That is what Helen thought. “I can’t bear that horrid noise anymore! My ears ache from it!”
It was night, and the only sounds outside our tent were the drone of insects and the distant voice of a mother singing a soft lullaby to her children.
“If you truly visit the gods,” she said, “why can’t you ask them to topple the wall for you?”
I smiled. “I did. And they told me to do it myself.”
Despite herself, Helen smiled back. “The gods are not always kind to us, are they?”
“Tomorrow will be the end of it,” I said to her. “We’ve finished the digging. Now comes the fire.”
I left Helen alone in our tent and went out into the darkness to supervise the preparations for tomorrow’s assault. All the men who had been working so hard at the digging were now bringing brushwood from the fields, dragging it through the tunnel, and piling it up at the base of the main wall’s foundation.
As I had expected, the wall’s dried bricks were framed every few yards by stout timbers. Some of them were very ancient, dry as tinder. When they caught fire, the whole section of the wall would cave in. Or so I hoped.
Through the whole long night the men brought the brushwood to the tunnel and packed it against the wall’s foundation. Lukka and two of his best men were down there, supervising the work and poking air holes along the base of the wall, so that the fire would not choke itself to death.
Finally it was finished. Lukka came out as the first hint of gray began to lighten the sky behind the mountains of Gilead and Moab, far across the Jordan.
I went in to make a final inspection, crawling along the first part of the tunnel on my belly in total darkness, feeling like an earthworm, blind and hemmed in on all sides. After what seemed like an hour, I felt the roof of the tunnel rising. I could get up and crawl on my hands and knees and, at last, stand like a man once more.
I carried a torch with me, and pieces of flint and iron to strike a spark that would light it. But not until the day was bright and Joshua’s priests were parading around the walls again. We wanted to keep the attention of Jericho’s defenders on the music and the marchers as long as possible, to let the fire get so good a start that there would be no way to put it out before the wall caved in. I also sensed that Joshua valued the public-relations aspect of making it appear as if the priests’ noise-making brought down the wall.
He was keenly aware of the value of manipulating people’s opinions. Time and again he compared their crossing of the Jordan River dry-shod with Moses’s leading them across the Sea of Reeds in Egypt. And he kept insisting that the people of Canaan must see that the God of Israel was mightier than their own gods, whom he considered to be false and nonexistent.
I had also brought a small candle with me, and used the flint to light it once I had reached the tunnel’s end. The brushwood seemed to be ready to burn: enough of it packed against and under the wall’s foundation to ignite the timbers. I could smell the night air, slightly damp, coming through the holes Lukka had poked through to the surface. It seemed enough to feed the fire its needed oxygen. All was ready, I thought.
I doused the candle, but the light did not disappear. Instead, it grew and glowed all around me until I realized that I had been transported once again to the realm of the Creators.
Four of them faced me, against that featureless glow of gold that they used to keep their world hidden from my eyes. Yet, if I concentrated hard enough, I could make out the faint traces of strange shapes behind them. Equipment of some kind? Instruments? We seemed to be in a huge chamber, rather than outdoors. A laboratory? A control center?
I recognized the neatly bearded Zeus, with Hera standing beside him. The two others were male; I had seen them before. One was slim and wiry, although as tall as Zeus. His face was narrow, with a long pointed chin, and closely cropped jet-black hair that came to a V on his high forehead that exactly matched the angle of his chin. His smile was sardonic; his eyes mischievous. I thought of him as Hermes, the messenger of the gods, the trickster and patron of thieves. The other was burly, big in the shoulders and arms, with thickly curled red hair and eyes as tawny as a lion’s. Ares, god of war. Obviously.
All of them wore identical suits of shimmering metallic fabric, almost like uniforms. The only differences among them were color: Zeus wore gold, Hera copper red, Hermes was clad in silver, Ares in bronze.
“You continue to assist our demented Apollo,” said Zeus. It was a flat statement, neither accusatory nor questioning, like a court clerk reading a charge.
I replied, “I continue to do what I must to revive the one called Athene.”
“You have been warned, Orion,” said Hera, her dark eyes flashing.
I made myself smile at her. “Would you destroy me, goddess? Put an end to me, at last? That would be a relief.”
“You could be a long time dying,” she purred.
“No!” snapped Zeus. “We’re not here to threaten or punish. Our purpose is to find Apollo and stop his mad scheming before he destroys us all.”
“And this creature,” said the dark-haired Hermes, “knows where to find him.”
“I’m not his keeper,” I said.
“He certainly needs one,” said burly Ares, chuckling at his own wit.
“We can open your brain, Orion, and fish out all your memories,” Hera said.
“I’m sure you can. And many of them you’ll find to be very painful.”
Zeus waggled one hand impatiently. “You say that you don’t know where the Golden One is.”
“Yes, that’s the truth.”
“But could you find him for us?”
“So that you can destroy him?”
“What we do with him is of no concern to you, Orion,” said Hera. “Considering how he’s treated you, I should think you’d be happy to see him put out of the way.”
“Can you revive Athene?” I asked.
Her gaze faltered, shifted away from me. The others looked uneasy, even Zeus.
“We’re not here to talk about her,” snapped the redhead. “It’s Apollo we’re after.”
Before I could think out all the implications of it, I said, “I can lead you to him — after he has revived Athene.”
“No one can revive her,” blurted Hera, annoyed.
Zeus and the others glared at her.
I said, “After he has failed to revive her, then.”
With a malicious smile, Hermes asked, “How do we know we can trust you?”
I shrugged. “Apparently you can find me when you want to. If you become convinced that I’m not living up to my end of the bargain, then do whatever you want with me. If Athene can’t be revived, I’m not all that interested in living any longer.”
Real sympathy seemed to fill Zeus’s eyes. But Hera sneered skeptically, “And what of your current love, the beautiful Helen?”
“She loves me just as I love her,” I answered. “As long as we are useful to one another, and no further.”
Zeus ran a hand across his beard. “You will deliver Apollo to us when you are satisfied that he cannot revive Athene?”
“I will.”
“We can’t trust the word of a creature,” said Hera. “This is madness! The longer we wait the more danger we…”
“Be quiet,” said Zeus. He spoke softly, but Hera stopped in midsentence. Turning his gray eyes back to me, he said, “I will trust you, Orion. The fate of the continuum depends on your word. If you are false to us, it will mean not only your own destruction, and not only our destruction, but the end of this continuum — the utter ruination of the entire space-time in which we exist.”