Diomedes and Odysseus are chosen to go find out, and since the two have come to this counsel from sleep, without their own weapons, they’re given gear by the guards, including a bull’s-hide helmet for Diomedes and a famous Mycaenaean boar’s-tusk helmet for Odysseus. With the skin of a lion that Diomedes has thrown across his shoulders and Odysseus’ black-leather helmet studded around with white teeth, the two warriors are terrifying to look upon.

Should I QT to that conference and observe it?

There’s no reason. Diomedes and Odysseus may already have left on their commando raid. Or Homer might have been lying or mistaken about this action, just as he was with Phoenix’s speech. Besides, it won’t help with my problem right now. I’m not a scholic anymore, just a man trying to find away to survive and end this war—or at least turn it against the gods.

Although there’s another part of tonight’s action elsewhere that comes to mind and chills my blood. When Diomedes and Odysseus venture out, they discover Dolon—the spearman whose body I borrowed just two nights ago when I followed Hector into his meeting with Helen and Paris—who’s been sent behind Achaean lines to spy for Hector. Dolon’s carrying a reflex bow and wearing a cap made of weasel skin and he’s sneaking carefully through the field of newly fallen dead in the dark, hunting for a way across the trench and past the Greek guards on the line, but sharp-eyed Odysseus sees him coming in the darkness and he and Diomedes lie among the corpses, surprise Dolon, and disarm him.

The Trojan begs for his life. Odysseus will tell him—if he hasn’t already—that “Death is the last thing you have to worry about”—and then calmly, quietly pumps the young spearman for specific information about the disposition of Hector’s Trojans and their allies.

Dolon tells all—the location of the Carians and Paeonians and Leleges and Cauconians, the sleeping areas of the crack Pelesgians and the stolid, faithful Lycians and the cock-strutting Mysians, the whereabouts of the camp of the famed Phrygian horsemen and the Maeonian charioteers—he tells everything and begs for his life. He even suggests that they tie him up and keep him prisoner until they see for themselves that his information is correct.

Odysseus will smile, or perhaps he already has, and will pat the shaking, terrified Dolon on the shoulder—I remember the muscled balance of Dolon’s body from when I was morphed as the boy—and then the son of Laertes and Diomedes will strip the young man’s cap and bow and wolf pelt—Odysseus softly telling the terrified boy that they’re disarming him before bringing him to camp as a prisoner—and then Diomedes will hack Dolon’s head off with one savage blow of his sword. Dolon’s head will still be shrieking for mercy as it bounces across the sand.

And Odysseus will hold up the boy’s spear and bow and weasel cap and wolf-pelt, and will offer them to Pallas Athena, crying—“Rejoice in these, Goddess. They’re yours! Now guide us to the Thracian camp so that we can kill more men and steal their horses! Those spoils, too, will be yours.”

Barbarians. I’m among barbarians. Even the gods here are barbarians. One thing is sure—I won’t be going to talk to Odysseus tonight.

But why does Patroclus have to die?

Because I was right the first time—Achilles is the key, the fulcrum through which I can shift the fates of everyone, gods and men alike.

I don’t think that Achilles will leave in a few hours when Dawn stretches forth her rosy fingertips. Uh-uh. I think Achilles will stay and observe, just as he does in Homer’s tale, taking pleasure in further misfortune for the Greeks. “I think now that the Achaeans will come crawl at my knees,” Achilles will say after the next bad day, when all the great captains—Agamemnon, Menelaus, Diomedes, and Odysseus—are hurt. And this is after last night’s embassy to Achilles, where they’ve already groveled to get him back. Achilles will take pleasure in the defeat of his fellow Argives and Achaeans, and it’s only Hector’s murder of his friend Patroclus, snoring now in the next room, that will bring the man-killer back to the battlefield.

So Patroclus has to die to turn the direction of events now.

I stand and take inventory of the things I’m wearing and carrying. A short sword, yes, to blend in with the troops, but I’ve never used the damned thing and know it doesn’t even have an edge. The Muse gave it to me as a prop, not a weapon. For real defense these past nine years, I’ve been equipped with the lightweight layer of impact armor—enough to stop a sword thrust or errant spear or arrow, we were told in the scholics barracks, although I have never had to test it—and the 50,000-volt taser tucked into the end of the shotgun mike baton we all carry. That weapon was designed only to stun an aggressor long enough for us to escape to a QT portal. Other hardware includes the lenses that enhance my vision, filters that boost my hearing, the stolen, cowl-like Hades Helmet furled around my shoulders, the QT medallion on its chain around my neck, and the morphing bracelet on my wrist.

Suddenly a plan—or at least part of a plan—begins to form in my tired mind.

I act before I can lose my nerve. Pulling up the Hades Helmet, disappearing from mortal and divine sight, feeling like Frodo or Bilbo or the gollum slipping on the ring that binds them all, I tiptoe from the sleeping annex where they laid out Phoenix’s cushion to Achilles’ bedchamber.

Achilles and Patroclus are sleeping together naked, the slave girls long gone, Patroclus’ arm flung across the man-killer’s shoulders.

This sight in the dim light stops me in my tracks. Achilles is gay? That means that stupid gay- and lesbian-obsessed junior professor in the department was right—his ranting papers correct—all that politically correct babble true!

I shake this out of my head. It means nothing except that I’m three thousand years away from Twenty-first Century Indiana and that I don’t know what I’m seeing. These two men have just fornicated with slave girls for two hours and fell asleep where they lay. And besides, who cares about the secret love life of Achilles?

I trigger the morphing band and bring up the scan I’d made two days earlier in the hall of the gods on Olympos. I don’t know if this will work—the other scholics used to laugh at the idea.

Probability waves shift through quantum layers I can’t perceive. The air seems to quiver, stand still, then quiver again. I slip the soft Hades Helmet off my head and become visible.

Visible as Pallas Athena, Tritogenia, Third Born of the Gods, Daughter of Zeus, defender of the Achaeans. Nine feet tall, radiating my own divine light, I step closer to the bed as both Achilles and Patroclus awake with a start.

I can feel the instability in every atom in this morphed form. The morphing bracelet was not designed for us to take the form of gods, but although my shape hums like a hardstruck harp, I use the short time this quantum substitution will give me. I work to ignore the sensation not only of suddenly having breasts and a vagina—I’ve never morphed into the form of a woman before—but also ignore the sensation of being a goddess.

The form is unstable. I know in my heart that I haven’t assumed the powers of Athena, just borrowed her quantum shell for these few seconds. Feeling as if there’s going to be some nuclear reaction, a morphing meltdown, if I don’t shed the quantum waveform of Athena quickly, I speak fast.

“Achilles! Wake! On your feet!”

“Goddess!” cries the fleet-footed man-killer, rolling from the cushions to the floor. “What brings you here in the middle of the night, Child of Zeus?”

Rubbing his eyes, Patroclus also struggles to his feet. Both men are naked, their bodies more sculpted and beautiful than the finest Greek statues, their uncircumcised penises dangling against their muscled and tanned thighs.