Around all but one. In Ilium’s main square, Paris’s funeral pyre outshines all the other fires in and around the city, but only one dark form presses close to it as if for warmth—Hector, moaning aloud, weeping, calling to his soldiers and servants and slaves to pour more wood onto the howling flames while he uses a large, two-handed cup to dip wine from a golden bowl, constantly pouring it onto the ground near the pyre until the earth there is so drenched it looks to be oozing blood.
Hockenberry is just finishing his dinner when he hears the footsteps coming up the spiral staircase.
Suddenly his heart is pounding and he can taste the fear in his mouth. Someone has followed him up here—there can be little doubt. The tread on the steps is too light—as if the person climbing the stairs is trying to move stealthily.
Maybe it’s some woman scavenging, thinks Hockenberry, but even as the hope rises, it’s dashed; he can hear a faint metallic echo in the stairwell, as of bronze armor rattling. Besides, he knows, the women in Troy can be more deadly than most men he’d known in his Twentieth and Twenty-first century world.
Hockenberry rises as quietly as he can, sets the wineskin and bread and cheese aside, sheaths his knife, silently draws his sword, and steps back toward the only standing wall. The wind rises and rustles his red cape as he conceals the sword under its folds.
My QT medallion. He uses his left hand to touch the small quantum teleportation device where it hangs against his chest under his tunic. Why did I think I had nothing valuable with me? Even if I can’t use this any longer without being detected and pursued by the gods, it’s unique. Invaluable. Hockenberry pulls out the flashlight and holds it extended the way he used to aim his taser baton when he owned one. He wishes he had one now.
It occurs to him that it might be a god climbing the last of the eleven flights of steps just below him. The Masters of Olympos had been known to sneak into Ilium disguised as mortals. The gods certainly had reason enough to kill him and to take back their QT medallion.
The climbing figure comes up the last few stairs and steps into the open. Hockenberry flicks on the flashlight, shining the beam full on the figure.
It is a small and only vaguely humanoid form—its knees are backward, its arms are articulated wrong, its hands are interchangeable, and it has no face as such—barely a meter tall, sheathed in dark plastic and gray-black-and-red metal.
“Mahnmut,” Hockenberry says in relief. He shifts the circle of the flashlight beam away from the little Europan moravec’s vision plate.
“You carrying a sword under that cape,” asks Mahnmut in English, “or are you just happy to see me?”
It’s been Hockenberry’s habit to carry some fuel in his backpack for a small fire when he’s up here. In recent months, this has often meant dried cow chips, but tonight he’s brought plenty of sweet-smelling kindling sold everywhere on the black market today by those woodcutters who had brought back the wood for Paris’s pyre. Now Hockenberry has the little fire going while he and Mahnmut sit on blocks of stone on opposite sides of it. The wind is chill and Hockenberry, at least, is glad for the fire.
“I haven’t seen you around for a few days,” he says to the little moravec. Hockenberry notices how the flames reflect off Mahnmut’s shiny plastic vision plate.
“I’ve been up at Phobos.”
It takes Hockenberry a few seconds to remember that Phobos is one of the moons of Mars. The closer one, he thinks. Or maybe the smaller one. At any rate, a moon. He turns his head to see the huge Hole a few miles to the northeast of Troy: it’s now night on Mars as well—the disk of the Hole is only barely visible against the night sky, and that is only because the stars look slightly different there, more brilliant, or clustered more tightly together, or maybe both. Neither of the Martian moons is visible.
“Anything interesting happen today while I was gone?” asks Mahnmut.
Hockenberry has to chuckle at that. He tells the moravec about the morning funeral services and Oenone’s self-immolation.
“Whoa, doggies,” says Mahnmut. The ex-scholic can only assume that the moravec deliberately uses idiomatic English he thinks is specific to the era Hockenberry had lived through on his Earth. Sometimes it works; sometimes, like now, it’s laughable.
“I don’t remember from the Iliad that Paris had an earlier wife,” continues Mahnmut.
“I don’t think it’s mentioned in the Iliad.” Hockenberry tries to remember if he’d ever taught that fact. He doesn’t think so.
“That must have been pretty dramatic to watch.”
“Yes,” says Hockenberry, “but her accusations about Philoctetes really killing Paris were even more dramatic.”
“Philoctetes?” Mahnmut cocks his head in a way that seemed almost canine to Hockenberry. For whatever reason, he’s come to associate that movement with the idea that Mahnmut is accessing memory banks. “From the play by Sophocles?” asks Mahnmut after a second.
“Yeah. He was the original commander of the Thessalians from Methone.”
“I don’t remember him from the Iliad,” says Mahnmut. “And I don’t think I’ve met him here either.”
Hockenberry shakes his head. “Agamemnon and Odysseus dumped him on the isle of Lemnos years ago, on their way here.”
“Why’d they do that?” Mahnmut’s voice, so human in timbre, sounds interested.
“Because he smelled bad, mostly.”
“Smelled bad? Most of these human heroes smell bad.”
Hockenberry has to blink at that. He remembers thinking just that ten years ago, when he’d first started as a scholic here shortly after his resurrection on Olympos. But somehow he hadn’t noticed it after the first six months or so. Did he smell bad? he wonders. He says, “Philoctetes smelled especially bad because of his suppurating wound.”
“Wound?”
“Snakebite. Bitten by a poisonous snake when he… well, it’s a long story. The usual ‘stealing stuff from the gods’ story. But Philoctetes’ foot and leg got so bad that it just poured pus, smelled bad all the time, and sent the archer into screaming and fainting fits at regular intervals. This was on the boat ride here to Troy ten years ago, remember. So finally Agamemnon, on Odysseus’ advice, just dumped the old man on the island of Lemnos and literally left him to rot there.”
“But he survived?” says Mahnmut.
“Obviously. Probably because the gods kept him alive for some reason, but he was in agony with that rotting foot and leg the whole time.”
Mahmut cocks his head again. “All right… I’m remembering the Sophocles play now. Odysseus went to get him when the seer Helenus told the Greeks that they wouldn’t defeat Troy without Philoctetes’ bow—given to him by… who?… Heracles. Hercules.”
“Yes, he inherited the bow,” says Hockenberry.
“I don’t remember Odysseus going to fetch him. In real life, I mean. During the past eight months.”
Hockenberry shakes his head again. “It was very quietly done. Odysseus was gone for only about three weeks and no one made a big deal about it. When he returned, it was sort of like… oh, yeah, I picked up Philoctetes on my way back from getting the wine.”
“In Sophocles’ play,” says Mahnmut, “Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was a central figure. But he never met his father when Achilles was alive. Don’t tell me he’s here too?”
“Not that I know of,” says Hockenberry. “Just Philoctetes. And his bow.”