"How did he lose her?" Shea asked.
"Nobody knows. That part of the poem is missing. Anyway, he went through the burning city and saw the bound prisoners and the piled plunder. The ghost of Creusa appeared to him, 'larger than life', the poem says, that's why she looked so big, and told him what he just told his father."
"Well, I wish him all the best, but what do we do?"
"We go with him, of course!" Chalmers said.
"Why? I can't say that building a new Troy is on my list of things to do this week. I didn't see enough of the old one to conceive a real affection for it.
"Because this man is going to travel!" Chalmers said. "We are looking for Florimel, and if she's in this world, the only way to find her is to travel. Of course, we could always go back to the city and hope the Greeks don't kill us. Then we might hitch a ride with Odysseus; he's going to travel, too. Of course then we have to risk Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Laestrygonians, and so forth, get turned into pigs, eaten by a Cyclops, that sort of thing."
"On second thought," Shea said, "following our friend Aeneas sounds like a dandy idea." And so they went.
The day got hotter as they walked along, but at least there seemed to be no pursuit. There was little talk among the despondent refugees, so there was plenty of time to observe and ponder. It seemed odd to Shea that the people around them were all rather large. Not giants like Aeneas and the men of his household, but averaging bigger than typical twentieth-century Americans.
"I thought ancient people were much smaller," Shea noted. "But even the women here are bigger than I am."
"It's the age of heroes," Chalmers said. "Everything was bigger, better, handsomer. Men were stronger, women more beautiful and virtuous, or conversely more wicked. The heroes of Homer are always picking up stones 'such as three men could lift, as men are now'."
"Kind of like the way we picture the Old West, eh? The good guys are better, the bad guys are badder, and everything is much cleaner than it actually was."
"Exactly. In all probability, the Earps were back-shooting cardsharps who wore filthy clothes that never got ironed and had rotten teeth, but legend has made them towering, heroic exemplars of good fighting evil. It was the same with the heroes of antiquity."
"But these don't even look like Mycenaeans," Shea complained. "Just a while ago, I saw an article in National Geographic ..."
Chalmers shook his head. "Homer lived, if he lived at all, around four hundred years after the Trojan War. Virgil lived another eight hundred years after that. He had no idea what the people of the Mycenaean civilization looked like. What we see here," he swept an arm to take in the solemn procession, "is how Romans of the Augustan Age pictured the people of Homer. It's an amalgam of general Hellenistic fashions and old Greek paintings from walls and vases, sculptures and so forth. There's a prevalence of bronze, because Homer stressed that all the weapons and armor were bronze."
Before them, Aeneas walked tirelessly along, still carrying his father.
"Aeneas has lots of followers, even slaves," Shea said. "Why does he always carry the old guy?"
"That's Virgil again, rather than Homer. Virgil wanted to create a Roman national Epic, using Homeric models. But Roman heroes had to have Roman virtues, and to the Romans no virtue was greater than pietas. It was the scrupulous observance of duty toward one's parents, ancestors, hearth and gods. Those are the household gods Anchises is carrying wrapped up in that cloth. The image of the great hero carrying his aged father and the Penates on his back is the most vivid image of pietas in all of Roman legend."
"I see. So you know the poem pretty well?"
"It's coming back to me: 'Arma virumque cano,' it begins, 'Of arms and the man I sing'."
"I thought George Bernard Shaw wrote that."
Chalmers sighed. "And to think I once thought you were an educated man."
"What about it, Doc? Do you think you can work us up a little magic?" Shea profoundly hoped so. The band of refugees had reached Antander near the foot of Mt. Ida and there had set about building a fleet to bear them westward. Their number included numerous craftsmen, and even the noblemen did not seem averse to working with their hands, as long as the work involved weapons, horses, or ships. They cut and hauled wood and the ribs and planks took shape almost as if by magic, for the craftsmen worked the same way the heroes fought, with inhuman swiftness and certainty.
Even in the midst of all this legendary activity there was scut work to be done by inferiors. Boiling pitch and hauling it to the growing fleet was one of these. It was the job to which Chalmers and Shea had been set. Apparently, they were good only for such filthy, unpleasant labor. Harold was anxious to raise then-status, especially if they were to gallivant around the Mediterranean with this crew. And the crew was growing, as more refugees from the sack of Troy and its nearby villages trickled in. Already, a dozen ships were near completion and more keels had been laid.
"I think I can work something," Chalmers said. "It's not simple. The people of this mythos don't go in much for the mechanical sort of sorcery we've seen elsewhere; the use of spells and rituals that are actually rather scientific, even if the rules seem arbitrary."
"Yes, but?" Shea said, impatiently.
Chalmers ignored the urging and laid aside the stick with which he had been stirring a cauldron of boiling, stinking pitch. He sat wearily on a convenient rock and mopped his brow with a rag. Both of them had swapped their sixteenth century garb for tunics of local weave.
"Classical magic," Chalmers bore on, "characteristically involves bribing, flattering and manipulating the gods, getting them to do what you want."
"That sounds bad. Are Greek gods as hard to deal with as university department heads?"
"Oh, nothing that difficult. More like police or small-time politicians. That's the good part, you see:
Greek gods work cheap. All they really want is modest sacrifices and lots of flattery. They respond readily to suggestion that other gods, who are invariably rivals, are trying to horn in on their glory. They are extremely childish and extremely powerful."
"But then don't you ran the risk of falling afoul of those other gods?"
"Unfortunately, yes. And gods will frequently strike at a rival by attacking the rival's worshippers and favorites."
"Who are the favorites?" Shea asked, picking up the stick and giving the pitch a stir. It was almost hot enough.
"Their children, for one. Take Aeneas over there." Chalmers nodded toward the beach, where the hero was inspecting a rack of oars made of polished olive wood. Like everything else here, the oars were exquisitely designed and made. They could have hung in a first-rank art museum.
"What about him?"
"Well, you've seen his father. Do you know who his mother is?"
"Mrs. Anchises?"
"The goddess Aphrodite. Or, rather, Venus, this being a Roman story."
Shea gaped. "Venus? You mean Aeneas is a demigod?"
"A great many of the heroes were. Greek gods and goddesses spread themselves pretty thin."
"But Venus herself!" Shea shook his head in wonder. "But what did the goddess of love and beauty see in old Anchises?"
"I daresay he was younger then," Chalmers said drily. "Doubtless he was handsomer as well. It was a great help on the battlefield. Once, the Greek hero Diomedes wounded Aeneas but his mother spirited him away before Diomedes could deal the deathblow."