Cassandra throws back her head in a silent howl. Below them, Hector is still offering the wind gods sacrifices and honeyed wine if only they will light his brother’s pyre. If theater had been created at this time, the attendees here today would think that this drama had slipped into farce.

“All that is gone,” whispers Cassandra, slicing across her own forearm with the razor-sharp edge of her dagger. Blood trickles across her pale flesh and drips on marble, but she never looks down at it. Her gaze stays on Andromache and Helen. “The old future is no more, sisters. The Fates have abandoned us. Our world and its future have ceased to be, and some other one—some strange other kosmos—has come into being. But Apollo’s curse of second sight has not abandoned me, sisters. Menelaus is seconds away from rushing up here and sticking his sword through your lovely tit, Helen of Troy.” The last three words are spat out with total sarcasm.

Helen grabs Cassandra by the shoulders. Andromache wrestles away the knife. Together, the two shove the younger woman back between the pillars and into the cool shadows of the interior mezzanine of Zeus’s temple. The clairvoyant young woman is pressed back against the marble railing, the two older women hovering over her like Furies.

Andromache lifts the blade to Cassandra’s pale throat. “We’ve been friends for years, Cassandra,” hisses Hector’s wife, “but one more word out of you, you crazy cunt, and I’ll cut your throat like a hog being hung up to bleed.”

Cassandra smiles.

Helen puts one hand on Andromache’s wrist—although whether to restrain her or be an accomplice to murder, it is hard to tell. Her other hand remains on Cassandra’s shoulder.

“Is Menelaus coming to kill me?” she whispers into the tormented seer’s ear.

“Twice he will come for you today, and each time he will be thwarted,” replied Cassandra in monotone. Her eyes are not focused on either woman. Her smile is a rictus.

“When will he come?” asks Helen. “And who will thwart him?”

“First when Paris’s pyre is lighted,” says Cassandra, her tone as flat and disinterested as if she is reciting from an old children’s tale. “And secondly when Paris’s pyre burns out.”

“And who shall thwart him?” repeats Helen.

“First shall Menelaus be stopped by Paris’s wife,” says Cassandra. Her eyes have rotated up in her head so that only the whites show. “Then by Agamemnon and the would-be Achilles-killer, Penthesilea.”

“The amazon Penthesilea?” says Andromache, her surprised voice loud enough to echo in the Temple of Zeus. “She’s a thousand leagues from here, as is Agamemnon. How can they be here by the time that Paris’s funeral pyre burns out?”

“Hush,” hisses Helen. To Cassandra, whose eyelids are fluttering, she says, “You say Paris’s wife stops Menelaus from murdering me when the funeral pyre is lighted. How do I do that? How?”

Cassandra slumps to the floor in a swoon. Andromache slips the dagger into the folds of her gown and slaps the younger woman several times, hard. Cassandra does not awaken.

Helen kicks the fallen form. “Gods damn her. How am I to stop Menelaus from murdering me? We may be just minutes away from…”

From outside the temple a huge roar goes up from the Trojans and Achaeans in the square. Both women can hear the whoosh and roar.

The winds have obediently roared in through the Scaean Gate. The tinder and timber have caught the spark. The pyre is lighted.

Menelaus watched as the winds blew in from the west and fanned the embers of Paris’s pyre first into a few flickering tongues of flame and then into a blazing bonfire. Hector barely had time to run down the steps and leap free before the entire pyre erupted in flames.

Now, thought Menelaus.

The ordered ranks of Achaeans had broken up as the crowd jostled back away from the heat of the pyre, and Menelaus used the confusion to hide his movements as he slid past his fellow Argives and through the ranks of Trojan infantry facing the flames. He edged his way around to the left, toward Zeus’s temple and the waiting staircase. Menelaus noticed that the heat and sparks from the fire—the wind was blowing toward the temple—had driven Priam, Helen, and the others back off the balcony and—more important—the intervening soldiers off the stairs, so his way was clear.

It’s as if the gods are helping me.

Perhaps they are, thought Menelaus. There were reports every day of contact between Argives and Trojans and their old gods. Just because mortals and gods were warring now didn’t mean that the bonds of blood and old habit had been completely broken. Menelaus knew dozens of his peers who secretly offered sacrifices to the gods at night, just as they always had, even while fighting the gods by day. Hadn’t Hector himself just called on the gods of the west and north winds—Zephyr and Boreas—to help him light his brother’s pyre? And hadn’t the gods complied, even though the bones and guts of Dionysos, Zeus’s own son, had been scattered on the same pyre like inadequate firstlings that one tosses to dogs?

It’s a confusing time to be alive.

Well, answered the other voice in Menelaus’ mind, the cynical one that had not been ready to kill Helen this day, you won’t be alive for long, boyo.

Menelaus paused at the bottom of the steps and slipped his sword from its scabbard. No one noticed. All eyes were on the funeral pyre blazing and crackling thirty feet away. Hundreds of soldiers raised their sword hands to shield their eyes and face from the heat of the flames.

Menelaus stepped up onto the first step.

A woman, one of the veiled virgins who had earlier carried the oil and honey to the pyre, emerged from the portico of Zeus’s temple not ten feet from Menelaus and walked straight toward the flames. All eyes turned in her direction and Menelaus had to freeze on the lowest step, lowering his sword, since he was standing almost directly behind her and did not want to draw attention to himself.

The woman threw down her veil. The Trojan crowd opposite the pyre from Menelaus gasped.

“Oenone,” cried a woman from the balcony above.

Menelaus craned to look up. Priam, Helen, Andromache, and some of the others had stepped back out onto the balcony at the sound of the crowd’s gasps and shouts. It had not been Helen who spoke, but one of the attending female slaves.

Oenone? The name was vaguely familiar to Menelaus, something from before the last ten years of war, but he couldn’t place it. His thoughts were on the next half minute. Helen was at the top of these fifteen steps with no men between him and her.

“I am Oenone, Paris’s true wife!” shouted this woman called Oenone, her voice barely audible even at this proximity over the rage of wind and fierce crackling of the corpse fire.

Paris’s true wife? In his puzzlement, Menelaus hesitated. There were more Trojans jostling out of the temple and adjoining alleys to watch this spectacle. Several men stepped up onto the stairs next to and above Menelaus. The red-haired Argive remembered now that the word in Sparta after the abduction of Helen had been that Paris had been married to a plain-looking woman—ten years older than he had been on their wedding day—and that he had put this wife aside when the gods helped him to abduct Helen. Oenone.

“Phoebus Apollo did not kill Priam’s son, Paris,” shouted this woman called Oenone. “I did!”

There were shouts, even obscenities, and some of the Trojan warriors on the near side of the fire stepped forward as if to grab this crazy women, but their comrades held them back. The majority wanted to hear what she had to say.

Menelaus could see Hector through the flames. Even Ilium’s greatest hero was powerless to intercede here, since his brother’s blazing corpse fire stood between him and this middle-aged woman.