The War Nerd Iliad by John Dolan

Author:John Dolan [Dolan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627310642
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2017-10-09T22:00:00+00:00

13

FIRE

ZEUS WATCHES THE LITTLE POINTS of light—Trojan torches moving toward the Greek ships. He promised Thetis he’d let the Trojans burn at least one of those ships.

Zeus considers the matter as good as finished. He has other places to deal with, so he turns his mind away from Troy. Seeing Zeus’ attention wander, Poseidon grunts in satisfaction. He’s been waiting for this chance.

Poseidon is a strange god. Old, solitary. He never feasts with the other gods. He can hardly communicate with the younger ones, Zeus’ shiny, quasi-human brats.

No one understands him. Fishermen pray to him as god of the sea, but that’s not what he is. Poseidon owns one-third of the universe, the part that lies between Zeus’ sky and Hades’ nightmare caverns under the earth.

They were three brothers: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. They killed their father, naturally. Then, to avoid killing each other, they decided to divide up the universe by drawing straws. Zeus got the long straw and claimed the overworld, the sky and the lightning, all the shiny parts.

Hades got the short straw, and went down under the earth, to the world of the dead.

Poseidon drew the middle straw, the surface. Zeus told him it was the second-best, but Poseidon has been brooding a long time, wondering if he’s been cheated. Zeus got the best part; everyone agrees on that. But what if Hades’ underworld is second-best? After all, everyone fears Hades, whereas Poseidon gets squeezed between sky and Hell. He feels squashed, slighted.

For example, look at what happened with that Demeter. Even though Poseidon invented horses just to please her, she ended up going down to the underworld with Hades.

Poseidon is always coming in last and he’s sick of it. He should be running all the worlds, and here’s his chance. He’ll take over the war in Troy, now that Zeus has taken his eye off it. He’ll save the Greeks, and they’ll worship him in place of Zeus.

Poseidon rolls down from the mountaintop, crashing into the sea like a landslide. He translates himself into a wave rushing toward the shore where the Greek ships are beached. All the surface is his, land as well as sea.

When he comes ashore at Troy, Poseidon wrenches himself into something like human form. He’s trying to look like Kalkys, the Greek shaman. But he’s so old and crazy that he does a very bad imitation of Kalkys, a hulking, fuming god badly crammed into a man’s body.

He comes up behind Ajax in the middle of the fight at the wall, tries to talk. But Poseidon’s voice sounds nothing like Kalkys or any other human ever born. The two Ajaxes flinch away from this thing and its noises, its fuming semblance of human shape.

In a rage, Poseidon lifts his trident. He’ll stop trying to encourage the Greeks with words. He’ll do it directly, through the earth itself. He slams the trident into the ground at the two Ajaxes’ feet. The pressure wave reverberates through the whole Greek force, up through the earth into their bodies.

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