"What are you going to do?" Kassandra asked, approaching Helen. Helen held out her hands and grasped Kassandra's in hers.

"You are his twin sister and a priestess," she said. "Now join me in chanting and praying that the Sea-born may send us one of her sea-fogs. Hecuba, I beg you, if you love your son, send for a strong rope ladder; we cannot ask the Goddess to do for us what any rope-maker could do for a copper coin."

She dispatched a messenger for a rope ladder, and when it came, Helen went and stood with Kassandra at the very edge of the wall, watching Paris and Menelaus arming themselves while their heralds exchanged insults.

Menelaus and Paris paced carefully round, marking off the circle into which no other fighter on either side might approach while either of them lived. That done, they bowed ceremoniously to one another; a trumpet sounded, and they began to fight.

"Chant!" Helen urged. Tray! Beseech the Goddess to send us her sea-fog!"

The women began chanting; Kassandra was so busy watching the men swing their swords that she could hardly form the words of the prayer, though this was simple magic enough. At first the men seemed evenly matched enough, though Paris was taller and had a longer reach; and it seemed to her that Menelaus was overly fat; but for all that he was as quick as a mongoose. They circled each other exchanging blows, carefully taking one another's measure but not yet seriously joined in battle.

Kassandra's eyes ached. Was it dust in the battle square before them? Or was it actually a swirl of sea-fog drifting up from the shore? She could not be sure. Helen stepped to the edge of the wall and let the rope ladder down; she had hooked it for security around the edge of the wall's stones. Then she rose to her full height and called aloud:

"Menelaus!"

He turned his eyes upward briefly and stopped in mid-stroke. Helen slowly unfastened the neck of her garment and let it drop till her breasts were bare.

As she stood without moving, it seemed to Kassandra that the air was filled with faint glowing golden sparkles, as if the veil between the worlds grew thinner. Helen, touched with that golden shimmer, seemed to gain height and majesty and to glow from within with beauty beyond anything human. It was no woman but the Goddess herself standing on the wall.

As for Menelaus, he stood as if his feet had taken root in the earth beneath them.

Not so Paris. As his eyes fell upon Helen standing there in the form of the Goddess, he broke away, sprinting for the foot of the wall. From the ranks of the Akhaians came a great cry of awe and longing; then Paris was atop the wall and pulling up the ladder; with everyone's eyes on Helen - or rather on the Goddess - Kassandra realized that probably no one had seen him climb the ladder at all. He bundled it up and tossed it down inside.

Helen still stood unmoving, her body glowing with light. Then in the flicker of an eyelash the illusion - if it had been illusion - was gone, and it was only Helen who stood there, her face a little sunburnt, fastening up her dress. She came to Paris and said, "You are wounded."

"Nothing serious, Lady," he said, his eyes still wide; but the stripe of red just outside the edge of his leather armor was dripping now.

She said, "Come along; I'll care for it," and led him away.

There were shouts from the Akhaians now.

"Paris! Where did he go? Coward—!"

But through and beyond it all there were cries of, "The Goddess! She appeared before us on the wall! The Beautiful One, the Sea-born!"

Hector's chariot rumbled back through the gate and the next minute he was striding up the stairs built into the wall. He looked round and demanded, "Where is he, then?"

Hecuba said, her voice quavering, "Did you not see the Goddess take him?"

"That's what they said in the Akhaian ranks," said Hector, "and when I asked my own charioteer, he swore he saw Aphrodite stoop down from the walls and fling her cloak over Paris and snatch him away. As for me, I don't know what it was I saw; maybe just the blaze of the sun in my eyes. Where is Helen?"

"When the Goddess returned Paris here, she saw that he was bleeding," Andromache said, "and took him to her rooms to bandage his wound; by now they're probably in the bath."

"I don't doubt it a bit," Hector growled, "but I wish if Goddesses are going to interfere, they'd wait till things were properly settled. If the Goddess came herself to snatch Paris to safety, I wish she'd snatched Menelaus - and Helen too - all the way back to Sparta. If she's capable of the one - and notice, Immortals, I'm not impious to say she couldn't do it - she's capable of the other. Kassandra, what did you see? Are you going to tell me fairy-tales about the Goddess on the wall snatching him away?"

For a moment Kassandra was overjoyed; Hector appealed to her as if she were a trustworthy witness.

"Not a bit of it," she said. "But it looked to me as if Menelaus had some kind of vision; he stopped fighting and stared at the wall, and Paris ran for his life."

Hector sighed and said, "Well; it's too late for any more fighting today; but wait till this gets around. But of course if the Goddess intervened—even by giving Menelaus a vision - no one can blame Paris."

But he did not sound altogether convinced.

By twilight everyone in both armies, and most of the civilians in the city had heard the story, which of course did not grow less in the telling.

According to most of the eyewitnesses, the Goddess had appeared on the city wall and snatched Paris from under Menelaus's very sword, delivering him from a certain death-stroke; in one version Menelaus had sliced Paris in one stroke from chin to pelvis and the Goddess had healed him at a touch; she had bound up his wounds with nectar and ambrosia and transported him into Helen's very chamber.

Kassandra, when asked, replied only that she was not sure what she had seen; the sun had been in her eyes.

Privately she was certain that somehow the Goddess had intervened. But she was no longer certain quite how it had happened, although she was perfectly sure that, for a moment at least, Helen had worn the semblance of the Goddess. It would not be, after all, for the first time.

For two days the city talked of nothing but the duel, and the supposed intervention of the Gods. Hector and Aeneas came back from councils saying that the Akhaians were insisting that Menelaus had won the duel because Paris had fled, wounded.

"What did you answer them?" Priam asked eagerly.

"What do you think? We said that it was obvious that Paris had won, since the Gods themselves had intervened to save his life," Hector replied.

Kassandra, who had watched the battlefield from the walls most of the day, remembering her own arms-training and thinking that she could probably do as well as most of the Akhaian soldiers or any of the Trojans, asked, "What was that all about this afternoon? I saw two soldiers I did not know stand out for combat, and before they ever got to fighting, one of them started unarming and ended by stripping off his clothes down to his loincloth. Did they decide to wrestle instead of fighting with swords?"

Aeneas chuckled.

"Oh, no," he said. "Do you know Glaucus the Thracian?"

"I have spoken with him," Helen said. "He was the sailing-master of one of the ships which brought us here."

"Well, he stood out and challenged any Akhaian to give him a fight and Diomedes accepted. So they began calling out their lineage, in order to find out if they could meet honorably in single combat, and before they reached their great-grandfathers, they discovered they were cousins."