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.