I nodded agreement, but I wondered how Achilles would take to the prospect of a long life as a cripple.
As if in answer to my thoughts, a loud wail sprang up from the Myrmidones’s end of the camp. I jumped to my feet. Poletes got up more slowly.
“My lord Achilles!” a voice cried out. “My lord Achilles is dead!”
I glanced at Poletes.
“Poison on the arrowhead?” he guessed.
I threw down the wine cup and started off for the Myrmidones. All the camp seemed to be rushing in the same direction. I saw Odysseus’s broad back, and huge Ajax outstriding everyone with his long legs.
Spear-wielding Myrmidones guards held back the crowd at the edge of their camp area, allowing only the nobles to pass them. I pushed up alongside Odysseus and went past the guards with him. Menalaos, Diomedes, Nestor, and almost every one of the Achaian leaders were gathering in front of Achilles’s hut.
All but Agamemnon, I saw.
We went inside, past weeping soldiers and women tearing their hair and scratching their faces as they screamed their lamentations.
Achilles’s couch, up on a slightly raised platform at the far end of the hut, had turned into a bier. The young warrior lay on it, left leg swathed in oil-soaked bandages, dagger still gripped in his right hand, a jagged red slash from just under his left ear to halfway across his windpipe still dripping bright red blood.
His eyes stared sightlessly at the mud-chinked planks of the ceiling. His mouth was open in a rictus that might have been a final smile or a grimace of pain.
Odysseus turned to me. “Start your men building the siege tower.”
I nodded.
Chapter 17
ODYSSEUS and the other leaders headed for Agamemnon’s hut for a council of war. I went back to my own tent. The camp was wild with the news: Achilles dead by his own hand. No, it was a poisoned arrow. No, a Trojan spy had done it. No, the god Apollo had slain him personally in vengeance for killing Hector and then despoiling his body.
The god Apollo.
I crawled into my tent and stretched out on the straw pallet. Lacing my fingers behind my head, I thought that for once I wanted to sleep, I wanted to go into that other existence and meet the Creators again. I had things to tell them, questions to ask, answers to demand.
But how could I pass through to their dimension? The Golden One had brought me to them. I could not do it myself.
Or could I? Closing my eyes, I cast my thoughts back to the “dreams” I had gone through before. I slowed their moments down to ultra slow-motion in my mind, stretching each second into hours, peering deeper and deeper into the scene until I could almost visualize the individual atoms that made up our bodies and see them scintillating and vibrating in their eternal dance of energy.
A pattern. I sought a pattern. There must be some arrangement of energies, some alignment of particles, that forms a gate between one world and the other. They are linked, I knew, part of what the Golden One called a continuum. Where is the link? How does the gate operate?
Outside my little tent, I knew, insects buzzed and the stars turned on their spheres. The moon rose and climbed up the night sky. Midnight came and went. Still I lay there as in a trance, my eyes closed, my vision focused on the times when the Golden One had pulled me through the gate that linked his world with mine.
I saw a pattern. I replayed each moment when the Golden One had summoned me before him, and saw the same pattern of energies arrange themselves in the atoms around me. I visualized the pattern, froze it in my memory, and then poured every gram of mental energy I had into that image. I felt perspiration trickling across my brow, my chest, my arms and legs. Still I concentrated until it felt as if my brain was on fire.
I will not stop, I told myself. I will break through or kill myself. There is no third way.
A flash of cryogenic cold swept through me and then, with the abruptness of a light being switched on, I felt a gentle warming glow.
I opened my eyes and saw myself standing in the middle of a circle of the same gods and goddesses I had met before. But this time I was on their level, in their midst. And they looked shocked.
“How dare you!”
“Who summoned you?”
“You have no right to intrude here!”
I grinned at their surprise. They were truly splendid, robed and gowned in rich fabrics and glittering metallics. I had on nothing except my leather kilt, I realized.
“The insolence of this creature!” said one of the women.
I searched their faces for the Golden One. He pushed past two other men and confronted me.
“How did you get here?” he demanded.
“You showed me the way.”
Anger flared in his gold-flecked eyes. But the older, bearded one I thought of as Zeus stepped forward to stand beside him.
“You show remarkable abilities, Orion,” he said to me. Then, turning to the Golden One, “You should be congratulated for making him so talented.”
I thought I saw a trace of an ironic smile on Zeus’s bearded face. The Golden One bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.
“Very well, Orion,” he said, “so you’ve found your way here. To what purpose? What do you want?”
“I want to know if you have decided to make Troy win this war or not.”
They glanced back and forth at one another without answering.
“That’s not for you to know,” said the Golden One.
I looked around at all their faces, so flawlessly beautiful, so unable to hide their inner feelings.
“By that,” I said, “I take it that you are still arguing among yourselves about what the outcome should be. Good! The Achaians will attack Troy one more time. And this time they will take the city and burn it to the ground.”
“Impossible!” snapped the Golden One. “I won’t permit it.”
“You think that by killing Achilles you’ve ruined any chance the Achaians had of winning. Well, you’re wrong. We’ll win. And on our next attack.”
“I’ll destroy you!” he raged.
I regarded him calmly. Strangely enough, I actually felt serene within myself. Not a trace of fear.
“You can destroy me, certainly,” I said. “But I have learned something about you self-styled gods and goddesses. You cannot destroy all of your creatures. You can influence us, manipulate us, but you haven’t the power to destroy us, one and all. You may have created us, but now we exist and act on our own. We are beyond your control — not totally, I know, but we have much more freedom of action than you like to admit.”
Zeus said softly, like the warning rumble of distant thunder, “Be careful, Orion. You are tempting a terrible wrath.”
“Your powers are limited,” I insisted. And suddenly I understood why. “You can’t destroy us! If you did, you would be destroying yourselves! You exist only as long as your creatures exist. Our destinies are linked throughout time.”
One of the goddesses, a cruel smile on her beautiful lips, stepped toward me. “You flatter yourself, arrogant creature. You can be destroyed utterly, and very painfully, too.”
The Golden One agreed. “We don’t have to destroy all of you creatures. Merely striking a city with plague or sending a devastating earthquake is usually enough to get what we want from you pitiful little worms.” The goddess reminded me of what the Achaians had said of Hera, the wife of Zeus: beautiful, wily, and a relentless, implacable enemy.
“Personally, I favor the Achaians,” she said, tracing a fingernail down my bare chest hard enough to draw blood. “But if your conceited interference is what we have to look forward to, I will gladly switch my loyalty to agree with our Apollo, here.”