Blood of the Heroes

by Steve White

  They also received their equipment. With it came a lecture from Rutherford.

  “There is a fixed policy against sending back anachronistically advanced items,” he explained. “First of all, the time travelers would be put in an awkward position, having to explain such things. Secondly, there is the danger of contaminating the local culture, and thus altering observed history.”

  “But Kyle,” said Nagel, “I thought that couldn’t be done in any case. Didn’t you and Mr. Thanou say that something would prevent it?”

  “To the best of our knowledge, that is true,” said Rutherford judiciously. “But one never knows just what is going to happen to prevent it. You might not want to be standing nearby when whatever it is occurs. So it’s best if the problem never arises at all.”

  “But surely,” Nagel wheedled, “in such a primitive era, we’ll need—”

  “Remember the Articles of Agreement, Sidney,” Rutherford told him sternly. “You are going to be living on the local technological level. That is precisely why we were obligated to satisfy ourselves of your ability to endure it. And as a general rule you’re not going to be expected to practice wilderness survival. Your real survival tools are these.” He indicated their rough hempen traveling sacks, compatible with what the probe had observed … but with false bottoms into which those “survival tools” were woven for safekeeping. He withdrew a few of them: bronze and gold ornaments, copied from archaeological finds. “You’re going to be in relatively well-populated areas where you can use these trade goods to purchase food and shelter. Pity that money hadn’t been invented then; it would be far more convenient to carry … which, come to think of it, is precisely why money did eventually get invented.”

  There were other items, of course. They would carry sturdy five-foot walking sticks, an essential in an age when almost all traveling was by foot. There were horses in Greece, but they were seldom ridden, and chariots were only for the nobility. In addition, Jason was issued a bronze sword-dagger. Its blade was a beautifully tapering thing, designed for thrusting although it had a double edge and a fuller to strengthen it. Its tang flared out and back and then forward again to form a guard for the hand that grasped the ivory-encased hilt. The longer thrusting swords of the period would have been inappropriate—like chariots, they were for the aristocratic warriors, and Jason wasn’t going to be posing as a member of that social set. Anyway, he decided while practicing with it, he liked this blade better.

  Nagel watched him with a hint of nervousness “I say, do you know how to use that thing?”

  “I think I can probably get by with it, Dr. Nagel.” In fact, he was an expert with a number of similar weapons, using fighting styles millennia in advance of what they were doing in the Aegean Bronze Age. He didn’t plan to start any fights, but he was confident he could finish any.

  Along with the rest of their gear, they received names. Rutherford was puckishly pleased to let Jason keep his own. (“Even if it isn’t a commonly used name at the time, it at least won’t sound outlandish.”) For the others, he’d come as close as possible to their actual given names: Deianeira for Deirdre and Synon for Nagel. Both were names that had been recorded on the probe’s sound track.

  At last, the time came for their final briefing by Rutherford. “You will arrive in the Inachos valley, a couple of miles north of Argos, on August 15, 1628 B.C.—not that they were using our dating system then, of course. That date was chosen to allow you time to position yourselves in a locale from which you can observe the effects of the volcano at reasonably close range, though at a safe remove. One of the Cyclades, or northern Crete, would be best; in either case, you should stay in the higher elevations.”

  “Can’t we go to Santorini itself—or Kalliste, as it was originally called—first?” Deirdre asked. “Study it as it was before?”

  “I leave that to Commander Thanou’s discretion. It will depend on how promptly you can make your way there. The problem is, we have no way of knowing the exact date. It could be early or late in the autumn. If the latter, you should have time for a visit.”

  “I hope so,” she said earnestly, with a meaningful glance at Jason. “We could settle the question of the original size and shape of the island, and I could make some important geological observations even without advanced equipment.”

  “No doubt. But safety comes first. I cannot overemphasize that if you are on the island at the time of the explosion, you will assuredly die.” Rutherford paused for effect, then resumed. “Your TRDs will activate on November 15. This will give you time to observe the aftereffects of the event. The extent to which it crippled the Minoan economy and created the conditions for the later conquest of Crete by mainland Greeks is a subject of unending controversy—which is one of the reasons we were able to get funding for this expedition. So you will be in the Bronze Age for three months. For the last part of that period, you will need to have established yourself in a secure locale, for the sailing season ends in mid-October, before the autumn gales begin. Commander Thanou, do you have anything to add?”

  “I’d just like to reemphasize something that both of you have already been told. After the temporal displacement, there will be a moment of disorientation. It’s worse if you arrive in darkness—in fact, it has been known to cause emotional collapse under those conditions. So we don’t time our arrivals for midnight, as much as we would like to in the interest of minimizing the chance of anyone actually seeing time travelers appear out of nowhere. Instead, we compromise by arriving just after daybreak. Still, it’s disconcerting—and it will almost certainly affect you more than me, since this is your first time. Don’t be alarmed; the effect is only temporary.”

  They proceeded to the great central dome which held the displacer stage: a circular platform about thirty feet in diameter, surrounded by masses of supporting equipment and ranks of control panels whose personnel ignored them in their Bronze Age clothing. Even odder-looking outfits were common here—like those of a passing group who were obviously returning from the Elizabethan era. Deirdre and Nagel tried not to stare, since no one else in the dome was. Jason glanced at the sacks those returnees were carrying and wondered how many first editions of Shakespeare they held, in addition to copious notes on the paper that was so fortuitously available in that age.

  They swung their own sacks over the edge as they climbed onto the stage with the aid of their walking sticks. Rutherford solemnly shook hands with each of them, then withdrew to the glassed-in control center that overlooked the stage. They waited, watching a large digital clock count down.

  When the moment came, it was as Jason remembered so well. There were no flashy visual effects. As viewed by outside observers like Rutherford, they simply vanished. They themselves felt a sensation outside normal human experience. It could only be compared to coming out of a deep and very convincing dream. But the comparison was not close, for there was a wavering of reality, leaving in its wake no sense of transition and no impression of time having passed. Afterwards, the displacer stage and everything around it were gone, though their minds held no recollection of it disappearing.

  They were standing on a narrow, rutted road, with the morning sun peeking over the hills of Argolis to the east.

  Chapter Five

  As Jason had predicted, he was the first to recover from displacement sickness. Deirdre was next to reestablish her sense of reality after a disorientation foreign to normal human experience. She stopped trembling in a surprisingly short time. In fact, Jason wouldn’t have objected if she’d continued to need assistance just a little longer.

  “All right,” he said after Nagel had finally regained his composure. “Let’s get started for Argos.” The town to which Rutherford’s probe had been taken in 1710 b.c., as the yet-unborn twenty-fourth century measured time, was the obvious place for them to make their initial appearance in this world.

  As they walked, the rising sun revealed a landscape disconcertingly different from everything the word “Greece” calle
d to mind. The hills to either side were darkly forested, and along the roadside the olive groves were generally surrounded by oak and poplar. Soon the two hills of Argos—the Apsis and the higher Larissa—became visible up ahead. The place had grown from the village of the recordings they had seen, spreading around the base of two hills. A wood-stockaded fort crowned the Larissa. Around its base clustered a town whose buildings were basically of wood construction in this well-forested milieu, though well plastered. The few early risers they passed looked no different from the ones they had viewed on film, and the looks they gave the new arrivals held no more curiosity than unfamiliar faces would normally occasion.

  Security at the fort was not particularly tight, but a guard stood outside. Although the sun hadn’t yet warmed the air to the heat to be expected later in this August day, he wore only a kilt and leg guards of linen. But he had a helmet constructed of overlapping hide thongs and covered with rows of boars’ tusks, and carried a large, oxhide-covered, figure-eight-shaped shield. The only weapon he carried was a spear, which he hefted importantly as the strangers approached.

  “Rejoice,” said Jason, giving the general-purpose greeting. “We have come far, all the way from Aetolia, and ask your lord’s hospitality.” It was his first attempt to speak the language to a local, and he was sure he must sound heavily accented. But he had been given the correct, aristocratic idiom, so the favor he was asking was one to which he was presumptively entitled as a gentleman.

  “Very well,” said the guard. “Enter. You can tell your story to the wanax Acrisius . “

  Behind him, Jason could sense Nagel’s excitement. It intensified as they crossed the compound toward a building which was larger than others they’d seen but apparently of the same kind of construction.

  “That hall,” Nagel whispered to him, all a-titter, “is a small-scale but inarguable ancestor of the royal megarons that will grow to sumptuous proportions in the later Mycenaean era.”

  “Well,” Jason whispered back, “we’ve already learned that this Acrisius is entitled to call himself a wanax , or king.” Of course, Acrisius wasn’t in the same class as the proud rulers who, as he knew from his orientation, would soon establish themselves at Mycenae. Those rulers would accumulate so much treasure that they could afford to take with them into the afterlife the hoard of gold that Heinrich Schliemann would dig out of Grave Circle A thirty-four centuries from now. But most of their treasure would go as gifts to vassal warlords, in return for which they were obliged to fight for the high king on call. On his own modest scale, Acrisius doubtless assured the loyalty of his own vassals the same way. Thus were such things done in this moneyless economy. “Is that what surprised you—hearing that title?”

  “No! It was his name! It is the name of one of the mythological dynasty that supposedly ruled the city-state of Argos—and this is far earlier than the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. to which learned speculation has assigned the actual originals of the Greek heroes. I hadn’t dreamed we would encounter any identifiable individuals this far back!”

  “Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Deirdre suggested. “An accidental similarity of names.”

  “Right,” Jason agreed. “Maybe scholars have taken those mythic genealogies too literally. They must be a grab bag of dimly remembered names, strung together in whatever way was politically useful to the rulers under whose patronage the myths were compiled.”

  “There must be something to that.” The admission clearly took a lot out of Nagel, for it meant paying respectful attention to an observation about his field from someone lacking the proper academic credentials. But he accepted the theory the way a shipwreck survivor accepts a floating piece of wreckage. “For example, the myths will give Acrisius a quasi-divine ancestry, making him a descendant of a refugee Egyptian prince named Danaos.”

  The warlord who greeted them beside the central hearth of the central hall was, of course, nothing of the kind. He seemed an affable enough semibarbarian, though, as he listened to Jason recite their well-prepared story. He was even enlightened enough to give “Deianeira” a gesture of respect on the strength of Jason’s declaration that she was a princess from Aetolia, far enough to the north that they could safely be vague about details. She was, the story went, niece to a very important Cretan whose sister had been politically married to a mainland chieftain. Deianeira’s own husband had died, and now she was traveling to Crete to rejoin her mother’s family. She was carrying that portion of her late husband’s treasure which, in accordance with her mother’s original marriage contract, belonged to her under Cretan inheritance laws.

  Deirdre had been delighted to have that last part confirmed in the course of their orientation. Less delightful from her standpoint was the fact that Cretan society, while matrilineal, was not matriarchal. It was as male-dominated as every other known Bronze Age society. Big surprise , Jason had carefully refrained from saying. His own persona was that of a relative on her father’s side who was escorting her to Crete—a middle-ranking landless warrior. “Synon” had been harder to account for. The nit-picking bureaucracy revealed by the Linear B tablets—for which Nagel would have been a natural—was still several centuries in the future of this pristinely illiterate society. They’d decided to pass him off as a Cretan-trained steward or seneschal or something, along to manage the property transfer—and related to the family, hence socially acceptable. Acrisius seemed to buy it.

  Finally that worthy leaned back and scratched the thick salt-and-pepper beard that made him seem impressively mature among the mostly late-teens-to-early-twenties bravos who otherwise filled the hall. (He was probably about fifty, but in a kind of physical condition that Jason found surprising for someone of his age in this era.) “Be welcome. I must spend most of the day inspecting the outlying holdings. But rest from your travels, and eat with me later. We will talk at greater length.”

  “Thank you, lord.”

  As a slave led them to their rooms, Jason congratulated himself on how smoothly things had gone so far. Admittedly, he hadn’t had a chance to broach the topic of Rutherford’s disguised probe. But there would be time for that after the feast.

  *

  “Ah, yes, the image of Hyperion.” Acrisius nodded and belched solemnly. “So you have heard of it?”

  “Indeed we have,” Jason assured him. “Even in Aetolia.”

  “It appeared in the time of our grandfathers’ fathers. It might well have been eighty-two winters ago, as you say.” Acrisius peered curiously at his guests, clearly intrigued by people who claimed to count time to such an unheard-of degree of precision. “Yes. My grandfather Lynkeos told me about the image of Hyperion. He was only a small boy at the time. But his own father told him about the way it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Everyone thought Hyperion had taken it back. But that was before the god himself came to ask about it.”

  Jason came suddenly alert. “The god himself came?”

  “Oh, yes. That often happened in those days, you know. That was when the gods were still begetting Heroes on mortal women. My grandfather’s father Danaos was a Hero, you know,” he added parenthetically. Out of the corner of his eye, Jason saw Nagel stiffen. “But this was different,” Acrisius continued. “Hyperion came demanding an accounting of our stewardship of his image. According to my grandfather, he almost seemed angry at first, on hearing it had vanished. It was puzzling. But then he assured everyone that he had, indeed, taken it back and that now it burns at the heart of the sun, an eternal offering. So everything was all right after all.”

  Jason made a sign of respect to the gods, as he had learned from the probe’s recording. With a fraction of his consciousness, he made certain his companions were doing likewise.

  It had come as no surprise to Nagel—in fact, it had been something of a vindication—that these people worshiped gods whose names, at least, corresponded to those of the Titans of classical Greek mythology: the generation of gods (six couples, or maybe seven, depending on which account
you read) that had preceded the Olympians. Not that the distinction was entirely clear. In fact, there was a lot of overlap, with many of the Olympians also appearing in the rather incoherent local pantheon. Partway up the slopes of Larissa was a grotto sacred to Hera. Some of them were missing, though—like Apollo, an Asiatic deity whose worship wouldn’t enter Greece until Iron Age times. At present, the job of sun god was handled by Hyperion … to whom the locals had decided Rutherford’s bogus idol bore a resemblance.

  And who, according to Acrisius, had come to look in on it.

  Jason’s eyes met Nagel’s briefly. The historian looked as puzzled as Jason felt. He leaned forward in the flickering firelight. “We have never heard this part of the tale, Lord Acrisius. Did your grandfather tell you anything else about the god?”

  “Well, he was barely walking at the time, you understand. But he got a glimpse of Hyperion. He never forgot it.” Acrisius took on an expression foreign to his listeners, who came from a time when literal belief in the supernatural was no longer possible. “He had the look of the gods: very tall, with hair that was almost the color of silver, but with a golden shimmer. And he had the face of the gods: like that of men but more beautiful … and yet not like that of men, for its beauty is of another kind.” He shivered, although the temperature was what one would expect in Greece in August, and took a deep drink. “Ah, well, that was long ago. The gods don’t come among men nearly as much anymore. Let’s talk about your plans, instead. Are you sure you want to go to Nauplia? Granted, you’ll have no trouble getting passage there, but …” His voice trailed off, as though from an awkward subject.