Helen slides the sheet off my lower body. The light is coming up now and I can see her better than any time since I watched her in her bath the night before. She swings her leg up and straddles me, one hand flat on my chest while her other hand goes lower, finding, encouraging.
“Listen to me,” she says, looking down over her breasts at me. “If you are going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.”
I take this as an invitation and try to move into her.
“No, not yet,” she whispers. “Listen to me, Hock-en-bear-eeee. If you’re going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum. And I don’t mean what you’re doing now.”
It’s difficult, but I pause long enough to listen.
An hour and a half later the city is coming alive and I am walking the streets, fully garbed in my usual scholic’s gear and morphed as a Thracian spearman. The sun has risen and the city is coming fully alive, with crowded streets, opening market stalls, driven animals, running children, and swaggering warriors breaking their fast before going out to kill.
Near the marketplace, I find Nightenhelser—morphed as a Dardanian watchman but visible as Nightenhelser through my lenses—eating breakfast in an outdoor restaurant we’ve both frequented. He looks up and recognizes me.
I don’t flee or use the Hades Helmet to disappear. I join him at the table under a low tree and order bread, dried fish, and fruit for breakfast.
“Our Muse was hunting for you at the barracks before dawn this morning,” says the portly Nightenhelser. “And again near the walls here this morning. She was asking after you by name. She seems eager to locate you.”
“Are you worried about being seen with me?” I ask. “Want me to move on?”
Nightenhelser shrugs. “All of us scholics are on borrowed time anyway. What does it matter? Tempus edax rerum .”
I’ve been thinking in ancient Greek for so long that it takes me a second to translate the Latin. Time is a devourer. Perhaps so, but I want more of it. I break the fresh, hot bread and eat, marveling at the glorious taste of it and of the sweet breakfast wine. Everything looks, smells, and tastes crisper, cleaner, newer and more wonderful this morning. Perhaps it was the night’s rain. Perhaps it was something else.
“You smell suspiciously perfumed this morning,” says Nightenhelser.
At first my only response is a blush—can the other scholic smell the night’s revelries on me?—but then I realize what he’s talking about. Helen had insisted I bathe with her before leaving. The old female slave who had directed the carrying of the hot water to the bath, I’d learned, was Aithra, Pittheus’ daughter, wife of King Aigeus and mother of the famous Theseus—ruler of Athens and the man who had abducted Helen when she was eleven. I remembered the name Aithra from my graduate-school days, but my instructor, Dr. Fertig, a fine Homerian scholar, had insisted that the name had been drawn at random from the epic stock—“Aithra, daughter of Pittheus” must have sounded good to Homer or some poetic predecessor who needed a name for a mere slave, said Dr. Fertig, and that the noble Theseus’ mother couldn’t possibly be Helen’s servant in Troy. Well . . . wrong, Dr. Fertig. Just half an hour ago, lounging in the sunken marble tub with a naked Helen, she mentioned that the old slave-woman Aithra was, indeed, Theseus’ mum . . . that Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeukes, when they rescued her from Theseus’ captivity, had carried off the old lady as punishment, and Paris had brought her along to Troy with Helen.
“Thinking about something, Hockenberry?” asked Nightenhelser.
I blushed again. Right then I had been thinking about Helen’s soft breasts visible through the bubbles in the bath. I ate some fish and said, “I wasn’t on the field yesterday evening. Anything interesting happen?”
“Nothing much. Just Hector’s big duel with Ajax. Just the showdown we’ve been waiting for since the Achaean ships first touched their bows to shore down there. Just all of Book Seven.”
“Oh, that,” I said. Book Seven was an exciting duel between Hector and the Achaean giant, but nothing happened. Neither man hurt the other even though Ajax was obviously the better fighter, and when evening made it too dark to fight, Ajax and Hector called a truce, exchanged gifts of armor and weapons, and both sides went back to burn their dead. I hadn’t missed anything crucial; nothing to give up one minute with Helen.
“There was something odd,” said Nightenhelser.
I ate bread and waited.
“You know that Hector was supposed to come out of the city with his brother, Paris, and both were supposed to lead the Trojans back into battle. Homer says that Paris kills Menesthius at the beginning of the fight.”
“Yes?”
“And later, do you remember when King Priam’s counselor, Antenor, advises his fellow Trojans to give back Helen and all the treasures looted from Argos—give them back and let the Achaeans go away in peace?”
“That’s while Ajax and Hector are pals after they fail to kill each other, exchanging gifts on the field, right?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Well what about it?”
Nightenhelser sets his goblet down. “Well, it was Paris who was supposed to answer Antenor and urge his fellow Trojans to refuse to surrender Helen but offers to give up the treasures in exchange for peace.”
“So?” I say, realizing where this is going. My stomach suddenly feels queasy.
“Well, Paris wasn’t there last night—not to come out of the Scaean Gates with Hector, not to kill Menesthius, and not even to offer the peace proposal at dusk.”
I nod and chew. “So?”
“So that’s one of the largest discrepancies we’ve seen, isn’t it, Hockenberry?”
I have to shrug again. “I don’t know. Book Seven has the Achaeans building their defensive wall and trench near the shore, but you and I know that those defenses have been there since the first month after they arrived. Homer messes up the chronology sometimes.”
Nightenhelser looks at me. “Perhaps. But the absence of Paris to refute Antenor’s suggestion about giving up Helen was strange. Finally, King Priam spoke for his son—saying that he was sure that Paris would never surrender the woman, but that he might give up the treasure. But without Paris being there in person, a lot of the Trojans in the crowd were mumbling their agreement. It’s the closest thing to peace breaking out that I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been here, Hockenberry.”
My skin feels cold. My self-indulgence with Helen last night, my long impersonation of Paris, has already changed something important in the flow of things. If the Muse had known the details of the Iliad—which she didn’t—she would have known at once that I had taken Paris’s place in bed with Helen.
“Did you report the discrepancy to the Muse?” I ask softly. Nightenhelser would have gone off shift when darkness fell. Since I was missing, he was the only scholic on duty last evening. It was his duty to report such oddities.
Nightenhelser chews the last of his bread slowly. “No,” he says at last, “I didn’t dictate that to the word stone.”
I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.
“We’d better go,” says the other scholic. The restaurant is filling up with Trojan men and their wives waiting for a seat. As I drop coins on the table, Nightenhelser grips my forearm. “Do you know what you’re doing, Hockenberry?”