Mercury Begins (Mercury Trilogy)

by Kroese, Robert

  “OK, open the hatch, Dave!” Mercury yelled. “We’re going to need a lot more of these shoes.”

  “All right,” said Daedalus, scratching his chin. “But I’m not sure I have enough feathers.”

  “I don’t care about the feathers, you numbskull,” said Mercury. “I just want shoes with rubbery soles, so the men don’t make so much noise inside the horse. These shoes hardly make any noise at all. You could sneak right up on someone with these rubbery soles. Hey, that’s what we’ll call them!”

  “Sneakers?” asked Daedalus.

  “Sneakers? Good grief, no. That’s a terrible name. I was thinking ‘rubbers.’ Imagine a hundred Greeks, oiled up and wearing rubbers! The Trojans wouldn’t stand a chance!”

  “You’re going to put a hundred men inside the horse?”

  “Sure,” said Mercury. “We’ll tell the Trojans the horse is a gift. They’ll drag it right into the city. Then at night, our oiled up contingent will pop out from underneath the horse and penetrate the Trojan defenses.”

  Daedalus regarded him dubiously. “You realize the Trojans aren’t all complete idiots, right?”

  “I don’t need them all to be idiots,” sniffed Mercury. “As long as there is an idiot or two in a position of power – and there always is – we should be fine. Or did you want to go back to hoping the horse will magically spout fire?”

  Daedalus muttered to himself but, not having any better ideas, he went along with Mercury’s plan. The two of them met with the Greek commander to persuade him of the soundness of their idea. Fortunately Mercury’s theory about idiots in power held true for the Greeks at least; the Greek commander, who possessed an inexplicable respect for Daedalus’ “genius,” gleefully went along with the plan. He found a hundred Greek soldiers willing to slip on rubbers and climb inside the wooden horse[4], and the rest of the force boarded the ships and made a great show of leaving the area. Under cover of night, the hundred men dragged the horse within view of the city walls and then climbed inside. After several of them fainted from lack of oxygen, Daedalus had the idea of drilling air holes in the horse’s back. The sun was just coming up when he slunk away over the hills.

  Meanwhile, Mercury went and hid on a rocky outcropping about a hundred yards away to make sure everything went according to plan. It didn’t.

  “We should burn it,” said one of the Trojans who had come out of the city to look at the horse.

  “Burn it and throw it in the sea,” said another.

  “No!” cried a third. Chop it into pieces, then burn it and throw it into the sea!”

  “Yes!” exclaimed a fourth. “And then retrieve the ashes from the sea and burn them some more!”

  “Shut up, Bill,” said several of them in unison.

  “Whatever we do,” said the first man, “let’s agree right now that there is no way in hell we’re bringing that thing inside the city gates.”

  There were murmurs of agreement.

  “All right,” said the first man. “Let’s leave half our men here to watch it while the rest fetch oil and kindling.” The men began to organize into groups.

  As Mercury considered intervening, he heard a voice behind him. “Hey! What are you doing there?” Mercury spun around to see a man dressed in ragged clothing and holding a wooden staff approaching. Farther off were two other men, who were occupied with ushering a herd of sheep onto the grassy knoll that led up to the outcropping.

  Too surprised to think rationally, Mercury simply blurted out the first thing that he thought of. Fortunately, he was so adept at sarcasm that he reflexively replied, “Oh, thank God you found me!”

  That gave the shepherd pause, and Mercury decided to double down on his initial instinct. “I’ve been left here to die by the Greeks! Please, you must help me!”

  The commotion brought the other two shepherds over, and they conferred and decided to take Mercury down to the Trojans stacking kindling under the horse. They tied Mercury’s hands and prodded him down the hillside.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” demanded one of the Trojans, who was wearing a robe that marked him as a priest.

  Mercury pretended to cower in fear, which was difficult because he was a good foot taller than any of the Trojans. On his knees, he was eye-to-eye with the priest.

  “What shall I do?” cried Mercury piteously. “Where shall I go? The Greeks will not let me live, and the Trojans cry out for vengeance upon me!” He wrapped his arms around the knees of the priest.

  “OK, OK, enough of that,” said the priest, embarrassed. “Stand up and tell us your story. My name is Laocoön. Who are you, and how do you come to be hiding amongst the rocks?”

  “Your name is Laocoon?” asked Mercury.

  “Laocoön,” replied the priest.

  “That’s what I said. Laocoon.”

  “No, Laocoön, with the two dots over the second o.”

  “Oh, Laocoön! Like raccoön.”

  “I think that’s just raccoon, without the dots.”

  “Huh,” replied Mercury. “We Greeks always say it with dots.”

  “Ah, so you are a Greek!” said Laocoön.

  “My fate is too harsh for me to bear!” cried Mercury, putting the back of his hand to his forehead.

  “Here, have a seat,” said Laocoön, leading Mercury to a nearby rock. As Mercury took a seat, the King of the Trojans, Priam, arrived on the scene. “Who is this man?” demanded the king.

  “Some shepherds found him hiding nearby. He is a Greek, and he was about to tell us how he came to be here, abandoned by his countrymen.”

  The king sat to listen to Mercury, and the men who had been piling sticks underneath the horse stopped to listen as well. Mercury began, “I speak the truth, whatever may happen to me. My name is Sinon,” he said, pulling a name out of the air, “and I will not deny that I am a Greek.” He proceeded to tell them an absurd story about how the Greeks wanted to kill him because he advocated seeking peace with the Trojans. “If you kill me,” he said, “you’ll be doing the Greeks a favor.”

  “Tell us more!” shouted one of the Trojans. The men were enraptured by his tale. He had them right where he wanted them. But Laocoön still looked skeptical, and the king’s expression was unreadable.

  Mercury went on, telling how the Greeks had wanted to leave Troy, but the seas were too rough. “The gods demanded a sacrifice in exchange for calming the seas, and I was selected. I escaped my bonds and hid here, amongst the rocks. The sea eventually calmed enough for our ships to set sail, and they left me here for dead. And now I will never see my home again, nor my wife and children. Doubtless these cruel men will take vengeance on them because I have escaped. And now I beseech you, O King, to have pity on me, for I have suffered much, though indeed, I have not done harm to any man.”

  King Priam appeared moved by Mercury’s story. “Untie this man,” he commanded. To Mercury, he said, “Forget your own people. From today you are one of us. But tell us now, why did the Greeks make this great Horse of Wood that we see?”

  “Oh, that,” said Mercury. “Well.” He had been so focused on communicating his baleful state to secure the Trojans’ pity that he had forgotten entirely about the horse. His wrists now free, he stood up and lifted his hands to the sky. “O sun and moon and stars!” he began dramatically, not sure where he was going with this speech. “I call you to witness that I have a right to tell the secrets of my countrymen. Listen, O King! From the beginning, when the Greeks first came to this place, their hope has been in the hope of the goddess….” He trailed off, trying to recall a suitable deity. The trouble was that many of the supposed “gods” and “goddesses” worshiped by the Greeks were actually acquaintances of his, and the legends the Greeks had made up about some of them were so far off from the reality that it was hard to remember which of his fellow angels were held in high esteem and which were hated or completely unknown. He never could figure out why that jerkwad Marduk was revered by the Babylonians, for example. The most amazing thi
ng Mercury had ever seen Marduk do was to belch the Phoenician alphabet backwards. Most of the angels went by various aliases as well, which didn’t help matters.

  “You mean Minerva?” offered on of the audience helpfully.

  “Yes!” exclaimed Mercury. “Minerva. Of course. Who else would I be talking about? Minerva.” Who the hell is Minerva? he wondered. He proceeded to make up a story about how the Greeks had pissed off Minerva and built the wooden horse to make it up to her.

  “Why a horse?” asked one of the audience, confused. “I thought the symbol of Minerva was an owl.”

  “Boy, you don’t know much about religion, do you?” asked Mercury scornfully. “Owls are out. The gods are all about quadrupeds these days.” He was going to catch holy hell from Prophecy Division for Explicit Promulgation of Polytheism,[5] but these were desperate times. “Yeah, so they built this horse to honor Minerva. The priest told them to make it, like, super-big so that it would be impossible to move it inside the walls of Troy.”

  “Why?” asked Laocoön.

  “Why what?”

  “Why wouldn’t they want it to be moved inside the walls of Troy?”

  “Oh,” said Mercury. “Because supposedly if it gets moved inside the walls, the Greeks will never conquer the city. I guess it’s magic or something. I’m not sure I buy it. Anyway, the damn thing is so heavy you’d never be able to move it. They had a terrible time just getting it out here on the plain where you guys could see it.”

  “Why did they do that?” asked Laocoön.

  “Um,” said Mercury. “I think they were sort of mocking you. They wanted it to be visible from the city walls, as a sign of your inevitable destruction. They plan on coming back eventually, with more troops. They’re convinced that with Minerva on their side, you won’t stand a chance. As long as that horse remains outside the city, Minerva will back them up, and since there’s no way you can move it….”

  “The Greeks moved it,” said the king.

  “Well, sure,” replied Mercury. “But you know….” He shrugged apologetically.

  “What?” demanded the king.

  “Apologies, Your Highness,” said Mercury. “It is said that Greeks are stronger than Trojans.”

  That did it. A chorus of boos (and the occasional boö) erupted from the crowd, and Mercury could see that King Priam could think of nothing but getting the giant horse inside the city gates. But Laocoön remained unconvinced. “I think it’s a trick,” he said. “Watch.”

  Laocoön grabbed a spear from a nearby soldier and hurled it at the horse. The spear wedged between two of the boards comprising the side of the horse, and a great clattering arose from within. Mercury winced.

  “Did you hear that?” Laocoön crowed. “There are men inside the horse!”

  Perplexed muttering arose from the crowd.

  “Men inside the horse!” Mercury exclaimed. “Absurd!” But he was clearly losing the crowd. One man had climbed onto another’s shoulders and was trying look into the horse’s mouth. No one was paying any attention to Mercury anymore. The men chattered anxiously to each other about whether it was possible that there were men hidden inside the horse.

  “Psst!” said someone behind him. Mercury spun to find the source of the sound, but all he saw was a crowd of onlookers gaping at the horse.

  “Psst!” said the voice again. This time he pinpointed the source. A woman standing off to the side, covered almost entirely by a shabby brown cloak. Mercury approached her. “Look,” he said, “this is hard enough without the heckling. I don’t know what…”

  “Shut up, Mercury,” said the woman, revealing a little of her face. The little that she revealed was flawless – perfect alabaster skin; full, red lips and the kind of nose you could draw with two little dots. A lock of red hair caressed her cheek.

  “Lailah?” Mercury asked, awed.

  “They call me Venus here, actually,” she said. Lailah was a looker even by cherubic standards, although of course Mercury, being an angel himself, was immune to her appeal. That’s what he told himself whenever he saw her, anyway. She was something of a legend in the Apocalypse Bureau. This was the first time she had ever spoken to Mercury.

  “I didn’t even know you were down here,” said Mercury. “How long have you been in Troy?”

  “A few days. I’m on a long-term classified assignment in the Mediterranean. Greece and Italy mainly. Mercury, right? I heard you got picked to be Uzziel’s scapegoat on this whole Trojan mess.”

  “Uh, scapegoat?” asked Mercury uncertainly. He didn’t remember that being in the job description.

  “You didn’t wonder why he called in a rookie to handle the sack of Troy? No offense, but they don’t usually summon angels who are still wet behind the wings to clean up a mess of this magnitude.”

  “I guess I didn’t realize…” started Mercury.

  “Good grief, do you pay any attention at all to the SPAM?[6] The Bureau has been trying to redirect history in this area for years. The founding of Rome is way overdue and the budget overruns are insane. Uzziel is about to lose his job over it. So he called you in to fail spectacularly. The Greeks were about to high-tail it out of here. And if they do, Uzziel is going to blame it on you.”

  A light went on in Mercury’s brain. No wonder no one else had volunteered for this assignment. What he had seen as an opportunity for a cushy permanent position with the Apocalypse Bureau was actually a one-way ticket to humiliation and a century or more of menial labor. He’d be lucky to be handling baggage at the planeport after this debacle. “Oh, man, I’m screwed,” Mercury moaned.

  “Pull yourself together,” snapped Venus. “Uzziel is a moron. We’re going to pull off this assignment in spite of his mismanagement. Got it?”

  Mercury nodded.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ve already located Aeneis. We just have to make sure…”

  “Who?” Mercury asked.

  Venus stared at him in disbelief. “Aeneis!” she exclaimed. “The Trojan who is supposed to survive the Greek sack!”

  Greek sack, thought Mercury, trying to suppress a giggle.

  “Wow, you’re a real pro, aren’t you?” Venus said coldly. “Aeneis. Trojan hero. The guy who is supposed to escape the destruction of Troy and found Rome? Uzziel must have covered this in the briefing.”

  “Oh, Aeneis!” said Mercury, smacking his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Sure. It’s right here in my notes,” he said, holding out the sheet of parchment.

  “That looks like it says ‘Anus,’” said Venus.

  “Shorthand,” Mercury said. “I leave out unnecessary vowels. And sometimes insert other unnecessary vowels. It’s a complex system.”

  The man who had climbed the other man’s shoulders was now dangling from the horse’s mouth, trying to peer inside. “It smells funny,” the man said. “Like somebody’s cooking rancid beef in olive oil over a rubber tree fire.” Mercury winced. That was one problem with having a hundred sweaty Greeks crammed inside a wooden horse: the smell was a bit overwhelming, even on the outside.

  “As I was saying,” Venus continued, “I’ve located Aeneis, and I think I can convince him to leave the city once the destruction of the city starts. That’s where you come in. So what does the horse do exactly, shoot fire from its mouth?”

  “Actually,” said Mercury, “that feature didn’t make it into version one point oh. We decided to scale back the feature set after our initial alpha testing indicated that…”

  “You don’t really have men hiding inside the horse, do you?”

  “Why do people keep saying that?” exclaimed Mercury. “Of course there are no men hiding inside the horse!” He leaned in and whispered, “Actually, there may be a few men inside the horse.”

  “Oh, for the love of Zeus,” Venus muttered, regarding the horse dubiously. She looked like she was on the verge of bailing out of the whole operation.

  “I think I see something moving!” cried the man who was peering into the horse’s mouth. M
ercury waved his hand and the man’s fingers slipped. He fell to the rocky ground, his left leg bending unnaturally underneath him. The man howled in pain.

  “Serves him right,” muttered Mercury. “That’s a gift horse.”

  “OK, here’s what we’re going to do,” said Venus, a determined look in her eyes. “I hate to do it, but I’m going to call in a favor. We need a major miracle to salvage this operation. Let me make a few calls.” Venus stepped away and pulled her hood over her face. Mercury could only assume she was communing with her superiors on the interplanar communication channel known as Angel Band.

  “Is that some kind of latch?” a man asked, staring up at the horse’s belly.

  Mercury waved his hand and the latch disappeared.

  “I don’t see anything,” said another man.

  “We should cut it open,” said the first man. “Somebody get a saw.” Discussion ensued about whether to cut into the belly of the horse or cut two of its legs off so that it would topple over and smash into pieces.

  “No, we shall burn it!” cried Laocoön. “I don’t want one piece of this accursed likeness to remain uncharred. Burn it!”

  Cries of “Burn it! Burn it!” went up from the crowd. Mercury observed the scene nervously. Venus stood several paces away, gesturing wildly as she addressed someone unseen.

  “OK, everybody get away from the horse!” Mercury yelled.

  “Why?” asked Laocoön, regarding Mercury bemusedly. “Are you afraid we’ll find the door and discover a hundred Greeks hiding inside?”

  “No!” cried Mercury, a bit too loudly. “It’s just bad luck, is all. You know what happened to the last guy who messed with Minerva’s horse?”

  “No, what?” asked another man.

  “Well,” said Mercury. “Let me tell you. First, he had this sort of foreboding feeling, you know, like when you’re in bed and you think you remembered to close the gate to the sheep pen, but you’re not a hundred percent sure, and it just bugs you like crazy? And then, after a few hours of that, he had the worst case of acid reflux you can imagine. Just awful. You know how it just burns at the base of your throat. Not heartburn, but just this burning up here, in the esophageal region. And then…”