by Tad Williams
!Xabbu nodded and gave Renie a last smiJe, then the pair jogged away toward distant Troy, the city's congregated towers pale and perfect as an ivory chess set.
"The Bushman—he's important to you, isn't he?" said Paul Jonas as they watched the two figures obscured by swirling dust.
"Yes. Yes, he is."
"Oh, God, I've just thought of something else," Jonas said unhappily. "Where do you think Orlando's friend is? We didn't stop to see if he might still be at the camp."
Renie shook her head. "I don't believe it. Those two are like Siamese twins—if one of them's out there, the other is bound to be right next to him or right behind." She squinted, then swore. The windblown dust was spouting from beneath chariot wheels. A ragged arm of Trojan cavalry had swung wide in an attempt to encircle the Greek flank, and Renie and Paul Jonas were uncomfortably close to the line of attack. Already other stragglers from the battle's edge were hurrying toward them, fleeing for their lives. Renie snatched at Jonas' arm and yanked him back toward the sloping beach and its only relative safety.
"Jesus Mercy, I'm an idiot!" she groaned as they stumbled down a slope. "!Xabbu and T4b—we forgot to agree on a place to meet up." Arrows, fewer now than earlier in the day, but still just as deadly, flew over their heads and dug into the sandy soil.
Jonas was trying to run while keeping his shield over his head, and not doing a very good job of it. "We can worry about it when we get there," he panted. "If we live that long."
To Sam Fredericks, caught in a crush of men and chariots in the middle of the field, the walls of Troy still seemed remote, a dream-castle from a fairy tale standing pale and untouched above the muck. Around her men screamed and died. Most of the Myrmidon heroes and their resurgent allies had climbed down from their chariots to engage the Trojans hand to hand.
"Now is the time, O King," her driver called above the din. "Now you can break this last stand of Priam's folk and send them fleeing back to the walls, where we will slaughter them."
Sam felt paralyzed. When she had decided to put on the armor, she had been able to think only as far as keeping the Trojans away from Orlando. She had seen herself making a brave show, perhaps even giving the rest of the Greeks a moment to recover their courage and throw the Trojans back, but she had imagined nothing like this—almost under the walls of Troy, with death all around her and the battle perhaps resting on what she did next. . . .
The charioteer swore an oath as a badly-thrown spear rattled off the body of the chariot and for a moment became tangled in the horses' harnesses. One of the proud beasts stumbled for a moment, and Sam was again almost pitched out, but sheer terror had quickly made her an expert at holding on.
"There," she shouted, pointing to an open space beyond the stew of men and spears. She had to get out this scanhouse before her nerves failed entirely. "Go there!"
The charioteer gave her a strange look, but lifted the reins and whipped the horses through a gap in the swirl of battle. Even as they burst out to relative safety, the battle behind them broke apart again with the Greeks pressing forward. Dozens of Trojans drew their chariots away and hastened back toward the walls of their home. Seeing the retreat, others broke from the struggle and joined them, and for a moment Sam felt like she was the leader in some strange race, her chariot in front, the fleeing Trojans right behind, with her own allies sweeping along after them, shouting loudly as they sensed victory within reach.
For long seconds she could only cling as they hurtled along over the uneven ground, the chariot bouncing and creaking like the world's most poorly maintained carnival ride, until the white walls were only a long stone's throw away. Abruptly, the charioteer yanked hard on the reins and the horses veered sharply to the side, coming around in a broad circle to face the Trojan horde stampeding back toward the shelter of Troy.
"Now they will see you and know fear, my lord!" the charioteer shouted.
"What? Are you scanning utterly?"
Sam had put down her spear so she could cling with both hands to the side of the chariot, which was up on one wheel and seemed about to tip over at any moment. The idiot charioteer was about to turn her simple attempt to get out of the fighting into some kind of heroic death-stand against a hundred terrified Trojans. She slipped down until centrifugal force pressed her against the inside of the chariot, then reached out and snatched at his greaved leg, trying to get his attention. They completed their turn, the walls directly behind her now. She thought she could even see tiny figures on the battlements.
"Stop!" she shouted, pulling on the driver's leg. "What's wrong with you? Stop!"
He looked down, clearly astonished to find great Achilles kneeling on the floor of the chariot. An instant later something snapped into his chest. He let go of the reins to grab at the black shaft quivering there, but the chariot bounced and he was gone, hurled away like unneeded ballast.
The one mercy was that Sam had only a moment to think about it. The careening chariot began to wobble, then the wheels struck something solid, which almost knocked the entire car sideways. It bounced, rose, then struck again even harder as something splintered with a terrible, final sound. Another impact sent Sam flying through air.
She struck the ground hard, rolling so fast that her thoughts were like rapidly beating black wings—around and around and around and then she hurtled into nothingness.
At first Sam thought she had gone blind. Her eyes stung, and she could see nothing. Her swollen, aching head seemed about to burst like a water balloon.
You're an idiot. You're the uttermost idiot in the world. . . . she told herself as she struggled up onto her hands and knees. When she wiped at her face, her hand came away slick and wet. Terror made her whimper as she rubbed her eyes.
Light.
For a moment she could see only a little shimmer, a smear of gray and brown, but after the momentary blindness it seemed as sumptuous as full-color stereoptic wraparound. She wiped again and now could see her own hands through eyes made cloudy by the same blood that was dribbling from her fingers.
I've ripped my face off. Oh, God, I'm probably all torn up, all ugly. A thought whisked past—she could die in this network, but what about getting a disfiguring injury?—leaving her with another even more terrible idea. How do I know I'm not dying anyway?
A bad head injury. Even the words had the stomach-clenching sound of the End of the Road.
She had rubbed away enough blood that she could see around her, although her eyes still smarted. The chariot lay a dozen meters away, or at least the largest piece of it did. One of the horses was clearly dead, the other still kicking fitfully. Men in other chariots were wheeling toward her over the rough ground, but she had no idea which side they were on.
Sam found one of the spears and used it as a prop as she struggled to her feet. A fiercely burning ache ran all the way down her side—only the cracked-eggshell feeling in her head had prevented her from noticing it before now—but as far as she could tell, none of her limbs were broken.
She watched the distant chariots speeding toward her and wondered what to do next. She did not realize that others had been closer until the voice spoke from behind her,
"So we will test our arms after all, son of Peleus. I see you have lost your chariot. What else will you lose this day, I wonder?"
Sam Fredericks turned so fast a jolt of dizziness nearly knocked her down. The man standing before her seemed impossibly large despite his perfect proportions. His eyes glared from the slot of his helmet. "Who. . . ?" she croaked.
The man banged his long spear against his shield; the noise made Sam's head feel like it was collapsing in on itself. "Who?" he roared. "You have slaughtered my kinsmen, sacked my father's cities, and yet you do not know Hector, son of Priam, when you meet him face-to-face?" The man pulled off his helmet, setting free his thick knot of black hair, but even as he did a peculiar look came over his handsome, scowling features. "You look strange to me, Achilles. Has falling to the ground changed you so much?"
Sam tried
to back up and found herself teetering on the edge of a shallow ditch. "I'm . . . I'm not. . . ."
"By Olympian Zeus, you are not Achilles at all, but Patroclus in his armor! Has all this rout then been in fear of something that was not so?" He snorted like an angry horse. "Have you put Troy's power to flight with naught but the effigy of Achilles?" His expression hardened as though a cold wind had blasted it to freezing. He raised his massive spear. Sam stared at its huge bronze point with horrified absorption. "Well, you will not live to enjoy your joke. . . . "
Her shield was out of reach. She almost thought she heard someone call her name—a distant voice, like the last words of a dream heard while waking up—but it was meaningless now, Sam could only cringe back, raising her hands to her face as Hector took a few running steps and sent the black spear whistling toward her.
There were moments, as he urged his horse across the plain, that he seemed to be riding through some ancient tapestry from a museum, past frozen vignettes of men struck down while fleeing and of fallen warriors locked with enemy soldiers in mutually fatal embraces—dozens of small but varied illustrations of the Folly of Mankind. He skimmed above it all. still seeing with some of the strange, high clarity with which he had awakened, but intent on hurrying forward.
Even in the spots the active battle had left behind, it was hard to make really good time through the corpses of men and horses and the clouds of crows and other scavengers. Although Thargor was one of the finest bareback riders in all the Middle Country—and Orlando, to his gratitude, had apparently retained some virtual command of those skills—he still found himself wishing desperately for a saddle.
Beggars can't be choosers, he reminded himself. It was not a very inspiring war cry.
Orlando thought he could see Fredericks in the distance now, the polished bronze armor—Orlando's own armor—glinting in the occasional spray of sunlight. The wind was growing stronger. Whirling horizontal dust clouds sprang up and rushed past him as he dug in his heels and leaned forward over his straining horse's neck. The morning's clarity was beginning to fade, leaving him with only a dogged sense of the task in front of him. At times it seemed like the fever had returned and he thought he could hear whispering voices all around him.
Although there were more men here on the fringes of combat than he had encountered on his ride across the plain, few raised a hand against him. Some clearly mistook him for the man whose armor he wore; he ignored their cries of recognition as he galloped past. Here and there others who wished to challenge him rose up in his path, both Greeks and Trojans, but Orlando did his best to ride around them, not wanting to waste time on meaningless combat. When forced, he used the momentum of his horse and his long spear to shove them away; if he killed one or two, it was more by accident than design. But for the most part the survivors who had made their way to the battle's edge, or had been left there when its strongest tide swept past, seemed to have little wish to oppose the lone rider in golden armor. Most hurried to get out of his way.
This much was familiar to Orlando. By the time Thargor had fought in his last great battles, at Godsor Rim and in the Pentalian Swamps, his reputation was such that only the most famous heroes or a few suicidal overachievers hoping to make a reputation of their own would fight him on open ground, one-to-one. It was strange, as he floated along almost separate from his own body, to remember those make-believe wars. In the Middle Country he had been full of adrenaline and roaring good humor, the barbarian lord of the battlefield, cutting down men by the dozens and leaving a wake of mangled bodies all across the field—fighting two, three, even four men at once just for the glory of the challenge. Now he wanted only to survive long enough to accomplish a single small task.
He was closing on the thickest part of the battle, which had crawled across the plain like a living organism until it was almost within bowshot of Troy's mighty walls. As he jerked the horse's harness to avoid a wounded man crawling on the ground, he caught a glimpse of something shiny bursting free from the middle of the conflict, heading for the walls as though bearing some crucial strategic message for Troy's defenders. It was Fredericks, he felt sure—the gleam was his friend's figure crouched low behind the charioteer—but Orlando could make no sense of what was happening. A few of the nearer Trojan chariots sped in pursuit, and two or three more curled out from another part of the chaos as though to catch Fredericks in a pincer, but they were all too far behind to catch up.
But what was Fredericks doing?
Ever more desperate now to reach his friend, Orlando saw open ground before him and dug his heels into his horse's sides. Fredericks' distant chariot suddenly veered away from the walls in a wide circle, curling back on its own path.
Doesn't she see those men are after her? Orlando reached back and spanked his horse's flank hard with the butt of his spear, then let the reins go slack as he leaned in and grabbed a fistful of braided mane, clinging as the animal belled toward a gap in the fighting.
Something had happened to Fredericks' chariot. It rose for a moment, cresting a bump, then smashed down and rose again, but this time only one on side. For almost three full seconds it careened on one wheel, then suddenly chariot and horses were down in a single confused mass, tumbling over and over. A wheel flew up into the air and spun several times like a flipped coin before falling away to one side. Orlando's view was blocked by the chariots now wheeling toward the wreckage.
He screamed his friend's name, but only a few heads even turned—the battle around him had become a grim, final struggle, and no man's life was safe. A helmeted man stumbled out of a clump of soldiers right into his path. He did not even see Orlando before the horse ran him down.
Within moments the dense mass of the battle's center was falling away behind him and he was again speeding across open plain. As he passed the first of the chariots that had been pursuing Fredericks, Orlando raised his spear to skewer either the crouching driver or his armored passenger.
No, they're just Puppets, he told himself and veered away. Like windup toys. Don't waste energy getting angry. But he was angry. Instead of the laughing excitement of Thargor's Middle Country battles, he was full of cold, detached fury.
He could see the wreckage of the chariot clearly now, only a few hundred meters away; his heart stuttered as he saw a body crumpled grotesquely beside it, but a moment later another figure crawled out of the high grass and lurched up onto its feet. The armor it wore was his own. Before he could even feel relief, a huge bronze chariot wheeled to a skidding stop and a tall man jumped out of the cart and jogged toward Fredericks.
"Stop!" Orlando shouted, but the wind snatched his words away. "It's me you want!"
Fredericks was hobbling badly, and made no attempt to flee the armored man. Orlando kicked at the horse's ribs, reaching toward the two small figures as though a few more inches could allow him to stop what was about to happen. The larger man raised a spear, then skipped forward and heaved it at Fredericks.
Orlando's friend took a helpless backward step and tumbled into a ditch. The spear sliced through the spot where she had stood and flew another twenty meters before it hit the ground and dug deep into the earth.
Other chariots were pulling up as Fredericks struggled up onto the edge of the ditch and crouched there on hands and knees. Orlando kept his head against the horse's neck, closing the distance, but slowly, so slowly. . . ! The man who had missed his throw returned to his chariot where he snatched another spear from his driver.
Orlando could faintly hear the man's voice now. "The gods have saved you, Patroclus. You have your own spear—try your arm, and see if it is strong enough to dent my shield."
Fredericks wavered, but did not stand up. Only the armor made Orlando certain it was his friend, since her face was a mask of blood.
"It's me!" Orlando screamed. "You want me, you bastard!"
The man turned. For a moment, seeing the stranger's thick black hair and powerful muscles, Orlando thought he was looking at his own Thargor sim. "G
laucus?" the man called. "Why do you shout at me, noble Lycian? Is your house not bound by love and blood to that of my father Priam?"
For the first time, and with a sinking heart, Orlando knew who he faced. He had heard enough stories in the last two days about Hector to know he could not have picked a worse enemy, but things were too far gone to stop now. He reined up the horse and swung down. The ground felt strangely unsolid beneath his feet, as though he walked on clouds.
Oh, God, I don't think I'm strong enough.
The two tall men faced each other across the hummocky ground, each clutching a long spear. Other chariots had pulled up, but the occupants seemed to sense the momentous nature of what was happening and merely watched in gaping silence.
"I'm not Glaucus." Orlando pulled off his own helmet, letting the golden hair spill free. "And I'm not going to let you kill my friend either."
Hector did not react. Instead, a curious stillness seemed to flow through him, a stillness so complete that for a long moment Orlando wondered if the Trojan would ever move again.
"You are here, then," Hector said slowly. He picked up his helmet and pulled it on, so that his eyes were invisible in the blackness of the slot. "Raper of cities. Murderer of innocents. Great hero of the Greeks; more anxious to listen to songs of your own glory than to come out and fight. But finally . . . you are here." He clanged the shaft of his spear against his shield. "One of us will be carried from this field, his life smashed out of him. This the gods decree!"
"Gardiner, don't!" Fredericks shouted. "You're not strong enough. You're sick."
She was right, but a look around showed Orlando that although the largest part of the Greek force was now moving in their direction, the nearest Greek soldiers were still long minutes away. Much closer, a dozen Trojan soldiers and charioteers had formed a sort of gallery; they might be content simply to watch this exciting moment, but Orlando knew they wouldn't allow him to run away.
