“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.