This idiot war is more complicated and senseless than the Vietnam War I half remember from my youth.
Suddenly Aphrodite, my new spymaster and boss, QT’s into existence thirty yards to my left. She’s also here to help the Trojans and to enjoy the slaughter. But—
In the last slowed seconds before real-time resumes, I remember that if the actual fighting goes the way of the old poem, Aphrodite herself will be injured by Diomedes in the coming hour. Why would she come down to the fray knowing that a mortal will wound her?
The answer is the same that I’ve been reminded of so forcibly over the past nine years, but now the fact of it hits me with the force and flash of a nuclear explosion—The gods don’t know what will happen next! None but Zeus, it seems, is allowed to peer ahead at Fate’s checklist.
All of us scholics are aware of this—we are not allowed, by Zeus’s prohibition, to discuss future events with the gods and they are forbidden to ask us about the future books of the Iliad. Our task is only to confirm after the fact that Homer’s Iliad has been truthful to the events of the day we are tasked to observe and record. Many’s the time that Nightenhelser and I, while watching the little green men haul their face-stones toward the shore as the sun sets behind the sea to the west, have commented on this paradox of the gods’ own blindness to coming events.
I know that Aphrodite will be injured this day, but the goddess herself does not. How can I use this information? If I were to tell Aphrodite, Zeus would know—I don’t know how he would know, but I know he would—and I would be atomized and Aphrodite punished in some lesser way. How can I use the information that Aphrodite, the goddess giving me these gifts to spy with, will be—may be—injured by Diomedes this day?
I don’t have time to find the answer. Athena finishes her fussing with Diomedes and releases her grip on space and time.
Real light and terrible noise and violent motion resumes. Diomedes steps forth, body and face and shield blazing, the light evidently apparent even to the other mortals, visible to his fellow Achaeans and the opposing Trojans.
Idaeus completes the motion of lashing his horses forward. The chariot roars and rumbles toward the Greek line, directly at the startled Diomedes.
Phegeus hurls his spear at Diomedes. The spear misses by an inch, the spearpoint passing over the son of Tydeus’ left shoulder.
Diomedes, skin flushed, forehead blazing with fever-sweat and battle heat, hurls his own spear. It flies true, catching Phegeus dead-center in the chest—“between the nipples,” I think Homer had sung it in Greek—and Phegeus is flung backward off the chariot, striking the ground and cartwheeling several times, the spear breaking off and splintering as the corpse tumbles to a stop in the dust of the chariot he had been riding five seconds before. Death, when it comes, comes fast on the plains of Ilium.
Idaeus leaps off the chariot, rolls, and struggles to his feet, sword in hand, prepared to protect his brother’s body.
Diomedes snatches up another spear and rushes forward again, obviously ready to spit Idaeus the way he has just slaughtered the young man’s brother. The Trojan turns to flee—leaving his brother’s body behind in the dust in his panic—but Diomedes throws strong and true, casting the long spear at the center of the running man’s back.
Ares, the god of war, flies forward—literally flies forward, using the same type of levitation harness the gods have issued me—and pauses time again, protecting Idaeus from a flying spear now frozen not ten feet from the running man’s back. Then Ares extends his forcefield around Idaeus, resuming time long enough for the energy field to deflect Diomedes’ spear. Then Ares quantum teleports the terrified man off the battlefield completely, sending him somewhere safe. To the shocked and terrified Trojans, it is as if a blink of black night has snatched their comrade away.
So that Ares’ brother Hephaestus, the fire god, will not have lost both his future priests, I think, but then lurch backward to safety as the battle resumes and more Greeks follow Diomedes into the breach created by the killing of Phegeus. The empty chariot bounces across the rocky plain, and is captured by cheering Achaeans.
Ares is back now, QTing into semisolidity, a tall godshape as he tries to rally the Trojans, shouting in a godvoice for them to regroup and fend off Diomedes. But the Trojans are split—some running in terror at the approach of blazing Diomedes, some turning in obedience to the war god’s booming voice. Suddenly Athena levitates across the heads of Greeks and Trojans, seizes Ares’ wrist, and whispers urgently to the furious god.
The two QT away.
I look to my left again and the goddess Aphrodite—invisible to the Greeks and Trojans struggling and cursing and dying around her—motions with her hand for me to follow them.
I pull down Death’s Helmet and become invisible to all the gods except Aphrodite. Then I trigger the medallion around my neck and QT after Athena and Ares, following their passage through space-time as easily as I would follow footprints in wet sand.
It’s easy being a god. If you have the right equipment.
They have not teleported far, only about ten miles, to a shaded place along the banks of the Scamander, the gods call it the Xanthus—the broad river that runs across the plains of Ilium. When I QT into solidity about fifteen paces from them, Ares’ head snaps around and he stares right at me. For an instant I know that the Hades Helmet has failed, they see me, and I am dead.
“What is it?” asks Athena.
“I thought I . . . felt something. A stir. A quantum stir.”
The goddess turns her gray eyes in my direction. “There’s nothing there. I can see in all the phase-shift spectra.”
“I can as well,” snaps Ares and turns his gaze away from me. I let out a shaky breath as silently as I can; the Hades Helmet still cloaks me. The god of war begins pacing up and down the river’s edge. “Zeus is everywhere these days.”
Athena walks beside him. “Yes, Father is angry at us all.”
“Then why do you provoke him?”
The goddess stops. “Provoke him how? By defending my Achaeans from slaughter?”
“By preparing Diomedes to do slaughter,” says Ares. I notice for the first time the reddish tint to the tall, perfectly muscled god’s curly hair. “This is a dangerous thing you do, Pallas Athena.”
The goddess laughs softly. “We’ve been intervening in this battle for nine years. It’s the Game, for God’s sake. It’s what we do. I know that you plan to intervene on your beloved Ilium’s behalf this very day, slaughtering my Argives like sheep. Is this not dangerous—this active participation by the god of war?”
“Not as dangerous as arming one side or the other with nanotech. Not as dangerous as retrofitting them with phase-shift fields. What are you thinking, Athena? You’re trying to turn these mortals into us—into gods.”
Athena laughs again but puts on a serious expression when she notices that her laughter only makes Ares more angry. “Brother, my augmentation of Diomedes is short-lived, you know that. I want only for him to survive this encounter. Aphrodite, your darling sister, has already urged on the Trojan archer Pandarus to wound one of my favorites—Menelaus—and even as we speak, she’s whispering in the archer’s ear—Kill Diomedes. ”
Ares shrugs. I know that Aphrodite is his ally and his instigator. Like a pouting little boy—an eight-foot-tall pouting little boy with a pulsing energy field—he finds a smooth stone and skips it across the water. “What does it matter if Diomedes dies today or next year? He’s mortal. He’ll die.”
Now Athena laughs without embarrassment. “Of course he will die, my dear brother. And of course a single mortal’s life or death is of no consequence to us . . . to me. But we must play the Game. I’ll not let that bitch-whore Aphrodite change the will of the Fates.”