Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  "Difference not," T4b grumbled. "Puppets trying to six us, seen? 'Less we six them first, seen? All there is to know."

  "Are you saying we shouldn't try to figure out the system?" Renie was stung, although she knew she shouldn't be. "Understanding how this thing works may be our only hope to get out of here."

  T4b shrugged, at the limit of his interest in conversation. Oh, my God, Renie thought, he's such a teenager.

  "I think I understand you, Renie," !Xabbu said. "But I wonder if there is even such a thing as . . . what would be the word? As . . . an uncorrupted environment anymore. If, as Azador said, there are things like the Twins moving from simulation to simulation, and the Grail Brotherhood and people like Kunohara entering wherever they want, the entire system is no longer what it first was."

  Renie nodded. "True. I wonder if that's part of what's going on—those breakdowns, where the whole system freezes. Maybe the system is just getting too complicated and unpredictable things are starting to happen, major collapses, all kinds of stuff."

  "Then the Otherland network would be very much like the real world," !Xabbu said. He was not smiling.

  The armory was a vast storeroom connected to an equally large smithy across the courtyard from the massive, shadowy Skaian Gate. At this late hour it was the only well-lit building in the area, its forges brighter by far than the fires of the soldiers camped in the open area behind the gates. As they entered, they were enfolded by steam and the scents of sweat and molten metal. The gymnasium-sized room was a magnificent clutter, an archaeologist's dream, full of the accoutrements of war—dismantled chariots, stacks of spears with splintered shafts, helmets damaged in ways that suggested their previous owners were probably not coming back to claim them—but Renie had little time to take it all in. The forge workers, almost uniformly old or crippled and thus exempted from serving as soldiers, came crowding forward to look at the newcomers, eyes wide. The torchlight revealed the reason.

  "As it is sung," one of the oldest armorers said, looking reverently at T4b, "noble Glaucus wears armor without peer."

  T4b stared down, astonished. His fitted chestplate, arm guards, and the greaves which stretched from his knees to his ankles were all made of bright-gleaming gold. Apparently the machineries of the network had improvised on the armor his sim had already been wearing when he crossed into the Troy simworld. The armorers crowded around the young man like autograph seekers around a professional athlete.

  "Is it true your grandfather Bellerophon wore it when he slew monsters?" asked a man with one arm.

  "Glaucus has been struck in the throat," Renie improvised. "While . . . while wrestling. His voice is weak."

  T4b shot her a grateful glance.

  "As long as his arm is still strong," the man who had spoken first said. "There will be much blood and weeping when the sun rises. Let Father Zeus grant a prayer that most of it will belong to the Greeks."

  The armorers, honored to serve the companions of the (apparently) famous Glaucus of Lycia, hurried to outfit Renie and !Xabbu. As the workers handled her with casual familiarity, Renie tried hard not to flinch, reminding herself that she was a man now. They tied a sort of padded linen mat around her chest, then draped a two-piece bronze cuirass over her torso and knotted it at the sides. As she experimentally lifted her arms, wondering how someone could run away in such a heavy thing, let alone fight, they added a dangling plate to protect her abdomen and groin, then fitted linen-padded bronze greaves on her lower legs. !Xabbu was patiently undergoing similar treatment, and Renie could not help admiring his trim, slender figure. It was so nice to see him as something other than a baboon! He saw her watching, and smiled in amusement.

  Damn it, woman, this is for real, she chided herself. It doesn't matter how good he looks, or how you look either, or even if you're a damned man now. There are people outside those gates who want to shoot you full of arrows and whack your head off with an ax.

  Suitably self-chastened, she allowed herself to be led to a pile of discarded helmets and was given something not at all like T4b's huge gold helm. It was instead a sort of cap of stiff leather with flaps that hung down over the ears, covered all over in rows of split animal tusks which had been drilled at either end and stitched onto the leather. She hoped the tusks were more use than simple ornamentation.

  "You're lucky," the one-armed man told her. "That's a fine piece of work."

  When !Xabbu had received a leather helmet of his own, they were allowed to choose from a waiting stack of wooden shields shaped like circles and figure eights, covered in stretched oxhide and banded with bronze. Renie picked a round one, hoping that the smaller size would allow more mobility, and !Xabbu followed her example. After being given a short stabbing-sword each, they stepped up to choose from the small forest of spears leaning against the wall, all more than twice their own height. Renie's new armor, instead of making her feel more secure, left her feeling heavy and confined. Already the cuirass chafed her unfamiliarly flat chest. As she examined the bronze-tipped spears, she could not help thinking of all the Greeks outside the gates who would be trying to skewer her with similar instruments, and she felt a moment of stomach-dropping dread.

  We don't belong here. We are in over our heads again.

  "If I may ask, noble Glaucus," an old man said to T4b as he knotted Renie's scabbard onto her belt, "why do your friends have no armor of their own? Is there some tale to tell? The Greeks often take armor as tribute, but not without killing its owner."

  T4b, who had been daydreaming while Renie and !Xabbu were fitted, looked up in surprise.

  Is he calling us cowards? Renie wondered. You could spend a year here trying to figure this out, but we have to fall into the nature of everything. She tried to think of something plausible "Our . . . our horses ran away with our belongings." So far, ever Puppet she had met except Brother Factum Quintus had take what she said at face value; she hoped these Greek slaves and freedmen would be the same.

  The old man proved her right. "Ah, it must have been a difficult journey for you from Lycia, then, if your horses were lost." He nodded, his expression serious. "But we are grateful you are here. Without you Lycians and Dardanians and others, Troy would have fallen years ago."

  "Always happy to help." Renie cocked her head toward T4b. He took a moment to catch on, then waved his arm, beckoning them to leave with him. The armorers came to the doorway again to send their good wishes and to have one last look at his golden armor.

  The encampment beside the Skaian Gate was huge. For a moment, Renie felt a return of confidence. Even if the Greeks could mount a force of equal size, surely there were enough men here for her and her friends to lose themselves somewhere away from the front lines.

  One of the sentries recognized T4b and led them to Sarpedon, who seemed to be some kind of relation to Glaucus. The chief of the Lycian allies was another movie-star type, not quite as imposing as Hector, but still tall and built like an Olympic gymnast. He accepted Renie's hurried explanation for T4b's silence without question.

  "As long as your arm is still strong, noble Glaucus," he told T4b, giving him a brisk slap on the shoulder that made the young man stagger. "There will be bloody deeds to do when the sun comes up, and the Greeks will not wait to hear you speak before trying your strength with their sturdy spears."

  T4b's smile was sickly, but Sarpedon was already off again, striding manfully from campfire to campfire, pep-talking the Lycian troops. Renie was beginning to feel heartily sick of the Trojans and their muscular nobility. If she heard one more person talk about the bloody deeds that would come with the morning, she thought she might scream.

  They found a place beside one of the fires. After an exchange of nods with the dozen or so men huddled there, T4b wrapped his cloak around his gleaming armor and sat quietly. !Xabbu crouched beside Renie and watched the wavering flames, perhaps thinking of other fires in more familiar places. For the first time Renie could observe the other soldiers, the levied troops who had come to the a
id of Troy. As the men sat staring at the fire or whispered quietly among themselves, Renie saw something she had missed before, but which was now all too apparent in their hooded eyes and hunched postures. For all the brave talk of the leaders like Hector and Sarpedon, these soldiers, these average men, were terrified of what the morning would bring.

  "Code Delphi. Start here.

  "Except for Emily, who has been softly, helplessly crying since we arrived, it is quiet now in the women's quarters. I am feeling the strong pull of sleep myself, although a part of me screams that every minute not spent trying to solve this or that puzzle is a minute wasted. I will take time to record these thoughts, since there is no effort in a soundless whisper, but I have no further strength.

  "We are in Troy. Again, our group has been split apart, but this time it is by my choosing. I made the choices as carefully as I could, but any decisions with so many ramifications, taken in such haste, will inevitably seem dubious. As Emily, Florimel, and I were led away by great Hector, the lion of Troy, I already feared I had made a terrible mistake. I have left Renie and the others to bear the heaviest burden of my decision—within hours they will be part of an attack on the besieging Greeks. I feel like a very small, very petty god, one who has been given the power of life and death without any of the usual certainties of divinity.

  "Even so, for all my guilty fears, I cannot help being drawn into the wonder and complexity of this simulation, cannot see Hector or his wife or parents without thinking of their well-known dreadful fates, and of the thousands of years they have been part of human thought. In a way, I know too much. Perhaps T4b, in his seemingly total ignorance of anything that happened before his own birth—and of much that has happened since—is in the best position of any of us. He will simply see and react to what is before him. But I cannot help what I know. I cannot shut off the life I have lived before coming to this strange, strange place.

  "Hector led us through the palace to this suite where the women were sequestered. Except for a few torches the hallways were dark, and empty but for a token force of guards. For the first time in a while I resented my blindness. The other senses have been invaluable to us in this network, but I would have liked to see the frescoes. Based on the details I have been able to discern here, I am certain the Grail Brotherhood made sure the wall paintings were as accurate as possible. When I was a child, I fell in love with the frescoes of Knossos in Crete, which were reproduced in gorgeous color in one of my parents' books: leaping dolphins and birds and bulls. I would have liked to see how the walls of Priam's palace were decorated.

  "Hector's wife Andromache and his mother Hecuba were up and waiting for us, worried about me—or rather worried about Cassandra, whose persona I have assumed. If I remember correctly, Cassandra was the king's daughter given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, who later poisoned the gift by decreeing that none of her predictions would be believed. Perhaps I chose poorly—perhaps I will even come to regret it later on—but to the best of my recollection, Cassandra figures little in most of the Trojan War,

  "Andromache was even more pleased to see her husband Hector than she was to see me, and obviously hoped that he would stay, but he is a brusque and businesslike man for all his romantic silhouette, and he made it clear that now the three of us were safely delivered he was heading back to the Trojan army camped inside the gates. Trying to hide the depth of her unhappiness, his wife lifted their little son Astyanax for a farewell kiss, but Hector had already donned his bronze helmet with its huge horsehair crest, and the sight of his father turned into such an alien creature frightened the child.

  "Watching, I was quietly stunned, for this is one of the most terrible moments of The Iliad, although acted out in a slightly different setting in the poem. Knowing what no one else in the room knew, with the possible exception of Florimel—that tall, brave Hector would never return alive, and that even his body would be dishonored before his family's helpless eyes—completely overwhelmed my certainty that these were Puppets, mere coded actors. In fact, as Hector kneeled and removed his helmet to stop his son's tears, it was almost impossible to believe that such a human gesture, no matter how famous or how often discussed, could be purely the product of an engineer's algorithm.

  "I am tired, so tired, but the memory will not leave my head. What could be worse—for Hector and his family to live this sad moment once, as real people, or to be condemned like Dante's sinners to repeat the tragic event over and over and over, with no hope of salvation?

  "It is foolish to think so much on these ghosts, for in a way that is what they are, when there are so many tasks to be undertaken to serve my real, living friends. It is exhaustion that keeps me cycling back through that instant again and again—Hector kneeling and taking off his helmet with its nodding plume, reaching out his arms to the crying boy, who is not yet sure it is really his father. Andromache and aged Hecuba watch with grim smiles, guessing even if they cannot admit it that although it seems the child is being needlessly fearful, what he has truly seen is the presence of Death in their house.

  "It has been a long day—it started in another world, after all. I am running out of words. The women have all taken to their beds. Florimel is snoring heavily beside me. Emily has at last dropped into shallow sleep, mumbling and tossing, but no longer crying. I am positive there is something wrong with her that goes beyond her youth and callowness—she has not been right since Renie and the others rescued me—but I have no strength to think anymore. Like the tragedy of this city, foreordained to destruction by the capricious gods, my thoughts loop over and over. . . .

  "Sleep. Tomorrow, we can try to make better sense of things. Sleep. . . .

  "Code Delphi. End here."

  It had been a strange dream, the kind that went with shallow, disturbed sleep. Stephen had been tied to the front of a huge wooden horse, calling to her that he could see everything, that he could see their flat in Pinetown and his school, while Renie had leaped and leaped without success, trying to reach him to pull him back down to the ground and safety.

  They're going to use that horse, she thought. They're going to use it to break down the gates and Stephen will be crushed. . . .

  As she surfaced from sleep, a contradictory thought flitted across her dreaming mind: No, wait, the horse is going to save us, because only we know about it. We're going to get into it and escape.

  But they couldn't get into it—the horse was on the outside of the walls, full of angry children with claws and shadowed faces, and she and the others were on the inside, helpless, waiting. . . .

  She gasped and opened her eyes. !Xabbu was leaning close, the still-unfamiliar face full of concern. "You were making bad noises," he said. "As you dreamed, I mean. It did not sound happy."

  She looked around, reorienting herself. The ground was dew-moist. The sky overhead was still dark, but most of the camp-fires had burned down to coals. Above them loomed Troy's famous gate, only faintly touched by ember-light, the watchtowers on either side jutting like great square tombstones.

  "It was just . . . I was dreaming about Stephen." She shook herself. Several others at the campfire were also sleeping uneasily; T4b was one of them. "Just another dream."

  They talked quietly about nothing important for a few moments, sharing impressions of their new bodies, trying to find a tone of normality although both of them knew there was nothing normal about their situation. Runners were going from campfire to campfire, quietly alerting the soldiers. The eastern sky was beginning ever so slightly to lighten.

  T4b woke up withdrawn and grim, his earlier bravado gone. Renie felt better—he would be less likely to do something youthfully stupid.

  "We gonna have to, like, fight up on the walls?" he asked, surveying the high ramparts. His eyes were wide, the whites plainly visible.

  "I don't think so—I think we're going out to attack the Greeks on the plain." She frowned. "But I don't want you to fight anybody if you can help it. Do you hear me, Javier? Don't make that face—w
e've been through enough for me to call you by your real name."

  He shrugged.

  She turned to include !Xabbu. "We can be killed out there. We're not code, like these men. Our job is to stay alive. Don't get caught up in all this glory-and-honor foolishness—it's like a netflick. It's not real. Do you understand me?"

  !Xabbu smiled at her, but it was a small one. T4b hesitated a moment, then nodded. "Are you . . . clenched?" he asked quietly. "Like, scared?"

  "Damn right." Renie could hear the runner exhorting the men at the next campfire, hear the soldiers clambering to their feet, slapping the dew from their armor and weapons. The rattle of movement and talk was growing louder. "I'm scared to death. Those spears and arrows are just as dangerous to us as they would be in RL. Keep behind your shields. We'll all stick together and protect each other. Don't get separated!"

  As the messengers reached their group and summoned them to join the rest, Renie stood and put on her helmet, then picked up her heavy spear and shield.

  It would have been nice to have some martial-arts training or something, she thought sadly as they jostled with the other men toward the standing mass just inside the gates. Instead of learning on the job.

  !Xabbu reached out and squeezed her arm below the bronze shoulder guard. On her other side, his golden armor still hidden beneath his cloak, T4b's lips were moving as though he prayed.

  Hector stood tall on a stone beside the gate, a living monument. His spear was three times his own height, but he waved it as easily as if it were a bamboo fishing pole.

  "Trojans, Dardanians, all our allies, now is the time!" he shouted. "Let us sweep down on the Greeks. Let us take fire to their black ships. Let us avenge every one of our cities sacked, every one of our wives and daughters taken to bed in slavery. Let every man face death with courage, so that the gods themselves weep at the bravery of Troy!"