Ilium

11 The Plains of Ilium

The gods have come down to play. More precisely, they have come down to kill.

The battle has been raging for some time now with the god Apollo lashing on the Trojans, with Athena spurring on the Argives, and other gods lounging in the shade of a tree on the nearest hill, sometimes laughing, Iris and their other servants pouring them wine. I’ve watched the Thracian chief Pirous, a bold Trojan ally, kill gray-eyed Diores with a rock. Diores, co-commander of the Epean contingent of the Greeks, went down with only a broken ankle after battled-maddened Pirous threw the rock, but most of Diores’ comrades fell back, Pirous hacked his way through the few who had stayed to guard their fallen captain, and—helpless now, his ankle smashed—poor Diores had to lie there while Pirous rushed in, speared the Thracian in the belly with his long casting spear, and pulled the man’s bowels out, hooking them on the barbed spearpoint and twisting more out while while Diores screamed.

This was the flavor of the last half-hour’s battle and it was a relief when Pallas Athena raised her hand, received nodded permission from other watching gods, and stopped time and motion in their tracks.

Now with my enhanced vision—enhanced by the contact lenses from the gods—I can see Athena across the milling no-man’s-land of lances, preparing Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, as a killing machine. I mean this almost literally. Like the gods themselves, and like me, Diomedes the man will now be part machine, his eyes and skin and very blood enhanced by nanotechnologies from some future age far beyond my short life span. In frozen time, Athena sets contact lenses similar to mine in the Achaean’s eyes, allowing him to see both the gods and, somehow, to slow time a bit when he concentrates in the thick of the action, thus—to the unenhanced onlooker’s view—increasing his reaction time threefold. Homer had written that Athena had “set the man ablaze,” and now I understand the metaphor; using the nanotechnology embedded in her palm and forearm, Athena is busy turning the neglible, latent electromagnetic field around Diomedes’ body into a serious forcefield. In the infrared, Diomedes’ body and arms and shield and helmet suddenly blazed “with tireless fire like the star that flames at harvest.” I realize now, watching Diomedes glow in the thick amber of god-frozen time, that Homer must have been referring to Sirius, the Dog Star, rising as the brightest star in the Greek (and Trojan) sky in late summer. It is in the eastern sky this night.

As I watch, she also injects billions of nanotech molecular machines into Diomedes’ thigh. As always with such a nano-invasion, the human body deals with it as an infection and Diomedes’ temperature goes up at least five degrees. I can watch the invading army of molecular machines moving up his thigh to his heart, from his heart to his lungs and arms and legs again, the heat making his body glow even more brightly in my infrared vision.

All around me, battlefield death is held in abeyance these stretched minutes. Ten yards to my left, I see a chariot frozen in a bubble of dust and human sweat and equine saliva. The Trojan charioteer—a short, even-tempered man named Phegeus, son of Troy’s foremost priest to the god Hephaestus and brother to stout Idaeus; in my morphed disguises, I had broken bread and drunk wine with Idaeus a dozen times in the past few years—is petrified in the act of leaning over the front of his chariot, the chariot rim in his left hand, a long throwing spear in his right. Ideaus stands next to his brother, frozen in the act of whipping on the motion-halted horses while clutching the rigid reins in his other hand. The chariot has been halted in the act of bearing down on Diomedes, all the human players here unaware that the goddess Athena has stopped everything while she plays dolls with her chosen champion, dressing Diomedes in forcefields and thru-view contact lenses and nano-augmenters like some pre-teen girl playing with her Barbie. (I remember a small girl playing with Barbie dolls, perhaps a sister from my own childhood. I don’t believe I had a daughter of my own. I’m not sure, of course, because the memories returning over the past months are like shards of glass with clouded reflections in them.)

I am close enough to the chariot to see the exultation of combat chiseled into Phegeus’ tanned face, and the fear frozen into his unblinking brown eyes. If Homer reported all this correctly, Phegeus will be dead in less than a minute.

I see other gods flocking to the battle site now like carrion crows to slaughter. There is Ares, god of war, flicking into solidity on my side of the battle lines, stepping close to the time-halted chariot holding Idaeus and his doomed brother. Ares palms open his own forcefield behind the frozen chariot carrying the two brothers toward death.

Why does Ares care what happens with these two? True, Ares is no lover of the Greeks—he has obviously learned to hate them in this war and kills them through his instruments or his own agency when he can—but why this obvious concern about Phegeus or his brother Idaeus? Is it just a countermove to Athena’s strategy of enabling Diomedes? This chess game with real human beings falling and screaming and dying has grown old to me, an obscenity. But the strategy still intrigues me.

Then I remember that the god of war is half-god-brother to Hephaestus, the god of fire, also born to Zeus’s wife, Hera. Phegeus’ and Idaeus’ father, Dares, has performed long and faithful service to the fire god within Troy’s walls.

This idiot war is more complicated and senseless than the Vietnam War I half remember from my youth.

Suddenly Aphrodite, my new spymaster and boss, QT’s into existence thirty yards to my left. She’s also here to help the Trojans and to enjoy the slaughter. But—

In the last slowed seconds before real-time resumes, I remember that if the actual fighting goes the way of the old poem, Aphrodite herself will be injured by Diomedes in the coming hour. Why would she come down to the fray knowing that a mortal will wound her?

The answer is the same that I’ve been reminded of so forcibly over the past nine years, but now the fact of it hits me with the force and flash of a nuclear explosion—The gods don’t know what will happen next! None but Zeus, it seems, is allowed to peer ahead at Fate’s checklist.

All of us scholics are aware of this—we are not allowed, by Zeus’s prohibition, to discuss future events with the gods and they are forbidden to ask us about the future books of the Iliad. Our task is only to confirm after the fact that Homer’s Iliad has been truthful to the events of the day we are tasked to observe and record. Many’s the time that Nightenhelser and I, while watching the little green men haul their face-stones toward the shore as the sun sets behind the sea to the west, have commented on this paradox of the gods’ own blindness to coming events.

I know that Aphrodite will be injured this day, but the goddess herself does not. How can I use this information? If I were to tell Aphrodite, Zeus would know—I don’t know how he would know, but I know he would—and I would be atomized and Aphrodite punished in some lesser way. How can I use the information that Aphrodite, the goddess giving me these gifts to spy with, will be—may be—injured by Diomedes this day?

I don’t have time to find the answer. Athena finishes her fussing with Diomedes and releases her grip on space and time.

Real light and terrible noise and violent motion resumes. Diomedes steps forth, body and face and shield blazing, the light evidently apparent even to the other mortals, visible to his fellow Achaeans and the opposing Trojans.

Idaeus completes the motion of lashing his horses forward. The chariot roars and rumbles toward the Greek line, directly at the startled Diomedes.

Phegeus hurls his spear at Diomedes. The spear misses by an inch, the spearpoint passing over the son of Tydeus’ left shoulder.

Diomedes, skin flushed, forehead blazing with fever-sweat and battle heat, hurls his own spear. It flies true, catching Phegeus dead-center in the chest—“between the nipples,” I think Homer had sung it in Greek—and Phegeus is flung backward off the chariot, striking the ground and cartwheeling several times, the spear breaking off and splintering as the corpse tumbles to a stop in the dust of the chariot he had been riding five seconds before. Death, when it comes, comes fast on the plains of Ilium.

Idaeus leaps off the chariot, rolls, and struggles to his feet, sword in hand, prepared to protect his brother’s body.

Diomedes snatches up another spear and rushes forward again, obviously ready to spit Idaeus the way he has just slaughtered the young man’s brother. The Trojan turns to flee—leaving his brother’s body behind in the dust in his panic—but Diomedes throws strong and true, casting the long spear at the center of the running man’s back.

Ares, the god of war, flies forward—literally flies forward, using the same type of levitation harness the gods have issued me—and pauses time again, protecting Idaeus from a flying spear now frozen not ten feet from the running man’s back. Then Ares extends his forcefield around Idaeus, resuming time long enough for the energy field to deflect Diomedes’ spear. Then Ares quantum teleports the terrified man off the battlefield completely, sending him somewhere safe. To the shocked and terrified Trojans, it is as if a blink of black night has snatched their comrade away.

So that Ares’ brother Hephaestus, the fire god, will not have lost both his future priests, I think, but then lurch backward to safety as the battle resumes and more Greeks follow Diomedes into the breach created by the killing of Phegeus. The empty chariot bounces across the rocky plain, and is captured by cheering Achaeans.

Ares is back now, QTing into semisolidity, a tall godshape as he tries to rally the Trojans, shouting in a godvoice for them to regroup and fend off Diomedes. But the Trojans are split—some running in terror at the approach of blazing Diomedes, some turning in obedience to the war god’s booming voice. Suddenly Athena levitates across the heads of Greeks and Trojans, seizes Ares’ wrist, and whispers urgently to the furious god.

The two QT away.

I look to my left again and the goddess Aphrodite—invisible to the Greeks and Trojans struggling and cursing and dying around her—motions with her hand for me to follow them.

I pull down Death’s Helmet and become invisible to all the gods except Aphrodite. Then I trigger the medallion around my neck and QT after Athena and Ares, following their passage through space-time as easily as I would follow footprints in wet sand.

It’s easy being a god. If you have the right equipment.

They have not teleported far, only about ten miles, to a shaded place along the banks of the Scamander, the gods call it the Xanthus—the broad river that runs across the plains of Ilium. When I QT into solidity about fifteen paces from them, Ares’ head snaps around and he stares right at me. For an instant I know that the Hades Helmet has failed, they see me, and I am dead.

“What is it?” asks Athena.

“I thought I . . . felt something. A stir. A quantum stir.”

The goddess turns her gray eyes in my direction. “There’s nothing there. I can see in all the phase-shift spectra.”

“I can as well,” snaps Ares and turns his gaze away from me. I let out a shaky breath as silently as I can; the Hades Helmet still cloaks me. The god of war begins pacing up and down the river’s edge. “Zeus is everywhere these days.”

Athena walks beside him. “Yes, Father is angry at us all.”

“Then why do you provoke him?”

The goddess stops. “Provoke him how? By defending my Achaeans from slaughter?”

“By preparing Diomedes to do slaughter,” says Ares. I notice for the first time the reddish tint to the tall, perfectly muscled god’s curly hair. “This is a dangerous thing you do, Pallas Athena.”

The goddess laughs softly. “We’ve been intervening in this battle for nine years. It’s the Game, for God’s sake. It’s what we do. I know that you plan to intervene on your beloved Ilium’s behalf this very day, slaughtering my Argives like sheep. Is this not dangerous—this active participation by the god of war?”

“Not as dangerous as arming one side or the other with nanotech. Not as dangerous as retrofitting them with phase-shift fields. What are you thinking, Athena? You’re trying to turn these mortals into us—into gods.”

Athena laughs again but puts on a serious expression when she notices that her laughter only makes Ares more angry. “Brother, my augmentation of Diomedes is short-lived, you know that. I want only for him to survive this encounter. Aphrodite, your darling sister, has already urged on the Trojan archer Pandarus to wound one of my favorites—Menelaus—and even as we speak, she’s whispering in the archer’s ear—Kill Diomedes. ”

Ares shrugs. I know that Aphrodite is his ally and his instigator. Like a pouting little boy—an eight-foot-tall pouting little boy with a pulsing energy field—he finds a smooth stone and skips it across the water. “What does it matter if Diomedes dies today or next year? He’s mortal. He’ll die.”

Now Athena laughs without embarrassment. “Of course he will die, my dear brother. And of course a single mortal’s life or death is of no consequence to us . . . to me. But we must play the Game. I’ll not let that bitch-whore Aphrodite change the will of the Fates.”

“Who among us knows the will of the Fates?” snaps Ares, still pouting, his arms folded across his powerful chest.

“Father does.”

“Zeus says he does,” says the god of war with a sneer.

“Are you doubting our lord and master?” Athena’s tone is almost, not quite, light and teasing.

Ares looks around quickly, and for a second I fear I’ve given myself away by making a noise where I stand on a flat boulder, afraid to leave footprints in the sand. But the war god’s gaze moves on.

“I show no disrespect to our Father,” Ares says at last, his voice reminding me of Richard Nixon’s when he was speaking into the hidden Oval Office microphone he knew was there. Putting his lies on the record. “My allegiance and loyalty and love all go to Zeus, Pallas Athena.”

“Which our Father must certainly note and reciprocate,” responds Athena, no longer hiding the sarcasm in her voice.

Suddenly Ares’ head snaps up. “God damn you,” he shouts. “You just brought me here to get me away from the battlefield while your cursed Achaeans kill more of my Trojans.”

“Of course.” Athena launches the two syllables as a taunt, and for a second I think I’m going to witness something I’ve not seen in my nine years here—a direct battle between two gods.

Instead, Ares kicks sand in a final show of petulance and QT’s away. Athena laughs, kneels by the Scamander, and splashes cold water on her face. “Fool,” she whispers—to herself, I presume, but I take it as a statement directed at me protected here only by the Hades Helmet’s distortion field; “Fool” seems to me an accurate judgment of my folly.

Athena QT’s back to the battlefield. After a minute devoted to trembling at my own foolishness, I phase-shift and follow.

The Greeks and Trojans are still killing each other. Big news.

I seek out the only other scholic visible on the field. To the unaided eye, Nightenhelser is just another slovenly Trojan foot-soldier hanging back from the worst of the fighting, but I can see the telltale green glow the gods have marked us scholics with even when we’re morphed, so I take off the Hades Helmet, morph into the form of Phalces—a Trojan who will be killed by Antilochus by and by—and I walk over to join Nightenhelser where he stands on a low ridge looking down on the carnage.

“Good morning, Scholic Hockenberry,” he says when I approach. We’re speaking in English. No other Trojan is near enough to hear us over the clash of bronze and the rumble of chariots and both of these motley coalitions are used to odd tribal languages and dialects.

“Good morning, Scholic Nightenhelser.”

“Where have you been the last half hour or so?”

“Taking a break,” I say. It happens. Sometimes the carnage gets to be too much even for us scholics and we QT away to Troy for a quiet hour or so—or for a large flagon of wine. “Did I miss much?”

Nightenhelser shrugs. “Diomedes came charging in about twenty minutes ago and was struck by an arrow. Right on schedule.”

“Pandarus’ arrow,” I say, nodding. Pandarus is the same Trojan archer who wounded Menelaus earlier.

“I saw Aphrodite inciting Pandarus,” says Nightenhelser. The big man has his hands in the pockets of his rough cape. Trojan capes had no pockets, of course, so Nightenhelser had sewn these in.

This was news. Homer had not sung of Aphrodite urging Pandarus to shoot Diomedes, only of Athena’s earlier prompting of the archer to wound Menelaus so the war would resume. Poor Pandarus is literally a fool of the gods this day—his last day.

“Flesh wound for Diomedes?” I say.

“Shoulder. Sthenelus was there and pulled it out. Evidently this arrow wasn’t poisoned. Athena QT’d into the fray a minute ago, took her pet Diomedes aside, and ‘ put energy into his limbs, his feet, and his fighting hands .’ “ Nightenhelser was quoting some translation of Homer that I’m not familiar with.

“More nanotech,” I say. “Has Diomedes found the archer and killed him yet?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“Did Pandarus give that endless speech before Diomedes killed him?” I ask. In my favorite translation, Pandarus bemoans his fate for forty lines, has a long dialogue with a Trojan captain named Aeneas—yes, the Aeneas—and the two go charging at Diomedes in a chariot, flinging spears at the wounded Achaean.

“No,” says Nightenhelser. “Pandarus just said ‘Fuck me’ when the arrow missed its mark. Then he leaped on the chariot with Aeneas, tosssed a spear that went right through Diomedes’ shield and breastplate—but missed flesh—and said, ‘Shit,’ in the second before Diomedes’ spear caught him right between the eyes. Another case, I presume, of Homer’s poetic license in all the speech-making.”

“And Aeneas?” That encounter is crucial to history as well as the Iliad. I can’t believe I missed it.

“Aphrodite saved him just a minute ago,” confirms Nightenhelser. Aeneas is the mortal son of the goddess of love and she watches over him carefully. “Diomedes smashed Aeneas’ hipbone to bits with a boulder, just as in the poem, but Aphrodite protected her wounded boy with a forcefield and is carrying him off the field now. It really pissed Diomedes off.”

I shield my eyes with my hand. “Where is Diomedes now?” But I see the Greek warrior before Nightenhelser can point him out, about a hundred yards away, in the center of a melee, far behind Trojan lines. There is a mist of blood in the air around shining Diomedes and a heap of corpses on each side of the slashing, hacking, stabbing Achaean. The augmented Diomedes appears to be hacking his way through waves of human flesh to catch up to the slowly retreating Aphrodite. “Jesus,” I say softly.

“Yeah,” says the other scholic. “In the last few minutes he’s killed Astynous and Hypiron, Abas and Polyidus, Xanthus and Thoon, Echemmon and Chromius . . . all the captain Pairs.”

“Why in twos?” I ask, thinking aloud.

Nightenhelser looks at me as if I’m a slow student in one of his freshman classes. “They were in chariots, Hockenberry. Two men per chariot. Diomedes killed them all as the chariots came at him.”

“Ah,” I say, embarrassed now. My attention isn’t on the murdered Trojan captains but on Aphrodite. The goddess has just paused in her retreat from the Trojan lines, still carrying the wounded Aeneas, and is now strutting to and fro, clearly visible to the milling and frightened Trojans fleeing Diomedes’ attack. Aphrodite is forcing the Trojan fighters back toward the fray with stabs of electricity and shimmering forcefield shoves.

Diomedes sees the goddess and goes berserk, hacking his way through a final protective line of Trojans to confront the goddess herself. He does not speak but readies his long spear. Aphrodite raises a forcefield almost casually, still carrying the wounded Aeneas, obviously not worried by a mere mortal’s attack.

She has forgotten Athena’s modifications of Diomedes.

Diomedes leaps forward, the goddess’s forcefield crackles and gives way, the Achaean lunges with his long spear and the shaft and barb of it tear through Aphrodite’s personal forcefield, silken robes, and divine flesh. The razor-sharp spearpoint slashes the goddess’s wrist so that red muscle and white bone show. Golden ichor—rather than red blood—sprays into the air.

Aphrodite stares at the wound for a second and then screams—an inhuman scream, something huge and amplified, a female roar out of a bank of amplifiers at a rock concert from hell.

She reels, still screaming, and drops Aeneas.

Rather than press home his successful attack on Aphrodite, Diomedes unsheaths his sword and prepares to decapitate the unconscious Aeneas.

Phoebus Apollo, lord of the silver bow, QT’s into solidity between the berserk Diomedes and the fallen Trojan and holds the Achaean at bay with a pulsing hemisphere of plasma forcefield. Blinded by bloodlust, Diomedes hacks away at the forcefield, his own energy field crashing red against Apollo’s defensive yellow shield. Aphrodite is still staring at her mangled wrist, and it looks as if she may swoon and lie there helpless in front of the still-raging Diomedes. The goddess seems unable to concentrate enough to QT while in such pain.

Suddenly her brother Ares arrives in a blazing flying chariot, shoving aside Trojans and Greeks alike as he widens the ship’s plasma footprint to land by his sister. Aphrodite is blubbering and wailing in pain, trying to explain that Diomedes has gone mad. “He’d fight Father Zeus!” screams the goddess, collapsing in the war god’s arms.

“Can you fly this?” demands Ares.

“No!” Aphrodite does swoon now. She falls into Ares’ arms, still cradling the injured left hand and wrist in her bloody—or ichorish—right hand. It is strangely disturbing to watch. Gods and goddesses don’t bleed. At least not in my nine years here.

The goddess Iris, Zeus’s personal messenger, flicks onto the battlefield between the chariot and Apollo’s forcefield where the god still protects the fallen Aeneas. The Trojans have backed away now, eyes bugging, and Diomedes is being held at bay by the overlapped energy fields. The Achaean is radiating heat and fury in the infrared, looking all the world like a warrior made out of pulsing lava.

“Take her to her mother,” commands Ares, laying the unconscious Aphrodite on the floor of the chariot. Iris lifts the energy-craft skyward and phase-shifts it out of sight.

“Amazing,” says Nightenhelser.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I say. It is the first time in my more than nine years here that I have seen a Greek or Trojan successfully attack a god. I turn to see Nightenhelser staring at me in shock. I forget sometimes that the scholic is from a previous decade. “Well, it is,” I say defensively.

I want to follow Aphrodite to Olympos and see what happens between her and Zeus. Homer had written about it, of course, but there already has been enough disparity between the poem and real events here today to pique my interest.

I begin edging away from Nightenhelser—who is watching events so raptly that he does not notice my departure—and ready myself to don the Hades Helmet and twist the personal QT medallion’s controls. But something is happening on the battlefield.

Diomedes lets out a war cry almost as loud as Aphrodite’s still-echoing scream of pain, and then the augmented Achaean charges Aeneas and Apollo again. This time, Diomedes’ nano-strengthened body and phase-shifted sword hack through Apollo’s outer layers of energy shield.

The god stands motionless as Diomedes hacks and cuts his way through the shimmering forcefield like a man shoveling invisible snow.

Then Apollo’s voice rings out with amplification that must be audible two or three miles away. “Think, Diomedes! Back off! Enough of this mortal insanity—warring with the gods. We’re not of the same breed, human. We never were. We never will be.” Apollo grows in size from his imposing eight feet of stature to become a giant more than twenty feet tall.

Diomedes halts his attack and backs away, although it is impossible to tell whether it is out of temporary fear or sheer exhaustion.

Apollo bends down and opaques the forcefields around him and the fallen Aeneas. When the black fog disappear a minute later, the god is gone but Aeneas is still lying there, wounded, hip shattered, bleeding. The Trojan fighters rush to form a circle around their fallen and abandoned leader before Diomedes slaughters him.

It is not Aeneas. I know that Apollo has left a tensile hologram behind and carried the real wounded prince to the heights of Pergamus—Ilium’s citadel—where the goddesses Leto and Artemis, Ares’ sister, will use their nanotech god-medicine to save Aeneas’ life and mend his wounds in minutes.

I’m ready to flick away to Olympos when suddenly Apollo QT’s back to the battlefield, shielded from mortal view. Ares, still rallying Trojans behind his defensive shield, looks up when the other god arrives.

“Ares, destroyer of men, you stormer of ramparts, are you going to let that piece of dogshit insult you like that?” Invisible to the Achaeans, Apollo is pointing at the panting and recovering Diomedes.

“Insult me? How has he insulted me?”

“You idiot,” thunders Apollo in ultrasonic frequencies audible only to the gods and scholics and the dogs in Troy, who set up a fearsome howling in response. “That . . . that mortal . . . has just assaulted the goddess of love, your sister, slashing the tendons of her immortal wrist. Diomedes even charged me, one of the most powerful of the gods. Athena has made him into something superhuman to make Ares, war god, reeking of blood, into a laughingstock!”

Ares’ head swivels back toward the panting Diomedes, who has been ignoring the god since his attempt to cut through the forcefields failed.

“He makes fun of me!?” screams Ares in a shout everyone from here to Olympos can hear. I’ve noted over the years that Ares is rather stupid for a god. He’s proving it today. “He dares make jest of me!!??”

“Kill him,” cries Apollo, still speaking in the ultrasonic. “Cut out his heart and eat it.” And the god of the silver bow QT’s away.

Ares is going crazy. I decide I can’t leave yet. I desperately want to QT to Olympos and see how badly injured Aphrodite is, but this is just too interesting to miss.

First, the war god morphs into the runner Acamas, prince of Thrace, and runs to and from among the milling Trojans, urging them back into the battle to push the Greeks out of the salient they have created following Diomedes into the Trojan lines. Then Ares morphs into the form of Sarpedon and taunts Hector—the hero is holding back from the fight with rare reticence. Shamed by what he thinks are Sarpedon’s accusations, Hector rejoins his men. When Ares sees that Hector is rallying the main body of Trojan fighters, the god becomes himself and joins the circle of fighters holding the Greeks away from the hologram of unconscious Aeneas.

I confess I’ve never seen fighting this fierce during my nine years here. If Homer taught us anything, it is that the human being is a frail vessel, a fleshly flagon of blood and loose guts just waiting to be spilled.

They’re spilling now.

The Achaeans don’t wait for Ares to get his second wind, but rush in with chariot and spear behind the wild leadership of Diomedes and Odysseus. Horses scream. Chariots splinter and tumble. Horsemen drive their steeds into a wall of spearpoints and gleaming shields. Diomedes flames to the front again, calling his men forward even while he kills every Trojan who comes within his reach.

Apollo flicks back to the battlefield in a swirl of purple mist and releases the healed Aeneas—the real Aeneas—into the fray. The young man has been healed and more—he flows with light the way modified Diomedes did when Athena had finished with him. The Trojans, already rallying behind Hector, let out a massed yell at the sight of their resurrected prince and launch their counterattack.

Now it is Aeneas and Diomedes leading the fighting on opposite sides of the line, killing enemy captains by the bucketful, while Apollo and Ares urge more Trojans into the fray. I watch as Aeneas slaughters the carefree Achaean twins, Orsilochus and Crethon.

Now Menelaus, recovered from his own wound, shoves past Odysseus and rushes toward Aeneas. I hear Ares laugh. The war god would love it if Agamemnon’s brother, Helen’s real husband, the man who started this war by mislaying his wife, was cut down dead this day. Aeneas and Meneleus come within arm’s reach of each other, the other fighters backing away in respect for aristeia, the two warriors’ spears thrusting and feinting, thrusting and feinting.

Suddenly Nestor’s brother, Antilochus, good friend to the all-but-forgotten Achilles, leaps forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Menelaus, obviously afraid the Greek cause will die with their captain if he does not intervene.

Confronted with two legendary killers rather than one, Aeneas backs away.

Two hundred yards east of this confrontation, Hector has waded into the Achaean line with such ferocity that even Diomedes falls back with his men. With his augmented vision, Diomedes must see Ares—invisible to the others—fighting at Hector’s side.

I still want to leave, to check on Aphrodite, but I can’t tear myself away right now. I can see Nightenhelser madly taking notes on his recorder ansible. This makes me laugh, since the thousands of noble Trojans and Argives battling here are all as preliterate as two-year-olds. If they found Nightenhelser’s scribblings, even in Greek, they would mean nothing to these men.

All the gods are getting into the act now.

Hera and Athena blink back into existence, Zeus’s wife visibly urging Athena into the fight. Athena does not resist. Hebe, the goddess of youth and servant to the older gods, flashes down in a flying chariot, Hera takes control, and Athena also leaps aboard, dropping her robe while buckling on her breastplate. Athena’s battle shirt gleams. She lifts a crackling energy shield of bright yellow and pulsing red, and her sword sends bolts of lightning to the Earth.

“Look!” It’s Nightenhelser shouting to me above the fray. There’s real lightning coming from the north, a towering bank of dark stratocumulus rising forty thousand feet or higher into the hot afternoon sky. The cloud suddenly shapes itself into the form and visage of Zeus.

“LEAP TO IT THEN, WIFE AND DAUGHTER,” roars the thunder from that storm. “ATHENA, SEE IF YOU’RE THE WAR GOD’S MATCH. BRING HIM DOWN IF YOU CAN!”

Black clouds roil low over the battlefield while rain and lightning strike down at Trojan and Argive alike.

Hera brings the chariot low over the heads of the Greeks, then lower still, scattering Trojans like leather-and-bronze tenpins.

Athena leaps down into a real chariot next to exhausted, blood-encrusted Diomedes and his faithful driver, Sthenelus. “Are you done for this day, mortal?” she screams at Diomedes, the last word dripping sarcasm. “Are you half the size of your father to stop when your opponents hold the field so?” She gestures to where Hector and Ares are sweeping the Greeks back before their charge.

“Goddess,” Diomedes gasps, “the immortal Ares protects Hector and . . .”

“DO I NOT PROTECT YOU?” roars Athena, fifteen feet tall and growing, looming over the fading glow of Diomedes.

“Yes, Goddess, but . . .”

“Diomedes, joy of my heart, cut down that Trojan and the god who protects him!”

Diomedes looks startled, even horrified. “We mortals may not kill a god . . .”

“Where is that written?” booms Athena and leans over Diomedes, injecting him with something new, pouring energy from her personal god-field to his. The goddess grabs the hapless Sthenelus and throws him thirty feet from the chariot. Athena takes the reins of Diomedes’ chariot and whips the horses forward, straight toward Hector and Ares and the entire Trojan army.

Diomedes readies his spear as if he fully plans to kill a god—to slay Ares.

And Aphrodite wants to use me to kill Athena herself, I think, heart pounding with the terror and excitement of the moment. Things may soon be going quite differently than Homer predicted here on the plains of Troy.