Ilium

21 Ilium

I could tell you what it’s like to make love to Helen of Troy. But I won’t. And not just because it would be totally ungentlemanly of me to do so. The details are just not part of my story here. But I can say truthfully that if the vengeful Muse or maddened Aphrodite had found me a moment after Helen and I ended our first bout of lovemaking, say, a minute after we rolled apart on the sweat-moistened sheets to catch our breath and feel the cool breeze coming in ahead of the storm, and if the Muse and the goddess had crashed in and killed me then—I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the short second life of Thomas Hockenberry would have been a happy one. And at least it would have ended on a high note.

A minute after that instant of perfection, the woman was holding a dagger to my belly.

“Who are you?” demanded Helen.

“I’m your . . .” I began and stopped. Something in Helen’s eyes made me abort my lie about being Paris before I could vocalize it.

“If you say you are my new husband, I will have to sink this blade into your bowels,” she said evenly. “If you are a god, that shouldn’t matter. But if you aren’t . . .”

“I’m not,” I managed. The point of the knife was close enough to draw blood from the skin above my belly. Where did this knife come from? Had it been in the cushions while we were making love?

“If you aren’t a god, how have you taken Paris’s shape?”

I realized that this was Helen of Troy—the mortal daughter of Zeus—a woman who lived in a universe where gods and goddesses had sex with mortals all the time; a world where shapechangers, divine and otherwise, walked among mere humans; a world where the concept of cause and effect had completely different meanings. I said, “The gods gave me the ability to mor . . . to change appearances.”

“Who are you?” she asked. “What are you?” She did not seem angry, nor even especially shocked. Her voice was calm, her beautiful features undistorted by fear or fury. But the blade was steady against my belly. The woman wanted an answer.

“My name is Thomas Hockenberry,” I said. “I’m a scholic.” I knew that none of this would make sense. My name sounded strange even to me, hard-edged in the smoother tones of their ancient language.

“Tho-mas Hock-en-bear-reeee,” she mouthed. “It sounds Persian.”

“No,” I said. “Dutch and German and Irish, actually.”

I saw Helen frown and knew I was not only not making sense to her with these words, but was sounding actively deranged.

“Put on a robe,” she said. “We will talk on the terrace.”

Helen’s large bedroom had terraces on both sides, one looking down into the courtyard, the other looking out south and east over the city. My levitation harness and other gear—except for the QT medallion and morphing bracelet I had worn to bed—were hidden behind the curtain on the courtyard terrace. Helen led me to the outside terrace. We each wore thin robes. Helen kept her short, sharp knife in her hand as we stood at the railing in the reflected light from the city and from the occasional storm flash.

“Are you a god?” she asked.

I almost answered “yes”—it would be the easiest way to talk her out of putting that blade in my belly—but had the sudden, inexplicable, overwhelming urge to tell the truth for a change. “No,” I said. “I’m not a god.”

She nodded. “I knew you were not a god. I would have gutted you like a fish if you had lied to me about that.” She smiled grimly. “You don’t make love like a god.”

Well, I thought, but there was nothing else to say to that.

“How is it,” she asked, “that you can take the shape and form of Paris?”

“The gods have given me the ability to do so,” I said.

“Why?” The tip of the dagger blade was only inches from my bare skin through the robe.

I shrugged, but then realizing that shrugs weren’t used by the ancients, I said, “They lent me this ability for their own purposes. I serve them. I watch the battle and report to them. It helps that I can take the shape of . . . other men.”

Helen did not seem surprised by this. “Where is my Trojan lover? What have you done to the real Paris?”

“He’s well,” I said. “When I abandon this likeness, he will return to what he was doing when I morphed . . . when I took his shape.”

“Where will he be?” asked Helen.

I thought this was a slightly strange question. “Wherever he would have been if I hadn’t borrowed his form,” I said at last. “I think he’d just left the city to join Hector for tomorrow’s fighting.” Actually, when I morph out of Paris’s form, Paris will be exactly where he would have been if he’d continued on during the time I had his identity—sleeping in a tent, perhaps, or in the midst of battle, or shagging one of the slave girls in Hector’s war camp. But this was too difficult to explain to Helen. I didn’t think she’d appreciate a discourse on probability wave functions and quantum-temporal simultaneity. I couldn’t explain why it was that neither Paris nor those around him wouldn’t necessarily notice his absence, or how it was that events might reconnect to the Iliad as if I hadn’t interrupted the probability wave-collapse of that temporal line. Quantum continuity might be sewn up as soon as I canceled the morph function.

Shit, I didn’t understand any of this.

“Leave his form,” commanded Helen. “Show me your true shape.”

“My Lady, if I . . .” I began to protest, but her hand moved quickly, the blade cut through silk and skin, and I felt the blood flow on my abdomen.

Showing her that my right hand was going to move very, very slowly, I opened the glowing functions and touched the icon on the morphing bracelet.

I was Thomas Hockenberry again—shorter, thinner, gawkier, with my slightly myopic gaze and thinning hair.

Helen blinked once and swung the dagger up fast—faster than I thought any person could move. I heard the ripping and tearing. But it wasn’t my stomach muscles she had sliced open, only the tie of the robe and the silken material itself.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. Helen of Troy flung my robe open, using her free hand to slide it off my shoulders.

I stood naked and pale in front of this formidable woman. If a dictionary ever needed a perfect definition of “pathetic,” a photograph of this moment would suffice.

“You may put the robe back on,” she said after a minute.

I tugged it back up. The sash was torn, so I held it together with my hand. She seemed to be thinking. For several minutes we stood there on the terrace in silence. Even as late as it was, the towers of Ilium glowed from torchlight. Watchfires flickered along the ramparts on the distant walls. Farther to the south, beyond the Scaean Gate, the corpse fires burned. To the southwest, lightning flashed in the towering storm clouds. There were no stars visible and the air smelled of the rain coming from the direction of Mount Ida.

“How did you know I was not Paris?” I asked at last.

Helen blinked out of her reverie and gave a small smile. “A woman may forget the color of her lover’s eyes, the tone of his voice, even the details of his smile or form, but she cannot forget how her husband fucks.”

It was my turn to blink in surprise and not just at Helen’s vulgar speech. Homer had literally sung the praises of Paris’s appearance—comparing him to a “stallion full-fed at the manger” when describing Paris’s rush to join Hector outside the city this very night, sure in his racing stride . . . his head flung back, his mane streaming over his shoulders, sure and sleek in his glory. Paris was, in the teenagers’ parlance of my previous life, a hunk. And while I had been in Helen’s bed, I had owned Paris’s streaming hair, his sun-bronzed body, his washboard belly, his oiled muscles, his . . .

“Your penis is larger,” said Helen.

I blinked again. Twice this time. She had not used the word “penis,” of course—Latin was not yet a real language—and the Greek word she had chosen was slang closer to “cock.” But that made no sense. When we were making love, I’d had Paris’s penis . . .

“No, that wasn’t how I knew you were not my lover,” said Helen. She seemed to be reading my mind. “That is just my observation.”

“Then how . . .”

“Yes,” said Helen. “It was how you you bedded me, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I had nothing to say to this, and could not have spoken clearly if I’d had anything to say.

Helen smiled again. “Paris first had me not in Sparta, where he won me, nor in Ilium, where he brought me, but on the little island of Kranae on the way here.”

There was no island that I knew of named Kranae, and the word merely meant “rocky” in ancient Greek, so I took it to mean that Paris had interrupted their voyage to put into some small, rocky, unnamed island to have his way with Helen without the watching presence of the ship’s crew. Which would mean that Paris was . . . impatient. So were you, Hockenberry came the voice of something not totally unlike my conscience. Too late for a conscience.

“He’s had me—and I’ve had him—hundreds of times since then,” Helen said softly, “but never like tonight. Never like tonight.”

I was adither with confusion and smug with pride. Was this good? Was this a compliment? No, wait . . . that’s absurd. Homer sings of Paris as nearly godlike in his physical beauty and charm, a great lover, irresistible to women and goddesses alike, which must mean that Helen only meant—

“You,” she said, interrupting my confused thoughts, “you were . . . earnest.”

Earnest. I clutched the robe tighter and looked toward the coming storm to hide my embarrassment. Earnest.

“Sincere,” she said. “Very sincere.”

If she didn’t shut up soon and quit hunting for synonyms for “pathetic,” I thought I might wrestle the dagger away from her and cut my own throat with it.

“Did the gods send you here to me?” she asked.

I considered lying again. Certainly not even this strong-willed woman would gut someone on an errand from the gods. But again I chose not to lie. Helen of Troy seemed almost telepathic in her ability to read me. And telling the truth for a change felt good.

“No,” I said. “No one sent me.”

“You came here just because you wanted to bed me?”

Well, at least she hadn’t used the f-word again. “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”

She looked at me. Somewhere in the city, a man laughed loudly, then a woman did the same. Ilium never slept.

“I mean—I was lonely,” I said. “I’ve been here for the whole war by myself, with no one to talk to, no one to touch . . .”

“You touched me enough,” said Helen.

I couldn’t tell from her tone if it was sarcasm or an accusation. “Yes,” I said.

“Are you married, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“Yes. No.” I shook my head again. I must sound like a total idiot to Helen. “I believe I was married,” I said, “but if I was, my wife is dead.”

“You believe you were married?”

“The gods brought me to Mount Olympos across time and space,” I said, knowing she would not understand but not caring. “I believe I died in my other life, and they somehow brought me back. But they did not return all my memory to me. Images come and go from my real life, my former life . . . like dreams.”

“I understand,” said Helen. I realized from her tone that somehow, amazingly, she did understand.

“Is there a particular god or goddess you serve, Hock-en-bear-eee?”

“I report to one of the muses,” I said, “but I learned just yesterday that Aphrodite controls my fate.”

Helen looked up in surprise. “And so has she controlled mine,” she said softly. “Just yesterday, when the goddess saved Paris from Menelaus’ fury and brought him back here to our bed, Aphrodite ordered me to go to him. When I protested, she flew into a rage and threatened to make me the butt of hard, withering hate—her words—of both Trojans and Achaeans.”

“The goddess of love,” I said softly.

“The goddess of lust,” said Helen. “And I know much about lust, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

Again I didn’t know what to say.

“My mother was named Leda, called the daughter of Night,” she said in conversational tones, “and Zeus camed to her and fucked her while he was in the shape of a swan—a huge, horny swan. There was a mural in my home showing my two older brothers and an altar to Zeus and me as an egg, waiting to be hatched.”

I couldn’t help it—I barked a laugh. Then my stomach muscles clenched, waiting for the dagger’s blade to rip through it.

Instead, Helen smiled broadly. “Yes,” she said. “I know about abductions and being a pawn of the gods, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

“Yes,” I said. “When Paris came to Sparta . . .”

“No,” interrupted Helen. “When I was eleven, Hock-en-bear-eeee, I was carried off—abducted from the temple of Artemis Orthia—by Theseus, uniter of the Attica communities into the city of Athens. Theseus made me pregnant—I bore him a girl child, Iphigenia, whom I could not look upon with love and handed over to Clytaemnestra, to raise with her husband, Agamemnon, as their own. I was rescued from this marriage by my brothers and returned to Sparta. Theseus then went off with Hercules in his war against the Amazons, where he took time to invade hell, marry an Amazon warrior, and explore the Labyrinth of the minotaur in Crete.”

My head was spinning. Every one of these Greeks and Trojans and gods had a story and had to tell it at a drop of a hat. But what did this have to do with . . .

“I know about lust, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” said Helen. “The great king Menelaus claimed me as his bride even though such men love virgins, love their bloodlines more than life, even though I was soiled goods in a man’s world that loves its virgins so. And then Paris—spurred on by Aphrodite—came to abduct me again, to take me to Troy to be his . . . prize.”

Helen stopped the recitation and seemed to be studying me. I could think of nothing to say. There was a bottomless depth of bitterness beneath her cool, ironic words. No, not bitterness I realized, looking into her eyes—sadness. A terrible, tired sadness.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” continued Helen. “Do you think I am the most beautiful woman in the world? Did you come here to abduct me?”

“No, I did not come here to abduct you. I have nowhere to take you. My own days are numbered by the wrath of the gods—I have betrayed my Muse and her boss, Aphrodite, and when Aphrodite heals from the wounds Diomedes inflicted on her yesterday, she will wipe me off the face of the earth as sure as we’re standing here.”

“Yes?” said Helen.

“Yes.”

“Come to bed . . . Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I wake in the gray hour before dawn, having slept only a few hours after our last two bouts of lovemaking, but feeling perfectly rested. My back is to Helen, but somehow I know that she is also lying awake on this large bed with its elaborately carved posts.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“Yes?”

“How do you serve Aphrodite and the other gods?”

I think about this a minute and then roll over. The most beautiful woman in the world is lying there in the dim light, propping herself up on one elbow, her long, dark hair, mussed by our lovemaking, flowing around her naked shoulder and arm, with her eyes, pupils wide and dark, intent on mine.

“How do you mean?” I ask, although I know.

“Why did the gods bring you across time and space, as you say, to serve them? What do you know that they need?”

I close my eyes for a moment. How can I possibly explain to her? It will be madness if I answer honestly. But—as I admitted earlier—I’m terribly tired of lying. “I know something about the war going on,” I say. “I know some of the events that will happen . . . might happen.”

“You serve an oracle?”

“No.”

“You are a prophet, then? A priest to whom one of the gods has given such vision?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t understand,” says Helen.

I shift on my side and sit up, moving cushions to be more comfortable. It is still dark but a bird begins to sing in the courtyard. “In the place whence I came,” I whisper, “there is a song, a poem, about this war. It’s called the Iliad. So far, the events of the actual war resemble those sung about in this song.”

“You speak as if this siege and this war were already an old tale in the land you came from,” says Helen. “As if all this has already occurred.”

Don’t admit this to her. It would be folly. “Yes,” I say. “That is the truth.”

“You are one of the Fates,” she says.

“No. I’m just a man.”

Helen smiles with wicked amusement. She touches the valley between her breasts where I had climaxed just a few hours earlier. “I know that, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I blush, rub my cheeks, and feel the stubble there. No shaving in the scholics barracks for me this morning. Why bother? You only have hours to live.

“Will you answer my questions about the future?” she asks, her voice terribly soft.

It would be madness to do so. “I don’t really know your future,” I say disingenuously. “Only the details of this song, and there have been many discrepancies between it and the actual events . . .”

“Will you answer my questions about the future?” She sets her hand on my chest.

“Yes,” I say.

“Is Ilium doomed?” Helen’s voice is steady, calm, soft.

“Yes.”

“Will it be taken by strength or stealth?”

For God’s sake, you can’t tell her that, I think. “By stealth,” I say.

Helen actually smiles. “Odysseus,” she murmurs.

I say nothing. I tell myself that perhaps if I give no details, these revelations will not affect events.

“Will Paris be killed before Troy falls?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“By Achilles’ hand?”

No details! clamors my conscience. “No,” I say. Fuck it.

“And the noble Hector?”

“Death,” I say, feeling like some vicious hanging judge.

“By Achilles’ hand?”

“Yes.”

“And Achilles? Will he go home from this war alive?”

“No.” His fate is sealed as soon as he slays Hector, and he has known this all along . . . knew it from a prophecy he has carried with him like a cancer for years. Long life or glory? Homer said that it was . . . is . . . will be, the decision he must make. But, the prophecy goes, if he chooses long life, he will be known only as a man, not as the demigod he will become if he kills Hector in combat. But he has a choice. The future is not sealed!

“And King Priam?”

“Death,” I say, my whisper hoarse. Slaughtered in his own palace, in his private temple to Zeus. Hacked to bloody bits like a heifer being sacrificed to the gods.

“And Hector’s little boy, Scamandrius, whom the people call Astyanax?”

“Death,” I say. I close my eyes against the image of Pyrrhos flinging the screaming infant down from the wall.

“And Andromache,” Helen whispers. “Hector’s wife?”

“A slave,” I say. If Helen keeps up this litany of questions, I’m pretty sure I’ll go crazy. It was all right from a distance—from a scholic’s disinterested observer’s stance. But now I’m talking about people I have known and met and . . . slept with. It strikes me that Helen has not asked about her own fate. Perhaps she never will.

“And will I die with Ilium?” she asks, her voice still calm.

I take a breath. “No.”

“But Menelaus will find me?”

“Yes.” I feel like one of those black Crazy-8 tell-your-fortune toys that were popular when I was a kid. Why hadn’t I answered her like that black ball would have? That would be more like the Oracle at Delphi—The future is cloudy. Or Ask again. Am I showing off for this woman?

It’s too late now.

“Menelaus finds me but does not kill me? I survive his anger?”

“Yes.” I remember Odysseus’ telling of this in the Odyssey—Menelaus finding Helen hiding in Deiphobos’ quarters in the great royal palace, near the shrine of the Palladion, and of the cuckolded husband throwing himself upon her, sword drawn, fulling intending to kill this beautiful woman. Helen will uncover her breasts to her husband, as if inviting the blow, as if willing it—and then Menelaus will drop his sword and kiss her. It’s not clear whether Deiphobos, one of the sons of Priam, is killed by Menelaus before this or after he . . .

“But he takes me back to Sparta?” whispers Helen. “Paris dead, Hector dead, all the great warriors of Ilium dead or put to the sword, all the great women of Troy dead or dragged off to slavery, the city itself burned, its wall breached, its towers dragged down and broken up, the earth salted so that nothing will ever grow here again . . . but I live and am taken back to Sparta by Menelaus?”

“Something like that,” I say, hearing how lame it sounds.

Helen rolls out of bed, stands, and walks naked to the courtyard terrace. For a minute I forget my role as Cassandra and just gaze in something like awe at her dark hair tumbling down her back, at her perfect buttocks, and at her strong legs. She stands naked at the railing, not turning back my way as she says, “And what about you, Hock-en-bear-eeee? Have the Fates told you your own destiny through this song of theirs?”

“No,” I confess. “I’m not important enough to be included in the poem. But I’m pretty sure I will die today.”

She turns. I expect Helen to be weeping after all I’ve told her—if she believes me—but she’s smiling slightly. “Only ‘pretty sure’?”

“Yes.”

“You will die because of Aphrodite’s wrath?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve felt that wrath, Hock-en-bear-eeee. If she takes a whim to kill you, she will.”

Well, that’s encouraging. I say nothing for a while. There is a drone from the open terrace doorways on the city side. “What’s that?” I ask.

“The Trojan women are still entreating Athena for mercy and divine protection, chanting and sacrificing at her temple, as Hector ordered,” says Helen. She turns away from me again and stares down into the interior courtyard as if trying to find that solitary singing bird.

Too late for Athena’s mercy, I think. Then, without thinking about it, I say, “Aphrodite wants me to kill Athena. She’s given me the Hades Helmet and other tools so I can do just that.”

Helen’s head snaps around and even in the dim light I can see the expression of shock on her face, the pallor. It’s as if she has finally reacted to all my terrible oracle news. Naked, she comes back and sits on the edge of the bed where I am propped up on one elbow.

“Did you say kill Athena?” she whispers, voice lower than at any time since we began speaking.

I nod.

“Can the gods be killed then?” asks Helen, her voice so soft I can barely hear it from a foot away.

“I think they can,” I say. “Only yesterday, I heard Zeus tell Ares that gods could die.” Then I tell her about Aphrodite and Ares, their wounds, the strange place where they are healing. I explain how Aphrodite will emerge from that vat today sometime—how it’s possible she already has, since Olympos is on the same day-night schedule as Ilium and it’s already “tomorrow” there as well.

“You’re able to travel to Olympos?” she whispers. Helen appears to be lost in thought. Her expression has slowly melted from shock to . . . what? “Travel back and forth from Ilium to Olympos whenever you please?” she asks.

I hesitate here. I know I’ve told too much already. What if this Helen is merely my Muse in morphed form? I know she isn’t. Don’t ask me how I know. And to hell with it if she is.

“Yes,” I say, also whispering now, although the household is not coming awake yet. “I can go to Olympos when I want and stay there unseen by the gods.” Except for the single bird deluded to think it’s almost dawn, the city and the palace are eerily silent. There are guards at the front entrance, I know, but I cannot hear their shuffle of their sandals or the scrape of their spear butts on stone. The streets of Ilium, never totally silent, seem hushed now. Even the women’s chanting from the Temple of Athena has ceased.

“Did Aphrodite give you the means to kill Athena, Hockenberry? Some weapon of the gods?”

“No.” I don’t tell her about the Hades Helmet of Death or the QT medallion or my taser baton. None of these things could kill a goddess.

Suddenly that short dagger is in her hand again, inches from my skin. Where does she keep that thing? How does she make it appear that way? We both have our little secrets, I guess.

The dagger moves closer. “If I kill you now,” whispers Helen, “will it change the song of Ilium you know? Change the future . . . this future?”

This isn’t the time to be honest, Tommy boy, warns the sane part of my brain. But I speak the truth anyway. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t see how it can. If it’s my . . . fate . . . to die today, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether it’s by your hand or Aphrodite’s. Anyway, I’m not an actor in this drama, only an observer.”

Helen nods but still appears distracted, as if her question about my death were of little consequence either way. She lifts the dagger until its point is almost touching the firm white flesh under her chin.

“If I take my own life right now, will it change the song?” she asks.

“I don’t see how it will save Ilium or change the outcome of the war,” I answer. This isn’t completely true. Helen is a central figure in Homer’s Iliad and I have no idea whether the Greeks would stay to finish the fight if she kills herself. What would they be fighting for with Helen dead? Glory, honor, plunder. But then again, with Helen removed as the prize for Agamemnon and Menelaus, and Achilles still sulking in his tent, would mere plunder be enough to keep the tens and tens of thousands of other Achaeans in the fight? They’ve been plundering islands and Trojan coastal cities for almost a decade now. Perhaps they’ve had enough and are looking for an excuse. Isn’t that why Menelaus accepted the one-on-one combat with Paris to decide it all, before Aphrodite whisked Paris away? Back to this bed, Helen and Paris having sex in this bed mere hours ago. Perhaps Helen’s suicide would end the war.

She lowers the dagger. “I’ve thought of this self-murder for ten years, Hock-en-bear-eeee. But I have too much lust to live and too little fondness for death, even though I deserve to die.”

“You don’t deserve to die,” I say.

She smiles. “Does Hector deserve to die? Does his baby? Does lordly Priam, the most generous of fathers to me? Do all those people you hear awakening out there in the city deserve to die? Do even the warriors—Achilles and all the rest who have already gone down to cold Hades—deserve to die because of one fickle woman who chose passion and vanity and abduction over fidelity? And what about all the thousands of Trojan women who have served their gods and husbands well, but who will be torn from their homes and children and be sold into slavery because of me? Do they deserve such a fate, Hock-en-bear-eeee, just because I choose to live?”

“You don’t deserve to die,” I say stubbornly. The scent of her is still on my skin, my fingers, and in my hair.

“All right,” says Helen and slides the dagger under the mattress. “Then will you help me live and stay free? Will you help stop this war? Or at least change its outcome?”

“What do you mean?” I’m suddenly wary. I have no interest in trying to help the Trojans win this battle. And I couldn’t do it if I tried. Too many forces are in play here, not to mention the gods. “Helen,” I say, “I was serious about not having any time left. Aphrodite will be free of her recovery vat today, and while I might hide for a while from the other gods, she has a way she can find me when she wants to. Even if she doesn’t kill me right away for disobeying her, I won’t be free to act in the short time I have left as a scholic.”

Helen slides the sheet off my lower body. The light is coming up now and I can see her better than any time since I watched her in her bath the night before. She swings her leg up and straddles me, one hand flat on my chest while her other hand goes lower, finding, encouraging.

“Listen to me,” she says, looking down over her breasts at me. “If you are going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.”

I take this as an invitation and try to move into her.

“No, not yet,” she whispers. “Listen to me, Hock-en-bear-eeee. If you’re going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum. And I don’t mean what you’re doing now.”

It’s difficult, but I pause long enough to listen.

An hour and a half later the city is coming alive and I am walking the streets, fully garbed in my usual scholic’s gear and morphed as a Thracian spearman. The sun has risen and the city is coming fully alive, with crowded streets, opening market stalls, driven animals, running children, and swaggering warriors breaking their fast before going out to kill.

Near the marketplace, I find Nightenhelser—morphed as a Dardanian watchman but visible as Nightenhelser through my lenses—eating breakfast in an outdoor restaurant we’ve both frequented. He looks up and recognizes me.

I don’t flee or use the Hades Helmet to disappear. I join him at the table under a low tree and order bread, dried fish, and fruit for breakfast.

“Our Muse was hunting for you at the barracks before dawn this morning,” says the portly Nightenhelser. “And again near the walls here this morning. She was asking after you by name. She seems eager to locate you.”

“Are you worried about being seen with me?” I ask. “Want me to move on?”

Nightenhelser shrugs. “All of us scholics are on borrowed time anyway. What does it matter? Tempus edax rerum .”

I’ve been thinking in ancient Greek for so long that it takes me a second to translate the Latin. Time is a devourer. Perhaps so, but I want more of it. I break the fresh, hot bread and eat, marveling at the glorious taste of it and of the sweet breakfast wine. Everything looks, smells, and tastes crisper, cleaner, newer and more wonderful this morning. Perhaps it was the night’s rain. Perhaps it was something else.

“You smell suspiciously perfumed this morning,” says Nightenhelser.

At first my only response is a blush—can the other scholic smell the night’s revelries on me?—but then I realize what he’s talking about. Helen had insisted I bathe with her before leaving. The old female slave who had directed the carrying of the hot water to the bath, I’d learned, was Aithra, Pittheus’ daughter, wife of King Aigeus and mother of the famous Theseus—ruler of Athens and the man who had abducted Helen when she was eleven. I remembered the name Aithra from my graduate-school days, but my instructor, Dr. Fertig, a fine Homerian scholar, had insisted that the name had been drawn at random from the epic stock—“Aithra, daughter of Pittheus” must have sounded good to Homer or some poetic predecessor who needed a name for a mere slave, said Dr. Fertig, and that the noble Theseus’ mother couldn’t possibly be Helen’s servant in Troy. Well . . . wrong, Dr. Fertig. Just half an hour ago, lounging in the sunken marble tub with a naked Helen, she mentioned that the old slave-woman Aithra was, indeed, Theseus’ mum . . . that Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeukes, when they rescued her from Theseus’ captivity, had carried off the old lady as punishment, and Paris had brought her along to Troy with Helen.

“Thinking about something, Hockenberry?” asked Nightenhelser.

I blushed again. Right then I had been thinking about Helen’s soft breasts visible through the bubbles in the bath. I ate some fish and said, “I wasn’t on the field yesterday evening. Anything interesting happen?”

“Nothing much. Just Hector’s big duel with Ajax. Just the showdown we’ve been waiting for since the Achaean ships first touched their bows to shore down there. Just all of Book Seven.”

“Oh, that,” I said. Book Seven was an exciting duel between Hector and the Achaean giant, but nothing happened. Neither man hurt the other even though Ajax was obviously the better fighter, and when evening made it too dark to fight, Ajax and Hector called a truce, exchanged gifts of armor and weapons, and both sides went back to burn their dead. I hadn’t missed anything crucial; nothing to give up one minute with Helen.

“There was something odd,” said Nightenhelser.

I ate bread and waited.

“You know that Hector was supposed to come out of the city with his brother, Paris, and both were supposed to lead the Trojans back into battle. Homer says that Paris kills Menesthius at the beginning of the fight.”

“Yes?”

“And later, do you remember when King Priam’s counselor, Antenor, advises his fellow Trojans to give back Helen and all the treasures looted from Argos—give them back and let the Achaeans go away in peace?”

“That’s while Ajax and Hector are pals after they fail to kill each other, exchanging gifts on the field, right?” I say.

“Yes.”

“Well what about it?”

Nightenhelser sets his goblet down. “Well, it was Paris who was supposed to answer Antenor and urge his fellow Trojans to refuse to surrender Helen but offers to give up the treasures in exchange for peace.”

“So?” I say, realizing where this is going. My stomach suddenly feels queasy.

“Well, Paris wasn’t there last night—not to come out of the Scaean Gates with Hector, not to kill Menesthius, and not even to offer the peace proposal at dusk.”

I nod and chew. “So?”

“So that’s one of the largest discrepancies we’ve seen, isn’t it, Hockenberry?”

I have to shrug again. “I don’t know. Book Seven has the Achaeans building their defensive wall and trench near the shore, but you and I know that those defenses have been there since the first month after they arrived. Homer messes up the chronology sometimes.”

Nightenhelser looks at me. “Perhaps. But the absence of Paris to refute Antenor’s suggestion about giving up Helen was strange. Finally, King Priam spoke for his son—saying that he was sure that Paris would never surrender the woman, but that he might give up the treasure. But without Paris being there in person, a lot of the Trojans in the crowd were mumbling their agreement. It’s the closest thing to peace breaking out that I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been here, Hockenberry.”

My skin feels cold. My self-indulgence with Helen last night, my long impersonation of Paris, has already changed something important in the flow of things. If the Muse had known the details of the Iliad—which she didn’t—she would have known at once that I had taken Paris’s place in bed with Helen.

“Did you report the discrepancy to the Muse?” I ask softly. Nightenhelser would have gone off shift when darkness fell. Since I was missing, he was the only scholic on duty last evening. It was his duty to report such oddities.

Nightenhelser chews the last of his bread slowly. “No,” he says at last, “I didn’t dictate that to the word stone.”

I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.

“We’d better go,” says the other scholic. The restaurant is filling up with Trojan men and their wives waiting for a seat. As I drop coins on the table, Nightenhelser grips my forearm. “Do you know what you’re doing, Hockenberry?”

I look him in the eye. My voice is firm when I respond. “Absolutely not.”

Once on the street, I go the opposite direction from Nightenhelser. Stepping into an empty alley, I pull up the cowl of the Hades Helmet and touch the QT medallion.

It is sunrise on the summit of Mount Olympos. The white buildings and green lawns reflect the rich but lesser light here. I’ve always wondered why the sun seems smaller on and around Olympos than in the skies above Ilium.

I had envisioned the chariot stand near the Muse’s building, and that’s where I have arrived. I hold my breath as a chariot spirals down from the morning sky and lands not twenty feet from me, but Apollo steps out and strides away without noticing me. The Hades Helmet still works.

I step onto the chariot and touch the bronze plate near the front. I had watched the Muse carefully as she flew us across the caldera lake the other day. A glowing, transparent keyplate comes into existence inches above the brass. I touch the icons there in the sequence I’d watched the Muse use.

The chariot wobbles, rises, wobbles again, and steadies itself as I move the glowing, virtual energy controller next to the readouts. I twist it left and the chariot banks left fifty feet above the summit grass. I touch the forward-arrow icon and the chariot leaps ahead, flying south over the blue lake. To any god watching, it should look like an empty chariot flying itself, but no god is visible to watch.

Across the lake, I gain a bit of altitude and try to find the right building. There—just beyond the Great Hall of the Gods.

Some goddess—I do not recognize her—cries out from the front steps of the huge building and points toward my seemingly empty chariot, but it’s too late—I’ve identified the building I want: huge, white, with an open doorway.

I’m getting the knack of the chariot controls now and I dive within twenty feet of the ground and accelerate toward the building. I have to lift the left side of the chariot almost perpendicular to the ground—I do not fall, there is some artificial gravity in the machine—as I zip between the giant columns at forty or fifty miles per hour.

Inside, the space is as I remember it: the giant vats filled with bubbling, violet liquid, green worms roiling around the unconscious, floating, healing gods. The Healer—the giant centipede-thing with metallic arms and red eyes—is on the opposite side of Aphrodite’s reconstruction vat, preparing to remove her from it, I presume; his red eyes look my way and his many arms quiver as the chariot rushes into the quiet space, but he is not between me and my target and I accelerate forward before he or anything else can stop me.

It is only at the last second that I decide to jump rather than to stay with the chariot. It must be the memory of Helen, the night with Helen—the renewed pleasure of life in those hours with Helen.

The Hades Helmet still shielding me, I leap from the speeding chariot, land hard, feel something bruise if not break in my right shoulder, and then I tumble to a stop on the floor as the chariot flies directly into the reconstruction vat, smashing plastic and steel, throwing violet liquid a hundred feet into the air of the giant room. Something—either part of the chariot or a huge shard of vat glass—slices the giant centipede Healer in two.

Aphrodite’s body rolls out onto the floor in a wave of violet liquid and a coiling mass of writhing green worms. The other vats—including the one holding Ares in his nest of worms—rock but do not break or tumble.

Claxons, alarms, and sirens go off, deafening me.

I try to rise, but my head, left leg and right shoulder ache terribly and I sink back to the floor. I crawl to one side of the room, trying to stay out of the violet goo. I’m afraid of what the chemicals will do to me, but more afraid that the outline of my body will be visible in the flood if I can’t get away from it. Black spots dance in my vision and I realize I’m going to pass out. Gods and floating robot-machines are rushing into the great healing chamber.

In the seconds before I lose consciousness, I see mighty Zeus stride in, his cloak billowing, his brow furrowed.

Whatever’s going to happen next will have to happen without me. I set my forehead against the cool floor, close my eyes, and let the blackness wash over me.