The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  When Leo bolts, I run, too, and Aeneas follows. I take comfort in the fact that even Lord Aeneas looks scared.

  We slow down, sobered up inside the wall.

  Leo suddenly grabs my arm and says, “We’re uh . . . deserting our watch.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I stop, hoping Aeneas doesn’t think our excitement is too cowardly. But he also appears shaken, trying to cover it with a lofty distant expression. “We’ll just pop out on the ramparts at the next doorway,” I say, pulling Leo with me.

  “I’m going to find Cassandra,” Aeneas says thoughtfully, turning toward the alleys leading to the town center. “She likes interpreting signs.”

  Cassie! Her black-eyed glance can make me feel as low as a worker ant trudging through the dirt. Yes, she’s the one I fell for a couple of summers ago. Before she was weird. I had heard the rumors about her and Apollo – that she dumped him – and hope that means she prefers us mortals. Imagine dumping Apollo though! What chance do I stand? I can’t help it. Often, I volunteer for extra palace guard duty, glancing at her window where I can see her sewing with her mother, Hecuba, both of them silent, worried, their golden needles flashing.

  I brush up my helmet’s horse-haired plume and suck in my belly under my cuirass to make my shoulders look bigger.

  If only I could have had the nobility of her brother, Hector, whose death recently gutted us all. If only I had the wiles of Odysseus, the beauty of Achilles without their Greekness . . .

  I try to return my attention to the job at hand. Leo and I stroll the walls confidently. The plain is now silent, the fires only smoldering orange embers, the beach dark. When we meet the men watching the north walls, they agree with us that there doesn’t seem to be Greeks below any more. But none of us feel easy about it. Leo and I don’t mention the strange thing we had seen. We stroll back to the other side of the citadel.

  Then Aeneas reappears, nervously scanning the air above us, Cassandra close on his heels. She’s not at her best, pale and looking as if she had been crying for a week. Well, she probably has. Ever since Hector died, the women have been pretty soggy. But even as nervous and upset as she had been lately, tonight it appears even worse.

  She gives me a long stare from behind Aeneas. “Coroebus,” she says.

  My heart pounds. “Evening, Cassandra,” I say.

  For a moment, her mouth opens as if she wants to say something but Aeneas points up in the air. “Tell her what you heard,” he commands to Leo.

  “Uh, well, m’lady,” Leo says, looking up over his shoulder. “They were like footsteps. Just above our heads. And digging. Like . . .” He stops.

  Cassandra hardly looks likes she’s paying attention to him. She finds one of the archers’ slits in the wall and puts her head through. “So many of them,” she says.

  Leo, Aeneas, and I all look at each other, puzzled. There was no one out tonight.

  “A thousand ships full,” I say. “So they brag.”

  “No,” Cassandra says, pulling back slightly, then turning slowly and lifting her head. “Not them.”

  We all look where she’s looking, roughly towards the horizon above Tenedos.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The ones in the clouds of dust. The ones with the baskets.”

  I can pinpoint this moment as the one when I realized that she isn’t quite the woman I’m looking for in life. Although, looking at her big brown eyes and the fall of the folds of her chiton, I can still remember . . .

  But Cassandra has definitely gone spooky.

  While she’s seeing things on the plain, we all glance around at each other again. We all go to the wall to look. I think the others see what I see: the dark plain, the black sea. Aeneas rolls his eyes then winds his finger mid-air around his temple, nodding toward Cassie’s back.

  “They’re coming for us,” Cassandra says, taking her earrings off and throwing them down, then grinding them underfoot. “But it won’t matter after tomorrow anyway.”

  “Uh, right, Cassie,” Aeneas says, his hand on her shoulder. “Maybe you should go back now. I’m sure Auntie Heck is missing you.”

  Cassandra gives me that long look again. “Coroebus. You will defend me when the big animal spills its guts into the city?”

  We all freeze. I suddenly think thoughts that scare me for their impiety about Apollo and his cruel revenges on Cassandra. “Yes, ma’am,” I say, being polite.

  Aeneas guides her away.

  After they are gone, Leo and I don’t say much. I think he knows that I had it bad for Cassandra. I don’t know how I feel now. Sick. Confused. Even if he didn’t know, there isn’t much to say when the king’s daughter shows signs of cracking.

  We are as bristled as teased cats for the rest of the night. I keep imagining creaking and groaning noises in the wind.

  Like the sound a ship would make on land.

  Impossible.

  Schliemann stood atop the ruins reaming out his right ear with his little finger like an artilleryman swabbing down a gun barrel. The autumn wind had got there first, piercing him down to the nerve.

  The pain eased, replaced with the dull ringing that came and went daily, hourly, sometimes by the minute.

  All around and below him in the trenches Turks, Circassians, and Greeks sang, but not together, as each nation competed with the most drunken-sounding drinking song in their own tongues. Schliemann’s ears bothered him too much to try to listen to any of the words; it was all a muffled din to him. The diggers handed over a long line of baskets, each to each, from where others dug with a pick and shovel to the edge of the hill mound of Hissarlik, where the soil was dumped over into the plain below.

  Since there were four or five clans, Turks and Greeks present, he’d learned to put a Circassian between, so that the baskets went from the diggers to Turk to Circassian to Greek to Circassian to Turk and so on. Sometimes there were four or five Greeks or Turks to each neutral middleman, sometimes ten or fifteen. The last in the line were all Circassian, who had the task of filling the flat alluvial plain that stretched away to the small river flowing to the sea two miles away.

  The ringing in his ear returned slowly to the drone (he wasn’t that musical, but he’d imitated it as best he could once for a violinist, who pronounced it “B below middle C”) that was always there.

  Today, progress was fast. They’d uncovered one of the Roman phase walls and were rapidly digging along where it sank into the debris. What he searched for lay below, probably far below. Only when the diggers found something other than building stone, perhaps pottery or weapons, did things slow down, the workers graduating from shovels to trowels while those shifting baskets caught up with others carrying away piles of earth. But today, the diggers kept at it full swing. He suspected that this meant his colleague, Dorpfeld, would be along to complain that the diggers weren’t being systematic enough. Dorpfeld was methodical, even for a German. One thing I’ve learned, Schliemann thought, is that some follow and some lead. And I’m the leader here.

  Schliemann wanted bones: Trojan bones buried with honor. If it was gold that honored them, so much the better. Schliemann liked the way his Sophie’s eyes lit up when she saw the gold they uncovered. Just seeing her delight was almost reward enough for him these days. She deserved everything in heaven and earth simply for not being that Russian chunk of ice he had married first and foolishly.

  I’ve made very few mistakes in my life, but the Russian marriage was one, he thought. However, marrying dear, beautiful, Greek Sophie makes up for that. I am rich, I am successful, I am famous, I have a loving family.

  Now, all I want are some Trojan bones and for that head louse Botticher to sink into the earth instead of writing all that vitriolic rubbish about me.

  Suddenly, he groaned. His earache had worsened.

  One of the Turks scrambled up to him. “Boss!” he said impatiently.

  Schliemann realized the digger had called to him several times. He pretended that he had been preoccupied rather than mostly-
deaf and turned slightly. The Turk handed him a shard.

  Impossible. On it was the feathery curved design that Schliemann recognized as an octopus tentacle. Mycenaean.

  “Where did you get this?” Schliemann demanded in Turkish, glaring at the young man. A thought flared up that someone was sabotaging the dig (Botticher?) by bribing his workers to put Greek pottery in Turkish soil.

  The Turk pointed, jabbering, but Schliemann could only hear the word “boss,” which the Turk repeated with respect over and over. He was excited. Then Schliemann thought he lip-read the phrase “much more.”

  Mycenae. Of course. Yes, how could I forget? Schliemann’s mind raced as he followed his digger. The royal families of Troy and Mycenae were guest-friends. It was on a royal tour of Sparta that Paris fell in love with and stole Helen. Of course there would be Mycenaean pottery! It was probably sent to Troy as . . . say, wedding gifts for Hector and Andromache.

  The diggers were gathered at one corner of the trench, one of them carving the soil with his small knife. Edges and rounded curves of pottery stuck out all along.

  “My good men!” Schliemann said first in Greek, then Turkish, clapping his hands. “Good work! Early lunch!” Half the workforce put down their tools, wiping their foreheads and grinning. Then he repeated it in Circassian and the remainder cheered and climbed out of the trench after the others.

  Schliemann smiled and nodded, watching them go, saluting them with dignified congratulations. Then he slid down into the trench and stroked the smooth edge of a partially excavated Mycenaean stirrup cup, elegantly decorated with stripes.

  “Oh, Athena!” he whispered, his throat tight, ears banging painfully, eyes stinging. “Dare I imagine that Hector himself drank from this cup?”

  He felt a change in the light and looked up with a start. At first he saw no one. He put the pottery shard into his shirt, then found a foothold in the trench, climbing half-way up. The hill was a broken plane, gouged mostly by his own trenches but also by age. The city walls had grown weary with time, crumbled, grown pale grasses and stray barley. Dark elms, losing their summer dresses, blew in the relentless seawind.

  There. One of the diggers, lagging behind? Schliemann wondered. But he didn’t recognize him. A young man whose shirt had torn and was hanging on one shoulder. Not even a young man but a big boy, only his upper half visible. Confused, Schliemann tried to calculate just which trench the lad was in.

  “Hey, you!” Schliemann called in Turkish, scrambling towards him.

  The boy turned slightly but didn’t look at Schliemann. He was looking toward the tallest of the remaining towers of Ilium and then he seemed to trip backwards and was gone.

  “Local rascal,” Schliemann said, irritated that his spell had been broken. Never mind. He returned to the trench and took out his pocket knife to scrape, ever so gently, around the striped cup.

  Already, he was composing tonight’s letters: two in English to friends, two in French to other archaeologists, one in Russian to his mercantile partners, another in Swedish to a correspondent there, a Turkish note to the Museum at Constantinople, a letter in Greek to his mother-in-law. Oh, yes, he needed to write to his cousin in Germany.

  This was an incredible find.

  He stuck his finger back in his ear as the roaring in it crashed into his head like the ocean. “Owww,” he moaned.

  This watch is almost over. Look, there’s old Rosy-fingers in the east.

  You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how you never wrote that thank-you letter to grandad before he died? Or about the pain in your tummy being fatal? Or about the money you owe? Well, I’ve had a night like that without being in bed. Leo and I kept ourselves awake some of the time by gambling in a sticks and stones game, the sort you can scramble underfoot if one of the sleepless mucky-mucks happen to show. Most of the time we just stared out at nothing, worried that those footsteps might come back.

  It wasn’t helped by Andromache’s spell of sobbing and shouting a few hours ago. Hector wouldn’t have liked that, even though it’s strangely heart-warming to hear a wife miss her husband. But Hector knew that women’s wailing unsettled the soldiers.

  Like me. Unsettled is about one-tenth of it.

  Thinking about how we’ve lost most of our best generals, most of all Hector. Thinking about how it’s no longer special being a prince when every other soldier is as well. Thinking about my family. Thinking about spooky Cassandra. Thinking about how rotten this war is.

  When the sun comes up we’ll see what they were up to on the beach last night.

  Leo and I still don’t want to believe that after ten years, they had simply swum away. But then, Achilles was their man, like Hector was our man. With both those guys gone, maybe they decided it’s time to pack it in.

  Now, in the earliest light, I lean over the wall and see a huge dark shape sitting outside the main city gate. Bigger than the gate itself.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Coro, the ships are going!” shouts Leocritus. Like me, he has become alert in the morning light. He points out to sea, which is as thick with ships as wasps on a smear of jam.

  “But, Leo, what the hell is that?” I say again, putting my hands on the sides of his head and making him look down, to the right.

  At the horse.

  “Zeus H. Thunderfart!” he breathes.

  The soldiers on watch from the other walls are shouting down to the people. “They’re gone! The Greeks have gone!”

  People come out to see what’s happening. Doors open and people hang out their top windows, pointing to the ships now on the horizon.

  Celebration! I hug Leo and he hugs me; we jump up and down, making obscene gestures at the cowardly Greeks ships sailing south. I’ve never heard such a din in Troy. The women are waving scarves, bringing out the tiny children on their hips, banging on pots. The men bang on everything, shouting about the shortcomings of Agamemnon’s men and the strength and bravery of Trojan warriors. All so early in the morning even before the wine has been brought out.

  Everyone’s clambering and excited, falling all over each other, crowding at our end of town. Now word is getting around about the giant horse at the gate.

  I’m still on the wall, looking at it.

  It’s about four men tall and six men long, probably fashioned of elm with a big box belly and a straight neck jutting out at an angle, alert pointy ears. Its carved eyes look wild and windblown, as if in battle. Is this a peace offering?

  I can hear voices asking whether we should open the gate or not. A couple of our soldiers look up at us on the wall. “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know,” I shout down. “Get a priest. Or someone from the royal family.”

  After a few minutes, the great King Priam, a frail and tiny man billowing with the finest-woven white robes, arrives with Aeneas trotting behind. They open the gate, go out, and a crowd surrounds the horse.

  I also see a commotion, a V-shaped wedge of frightened and alarmed people, running down from the high city. The cutting point of the wedge is the massive priest of Poseidon, almost as naked as if he had come straight from bed as well, waving his thick arms and shouting out in a basso growl: “What’s happening?” Probably from years of practice, his half-grown sons duck and weave around his great flying elbows, two curious kids wondering what the mayhem was all about.

  “What’s this about a good-bye present?” Laocoon says. “This is a trick.” He turns to borrow a staff from one of his gang of water-worshipping thugs. With a mighty swing (why wasn’t he ever on the battlefield, I wonder?), he bashes it on the side of the horse.

  The wood made a moaning, low sound, the stick playing it like an equine string. Eerie.

  “This is a trick!” Laocoon repeats.

  “Oh, shove off, Laocoon!” a man shouts. “Go soak your head in the sea!” There is enough laughter that the man swaggers.

  King Priam raises his hands, his wrists like twigs, his face mou
rnful, but he’s got that magic touch of a king. Everyone fell silent. “Let’s examine the matter,” he pipes in an old man’s voice.

  Then I see Cassandra, coming down beside Laocoon’s crowd. “Don’t touch it! Get rid of it!” she yells. “It will destroy the city!”

  But when Aeneas laughs, everyone joins him. “It’s just a pile of sticks, Cassie!”

  Several people start hitting the horse again, making it shiver like a big drum.

  Laocoon raises his arms to demand silence. It sounds to me like Laocoon says, “Ween ye, blind hoddypecks, it contains some Greekish navy,” but the crowd was still making lots of noise.

  His clinging sons look out wide-eyed from behind their father’s back. Laocoon’s voice is booming. “How can you trust the Greeks?” Poseidon’s priest asks, staring down Aeneas, not looking at King Priam.

  The laughter and banging stops.

  Leo and I have relaxed. With the Greeks gone there seems to be no need to watch the plain any longer. Mistake. But I don’t know what we could have done about what happened next anyway.

  “Oh, look,” says someone by the gate, pointing towards where the Greek ships used to be. Huge winding shapes are swimming across the land. “Big snakes.”

  Later, after the snakes had slithered away, a smaller crowd reforms around the horse and the three mangled bodies of Laocoon and his two sons. They look like something the butcher throws to the dogs at the end of a hard week, but smell worse, like shit and rotten meat. Even though we both would have preferred to be on the battlefield without weapons than do this digusting chore, Leo and I help scoop the bodies onto shields to take back to the family. I always hate the moment the wails begin; it’s almost worse waiting for the wails than hearing them.

  Many of the onlookers are inside the gates again, wet patches where they had been standing. Cassandra leads a shocked King Priam away with daughterly concern. Aeneas is stunned. He rubs his arm and says, “That was very unexpected,” first looking at the bodies then speculatively towards the sea.

  I don’t like being down here, off the wall, now. “Where did the snakes go?” I ask.