“Soon then.”

“Aye, soon. Today, perhaps. Deiphobus has been waiting his turn in line to boink the poxy doxy since the week Paris dragged her bumpy ass here—gods curse the day—so he’s probably well into the rites of Dionysos, if not of marriage, even as we speak, sister.”

The old hags cackled up bits of cheese and bread.

Menelaus slammed up from his table and strode the streets, carrying his spear in his left hand, his right hand on the hilt of his sword.

Deiphobus? Where does Deiphobus live?

It had been easier before the War with the Gods began. All of Priam’s unmarried sons and daughters—some in the fifties now—had lived in the huge palace in the center of the city—the Achaeans had carefully planned to carry the slaughter there first after breaching the Trojan walls—but that one lucky bomb on the first day of the new war had scattered the princes and their sisters to equally plush living quarters all over the huge city.

Thus, an hour after leaving the cheese shop, Menelaus was still striding the crowded streets when the Amazon Penthesilea and her dozen fighting women rode past while the crowds went wild.

Menelaus had to step back or be struck by the lead Amazon’s warhorse. Her greaved leg almost brushed his cloak. She never looked down or to the side.

Menelaus was struck so hard by Penthesilea’s beauty that he almost sat down then and there on the horse-dunged cobblestones. By Zeus, what frail beauty wrapped in such gorgeous, gleaming war armor! Those eyes! Menelaus—who’d never gone to war against or alongside the Amazon tribe—had never seen anything like it.

As if in a seer’s trance, he stumbled along behind the procession, following the crowds and the Amazons back to Paris’s palace. There the Amazon was greeted by Deiphobus, with no Helen in the retinue, so it seemed like the cheese hags had been wrong. At least about Helen’s current whereabouts.

Watching the door where Penthesilea had disappeared, Menelaus, like some lovestruck teenage shepherd boy, finally pulled himself away and began wandering the streets again. It was almost noon. He knew he had little time—Agamemnon had planned to start the uprising against Achilles’ rule by midday and have the battles fought by nightfall—and he recognized for the first time what a huge city Ilium was. What chance did he have of stumbling across Helen here in time to act? Almost none, he realized, since at first cry of battle amidst the Argive ranks, the great Scaean Gates would be closed and the guard on the walls doubled. Menelaus would be trapped.

He was headed for the Scaean Gates, filled with the triple nausea of failure, hatred, and love, almost running, half happy he had not found her and sick to his soul that he had not found and killed her, when he came upon a sort of riot near the gate.

He watched for a bit, seemingly unable to tear himself away from the spectacle, although the spectacle threatened to engulf him as it spiraled out of hand. Old women nearby babbled the tale.

It seemed the women of Troy had been somehow inspired by the mere arrival of Penthesilea and her egg-carton of Amazons—all sleeping now, presumably, on Priam’s softest couches—word had leaked out of the temporary palace of Penthesilea’s vow to kill Achilles—and Ajax, too, if she had the time, and any other Achaean captain who got in her way, since her Amazon eyes were full of business. This had stirred something dormant but certainly not passive in the women of Troy (as opposed to the surviving few Trojan Women), and they had rushed out into the street, to the walls, onto the very battlements, where the confused guards had given way to the screaming wives and daughters and sisters and mothers.

Then it seemed that a woman named Hippodamia, not the well-known wife of Pirithous, but rather the wife of Tisiphonus—such an unimportant Trojan captain that Menelaus had never faced him on the field nor heard of him around the campfire—now this Hippodamia was whipping the women of Troy into a killing frenzy with her shouted oratory. Menelaus had paused to blend into the crowd but stayed to listen and watch.

“Sisters!” screamed Hippodamia, a thick-armed and heavy-hipped woman not without appeal. Her tied-back hair had come loose and vibrated around her shoulders as she shouted and gestured. “Why haven’t we been fighting alongside our men? Why have we wept about the fate of Ilium—wailed about the fate of our children—yet done nothing to change that fate? Are we so much weaker than the beardless boys of Troy who, in this past year, have gone out to die for their city? Are we not as supple and as serious as our sons?”

The crowd of women roared.

“We share food, light, air, and our beds with the men of our city,” shouted full-hipped Hippodamia, “why have we failed to share their fates in combat? Are we so weak?”

“No!” roared a thousand women of Troy from the walls.

“Is there anyone here, any woman, who has not lost a husband, a brother, a father, a son, a kinsman in this war with the Achaeans?”

“No!”

“Does any among us doubt what would be our fate, as women, should the Achaeans have won this war?”

“No!”

“So let us not tarry and loiter here a moment longer,” shouted Hippodamia above the roar. “The Amazon queen has vowed to kill Achilles before the sun sets today, and she has come from afar to fight for a city that is not her home. Can we vow less, do less, for our home, for our men, for our children, and for our own lives and futures?”

“No!” This time the roar went on and on and women began running from the square, jumping from the steps to the wall, some almost trampling Menelaus in their eagerness.

“Arm yourselves!” screamed Hippodamia. “Toss aside your weavings and your wools, leave your looms, don armor, gird yourselves, meet me outside these walls!”

The men on the walls and watching, men who had been leering and laughing during the first part of Tisiphonus’ wife’s tirade, slunk back into doorways and alleys now, getting out of the way of the rushing mob. Menelaus did the same.

He had just turned to leave, heading for the nearby Scaean Gate—still open, thank the gods—when he saw Helen standing on a nearby corner. She was looking the other way and did not see him. He watched her kiss two women goodbye and begin walking up the street. Alone.

Menelaus stopped, took a breath, touched the hilt of his sword, turned, and followed her.

“Theano stopped this madness,” said Cassandra. “Theano spoke to the crowd and brought this mob of women to its senses.”

“Theano is dead eight months and more,” said Andromache in cold tones.

“In the other now,” said Cassandra in that maddening monotone she assumed when half in trance. “In the other future. Theano stopped this. All heeded the chief priestess of Athena’s Temple.”

“Well, Theano is worm meat. Dead as Prince Paris’s pizzle,” said Helen. “No one stopped this mob.”

Women were already returning to the square and filing out through the gate in a parody of military order. They had obviously scattered to their homes and girded themselves in whatever odd armor they could find around the house—a father’s dull bronze helmet, its crest wilted or missing horsehair, a brother’s cast-off shield, a husband’s or son’s spear or sword. All the armor was too large, the spears too heavy, and most of the women looked like children playing dress-up as they rattled and clank-banged by.

“This is madness,” whispered Andromache. “Madness.”

“Everything since the death of Achilles’ friend Patroclus has been mere madness,” said Cassandra, her pale eyes bright as with fever and their own madness. “Untrue. False. Unfirm.”

For more than two hours in Andromache’s sun-filled top-floor apartment by the wall, the women had spent time with eighteen-month-old Scamandrius, the “god-murdered” child the whole city had mourned, the babe for whom Hector had gone to war with all the Olympian gods to avenge. Scamandrius—Astyanax, “Lord of the City”—was healthy enough under the watchful eye of his new nurse, while at the door, loyal Cicilian guards brought from fallen Thebe stood twenty-four-hour watch. These men had tried to die for Andromache’s fallen father, King Eetion, killed by Achilles when the city fell, and, spared not by their own choice but by Achilles’ whims, now lived only for Eetion’s daughter and her hidden son.