more than perfunctory. “You will pardon an old man if I have your name wrong—it has been many years since Phoinix was in his full bloom, like you two, and my mind sometimes forgets. Now, I must speak to your liege lord.” He turned to Paul as though Azador had disappeared. “We beg you to accompany us, resourceful Odysseus. Bold Ajax and I have been sent to plead with Achilles that he join us in battle, but he is prideful as always and will not come out. He feels that our leader King Agamemnon has done him a terrible wrong. We need your wits and your clever tongue.”

Well, there's a neat little summing-up,
Paul thought.
The system handing me what I need to go forward? I still wish I remembered all this better, though, he thought sourly. This would be bliss for a real Classics major—all except the maybe-gettingkilled part.

“Of course,” he said to old Phoinix. “I'll go with you.”

Azador fell in behind them, but neither of the other two seemed to notice.

The gate of the Greek camp was made of timber bound with heavy bronze, guarded by several armored men. The camp itself looked like something that had started out as a temporary bivouac, perhaps in the springtime of the invaders' hopes, but a decade on the Trojan plain had turned it into something far more involved, although still without any real homelike feeling. A deep ditch formed the outermost ring, with palisades of sharpened logs on either side. Inside the ditch rose a wall of piled stones twice as high as a man, reinforced by giant timbers. An ominously huge mound of dirt and sand had been raised a short distance inside the wall, as if in imitation of the distant hills. Smoke leaked from it in several places: there had been a great burning, and the remains were still smoldering. With a little thump of dismay that even the knowledge of virtuality could not entirely cushion, Paul realized what had been burned and entombed there. The slaughter must have been dreadful.

Ajax received a great deal of attention as they made their way across the Greek settlement, respectful nods and the occasional shouted greeting, but Paul himself, as Odysseus, received no less. It was incredibly strange to walk into this archaic fortress and be greeted with cheers by ancient Greek soldiers, a returning hero who in actuality had never been here before. He supposed it was the kind of thing that the Grail Brotherhood loved, but it made him feel like an impersonator.

Which, he supposed, was exactly what he was.

It really was a city, Paul realized. For every single Greek warrior, and there seemed to be thousands, there were two or three others, both military and civilian, working in support. Drovers with supply sledges, grooms for the chariot horses, water-bearers, carpenters and masons working on the fortifications, even women and children—the camp bustled with activity. Paul looked up to the shining walls of Troy and wondered what it felt like to be trapped inside for years, to look down each day and see this incredible human machine working tirelessly toward your destruction. The plain had probably once been the home of livestock and herdsmen, but now all the animals were penned inside the two cities, the great and the temporary, and the people also had drained away, making their choice between besiegers and besieged. Except for carrion birds, flocks of crows like earth-hugging storm clouds, the plain was as empty as if some great broom had swept away everything that did not have deep roots.

As they made their way through the camp, Phoinix and the massive Ajax continued to behave as though Azador were not present, but the gypsy had fallen into one of his watchful silences and seemed not to care. They walked to the water's edge, where the ships pulled onto the sand lay in a long row, hull by tilted hull, huge craft with twinned banks of oars on each side as well as a number of smaller, faster vessels. All were stained a shiny black, and many had sterns that curled high above their decks like the poised tails of scorpions.

The foursome headed through a field of rippling tents toward a large wooden hut, which even if it had been of the same material would have stood out from the others by its ornamentation, the painted doorposts and the beaten gold on the lintel. Paul at first thought it must belong to Achilles, but Phoinix stopped before the guardian spearmen on either side of the doorway and said to Paul, “He is angry at Achilles, but he knows it was his own foolishness that began this. Still, he is highest among us and Zeus has given him the scepter. Let him say his piece and then we will hurry to the son of Peleus and see if we can calm him.”

Ajax grunted, a deep, angry, rumbling sound like a bull who had backed into a nettle. As they stepped into the building, Paul wondered which of the disputants the giant was unhappy with, and could only be glad it was not him.

Paul had difficulty seeing at first. The smoke of a large fire clouded the air inside the cabin, despite the hole in the ceiling. There were many shapes, mostly armored men, but a few women as well. The old man made straight for a gathering at the cabin's far side.

“Great Agamemnon, High King,” Phoinix said loudly, “I have found clever Odysseus, wise and well-spoken. He will go with us to Achilles, to see if we can unknit the anger that is in that great warrior's heart.”

The bearded man who looked up at them from the bench was smaller than Ajax, but still large. His ringleted head sat low on his wide shoulders, a circlet of gold on his forehead the only mark of kingship; if he had the belly of a man who ate well, he was still muscular and imposing. His small eyes were set deep beneath his brows, but they glinted with prideful intelligence. Paul could not imagine liking such a man, but he could easily imagine being afraid of him.

“Godlike Odysseus.” The high king withdrew a broad hand from beneath his thick purple cloak and waved for Paul to sit. “Now is your wisdom needed more than ever.”

Paul took one of the rug-covered benches. Azador squatted beside him, still darkly silent, still seemingly of no more interest to the others than a housefly. Paul wondered what would happen if Azador spoke—would they continue to ignore him? It did not seem likely he would find out, since the gypsy had not uttered a word since the beach.

There was some talk back and forth about the fortunes of the siege, to which Paul listened carefully, nodding in agreement when it seemed appropriate. Some of the details seemed different than what he remembered of
The Iliad,
but that wasn't suprising: he felt sure a system this complex, with characters so sophisticated as to be indistinguishable from real people, would come up with countless different variations of the original story.

The siege was going badly, there was no question about that. The city had held strong against attack for almost ten long years, and the Trojans, especially King Priam's son Hector, had proved to be fierce fighters; at the moment they were also taking heart from the absence of the Greeks' greatest warrior, Achilles. Several times in past days they had not only pushed the Greeks away from the walls but had almost reached the Greek fortifications, with the ultimate aim of setting fire to the Greek ships and stranding Agamemnon's assembled army in a hostile country. The list of the fallen on both sides was heartbreakingly long, but the Trojan warriors—led by Sarpedon and Hector's brother Paris (who had stolen the beautiful Helen in the first place, starting the war), but most especially by the powerful, seemingly unstoppable Hector—had been doing tremendous damage to the Greeks, who were beginning to lose heart.

Paul could not help smiling inwardly as great Agamemnon and the others talked, laying out all the important points. Whoever had programmed this had taken into account that even the few folk who had actually read Homer, like Paul himself, would have done so a long time before, and perhaps without the most careful attention.

“. . . But as you know,” Agamemnon said heavily, tugging his beard in unhappiness, “in my greed I offended Achilles, taking from him a slave girl who had been given him as a prize to make up for the loss of my own prize. Whether Zeus the king of gods has turned his heart against me—everyone knows that the Thunderer watches over Achilles' destiny—I cannot say, but I do know that I feel a great doom hanging over the Greeks and their well-benched ships. If lordly Zeus has turned against us, I fear we will all leave our bones here on a strange shore, for no man can overcome the desires of the immortal Son of Time.”

Agamemnon quickly listed all the glittering, generous gifts he would give to Achilles as recompense for the stolen prize, if only the great warrior would forgive him—the girl herself returned, augmented by objects of precious metal and swift horses, and the pick of the spoils if Troy should finally be overthrown, not to mention lands and a royal daughter in Agamemnon's own Argos—then urged Paul to go with Phoinix and Ajax and win Achilles back. After they had drunk wine with him from heavy metal cups, and also spilled some as offerings to the gods, Paul and the others stepped back out onto the sand. The sun had gone behind the clouds and the plain of Troy suddenly looked dead and dreary, a gray, brown, and black marsh that had already swallowed whole armies of heroes.

Ajax was shaking his huge head. “It is Agamemnon's own stiff neck that has brought this on us,” he growled.

“It is the stiff necks of both of them,” aged Phoinix replied. “Why are the greatest always so quick to fury, so swollen with pride?”

Paul felt that he was expected to say something, perhaps offer some wise Odyssean aphorism on the foibles of the mighty, but he was not quite ready to attempt improvised rhetoric of the kind that all this Classical conversation seemed to require. He tried to compensate by looking properly concerned.

Hang on a bit,
he suddenly thought.
I damn well should be concerned. If the Trojans come down on us and drive us into this ocean—and there's no reason that might not be in the cards on this go-round of the simulation—then it's not just a bunch of Puppets that get killed, spouting poetry. It'll be me and Azador, too.

Lulled by the familiarity of names, almost charmed by seeing such a famous place brought to life, he had lost track of just what he had sworn he would never forget.

If I don't take it seriously,
he reminded himself,
it will kill me.

 

The camp of Achilles and his Myrmidons was at the far end of the Greek flotilla, almost on the beach; Paul and his escorts walked a long way in the gray shadows of the boats. The Myrmidon soldiers sat or stood around their tents, dicing, arguing, full of what seemed to Paul like raw nervous energy. As he and the others approached, the men watched with faces either angry or sullen with shame; none greeted them as others had so cheerfully elsewhere in the camp. The split between Agamemnon and Achilles was clearly doing nothing good for morale.

Achilles' hut was only a little smaller than Agamemnon's, but workmanlike and undecorated—a place for a famous warrior to sleep and nothing more. A slender, handsome young man sat on a stool before the door, his chin propped on his hands, looking as though he had lost his best friend. His armor did not seem to fit him correctly, as though the pieces had been improperly tied. When he heard the footsteps he lifted his head and looked at Paul and the others nervously, but with what seemed no recognition.

Old Phoinix clearly recognized him, though, and greeted him. “Please, faithful Patroclus, tell the noble Achilles that Phoinix, with bold Ajax and famed Odysseus, would speak with him.”

“He's sleeping,” the young man said. “He's not well.”

“Come—surely he will not turn away his old friends.” Phoinix could not entirely disguise his irritation. Patroclus looked at him, then at Paul and massive Ajax, as though trying to decide what to do.

Something in the young man's hesitancy set Paul's revived sense of danger on edge. It was natural that in such a delicate situation, caught between the wishes of honored comrades-in-arms and the pride of his lord, Achilles, that this Patroclus should find himself uncertain of how to proceed, but something about the youth seemed subtly out of place.

“I'll tell him,” Patroclus said at last, then disappeared inside the hut. He emerged a few moments later with his face set in an expression of disapproval and nodded them inside.

Someone had put in an effort to make the dwelling clean; the sandy floor had been swept with a branch, and the armor and few other possessions were all neatly placed along one wall. At the center of the room, stretched on a bed of boughs that had been covered with a wool rug, lay the focus of everyone's worries, Trojans and Greeks alike. He, too, was smaller than Ajax, who seemed to be the largest man in the whole countryside, but he was tall by any other standard and built like a marble statue, every muscle beneath his sun-browned skin sharply defined. Half-naked, with a cloak drawn over him like a sheet, he looked like a romantic painting come to life.

Achilles lifted his handsome head of dark golden curls and stared at them. He tilted his head to one side for a moment, as though listening to a voice no one else could hear, then turned back to face his guests. He did not look ill—his color, as far as Paul could tell inside the dark hut, seemed to be good—but there was a great lassitude to his movements.

“Tell Agamemnon I . . . I am sick,” he said. “I cannot fight. There is no use sending people to ask me, even . . .” again he paused, his eyes focusing distantly, “. . . even you, Phoinix, my old tutor.”

The aged man looked to Paul, as though expecting him to offer the first arguments, but Paul did not want to dive in quite so quickly. Instead, as Phoinix took up the slack by describing Agamemnon's generous offer of reparations in intricate detail, Paul watched Achilles' reactions. The famous anger was absent, or at least suppressed. Although he was clearly annoyed, it seemed the petty frustration of a man awakened from a nap to no useful purpose, which suggested that Patroclus had told the truth. But Paul could not remember anything about Achilles being sick in
The Iliad.
Perhaps this was one of the variations, sprung from the complexity of an endlessly reiterating environment.