Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“Tell them they can have my torch if they let you and Han go in the horse,” Dad said.

“How do you know I want to go in the damn horse?” I demanded.

But Han said, “Come on Alex, the Trojan Horse , for God’s sake!”

So I passed on Dad’s offer to the senior king. His eyes lit up with excitement like a little boy and he agreed to the deal at once, reaching out greedily for the toy to be placed into his hands.

We phoned Mehmet and told him what we’d arranged.

The time in the horse was hell. Thirty six hours in a baking windowless box stinking of sweat and halitosis and, increasingly as the time went by, of the urine that soaked into the layers of leather and wool which had been packed in to stop tell-tale drips from appearing underneath the horse. There was nothing to eat but strips of stinking dried fish and nothing to drink but mouthfuls of water that tasted as if it had been scooped from a ditch. While we waited for the Trojans, I had the whispered conversations of the Greeks to regale me as they discussed the booty they would capture, the cruelties they would inflict, the destruction they would unleash and the lip-smacking smorgasbord of rape that lay before them.

“Little girls,” one of them said, “really little girls. They’re lovely and tight and you don’t have to work so hard to hold them down.”

“This is long ago,” I kept reminding myself. “All these people were dead and buried and forgotten a thousand years before Christ.”

Then the Trojans came and we had to remain silent for hours in the hottest part of the day, waiting for the horse to move. After that came hours of jolting about as we were dragged slowly across the plain and into the city. And then at last, as night fell, silence returned outside.

Finally the time came. Our leader, an especially grim and dour-looking man named Uxos, opened a hatch. Then he and two others dropped down into the darkness below. We heard faint choking sounds and when finally Han and I lowered ourselves down, there were three Trojans sprawled down there in black pools of their own blood.

“This isn’t happening now,” I told myself again, “this is three thousand years ago.”

The relief of emerging into the cool night air was so immense in any case that I could have tolerated almost anything.

“Right,” said Uxos, “you two strangers come with me and Achios to the gates.”

The rest of the Greeks dispersed through the town.

I hadn’t anticipated Troy would be so beautiful. Softly lit by lamps, the deserted streets were lined with big, graceful, well-constructed houses, decorated with carved designs of people and animals and gods which had been picked out in coloured paints or sometimes in gold leaf. There were little gardens and pools with stone benches beside them under trees. There were statues and little shrines

As Han and I followed Uxos and Achios, his young sidekick, I thought of the Trojans sleeping behind these walls, grandparents, children, babies, peacefully sleeping and not knowing that this would be the last hour of peace in their lives. I imagined an old man snoring beside his arthritic wife, a young woman returning a sleeping baby to a cot, a little girl with her arm around a worn old doll, wriggling into a more comfortable position…

“This is all long ago,” I again tried to reassure myself.

But I was not much comforted. And I thought of the dirty little soldiers gathering outside the walls with their jagged blades and their lewd and murderous dreams.

Han, meanwhile, seemed to be in a different mental universe.

“This is so brilliant, Alex!” he whispered. “I keep telling myself over and over that we’re really here! We’re in the legend! We were in the wooden horse itself!”

Being really there was what he said excited him, but he wasn’t really there. It was all just some sort of fancy VR game to him. Actuality itself was just a particularly brilliant graphics package.

But then, not having a splice, he hadn’t heard what the soldiers were saying inside the horse.

Another unexpected thing about Troy was that it was very small. We were soon facing the city wall and the enormous bronze gates, where a single Trojan soldier stood on duty in a small square lined with trees. The Trojans had never expected an attack from inside. And yesterday they’d seen the Greeks apparently sailing away, leaving nothing behind them but their midden heaps and their strange wooden horse. So they weren’t really expecting an attack at all.

Uxos beckoned to Han and I to keep down while he and his lieutenant crept up to the gates, Achios going to the right and Uxos to the left.

They had it all worked out. Dissolving into the darkness under the trees, Achios emerged right in front of the sleepy sentry and softly called out to him. The man jumped slightly then peered into the darkness to see who it was. But before he could say or do anything else, Uxos had run silently out from the trees behind him, pulled back his head with a hand over his mouth, and dragged a blade across his throat.

As Uxos let him fall, Achios was already climbing up onto the lower of the two great bars that held the gates closed and was reaching up to push at the higher one. Uxos ran to join him and very quickly they had worked it loose and slid it back. Then they jumped down and heaved together at the lower bar.

As it came free, Hannibal leapt to his feet and punched his fist into the air with a triumphant, puerile “ Yes!”

I couldn’t bear to look at his face.

There was a shout from the top of the wall. A sentry up there had finally realised that something was going on. But it was far too late. The gates were swinging open. (Hannibal ran to give them a hand.) Outside in the darkness, one firebrand after another was bursting into flames to reveal the hungry, leering faces of the Greeks.

They all let out a cheer.

And there, right up in front, cheering with the rest of them, was my Dad, like a banal, benevolent giant, like something out of a comic book, his whole face lit up by boyish delight.

We didn’t actually participate in the rape and pillage. As the Greeks streamed shrieking in, Dad fell back. Han and I joined him and we went back to the tender and rejoined Mehmet on the Croesus.

Dawn was breaking over the plundered city as we settled in our seats to return to our own time. Smoke was pouring into the sky from within those immaculate porcelain walls, and there was a faint high sound wafting towards us over the sea. It sounded like whistling wind. It sounded like weather. It sounded like nothing of any consequence at all. But in fact it was human. It was human voices. It was the bland amalgam of hundreds and hundreds of terrified and despairing screams.

Then we were back in the present, in the very moment from which we had left. There were fields of wheat and poppies, and the city, that focal point of agony, was now just the peaceful and nondescript mound of Hisarlík, where nothing much more distressing had happened for hundreds of years than a tourist mislaying his camera case.

“Well!” exclaimed my dad. “That calls for a large breakfast I think. Do you think you could rustle up something, Mehmet? Plenty of cholesterol, plenty of calories and loads of strong coffee. Splendid. Now admit it boys, you don’t get an experience like that every day!”

And he phoned his people in Istanbul to send back a helicopter to lift him off. There was a TV company in Bulgaria he was hoping to acquire.

“Smoke?” said Han, as Dad finally disappeared over the horizon. “Smoke and then a long sleep, maybe?”