Mercury Begins (Mercury Trilogy) (3 page)

“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.

T
oo 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 on
e
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 t
he 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.
H
is
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 thing 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?
h
e
wondered.
He proceeded to make up a story about how the Greeks had pissed off Minerva and built th
e
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
E
xplicit
P
romulgation 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 Greek
s will never conquer the city.
I guess
i
t’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 wa
s
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,
s
capegoat?” 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 bla
me
it on
you.”