“Who are you?” she asked. “What are you?” She did not seem angry, nor even especially shocked. Her voice was calm, her beautiful features undistorted by fear or fury. But the blade was steady against my belly. The woman wanted an answer.

“My name is Thomas Hockenberry,” I said. “I’m a scholic.” I knew that none of this would make sense. My name sounded strange even to me, hard-edged in the smoother tones of their ancient language.

“Tho-mas Hock-en-bear-reeee,” she mouthed. “It sounds Persian.”

“No,” I said. “Dutch and German and Irish, actually.”

I saw Helen frown and knew I was not only not making sense to her with these words, but was sounding actively deranged.

“Put on a robe,” she said. “We will talk on the terrace.”

Helen’s large bedroom had terraces on both sides, one looking down into the courtyard, the other looking out south and east over the city. My levitation harness and other gear—except for the QT medallion and morphing bracelet I had worn to bed—were hidden behind the curtain on the courtyard terrace. Helen led me to the outside terrace. We each wore thin robes. Helen kept her short, sharp knife in her hand as we stood at the railing in the reflected light from the city and from the occasional storm flash.

“Are you a god?” she asked.

I almost answered “yes”—it would be the easiest way to talk her out of putting that blade in my belly—but had the sudden, inexplicable, overwhelming urge to tell the truth for a change. “No,” I said. “I’m not a god.”

She nodded. “I knew you were not a god. I would have gutted you like a fish if you had lied to me about that.” She smiled grimly. “You don’t make love like a god.”

Well, I thought, but there was nothing else to say to that.

“How is it,” she asked, “that you can take the shape and form of Paris?”

“The gods have given me the ability to do so,” I said.

“Why?” The tip of the dagger blade was only inches from my bare skin through the robe.

I shrugged, but then realizing that shrugs weren’t used by the ancients, I said, “They lent me this ability for their own purposes. I serve them. I watch the battle and report to them. It helps that I can take the shape of . . . other men.”

Helen did not seem surprised by this. “Where is my Trojan lover? What have you done to the real Paris?”

“He’s well,” I said. “When I abandon this likeness, he will return to what he was doing when I morphed . . . when I took his shape.”

“Where will he be?” asked Helen.

I thought this was a slightly strange question. “Wherever he would have been if I hadn’t borrowed his form,” I said at last. “I think he’d just left the city to join Hector for tomorrow’s fighting.” Actually, when I morph out of Paris’s form, Paris will be exactly where he would have been if he’d continued on during the time I had his identity—sleeping in a tent, perhaps, or in the midst of battle, or shagging one of the slave girls in Hector’s war camp. But this was too difficult to explain to Helen. I didn’t think she’d appreciate a discourse on probability wave functions and quantum-temporal simultaneity. I couldn’t explain why it was that neither Paris nor those around him wouldn’t necessarily notice his absence, or how it was that events might reconnect to the Iliad as if I hadn’t interrupted the probability wave-collapse of that temporal line. Quantum continuity might be sewn up as soon as I canceled the morph function.

Shit, I didn’t understand any of this.

“Leave his form,” commanded Helen. “Show me your true shape.”

“My Lady, if I . . .” I began to protest, but her hand moved quickly, the blade cut through silk and skin, and I felt the blood flow on my abdomen.

Showing her that my right hand was going to move very, very slowly, I opened the glowing functions and touched the icon on the morphing bracelet.

I was Thomas Hockenberry again—shorter, thinner, gawkier, with my slightly myopic gaze and thinning hair.

Helen blinked once and swung the dagger up fast—faster than I thought any person could move. I heard the ripping and tearing. But it wasn’t my stomach muscles she had sliced open, only the tie of the robe and the silken material itself.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. Helen of Troy flung my robe open, using her free hand to slide it off my shoulders.

I stood naked and pale in front of this formidable woman. If a dictionary ever needed a perfect definition of “pathetic,” a photograph of this moment would suffice.

“You may put the robe back on,” she said after a minute.

I tugged it back up. The sash was torn, so I held it together with my hand. She seemed to be thinking. For several minutes we stood there on the terrace in silence. Even as late as it was, the towers of Ilium glowed from torchlight. Watchfires flickered along the ramparts on the distant walls. Farther to the south, beyond the Scaean Gate, the corpse fires burned. To the southwest, lightning flashed in the towering storm clouds. There were no stars visible and the air smelled of the rain coming from the direction of Mount Ida.

“How did you know I was not Paris?” I asked at last.

Helen blinked out of her reverie and gave a small smile. “A woman may forget the color of her lover’s eyes, the tone of his voice, even the details of his smile or form, but she cannot forget how her husband fucks.”

It was my turn to blink in surprise and not just at Helen’s vulgar speech. Homer had literally sung the praises of Paris’s appearance—comparing him to a “stallion full-fed at the manger” when describing Paris’s rush to join Hector outside the city this very night, sure in his racing stride . . . his head flung back, his mane streaming over his shoulders, sure and sleek in his glory. Paris was, in the teenagers’ parlance of my previous life, a hunk. And while I had been in Helen’s bed, I had owned Paris’s streaming hair, his sun-bronzed body, his washboard belly, his oiled muscles, his . . .

“Your penis is larger,” said Helen.

I blinked again. Twice this time. She had not used the word “penis,” of course—Latin was not yet a real language—and the Greek word she had chosen was slang closer to “cock.” But that made no sense. When we were making love, I’d had Paris’s penis . . .

“No, that wasn’t how I knew you were not my lover,” said Helen. She seemed to be reading my mind. “That is just my observation.”

“Then how . . .”

“Yes,” said Helen. “It was how you you bedded me, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I had nothing to say to this, and could not have spoken clearly if I’d had anything to say.

Helen smiled again. “Paris first had me not in Sparta, where he won me, nor in Ilium, where he brought me, but on the little island of Kranae on the way here.”

There was no island that I knew of named Kranae, and the word merely meant “rocky” in ancient Greek, so I took it to mean that Paris had interrupted their voyage to put into some small, rocky, unnamed island to have his way with Helen without the watching presence of the ship’s crew. Which would mean that Paris was . . . impatient. So were you, Hockenberry came the voice of something not totally unlike my conscience. Too late for a conscience.

“He’s had me—and I’ve had him—hundreds of times since then,” Helen said softly, “but never like tonight. Never like tonight.”

I was adither with confusion and smug with pride. Was this good? Was this a compliment? No, wait . . . that’s absurd. Homer sings of Paris as nearly godlike in his physical beauty and charm, a great lover, irresistible to women and goddesses alike, which must mean that Helen only meant—

“You,” she said, interrupting my confused thoughts, “you were . . . earnest.”

Earnest. I clutched the robe tighter and looked toward the coming storm to hide my embarrassment. Earnest.

“Sincere,” she said. “Very sincere.”