Savi shot it again, almost severing it at the waist. Its blue, milky internal fluid spattered the walls and paving stones. What remained of the voynix fell, twitched, and lay still.
Harman and Daeman cautiously moved closer, trying not to step in the blue fluid or on pieces of the creature. This was the second voynix they’d seen destroyed in two days.
“Come on,” said Savi, pulling an empty crystal flechette clip from her gun and slapping in a replacement. “If there are more around, we’re in serious trouble. We have to get to the sonie. And quickly.”
Savi led them down a narrow street, turned into a narrower alley, then turned again into something smaller than an alley—a crack between stone buildings. They emerged into a wide, dusty courtyard, went under a stone arch, and came into a smaller courtyard.
“Hurry,” whispered Savi. She led them up an outside staircase, across a rooftop terrace duned with dust, and then up a rotted wooden ladder past shuttered windows to a higher rooftop.
“What are we doing?” whispered Harman as the three came out into the cool night air atop the building. “Don’t we have to get back to the sonie?”
“I’ll call it to us,” said Savi. She went to one knee by the low rooftop wall and activated her proxnet function, shielding the glow above her palm. Harman crouched next to her.
Daeman remained standing. The air up here was cool after the heat of the cobblestoned streets and narrow alleys and the view was interesting from this point on the hill. To their right stabbed the blue beam, bathing all the domes and rooftops and streets in its pale light. It was dark now and stars were visible across the sky. The city had no lights burning, but ancient domes and spires and some arches gleamed to the blue light. Savi had told them that the walled compound on the hill where the beam burned was called Haram esh-Sharif, or Temple Mount, and the two domed structures at the base of the beam machine were the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa Mosque.
“Itbah al-Yahud!” came a sudden, shrill, amplified cry from the streets behind them. The cry was repeated from the warren of narrow streets to their west, between them and the sonie.
“Itbah al-Yahud!”
Savi looked up from her palm display.
“What is that?” asked Harman in a shrill whisper. “Voynix don’t speak.”
“No,” said Savi. “It’s coming from the ancient, automated muezzin call-to-prayer speakers on all the mosques.”
“Itbah al-Yahud!” came the tremulous but urgent voice echoing from all over the dark city. “Al-jihad!” cried the amplified voice. “Itbah al-Yahud!”
“Damn!” said Savi, looking at her palm display. “No wonder it isn’t responding to the remote.”
“What?” Daeman and Harman both stepped closer, crouching to see the rectangular display floating inches above her palm. The view was of the front of the sonie where they had landed it. The fields of rocks and walled city glowed greenly in the camera’s low-light vision. Closer, looming over the lens, scores of voynix were milling around the sonie, throwing their bodies onto the machine, battering it with boulders and stacking huge rocks on top of it.
“They defeated the forcefield and broke something,” whispered Savi. “The sonie’s not coming to us.”
“Allahu akbar!” cried the echoing, amplified, trembling voices from all points of the low-roofed city. “Itbah al-Yahud! Itbah al-Yahud!”
The three walked to the edge of the rooftop. For a second, Daeman thought that the buildings and cobblestoned streets and walled courtyards were trembling, crumbling, dissolving in the reflected blue light, but then he realized that things were crawling across the stone and domes and walls and rooftops. Thousands of things—like an invasion of roaches scrambling wildly toward the blue light. But then Daeman realized how far away the shimmering, crawling buildings were, computed the scale, and realized that it wasn’t roaches or spiders scrambling and scrabbling toward them, but voynix.
“Itbah al-Yahud!” screamed the metallic voice from everywhere. The syllables echoed back from the Mount without losing their demented urgency.
“What does that mean?” asked Daeman.
Savi was watching the blue-lighted voynix scrabbling closer over rooftops and through the maze of narrow, winding streets. The wave of huge insectoid shapes was less than two city blocks away now, close enough that they could all hear the scratch and tear of cutting blade and sharp manipulators on stone and tile. Savi turned slowly. Her face looked older than ever in the pulsing blue light.
“Itbah al-Yahud,” she repeated softly. “Kill the Jew.”
32
Achilles’ Tent
I have to kill Patroclus.
That realization comes to me like a whisper in the night as I lie here in the Myrmidon encampment, in Achilles’ tent, wrapped in the shell of Phoenix’ old body.
I have to kill Patroclus.
I’ve never killed anyone. Jesus Christ, I protested the Vietnam War as a college student, couldn’t put the family dog to sleep—had to have my wife take her to the vet—and considered myself a pacifist for most of my academic life. I’ve never hit another man, for Christ’s sake.
I have to kill Patroclus.
It’s the only way. I trusted that rhetoric would do it—old Phoenix’s revised rhetoric—that rhetoric would persuade the man-killer Achilles into meeting with Hector, into ending this war, into burying the hatchet.
Yeah, right in my forehead.
Achilles’ decision to leave—to return to a long life of pleasure but little glory—is deeply shocking to this scholic, to any student of the Iliad, but it makes sense. Honor is still more important than life to Achilles, but after Agamemnon’s insults, he sees no honor in killing Hector and then being killed in turn. Odysseus—that ultimate rhetorician—was eloquent in his explanation and evocation of how the living Achaeans and countless generations after would honor Achilles’ memory, but it’s not their honor that Achilles cares about. Only his sense of honor counts here, and there will be no honor now for him in killing Agamemnon’s enemies and dying for Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ objectives. Only Achilles’ honor counts, and he’d rather sail for home in a few hours and live the life of a lesser mortal, forsaking his chance to be part of this band of brothers twenty centuries before Prince Hal and Agincourt, than compromise any more honor here on the bloody plains of Ilium.
I see that now. Why didn’t I see it before? If Odysseus could not convince Achilles to fight—Odysseus of the crafty ways and silver tongue—why did I think I’d succeed? I was a fool. Homer made me a fool, but I was still a fool.
I have to kill Patroclus .
Not long after Odysseus and Big Ajax left, just after the torches and tripod fires were extinguished in the main room of Achilles’ tent, I heard slave girls being escorted in for the pleasure of Achilles and Patroclus. I’d never seen either of these slave girls, but I knew their names—Homer leaves no one nameless in the Iliad. Achilles’ girl (I couldn’t have used that word while teaching at Indiana University in my other life or the Political Correctness Police would have had my job, but here it doesn’t seem appropriate to call these giggling sex toys “women”) was named Diomede, Phorbas’ daughter from the isle of Lesbos—although she was no lesbian. Patroclus’ main squeeze was named Iphis. I almost laughed out loud as I caught a glimpse of them through the folds in the tent door—Achilles, who is tall and blond and statuesque and chiseled with muscle, preferred the tiny, stocky, brunette and large-breasted Diomede; Patroclus, who is much shorter than Achilles and dark-haired, had opted for the tall, blonde, thin, small-busted Iphis. For half an hour or so, I could hear the women’s laughter, the men’s rough conversation, and then the moans and cries from all four in Achilles’ sleeping chamber. Obviously the hero and his pal had no qualms about having sex in the same room with each other, even commenting on it while it was occurring, which makes me think more of Bloomington, Indiana, male Realtors or lodge brothers having a weekend in the big city than it does of the noble warriors of this heroic age. Barbaric.