The huge allosaurus, thirty feet long from snout to tail, pounded out of the darkness at twenty miles per hour, ducking under branches as it lunged.

Daeman had time to scream but chose to tuck himself back into his trousers rather than turn and run while thus exposed. For all his lechery, Daeman was a modest man. He raised his heavy wooden walking stick to fight off the beast.

The allosaurus took the cane and arm both, ripping the arm free at the shoulder. Daeman screamed again and pirouetted in a fountain of his own blood.

The allosaurus knocked him down and ripped his other arm off—tossing it into the air and catching it like a morsel—and then proceeded to hold Daeman’s armless but still thrashing torso down with one massive clawed foot until ready to lower its terrible head again. Casually, almost playfully, the monster bit Daeman in half, swallowing his head and upper torso whole. Ribs and spinal column crunched and disappeared into the thing’s maw. Then the allosaurus gobbled the man’s legs and lower body, flinging pieces of flesh around like a dog with a rat.

The fax buzz started then, even as two voynix rushed up and killed the dinosaur.

“Oh, my God,” cried Ada, stopping at the edge of the trees as the voynix finished their bloody rendering.

“What a mess,” said Harman. He waved the other guests back. “Didn’t you warn him to stay inside the voynix perimeter down here? Didn’t you tell him about the dinosaurs?”

“He asked about tyrannosauruses,” Ada said, her hand still over her mouth. “I told him there weren’t any around here.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” said Harman.

Behind them, the crucible continued to roar and shoot sparks into the darkening sky.

9

Ilium and Olympos

Aphrodite has turned me into a spy, and I know the punishment we mortals have always dealt out to spies. I can only imagine what the gods will do to me. On second thought, I’d rather not.

This morning, the day after I became a secret agent for the Goddess of Love, Athena quantum teleports herself down from Olympos and morphs into a Trojan, the spearman Laodocus. Obeying Zeus’s command that the warriors of Ilium should be made to break the current truce, she seeks out the archer Pandarus, son of Lycaon.

Using the cloaking Hades Helmet and private teleportation medallion that my Muse gave me, I QT after Athena, then morph into a Trojan captain named Echepolus, and follow the disguised goddess.

Why did I choose Echepolus? Why is this minor captain’s name familiar to me? I realize then that Echepolus has only hours to live; that if Athena is successful in using Laodocus to break the peace, this Trojan—at least according to Homer—is going to get an Argive spear through his skull.

Well, Mr. Echepolus can have his body and identity back before that happens.

In Homer’s Iliad, this breaking of the truce occurred just after Aphrodite had spirited Paris away from his one-on-one battle with Menelaus, but here in the reality of this Trojan War, that non-confrontation between Menelaus and Paris had happened years ago. This truce is a more mundane thing—some of King Priam’s representatives meeting with some of the Achaeans’ heralds, both sides working out some abstruse agreement about time off from the fighting for festivals or funerals or somesuch. If you ask me, one of the reasons this siege has dragged out for almost a decade is all this time off from the fighting; the Greeks and Trojans have as many religious celebrations as our Twenty-first Century Hindus had and as many secular holidays as an American postal worker. One wonders how they ever manage to kill each other amidst all this feasting and sacrificing to the gods and ten-day-funeral celebrations.

What fascinates me now, so soon after I vowed to rebel against the gods’ will (only to find myself much more of a pawn to their will than ever before), is the question of how quickly and how sharply real events in this war can swerve from the details of Homer’s tale. Disparities in the past—the sequence of the Gathering of the Armies, for instance, or the timing of Paris’s aborted battle with Menelaus—have all been minor discrepancies, easily explained by Homer’s need to include certain past events in the short span of the poem set in the tenth year of the war. But what if events really take a different course? What if I were to walk up to—say—Agamemnon this morning and stick this spear (poor doomed Echepolus’ spear, to be sure, but still a working spear) through the king’s heart? The gods can do many things, but they can’t return dead mortals to life. (Or dead gods either, as oxymoronic as that sounds.)

Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the will of the gods? queries a craven, professorial little pissant voice that I listened to and followed most of my real life.

I am me, Thomas Hockenberry comes the reply from the contemporary me, as fragmented as he is, and right now I’m fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.

Now, in my role as spy rather than scholic, I stand close enough to hear the dialogue between Athena—morphed as Laodocus—and that buffoon (but fine archer) Pandarus. Speaking as one Trojan warrior to another, Athena/Laodocus appeals to the idiot’s vanity, tells him that Prince Paris will shower him with gifts if he kills Menelaus, and even compares him to the ultimate archer—Apollo—if he has the skill to bring off this shot.

Pandarus falls for the ruse hook, line, and sinker—“Athena fired the fool’s heart within him” was the way one fine translator described this moment—and has some of his pals hide him from view with their shields while he prepares his long bow and chooses the perfect arrow for this assassination. For centuries, scholics—Iliad scholars—have argued the issue of whether or not the Greeks and Trojans used poison on their arrows. Most scholics, myself included, argued the negative—such behavior simply did not seem to meet these heroes’ high standards of honor in battle. We were wrong. They sometimes do use poison. And a lethal, fast-acting poison it is. This explains why so many of the wounds listed in the Iliad were so quickly fatal.

Pandarus lets fly. It’s a brilliant shot. I track the arrow as it flies hundreds of yards, arcing and then hurtling directly toward Agamemnon’s redheaded brother. The shaft will skewer Menelaus as he stands at the forefront of his fighters watching the heralds jabbering away in no-man’s-land. That is, it will skewer him if no Greek-friendly god intervenes.

One does. With my enhanced vision, I see Athena abandon Laodocus’ body and QT to Menelaus’ side. The goddess is playing a double game here—tricking the Trojans into breaking the truce and then rushing to make sure that one of her favorites, Menelaus, is not actually killed. Cloaked head to toe, invisible to friend and foe but visible to this scholic, she slaps the arrow aside the way a mother flicks a fly from her sleeping son. (I think I stole that imagery, but it’s been so long since I actually read the Iliad, in translation or the original, that I can’t be sure.)

Still, despite her protective and deflective slap, the arrow hits home. Menelaus shouts in pain and goes down, the arrow protruding from his midsection, just above the groin. Has Athena failed?

Confusion ensues. Priam’s heralds flee back behind the Trojan lines and the Achaean negotiators scurry back behind the protection of Greek shields. Agamemnon, who has been using the truce time to inspect his troops lined up row upon row (perhaps the inspection is timed to show his leadership this first morning after Achilles’ mutiny), arrives to find his brother writhing on the ground, captains and lieutenants huddled around him.