Ilium

37 Ilium and Olympos

As it turns out, I can’t do it. I don’t have the guts or balls or ruthlessness or—perhaps—courage. I can’t kidnap Hector’s child, even to save Ilium. Even to save the child himself. Even to save my own life.

It isn’t dawn yet when I QT to Hector’s huge home in Ilium. I was here just two evenings before when—morphed then as the now-decapitated spearman Dolon—I followed Hector home in search of his wife and son. Since I know the layout from that visit, I QT directly to the nursery, not far from Andromache’s sleeping chamber. Hector’s son, less than a year old, is in a wonderfully carved cradle with mosquito netting draped over it. Nearby sleeps the same nurse who was on the battlements of Troy with Andromache that evening when Hector accidentally frightened his son with the reflection in his polished war helmet. She’s also fast asleep, reclining on a nearby couch, wearing a thin, diaphanous gown draped with all the complexity of an Aubrey Beardsley print. Even this sleeping gown is sashed under her breasts in the Greek and Trojan manner, showing how large and white the nurse’s bosom is, visible in the reflected light from the guardsmen’s fire tripods on the terrace beyond. I’d guessed earlier that she’s a wet nurse for the baby. This is relevant, actually, because my plot hinges on being able to kidnap the baby with the nurse, leaving Andromache behind—after “Aphrodite” appears to her and tells her that the child is being kidnapped by the gods, as punishment for unnamed failings on the part of the Trojans, and that if Hector wants the child, he can damned well come to Olympos to get him, blah, blah, blah.

First I have to gather up the baby and then grab the nurse—I suspect that she might be stronger than me, and almost certainly more adept at fighting, so I’ll taser her if I have to, although I don’t want to—and then QT the two of them to that rapidly populating hill in ancient Indiana, find Nightenhelser—I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with Patroclus—and convince the scholic to watch over the infant and his nurse until I come back for them.

Will Nightenhelser be up to the task of riding herd on this Trojan nurse for the days, weeks, or months until all this is over? Given the matchup of a Twentieth Century male classics professor versus a Trojan wet nurse circa 1200 b.c., I’d put my money on the nurse. And give my opponents good odds. Well, that’s Nightenhelser’s problem. My job is to find leverage against Hector, a way to convince him that he has to fight the gods—just as Patroclus’ “death” was my best shot to enroll Achilles into this suicidal crusade—and that leverage is sleeping in front of me right now.

Little Scamandrius, whom the people of Ilium lovingly call “Astyanax, Lord of the City,” mewls slightly in his sleep and rubs tiny fists against his reddened cheeks. Even though invisible under the Hades Helmet, I freeze and watch the nurse. She sleeps on, although I know that an actual cry from the baby will almost certainly wake her.

I don’t know why I pull off the cowl of the Hades Helmet, but I do, becoming visible to myself. There’s no one else here except my two victims, and they’ll be 10,000 miles away from here in a few seconds, unable to give my description to any Trojan police sketch artist.

I tiptoe closer and remove the mosquito netting from above the infant. A breeze blows in from the distant sea and flutters both the terrace curtains and the gauzier material around the crib. Without a sound, the baby opens his blue eyes and looks right at me. Then he smiles at me, his kidnapper, although I thought little pre-toddlers were afraid of strangers, much less of strangers in their bedroom in the middle of the night. But what do I know about kids? My wife and I never had any, and all the students I taught over the years were actually partially or poorly formed adults, all gangly and bumpy and hairy and socially awkward and goofy looking. I couldn’t even have told you that babies less than a year old could smile.

But Scamandrius is smiling at me. In a second he’s going to start making noise and I’ll have to grab him, grab the nurse, QT us the hell out of here—can I QT two other people along with me? We’ll find out in a second. Then I have to come back and use my last three minutes of morphing time to steal Aphrodite’s form and give my ultimatum to Andromache.

Will Hector’s wife be hysterical? Will she weep and scream? I doubt it. After all, in recent years she’s seen Achilles kill her father and her seven brothers, she’s watched her mother become Achilles’ plunder and then die trying to give birth to her rapist’s bastard, she’s watched her home occupied and defiled, and still she’s borne up—not only borne up, but bore a healthy son to her husband, Hector. And now she has to watch Hector go out to battle every day, knowing in her heart that her beloved’s fate has already been sealed by the cruel will of the gods. No, this is no weak woman. Even morphed as Aphrodite, I’d better keep a keen eye on Andromache’s sleeves to make sure she doesn’t have any daggers with which to greet the goddess’s news of the kidnapping.

I actually reach for the baby, my fingers with their dirty nails just inches away from his pink flesh, before drawing back.

I can’t do it.

I can’t do it.

Stunned by my own impotence even in the face of doom—everyone’s doom, for even the Greeks will be punished through their victory—I stagger out of the nursery, not even bothering to pull the Hades Helmet back on.

I put my hand on the QT medallion, but pause. Where do I go? Whatever Achilles is doing, it doesn’t really matter now. He can’t conquer Olympos on his own, or even with the Achaean army if the Trojans are still at war with them. In fact, my little charade with the man-killer may have been for nothing—Hector and his hordes may beat the Achaeans this very morning while Achilles is still ripping his hair out and screaming in grief over Patroclus’ apparent murder. Achilles doesn’t give a damn about the Trojans right now. And when Hector and the mystery man Athena promised Achilles—to lead him to Hector, she said, to show him how to get to Olympos—don’t come to him, will he know that my act was only an act? Probably. Then the real Athena will visit Achilles to see what’s wrong and will protest her innocence to the fleet-footed man-killer, and perhaps—just perhaps—the Iliad will get back on track.

It doesn’t matter.

This whole idiot plan is finished. So is Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. Past time, probably.

But where to go until the violent Muse or the reawakened Aphrodite finally find me? Go visit Nightenhelser and pissed-off Patroclus? See how long it takes the gods to track my quantum trail once they understand what I’ve done . . . tried to do?

No. That would just bring doom down on Nightenhelser. Let him stay there in 1200 b.c. Indiana and procreate with the lovely Indian maidens, perhaps start a university and teach classics—although most of the classical tales haven’t happened yet—and good luck to him about Patroclus, whom I have no urge to taser again just to drag back to Achilles’ tent. “April fool!” I could have my three-minute-morph Athena say. “Here’s your friend back, Achilles. No hard feelings?”

No, I’ll leave them alone there in Indiana.

Where to go? Olympos? The thought of the Muse hunting for me there, of Zeus and his radar eyes returning, of Aphrodite awakening . . . well, not to Olympos. Not tonight.

I think of one place and visualize it and touch the QT medallion and twist it and go there before I can change my mind.

I’m visible and Helen sees me at once in the soft light of candles. She rises on one arm on her cushions and says, “Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

I stand in her bedchamber and say nothing. I don’t know why I’m here. If she calls her guards or even comes toward me with that dagger, I feel too tired to fight, too tired even to flee on the QT. I don’t even think to wonder why her bedchamber is illuminated by candles at four-thirty in the morning.

She comes toward me, but not with the dagger. I’d forgotten how beautiful Helen of Troy is—her svelte, soft figure in the transparent gown making Scamandrius’ busty nurse look just lumpy and squat by comparison. “Hock-en-bear-eeee?” she says softly, with that sweet pronunciation of my name, so difficult to say in Ancient Greek. I almost weep as I realize that she’s the only human being on Earth, except for Nightenhelser—who may be dead by now—who knows my name. “Are you hurt, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“Hurt?” I manage. “No. I’m not hurt.”

Helen leads me into the bathing room adjoining her bedchamber. This is where I first saw her that night. Candles are lighted here as well, there is water in a basin, and I see my reflection—red-eyed, stubble-cheeked, exhausted. I realize that I haven’t really slept for . . . how long? I can’t remember. “Sit,” says Helen, and I collapse onto the ledge of a marble bathtub. “Why have you come, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

Stumbling with words, I say, “I tried to find the fulcrum,” and go on to explain my useless charade with Achilles, the kidnap of Patroclus, my plan to turn the heroes of the war against the gods to save . . . everyone, everything.

“But you did not kill Patroclus?” says Helen, her dark eyes intense.

“No. I just took him . . . elsewhere.”

“Using the gods’ method of travel,” says Helen.

“Yes.”

“But you could not spirit away Astyanax, Hector’s son, this way?”

I shake my head dumbly.

I see Helen thinking, her beautiful dark eyes lost in reverie. How can she believe my explanations? Who in the hell does she think I am? Why had she befriended me before—“befriended” being somewhat of a euphemism for that long night of passion—and what will she do with me now?

As if to answer that last question, Helen rises with a grim look in her eye and goes out of the bathing room. I hear her calling names in the hallway and know that the guards will be back with her in less than a minute, so I raise my hand to the heavy QT medallion.

I can’t think of anywhere to go.

I have charge left in my taser baton, but I don’t reach for it as Helen returns with several others. But not guards—serving girls. Slaves.

A minute later they are undressing me, stacking my filthy garments by the wall as other young women bring in tall pitchers of steaming hot water for the bath. I let them take the morphing bracelet off me, but I cling to the QT medallion. I shouldn’t get it wet, but I don’t want it out of my reach.

“You are going to bathe, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” says Helen of Troy. She lifts a short, gleaming razor blade. “And then I am going to shave you myself. Here, drink this. It will restore your energy and spirits.” She hands me a goblet with a thick liquid inside.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Nestor’s favorite drink,” laughs Helen. “Or it was when the old fool used to visit my husband, Menelaus. It restores.”

I sniff it, knowing that I’m being boorish. “What’s in it?”

“Wine, grated cheese, and barley,” says Helen, lifting the goblet closer to my lips by moving my cupped hands upward. Her fingers look very white against my sun-darkened and dirty skin. “But I also add honey to sweeten it.”

“So does Circe,” I say, laughing stupidly.

“Who, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

I shake my head. “Never mind. It’s in the Odyssey. Doesn’t matter. Irreli . . . irrele . . . irrelevant and immaterial.” I drink. The liquid has the punch of a Missouri mule. I wonder idly if there any mules in Missouri circa 1200 b.c.

The young servant girls have stripped me naked, having me stand to pull off my tunic and underthings. I don’t even think to be embarrassed. I’m too tired and the drink has given my brain a distinct buzz.

“Bathe, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” says Helen and offers me her arm to hold as I step into the deep and steaming bath. “I will shave you in the bath.”

The water’s so hot that I cringe like a child, lowering myself carefully, hesitating to let the steaming water touch my scrotum. But I do—I’m too tired to fight gravity—and when I lean back against the slanted marble back of the tub, Helen’s servants lathering my whisker-stubbled cheeks and neck, I don’t even worry about Helen handling the razor’s blade so close to my eyes and jugular. I trust her.

Feeling Nestor’s drink giving me energy again, deciding that if Helen offers me her bed I’ll definitely ask her to share it with me in this last hour or so before dawn, I close my eyes for just a moment. Just a few seconds.

When I awake it’s mid-morning, at least, with heavy light coming through small windows high on the wall. I’m shaved and clean, even perfumed. I’m also lying on a cold, stone floor in an empty room, not in Helen’s high bed. And I’m naked—completely naked, not even the QT medallion in sight. As real awareness flows into my brain like reluctant water into a leaky basin, I notice that I’m tied with multiple leather straps to iron rings in the wall and floor. Leather restraints run from my wrists—knotted together over my head—to the wall. Straps from my bound ankles, legs spread apart, run a few inches to two other iron rings in the floor.

This posture and situation would be embarrassing and alarming even if I were alone, but I’m not. Five women are standing over me, staring down at me. None of them look amused. I tug at the leather reins as I instinctively try to cover my genitals, but the straps are short and my hands don’t even lower to the level of my shoulders. Nor do the straps on my ankles allow me to close my legs. I see now that all of the women are carrying daggers, although some of the blades seem long enough to be called swords.

I know the women. Besides Helen in the center, there is Hecuba, King Priam’s queen, Hector’s and Paris’s gray-haired but attractive mother. Next to Hecuba is Laodice, the queen’s daughter and the warrior Helicaon’s wife. To the left of Helen is Theano, Cisseus’ daughter, the Trojan horseman Antenor’s wife, but—and possibly more relevant to my current situation—Ilium’s primary priestess serving the goddess Athena. I can’t imagine that Theano will be happy to hear that this mere mortal man has taken the form and used the voice of the goddess she’s served her entire life. I look at Theano’s grim expression and guess that she’s already heard the news.

Finally there is Andromache, Hector’s wife, the woman whose child I was going to kidnap and carry away to exile in Indiana. Her expression is the sternest of all the women’s. She is tapping a long, razor-sharp dagger against her palm and she looks impatient.

Helen sits on a low couch near me. “Hock-en-bear-eeee, you need to tell us all the story you have told me. Who you are. Why you have been watching the war. What the gods are like and what you tried to do during the night.”

“Will you release me first?” My tongue feels thick. She drugged me.

“No. Speak now. Tell only the truth. Theano has been given the gift from Athena of telling truth from lies, even from someone whose accent is as barbaric as yours. Speak now. Leave nothing out.”

I hesitate. Perhaps my best bet here might be to keep my mouth shut.

Leano goes to one knee next to me. She’s a lovely young woman with pale gray eyes, like her goddess. Her dagger blade is short, broad, double-edged, and very cold. I know the cold part because she’s just laid the blade under my testicles, lifting them like an offering on a silver serving knife. The dagger’s point draws blood in my sensitive perineum and my whole body tries to contract and rise away, even as I just succeed in not crying out.

“Tell everything, lie about nothing,” whispers Athena’s high priestess. “At your first lie, I will feed you your left stone. Your second lie, you eat the right one. Your third lie and I will be feeding my hounds whatever is left.”

So, all right, I tell everything. Who I am. How the gods have revived me for scholic duty. My impressions of Olympos. My revolt against my Muse, my attack on Aphrodite and Ares, my plot to turn Achilles and Hector against the gods . . . everything. The point of her dagger never moves and the metal under me never warms.

“You took the form of the goddess Athena?” whispers Theano. “You have this in your power?”

“The tools I carry do,” I say. “Or they did.” I actually close my eyes and grit my teeth, waiting for the cut, slash, plop.

Helen speaks. “Tell Hecuba, Laodice, Theano, and Andromache about your view of the near future. Our fates.”

“He is no seer granted such vision by the gods,” says Hecuba. “He is not even civilized. Listen to his speech. Bar bar bar bar.”

“He admits to coming from far away,” says Helen. “He can’t help being a barbarian. But listen to what he sees in our future, noble daughter of Dymas. Tell us, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I lick my lips. Theano’s eyes are the transparent, North Sea gray of a true believer, a Waffen SS man’s eyes. Hecuba’s eyes are dark and don’t show as much intelligence as Helen’s. Laodice’s gaze is hooded; Andromache’s bright and fierce and dangerously strong.

“What do you want to know?” I say. Anything I say will be about the fate of these people’s lives and husbands and city and children.

“Everything that is true. Everything that you think you know,” says Helen.

I hesitate only a second then, trying to pay no attention to Theano’s feminist blade against my nether regions.

“This is not a vision of the future,” I say, “but rather my memory of a tale that is told of your future, which is my past.”

Knowing that what I just said can’t make any sense to any of them, and wondering if it even came through my barbarous accent—accent? I don’t think I speak this Greek with an accent—I tell them about the days and months to come.

I tell them that Ilium will fall, that blood will run in the streets, and that all their homes will be put to the torch. I tell Hecuba that her husband, Priam, will be murdered at the foot of Zeus’s statue in their private temple. I tell Andromache that her husband, Hector, will be cut down by Achilles when no one from the city has the nerve to go out and fight alongside her love, and that Hector’s body will be dragged around the city behind Achilles’ chariot and then be dragged back to the Achaean camp to be pissed on by the soldiers and worried by the Greek dogs. Then I tell her that in just a few weeks, her son, Scamandrius, will be thrown down from the highest point on the city’s wall, his brains dashed out on the rocks below. I tell Andromache that her pain will not be over then, because she will be condemned to live and to be dragged back to the Greek isles as a slave, how she will end her days serving meals to the men who killed Hector and burned her city and killed her son. That she will end her days listening to their jokes and sitting silently while the aging Achaean heroes tell stories about these glorious days of rape and plunder.

I describe to Laodice and Theano the rape of Cassandra, and the rape of thousands of the Trojan women and girls and how thousands more will choose the sword rather than such shame. I tell Theano of how Odysseus and Diomedes will steal the sacred Palladion stone from Athena’s secret temple and then return in conquest to desecrate and destroy the temple itself. I tell the priestess with the blade at my balls how Athena does nothing—nothing—to stop this rape and plunder and desecration.

And I repeat to Helen the details of Paris’s death and her own enslavement at the hands of her former husband, Menelaus.

And then, when I’ve told everything I know from the Iliad and explain again how I don’t know that all of this will come to pass, but explain how so much from the poem has come to pass during my nine years of duty here, I stop. I could tell them about Odysseus’ wanderings, or about Agamemnon’s murder after his homecoming, or even about Virgil’s Aenead with the ultimate triumph of Troy in the founding of Rome, but they wouldn’t care about any of that.

When I finish my litany of doom, I fall silent. None of the five women are crying. None of the five shows any expression that wasn’t on her face when I’d begun my descriptions of their fate.

Exhausted, depleted, I close my eyes and await my own fate.

They allow me to dress, although Helen has the servants bring me fresh undergarments and tunic. Helen holds up each tool—the QT medallion, the taser baton, the Hades Helmet, and the morphing bracelet—and asks if it is part of my “power borrowed from the gods.” I consider lying—I especially want the Hades Helmet back—but in the end I tell the truth about each item. “Will it work for one of us if we try to use it?” asks Helen.

Here I hesitate, because I really don’t know. Did the gods make the baton and morphing bracelet fingerprint-dependent to keep the weapon out of Greek and Trojan hands if we fell on the battlefield? Quite possibly. None of us scholics ever asked. The morphing device and the QT medallion, at least, will require some training, and I tell the women that. The Hades Helmet will almost certainly work for anyone, since it is a stolen artifact. Helen keeps all of the tools, leaving me only the impact armor that is woven into my cape and leather breastplate. She puts the priceless gifts from the gods in a small embroidered bag, the other women nod, and we leave.

We leave Helen’s house—the five women and me—and walk through the mid-morning city streets to the Temple of Athena.

“What’s going to happen?” I ask as we hurry through the crowded lanes and alleys, five grim-faced women in black robes not dissimilar from Twentieth Century Muslim burkas and one confused man. I keep looking above the rooftops, expecting the Muse to appear in her chariot at any moment.

“Silence,” hisses Helen. “We’ll speak when Theano casts silence around us so even the gods cannot hear.”

Before we enter the temple, Theano produces a black robe and insists I pull it on. Now we all look like robed women entering the temple through a back door, moving down empty corridors, although one of the six women is wearing combat sandals.

I’ve never been in the temple, and my glimpse into the main hall through open doors is not disappointing. The space is huge, mostly dark, lighted by hanging braziers and votive candles. It smells and feels most like a Catholic church to me—the scent of incense in a cavernous space where even the echoes are hushed. But instead of a Catholic altar and statues of the Virgin Mary and Child, this space is dominated by a huge central statue to Athena—thirty feet tall, at least, carved of white stone but garishly painted with red lips, blushing cheeks, pink skin—the goddess’s gray eyes look to be made of mother of pearl stone—and she is brandishing an elaborate shield of real gold, a breastplate of burnished copper inlaid with gold, a sash of lapis lazuli, and a forty-foot spear of real bronze. It’s impressive and I pause at the open door, staring into the sanctuary. There, right there by Athena’s sacred sandaled feet, will Ajax the Great trap and rape Cassandra, Priam’s daughter.

Helen comes back, seizes my arm, and roughly pulls me along the corridor. I wonder if I’m the first man ever to see into the inner sanctuary of Athena’s Temple in Ilium. Isn’t the Palladion statue and the temple itself watched over by young virgins? I look up to see the priestess Theano glaring at me and I hurry to catch up. Theano’s no virgin—she’s fierce Antenor’s wife and a piece of tempered work to be reckoned with.

I follow the women down a shadowed staircase to a broad basement, lit only with a few candles. Here Theano looks around, moves a tapestry aside, removes an oddly shaped key from a pocket in her robe, slides it into a seemingly solid wall, and the slab of wall pivots, opening onto a steeper staircase lighted with torches. Theano hurries us all through.

There is a corridor leading to four rooms in this basement under the basement, and I’m herded into the final room, a small place by temple standards—little more than twenty feet by twenty feet, furnished only by a central wooden table, four fire tripods barely glowing—one in each corner—and a single statue of Athena, cruder and smaller than all of the sculptures above. This Athena is less than four feet tall.

“This is the real Palladion, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” whispers Helen, referring to the sacred sculpture carved from a stone which fell from heaven one day, thus showing Athena’s blessing over the city of Ilium. When the Palladion is stolen, so the century-old story goes, Troy will fall.

Theano and Hecuba stare Helen into silence. My former lover—well, my former one-night stand—dumps the contents of her bag on the table and we all sit on the wooden stools, staring at the Hades Helmet, morphing bracelet, taser baton, and QT medallion. Only the medallion looks like it might be worth anything. The rest of the stuff I’d probably pass over at a garage sale.

Hecuba speaks to Helen. “Tell this . . . man . . . that we must see if his story can be true. If these toys of his have any power.” Hector’s and Paris’s mother lifts the morphing bracelet.

I know she can’t activate it, but I still say, “That has only minutes of power in it. Don’t fool around with it.”

The old woman shoots me a scathing glance. Laodice picks up the taser baton and turns it in her pale hands. “This is the weapon you used to stun Patroclus?” she asks. It is the first time she’s spoken in my presence.

“Yes.”

“How does it work?”

I tell her the three spots I have to tap and twist to activate the wand. I’m certain that the thing is designed to work only when I’m holding it. Certainly the gods wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave the weapon usable for others if I lost it, even though the double tap and single twist are a safety mechanism of sorts. I start to explain to Laodice and the others that only I can use the gods’ tools.

Laodice aims the taser at my chest and taps the shaft of the wand again.

Once, when I was hiking with Susan in Brown County, Indiana, we were crossing a hilltop meadow when lightning struck just ten paces from me, knocking me off my feet, blinding me, and leaving me semiconscious for several minutes. We used to joke about that—about the odds against it—but the memory of the jolt used to make my mouth go dry.

This blast is worse.

It feels as if someone has hit me in the chest with a hot poker. I fly off my stool, land numbly on the stone floor, and remember spasming like an epileptic—my arms and legs kicking wildly—before I lose consciousness.

When I come to, hurting, my ears buzzing, my head aching, the four women are ignoring me, looking into the corner at nothing.

Four women? I thought there were five. I sit up and shake my head, trying to get my vision back in focus. Andromache’s missing. Perhaps she went for help, to find a healer. Maybe the women thought I was dead.

Suddenly Andromache flickers into visibility in the empty space where the others are looking. Hector’s wife pulls the Hades Helmet cowl from her shoulders and holds it out.

“The Helmet of Death works, just as the old tales say,” says Andromache. “Why would the gods give it to such as he?” She nods in my direction and drops the leather and metal cowl-helmet onto the table.

Theano holds up the QT medallion. “We can’t make this work,” she says. “Show us.” It takes me a fuzzy moment to realize that the priestess is speaking to me.

“Why should I?” I say, getting to my feet and leaning on the table. “Why should I help any of you?”

Helen comes around the table and puts her hand on my forearm. I pull my arm away.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she purrs. “Don’t you know that the gods have sent you to us?”

“What are you talking about?” I look around the room.

“No, the gods can’t hear us in here,” says Helen. “The walls of this room are lined with lead. The gods can neither see nor hear through solid lead. This has been known for centuries.”

I squint around me. What the hell. Why not? Superman’s X-ray vision never worked through lead either. But why would there be a god-proof room in Athena’s temple?

Andromache steps closer. “Helen’s friend, Hock-en-bear-eeee, we—the women of Troy and Helen—have plotted for years to end this war. But the men—Achilles, the Argives, our own Trojan husbands and fathers—have power over us. They answer only to the gods. Now the gods have heard our most secret prayers and sent you as our instrument. With your help and our planning, we will change the course of events here, saving not only our city, our lives and our children’s lives, but also the destiny of mankind—freeing us from the rule of cruel and arbitrary deities.”

I shake my head again and actually laugh. “There’s a slight flaw in your logic, madame. Why would the gods send me as your instrument if your goal is to overthrow the gods? That makes no sense.”

The five Trojan women stare at me for a moment. Then Helen says, “There are more gods than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I stare at her for a second, then decide it has to be a coincidence. Either that or I’m not hearing correctly. My chest still hurts and my muscles ache from the spasms the taser caused.

“Give me the tools,” I say, testing.

The women slide to me the Hades Helmet, the taser baton, the morphing bracelet, and the QT medallion. I lift the baton as if to hold them all at bay. “What’s your plan?” I ask.

“My husband never would have believed me if I’d reported to him that the goddess Aphrodite had appeared and taken Scamandrius and his nurse away to be held for ransom,” says Andromache. “Hector has served these gods all his life. He’s not the egomaniac that man-killer Achilles is. Hector would have thought that anything the gods did was only a test of him. Unless Aphrodite or another god were to kill our son in front of witnesses, in front of Hector himself. In that case, his rage would know no bounds. Why didn’t you kill my son?”

I have no words to answer that. So Andromache answers for me.

“You are a sentimental fool,” she snaps. “You say that Scamandrius will be dashed to his death on the rocks if you do not change the plans of the gods.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you refused to kill the child who already is fated to die, even though your entire plan to end this war and win your own battle with the gods depended upon it. You are weak, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

“Yes,” I say.

Hecuba beckons me to sit, but I remain standing, taser baton in hand. “What’s your plan to end this war?” I ask. I’m almost afraid to ask. Would Andromache kill her own son to get her way? I look into her eyes and I’m even more afraid.

“We will tell you our plan,” says old Queen Hecuba, “but first you must prove to us that these last two god-toys work.” She gestures to the morphing bracelet and the medallion.

Watching them all carefully, I slip the bracelet on. The indicator tells me that there’s less than three minutes of actual morph time remaining. I use its scanning functioning to look at Hecuba, then trigger the morphing function.

The real Hecuba disappears as I assume her quantum probability wave space. “Believe me now?” I say in Hecuba’s voice. I raise my wrist—Hecuba’s wrist—and show them the morphing bracelet. I bring the taser baton out from her gown. The four remaining women, including Helen, gasp and step back, as shocked as if I’d cut the old dowager down with a short sword. More shocked, probably—death by swords, they know all too well.

I drop out of morph and Hecuba flicks back into existence on her side of the room. She blinks, although I know she’s had no sense of time passing, and the five women gabble together. I check the bracelet’s virtual indicator. Two minutes twenty-eight seconds of morph time left.

I slip the QT medallion chain around my neck. At least this device doesn’t seem to have any power limits. “You want me to QT out of here and then back to show you that this also works?” I ask.

Hecuba has recovered her composure. “No,” she says. “All of our plans—yours and ours—will depend upon your ability to travel to Olympos undetected and to return. Can you take one of us there now?”

I hesitate again. “I can,” I say at last, “but the Hades Helmet provides invisibility only for one. If I brought one of you to Olympos with me, you’d be seen.”

“Then you must bring something back here that will prove that you have traveled to Olympos,” says Hecuba.

I lift my hands, palms up. “What? Zeus’s chamber pot?”

All five women step back again, as if I’ve shouted some obscenity. I remember that—for very good reason—blasphemy is not the casual sport it was in my time, at the end of the Twentieth Century. These gods are very real, and insulting them has consequences. I glance at the walls and hope the lead really shields us from Olympos’s view—not because of the chamber pot quip, but because we seem to be planning deicide here.

“When I was with Aphrodite during the judgment of the gods,” Helen says softly, “I noticed that the goddess brushed her lustrous hair with a beautiful comb, forged in silver, shaped by some god of craft. Go to her chambers on Olympos and bring it back.”

I start to remind them of what I’d told them—that Aphrodite was currently floating in a healing vat—but then realized that it made no difference. Her comb wouldn’t be in the vat with her.

“All right,” I say, grasping the medallion and lifting on the Hades Helmet. “Don’t wander away while I’m gone.” I had the cowl in place before I triggered the medallion, so my voice must have come from emptiness in the second or two before I QT’d.

I don’t know for sure where Aphrodite’s private chambers are—she probably has one of those white temple-sized homes along the crater lake up here—but I do remember that the time she took me aside, almost seducing me—when she told me that I had to kill Athena—the Muse had brought me to Aphrodite in a chamber just off the Great Hall of the Gods. If it wasn’t her private chambers, it seemed at least an apartment she kept in the great hall, a sort of Olympian pied-à-terre.

I flick into solidity in the Great Hall and hold my breath.

The many mezzanines are empty, the hall is mostly dark, and the giant holographic viewing pool shows only three-dimensional static. But several gods are here, including Zeus, whom I’d thought to be away, sitting on Mount Ida watching the carnage on the Ilium battlefield. The King of Gods is on his high golden throne. Nearby are several other male gods, including Apollo. They’re all ten feet tall or taller. I’m forty feet away, and I’m invisible under the Hades Helmet, but I almost QT away I’m so afraid that they’ll hear me breathing. But their attention is on something else.

In front of and below the throne, in the center of the gods’ circle of attention, looking incongruous here to say the least, are what looks like a giant, pitted, cracked metallic crabshell the size of a Ford Expedition, a couple of futuristic-looking devices, and a small, shiny, vaguely humanoid robot. The robot is speaking—in English. The gods are listening, but they don’t look happy.