Ilium

18 Ilium

This city—Ilium, Troy, Priam’s City, Pergamus—is most beautiful at night.

The walls, each more than a hundred feet high, are lit with torches, illuminated by braziers on the ramparts, and backlit by the hundreds of fires of the Trojan army camping on the plain below. Troy is a city of tall towers, and most of these are lighted late into the night, windows warm with light, courtyards glowing, terraces and balconies warmed by candles and firepits and more torches. The streets of Ilium are broad and carefully paved—I once tried to slide my knifeblade between the stones and couldn’t—and most are lighted by open doorways, torches set into wall sconces, and by the cooking campfires of the thousands upon thousands of non-Trojan soldiers and their families living here now, allies to Ilium all.

Even the shadows in Ilium are alive. Young men and women of the lower classes make love in the dark alleys and on shadowy terraces. Well-fed dogs and eternally clever cats slip from shadow to shadow, narrow alley to courtyard, loping along the edges of the broad thoroughfares where fruit and vegetables, fish and meat have fallen from the day’s market carts and are theirs for the eating, and then slink back to narrow alleys’ gloom and darkness under the viaducts.

The residents of Ilium have no fear of starvation or deadly thirst. At the first alarm of the Achaeans’ approach—many weeks before the dark ships arrived more than nine years ago—hundreds of cattle and thousands of sheep were herded into the city, emptying farm fields for 400 square miles around the city. More such cattle drives happen regularly, and most of the beef gets to the city despite the Greeks’ halfhearted efforts to interdict. Vegetables and fruits flow easily into Ilium, delivered by the same shrewd farmers and traders who sell food to the Achaeans.

Troy was built where it was so many centuries ago largely because of the huge aquifer under it—the city has four giant wells that always run fresh and deep—but to be on the safe side, Priam long ago ordered a tributary of the River Simois to the north of Ilium diverted and run through easily defended canals and underground viaducts into the city proper. The Greeks have more trouble finding fresh water than do the technically besieged residents of Ilium.

The population of Ilium—easily the greatest city on Earth at this time—has more than doubled since the war began. First into the city for protection came the farmers and goatherders and fishermen and other peripatetic former denizens of the plains of Ilium. Following them came the armies of the allies of Troy—not only the fighting men, but often their wives and children and elders and dogs and cattle.

These allies include different groups: the “Trojans” not from Troy itself—the Dardanians and others from smaller cities and outlying areas far beyond Ilium, including the Trojan-loyal fighters from under Mount Ida and from as far north as Lykia. Also present now are the Adresteians and other fighters from places many leagues east of Troy, as well as the Pelasgians from Larisa in the south.

From Europe have come the Thracians, Paionians, and Kikones. From the south shores of the Black Sea have come the Halizones—dwellers near the River Halys and related to the Chalybes metalworkers of ancient legend. One can hear campfire songs and curses in the city from the Paphlagoes and Enetoi, a people from farther north along the Black Sea who may be the great-great-ancestors of the future Venetians. From north-central Asia Minor have come the shaggy Mysians—Ennomos and Nastes are two Mysian men I’ve spent time with and who will, according to Homer, be cut down by Achilles in the river battle to come—a slaughter so terrible that not only will the Scamander run red for months, but the river will be dammed up by the corpses of all the men Achilles will massacre there, including the unclaimed bodies of Nastes and Ennomos.

Also here, recognizable by their wild hair, by their oddly shaped bronze gear, and by their smell, are the Phrygians, Maionians, Karians, and Lykians.

This city is full and wonderfully alive and raucous all but two or three of its twenty-four hours each day. This is the finest and grandest and most beautiful city in the world—in this era or my era or any era in the history of all humankind.

I am thinking this as I lie naked next to Helen of Troy in her bed, the linens smelling of sex and of us, the breeze cool through billowing curtains. Somewhere thunder rumbles as a storm approaches. Helen stirs and whispers my name—“Hock-en-bear-eeee . . .”

I came into the city in late afternoon after QTing down from the hospital of the gods on Olympos, knowing that the Muse was looking for me to kill me, and that if she did not find me today, Aphrodite would when the goddess got out of her healing tank.

I had thought to blend in with the soldiers watching the last of this long day’s battles—somewhere out there in the late-afternoon sun and dust, Diomedes was still slaughtering Trojans—but when I saw Hector walking back to the city with only a few of his usual retinue, I morphed into one of the men I knew—Dolon, a spearman and trusted scout, soon to be killed by Odysseus and Diomedes—and followed Hector. The noble warrior came in through the Scaean Gates—Ilium’s main gates, made of sturdy oak planks as tall as ten men the size of Ajax—and he was immediately besieged by the wives and daughters of Troy asking about their husbands and sons and brothers and lovers.

I watched Hector’s tall red Trojan crest move through the mob of women, his head and shoulders swimming above the sea of beseeching faces, and saw him when he finally stopped to address the growing mob. “Pray to the gods, you women of Troy,” was all he said before turning on his heel and marching toward Priam’s palace. Some of his soldiers crossed tall spears and covered his retreat, holding back the wailing mass of Trojan women. I stayed with the last four of his guard and silently accompanied Hector into Priam’s magnificent palace, built wide, as Homer said, and gleaming with porches and colonnades of polished marble.

We stepped back against the wall—evening shadows already creeping into the courtyards and sleeping chambers here—and stood guard as Hector met briefly with his mother.

“No wine, Mother,” he said, waving away the cup she had ordered a servant to bring. “Not now. I’m too tired. The wine would sap what little strength and nerve I have left for the killing to come this evening. Also, I’m covered with blood and dirt and all the filth of battle—I’d be ashamed to lift a cup to Zeus with such dirty hands.”

“My son,” said Hector’s mother, a woman I had seen act with warmth and a good heart over the years, “why have you left the fighting if not to pray to the gods?”

“It’s you who have to pray,” said Hector, his helmet next to him on the couch. The warrior was indeed filthy—face grimed with layers of dirt and blood turned to a reddish mud by his sweat—and he sat as only the deeply exhausted can sit, forearms on his knees, head bent, voice dulled. “Go to Athena’s shrine, gather the most noble of Ilium’s noblest women, and take the largest, most beautiful robe you can find in Priam’s palace. Spread it across the knees of Athena’s gold statue and promise to sacrifice twelve yearling heifers in her temple if only she will pity Troy. Ask the grim goddess to spare our city and our Trojan wives and helpless children from the terror of Diomedes.”

“Has it come to that?” whispered Hector’s mother, leaning closer and taking one of her son’s bloody hands in hers. “Has it finally come to that?”

“Yes,” said Hector and struggled to his feet and lifted his helmet and left the hall.

With the three other spearmen, I followed the exhausted hero as he walked six city blocks to the residence of Paris and Helen, a large compound with its cluster of regal terraces and residential towers and private courtyards.

Hector brushed past guards and servants, pounded up steps, and flung open the door to Paris and Helen’s private quarters. I half expected to see Paris in bed with his stolen consort—Homer had sung that the horny couple had gone straight to bed hours earlier when Paris had been whisked from his showdown with Menelaus—but instead, Paris looked up from fondling his armor and battle gear as Helen sat nearby, directing female servants in their embroidery.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Hector snarled at the smaller man. “Sitting here like a woman, like a mewling infant, playing with your armor while the real men of Ilium die by the hundred, while the enemy surges around the citadel and fills our ears with his foreign battle cries? Get up, you goddamn deserter. Get up before Troy is burned to cinders around your cowardly ass!”

Instead of leaping to his feet in indignation, the royal Paris just smiled. “Ah, Hector, I deserve your curses. Nothing you say is unjust.”

“Then get off your butt and into that armor,” Hector said brusquely, but the fury in his tone had suddenly died away, either robbed of force by fatigue or by Paris’s calm refusal to defend himself.

“I will,” said Paris, “but first hear me out. Let me tell you something.”

Hector remained silent, swaying slightly on his sandaled feet. He was carrying his crested helmet under his left arm and had an extra-long throwing spear, borrowed from the sergeant of our small guard, gripped in his right hand. Now Hector used the butt of that spear to steady himself.

“I’m not keeping to my chambers for so long just out of anger or outrage,” said Paris, gesturing toward Helen and her servants as if they were part of the furniture. “But out of grief.”

“Grief?” repeated Hector. He sounded contemptuous.

“Grief,” Paris said again. “Grief at my own cowardice today—although it was the gods who carried me away from battle with Menelaus, not my own will—and grief at the fate of our city.”

“That fate isn’t written in stone,” snapped Hector. “We can stop Diomedes and his battle-maddened minions. Put on your armor. Come back to the battle with me. There’s another hour of daylight left. We can kill many Greeks in the bloody light of the setting sun and more in the cool twilight.”

Paris smiled at this and stood. “You’re right. Battle now strikes even me—the world’s greatest lover, not its greatest fighter—as the better way. Fate and victory shift, you know, Hector—now this way, now that way—like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.”

Hector put on his helmet and waited, silent, obviously not trusting Paris’s promise to join the fighting.

“You go on,” said Paris. “I have to don all this war gear. You go on, I’ll catch you up.”

Hector remained silent at this, still not willing to leave without Paris, but beautiful Helen—and she was beautiful—rose from her chair and crossed the marble floor to touch Hector’s blood-streaked forearm. Her sandals made soft sounds on the cool marble.

“My dear friend,” she said, her voice quavering with emotion, “my dear brother, dear to me—bitch that I am, vicious, scheming cunt that I am, a female horror to freeze the blood—oh, how I wish my mother had drowned me in the dark Ionian Sea the day I was born rather than be the cause of all this.” She broke down, removed her hand from Hector, and began weeping.

The noble Hector blinked at this, raised his free hand as if to touch her hair, quickly drew back his hand, and cleared his throat in embarrassment. Like so many heroes, the great Hector was awkward with women other than his wife. Before he could speak, Helen went on—still weeping, hiccupping words between racking sobs.

“Or, Noble Hector, if the gods have truly ordained all these terrible years of bloodshed for me, I wish I had been the wife of a better man—a fighter rather than a lover, a man with a will to do more for his city than take his wife to bed in the long afternoon of his city’s doom.”

Paris took a half step toward Helen then, as if to slap her, but her proximity to the tall Hector held him back. We foot soldiers near the wall stared at nothing and pretended we had no ears.

Helen looked at Paris. Her eyes were red and brimming. She still spoke to Hector as if Paris—her kidnapper and putative second husband—was not in the room. “This . . . one . . . has earned the scalding scorn of real men. He has no steadiness of spirit, no grit. Not now, not . . . ever.”

Paris blinked and a flush rose into his cheeks as if he had been slapped.

“But he’ll reap the fruits of his cowardice, Hector,” continued Helen, literally spitting out the words now, her saliva striking the marble floor. “I swear to you that he will reap the fruits of his weakness. By the gods, I swear this.”

Paris stalked out of the room.

Helen turned to the standing, grime-streaked warrior. “But come to the couch and rest next to me, dear brother. You are the one hit hardest by all this fighting—and all for me, Hector, whore that I am.” She sat on the cushioned couch and patted a place next to her. “The two of us are bound together in this fate, Hector. Zeus planted the seed of a million deaths, of the doom of our age, in each of our breasts. My dear Hector. We are mortals. We will both die. But you and I will live for a thousand generations in song . . .”

As if unwilling to hear more, Hector turned on his heel and left the room, donning his tall helmet so that it flashed in the low-slanting rays of the evening sun.

Looking one last time at Helen as she sat, head bowed, on the cushioned bench, noting her perfect pale arms and the softness of her breasts visible in her thin gown, I lifted my spear—the scout Dolon’s spear—and followed Hector and his other three loyal spearmen.

This is important that I tell it like this. Helen stirs, whispers my name, but goes back to sleep. My name. She whispers, “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” and it as if I have been speared through the heart.

And now, lying next to the most beautiful woman in the ancient world, perhaps the most beautiful woman in history—or at least the one woman who has caused the greatest number of men to die in her name—I remember more about my life. About my former life. About my real life.

I was married. My wife’s name was Susan. We met as undergraduates at Boston College, married shortly after graduation. Susan was a high school counselor but rarely worked after we moved to Indiana where I began teaching classics at Indiana University in 1972. We had no children, but not for want of trying. Susan was alive when I grew ill from liver cancer and went into the hospital.

Why in God’s name am I remembering this now? After nine years of almost no personal memories, why remember Susan now? Why be slashed and cursed by the jagged shards of my former life now?

I don’t believe in God with a capital G and, despite their obvious solidity, I don’t believe in the gods with their small g’s. Not as real forces in the universe. But I believe in the bitch-goddess Irony. She crosses all time. She rules men and gods and God alike.

And She has a wicked sense of humor.

Like Romeo lying next to Juliet, I hear the thunder move toward us from the southwest, the sound echoing in the courtyard, the leading wind stirring the curtains on the terraces on both sides of the large bedroom. Helen stirs but does not wake. Not yet.

I close my eyes and pretend to sleep a few more minutes. My eyes feel gritty, as if I have sand under my eyelids. I’m getting too old to stay awake so long, especially after making love three times to the most beautiful and sensual woman in the world.

After leaving Helen and Paris, we followed Hector to his home. The hero who had almost never run from a fight in his life was running from the temptation Helen had offered—running home to his wife Andromache and their one-year-old son.

In all my nine years of observing and hanging around Ilium, I had never spoken to Hector’s wife, but I knew her story. Everyone in Ilium knew her story.

Andromache was beautiful in her own right—no comparison to Helen or the goddesses, it was true, but beautiful in her own more human way—and she was royalty as well. She came from the Trojan area known as Cilicia in Thebes, and her father was the local king, Eetion, admired by most, respected by all. Their small palace was on the lower slopes of Mount Placos in a forest famous for its timber; the great Scaean Gates of Ilium were built from Cilician timber, as were the siege-engine towers sitting on their wheels behind Greek lines less than two miles away.

Achilles had killed her father, cutting Eetion down in combat when the swift-footed Achaean man-killer had led his men against the outlying Trojan cities shortly after the Greeks had landed. Andromache had seven brothers—none of them fighters, but sheepherders and tenders of oxen—and Achilles had killed them on that same day, finding them in the fields and chasing them down to their death in the rocky hills below the forest. Achilles’ plan was obviously to leave no male vestige of the Cilician royal family alive. That night, Achilles had his men dress Eetion’s body in war-bronze and he burned the corpse with respect, heaping a grave-mound above the old king’s ashes. But Andromache’s brothers’ bodies lay untended in the fields and woods, food for wolves.

Rich with the plunder of a dozen cities, Achilles still demanded a literal king’s ransom for Eetion’s queen—Andromache’s mother—and he had received it. Ilium was still rich then, and free to bargain with its invaders.

Andromache’s mother had returned home to the halls of their empty palace in Cilicia and there—according to Andromache’s frequent telling of her woeful tale—“Artemis, in a shower of arrows, shot her down.”

Well, in a way.

Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto and sister of Apollo, is the goddess of the hunt—I saw her on Olympos only yesterday—but she is also the goddess presiding over childbirth. At one point in the Iliad, an infuriated Apollo flung shouts at his sister, in front of their father Zeus—“He lets you kill off mothers in their labor”—meaning that Artemis is responsible for dispensing death in childbirth as well as for serving as the divine midwife to mortal women.

Andromache’s mother died nine months after being taken hostage by Achilles on the day Eetion, Andromache’s father, was killed. Andromache’s mother died in childbirth, attempting to bring her husband’s killer’s child into the world.

Tell me that the bitch-goddess Irony doesn’t rule the world.

Andromache and their baby were not at home. Hector rushed from room to room in the house, the four of us spearmen holding back, watching the entrance but not interfering. The hero was obviously worried and showed more visible anxiety that I had ever seen him show on the battlefield. Back at the doorway, he stopped two servant women coming in.

“Where’s Andromache? Has she gone to the Temple of Athena with the other noble wives? To my sister’s house? To see my brother’s wives?”

“Our mistress has gone to the wall, master,” said the oldest of the servants. “All of the Trojan women have heard of the day’s terrible fighting, of Diomedes’ wrath and the turn of fortune against the sons of Ilium. You wife has gone to the huge gate-tower of Troy to see what she can see, to learn if her master and husband still lives. She ran like a madwoman, Master, with the nurse running along behind, carrying your child.”

We could hardly keep up with Hector as he ran to the Scaean Gates, and I realized a block from the wall that I shouldn’t stay with him. This event—the meeting of Hector and Andromache on the ramparts—was too important. Too many gods would be viewing it. The Muse might well be there, hunting for me.

Several hundred yards from the Gates, I dropped away from the loping spearmen and fell into a crowd on a side street. The shadows were deep now, the air cooling, but the topless towers of Ilium were still lighted by the red sun setting in the west.

I chose one of these towers and climbed its winding interior staircase while still morphed as the spearman Dolon.

The tower was built something like a minaret—although Islam was still millennia in the future—and I was the only one on the narrow, circular balcony when I stepped out onto it. The sun was in my eyes, but by polarizing my visual filters and magnifying the focus on my god-given contact lenses, I had a clear view of the reunion on the wall.

Andromache rushed down the rampart and flung herself at her husband, her feet twirling in the air as he lifted her and returned the hug. His polished helmet caught the rich evening light. Other soldiers and worried wives on the wall stepped away, giving their leader and his bride some privacy. Only Andromache’s nurse, holding the one-year-old boy, stayed close to the couple.

I could have eavesdropped on their conversation with my shotgun-microphone baton, but I chose just to watch them, seeing their mouths move, studying their expressions. After her rush of relief at seeing her warrior-husband alive and unharmed, Andromache frowned and began speaking quickly, urgently. I remembered from Homer’s tale the rough outline of what she was saying—a retelling of her own woes, her loneliness after Achilles’ murder of her father and brothers. I could actually read her lips on some of the words as she said, “You are my father now, Hector, and my noble mother as well. You are a brother to me now, my love. And you are also my husband, young and warm and virile and alive! Take pity on me, my husband! Do not abandon me. Do not go back out onto the plains of Ilium and die there and have your body dragged behind an Achaean chariot until your flesh is flayed from your bones. Stay here! Fight here. Protect our city by fighting on the ramparts, here.”

“I can’t,” said Hector, his helmet flashing as he slowly shook his head.

“You can,” I saw Andromache say, her face contorted with love and fear. “You must. Draw your armies up close to where that fig tree stands . . . do you see it? This is where our beloved Ilium lies most open to their attack. Three times the Argives have tried that point, hoping to overrun our city, three times their best fighters led the way—both Ajaxes, the big and little, and Idomeneus, and terrible Diomedes. Perhaps a prophet showed them our weakness there. Fight here, my husband! Protect us here!”

“I can’t.”

“You can,” cried Andromache, pulling away from his embrace. “But you won’t!”

“Yes,” I watched Hector say, “I won’t.”

“Do you know what will happen to me, Noble Hector, when you die your noble death and become food for the Achaean dogs?”

I saw Hector wince but stay quiet.

“I will be dragged off as some sweaty Greek commander’s whore!” shouted Andromache, her voice so loud that I heard it half a block away. “Carried off to Argos as booty, as some slave for Big Ajax or Little Ajax or terrible Diomedes or some lesser captain to fuck at his whim!”

“Yes,” said Hector, his gaze pained but steady. “But I’ll be dead, with the earth over me to muffle your cries.”

“Yes, oh, yes,” cried Andromache, weeping and laughing at the same time now. “Noble Hector will be dead. And his son, whom all the citizens of Ilium call Astyanax—‘Lord of the City’—will be a slave to the Achaean pigs, sold away from his slave-whore mother. That will be your noble legacy, oh Noble Hector!”

And Andromache called the nurse closer and grabbed the child, holding him up like a shield between herself and Hector.

Now I saw the pain on Hector’s face, but he reached for the tiny boy, holding his arms out. “Come here, Scamandrius,” said Hector, calling their son by his given name rather than by the nickname given him by the city’s folk.

The boy flinched back and started to howl. I could hear his cries from my perch on the tower half a dozen rooftops away.

It was the helmet. Hector’s helmet. Polished, shining bronze, streaked with blood and grime, reflecting the sunlight and the distorted parapet and the boy himself. The helmet with its flaming red horsehair crest and its monstrously shining metal guards curving around Hector’s eyes and covering his nose.

The boy screamed and cowered against his mother’s breast, afraid of his father.

At such a moment, one would expect Hector to be devastated—no final hug from his son?—but the warrior laughed, threw back his head and laughed again, heartily and long. After a minute, Andromache laughed as well.

Hector swept the battle helmet off his head and set it atop the wall, where it blazed in the light of the setting sun. Then Hector swept his son up as well, hugging him and tossing him and catching him until the boy shrieked not in terror but delight. Holding his son in the crook of his strong right arm, Hector hugged Andromache to him with his left arm.

Still grinning, Hector raised his face to the sky. “Zeus, hear me! All you immortals, hear me!”

All the guards and women on the wall had fallen silent. The streets hushed in an eerie calm. I could hear Hector’s strong voice from blocks away.

“Grant this boy, my son, with whom I am well pleased, that he may be like me—first in glory among Trojans and men! Strong and brave like me, Hector, his father! And grant, oh gods, that Scamandrius, son of Hector, may rule all Ilium in power and glory some day and that all men shall say, ‘He is a better man than his father!’ This is my prayer, oh gods, and I ask no other boon from thee.”

And with that, Hector handed the child back to Andromache, kissed both of them, and left the wall for the battlefield.

I admit that the hours right after Hector bid good-bye to his wife were a low point for me. It didn’t help my mood to know that in the next year, Andromache would, indeed, be driven from the burning city to the land where she would be an expensive slave for other men. Nor did it help to know that the Achaean who will capture her—Pyrrhos, destined to become ancestor to the kings of the Eperiote tribe of the Molossians and to be given a hero’s tomb at Delphi—would rip Hector’s child, Scamandrius (called Astyanax, “Lord of the City,” by the residents of Ilium), from his nurse’s breast and will fling the child from the high walls to his bloody death. The same Pyrrhos will murder Hector’s and Paris’s father, King Priam, at the altar of Zeus in his own palace. The House of Priam will become all but extinct in one night. The thought is depressing.

This is not a defense for what I did next, but I offer it as a partial explanation.

I wandered the streets of Ilium until nightfall and after, feeling more alone and depressed than any time in my nine years as a scholic there. No longer morphed as Dolon, I was still dressed as a Trojan spearman—with the Hades Helmet ready for donning at a second’s notice, the QT medallion at the ready for instant escape—and soon found myself back near Helen’s compound. I confess that I had come here often over the years, stealing time between my scholic observations, coming secretly to the city and to this place just on the off chance of seeing her . . . of seeing Helen, the most beautiful and alluring woman in the world. How many times had I stood across the street from this multistory compound, staring up like a lovestruck boy and waiting until the lights were lit in the upper apartments and terraces, hoping against hope for just a glimpse of the woman?

Suddenly my moonstruck reverie was broken by a more chilling sight—a flying chariot trolling slowly above the streets and rooftops, cloaked to mortal eyes but quite visible to my enhanced vision. Leaning over the railing, scanning the streets, was my Muse. I had never seen the Muse fly so low above the city or plains of Ilium before. I knew she was looking for me.

I pulled up the Hades Helmet in an instant, hiding myself—I hoped—from gods and man. The technology must have worked. The Muse’s chariot floated less than a hundred feet overhead and never slowed.

When the chariot had passed, circling over the central marketplace a dozen blocks to the east, I activated the studs on my levitation harness. All of the scholics are outfitted with these harnesses, but we use them only rarely. Often, after a day’s confused fighting on the field, I had used the levitation harness to lift over the battlefield, to get a larger picture of the tactical situation, and then I would fly to Ilium—here to Helen’s house, to be honest—for a few minutes of hopeful gazing before QTing back to Olympos and my barracks.

Not now. I lifted above the street, invisible as I flew above the spearmen standing guard at the main entrance to Paris’s and Helen’s compound, crossed the high wall, and landed on one of the balconies of the inner courtyard outside the couple’s private apartments. Heart pounding, I entered the open doorway through blowing curtains. My sandals were almost silent on the stone floor. The compound’s dogs would have detected me—the Hades Helmet was no disguiser of scent—but the dogs were all on the ground floor and in the outer courtyard, not up here where the royal couple lived.

Helen was in her bath. Three female servants attended her, their bare feet leaving moist tracks as they carried warm water up and down marble steps leading to the sunken tub. Gauzy curtains surrounded the bath itself, but since the brazier tripods and the hanging lamps were inside the bathing area, the flimsy curtain material provided no obstacle to sight. Still invisible, I stood just outside the softly stirring fabric and stared at Helen in her bath.

So these are the boobs that launched a thousand ships, I thought, and immediately cursed myself for being such a jerk.

Shall I describe her to you? Shall I explain why the heat of her beauty, her naked beauty, can move men across three thousand years and more of cold time?

I think not—and not out of discretion or decorum. Helen’s beauty is beyond my poor powers of description. Having seen so many women’s breasts, was there anything unique about Helen’s soft, full breasts? Or something more perfect about the triangle of dark hair between her thighs? Or more exciting about her pale, muscled thighs? Or more amazing about her milky white buttocks and strong back and small shoulders?

Of course there was. But I’m not the man to tell you the difference. I was a minor scholar and—in my fantasies in my lost life—perhaps a novelist. It would take a poet beyond Homer, beyond Dante, even beyond Shakespeare to do justice to Helen’s beauty.

I stepped out of the bathing room, into the coolness of an empty terrace outside her bedroom, and touched the thin bracelet that allowed me to morph into other forms. The control panel of the bracelet only glowed when I called on it, but it spoke to my thumb with symbols and images. On it were stored the morphing data for all the men I had recorded in the past nine years. Theoretically, I could have morphed into a woman, but I had never found reason to do so and I certainly didn’t this night.

You have to understand something about morphing; it is not a reshaping of molecules and steel and flesh and bone into another shape. I don’t have a clue how morphing works, although a short-lived Twenty-first Century scholic named Hayakawa tried to explain his theory to me five or six years ago. Hayakawa kept stressing the conservation of matter and energy—whatever that is—but I paid little attention to that part of his explanation.

Evidently, morphing works on the quantum level of things. What doesn’t with these gods? Hayakawa asked me to imagine all the human beings here, including him and me, as standing probability waves. On the quantum level, he said, human beings—and everything else in the physical universe—exist from instant to instant as a sort of collapsing wavefront—molecules, memory, old scars, emotions, whiskers, beer breath, everything. These bracelets the gods gave us recorded probability waves and allowed us to interrupt and store the originals—and, for a short time, merge our own probability waves with the stored ones, take our own memories and will along into a new body when we morphed. Why this didn’t violate Hayakawa’s beloved conservation of mass and energy, I don’t know . . . but he kept insisting it did not.

This usurpation of another’s form and action is why we scholics almost always morphed into minor figures in the battle for Troy; literal spear carriers like the unnamed bodyguard whose form I had assumed after Dolon’s. If we were to become Odysseus, say, or Hector or Achilles or Agamemnon, we would look the part but the behavior would be our own—far inferior to the heroic character of the real person—and every minute we inhabited his form, we would carry actual events further and further from this unfolding reality that so paralleled the Iliad.

I have no idea where the real person went when we morphed into him. Perhaps the probability wave of that person simply floated around on the quantum level, no longer collapsing into what we called reality until we were finished with his form and voice. Perhaps the probability wave was stored in the bracelet we carried or in some machine or god’s microchip on Mons Olympos. I don’t know and don’t especially care. I once asked Hayakawa, shortly before he displeased the Muse and disappeared forever, if we could use the morphing bracelet to change into one of the gods. Hayakawa had laughed and said, “The gods protect their probability waves, Hockenberry. I wouldn’t try to mess with them.”

Now I triggered the bracelet and flicked through the hundreds of men I’d recorded there until I found the one I wanted. Paris. It’s probable that the Muse would have ended my existence if she’d even known that I had scanned Paris for future morphing. Scholics don’t interfere.

Where is Paris right now? Thumb over the activate icon, I tried to remember. The events of this afternoon and this evening—the confrontation between Hector and Paris and Helen, the meeting of Hector and his wife and son on the walls—all occurred near the end of Book Six of the Iliad. Didn’t they?

I couldn’t think. My chest ached with loneliness. My head was swimming, as if I’d been drinking all afternoon.

Yes, the end of Book Six. Hector leaves Andromache and Paris does catch up to him before Hector leaves the city—or just as Hector leaves the city. How had my favorite translation gone? “Nor did Paris linger long in his vaulted halls.” Helen’s new husband had buckled on his armor, as promised, and rushed out to join Hector and the two of them had strode through the Scaean Gates together, into more battle. I remember writing a paper for a scholarly convention in which I’d analyzed Homer’s metaphor of Paris racing along like a stallion breaking free of its tether, hair streaming like a mane back over his shoulders, eager for battle, blah, blah, blah.

Where is Paris now? After dark? What have I missed while wandering the streets and staring at Helen’s lights and Helen’s tits?

That was in Book Seven, and I’d always thought that Book Seven of the Iliad was a confusing, cobbled-together mess. It ended that long day that had begun in Book Two with Paris killing the Achaean named Menesthius and Hector slashing Eioneus’ throat. So much for husbandly hugs and fatherly embraces. Then there was more fighting and Hector had taken on Big Ajax in one-on-one combat and . . .

What? Nothing much. Ajax had been winning—he was the better fighter—but then the gods started quarreling about outcome again, there had been a lot of talk by the Greeks and Trojans, a lot of bluster blown back and forth, and a truce, and Hector and Ajax had swapped armor and acted like old pals, and then they all agreed to a truce while they gathered the dead for corpse fires, and . . .

Where the hell is Paris this night? Does he stay with Hector and the army to supervise the truce, speak at the funeral rituals? Or does he act more in character and come to Helen’s bed?

“Who gives a shit,” I said aloud and thumbed the activation icon on the bracelet and morphed into the form of Paris.

I was still invisible, decked out in Hades Helmet, levitation harness, everything.

I took off the helmet and everything else except the morphing bracelet and the small QT medallion hanging around my neck, hiding the gear behind a tripod in the corner of the balcony. Now I was only Paris in his war gear. I took off the armor and left it on the balcony as well, appearing now only as Paris in his soft tunic. If the Muse swooped down on me now, I had no defense except to QT away.

I walked back through the balcony curtains into the bathing area. Helen looked up in surprise as I parted the curtains.

“My lord?” she said, and I saw first the defiance in her eyes and then the downward-cast gaze of what might have been apology and self-subordination for her earlier harsh words. “Leave us,” she snapped at the servants and the women left on wet feet.

Helen of Troy came slowly up the steps of the bath toward me, her hair dry except for the wet strands over her shoulder blades and breasts, her head still lowered but her eyes looking up at me now through her lashes. “What will you have of me, my husband?”

I had to try twice before my voice would work properly. Finally, in Paris’s voice, I said, “Come to bed.”