“This day, all the gods willing—and Zeus has already spoken it into being—let my friends and family—and our foes—witness our final victory. Let us see the end to this war. Let us prepare now—before this beginning day ends—to welcome home Hector and Deiphobus in a victory celebration that will last a week—no, a month!—a party of celebration and deliverance that will let your faithful servant Priam of Ilium die a happy man!”

So spake Priam, King of Ilium, Father of Hector, and Hockenberry couldn’t believe his ears.

Helen slipped away from the side of Andromache and the other women, then descended the wide steps back down to the city, with only Andromache’s warrior slave-woman, Hypsipyle, at her side. Hockenberry hid behind the broad back of an imperial spearman until Helen was out of sight on the steps, and then he followed.

The two women turned down a narrow alley almost in the shadow of the west wall, then east up an even more narrow lane, and Hockenberry knew where they were going. Months ago, during his jealous phase after Helen had quit seeing him, he’d trailed Andromache and her here, discovering their secret. This was where Hector’s wife, Andromache, kept her secret apartment where Hypsipyle and another nurse watched over Andromache’s son, Astyanax. Not even Hector knew that his son was alive, that the baby’s murder by the hands of Aphrodite and Athena was a ruse by the few Trojan Women to end the war between the Argives and Trojans, turning Hector’s wrath toward the gods themselves.

Well, Hockenberry thought now, staying back at the head of the smaller alley so the two women would not notice they were being followed, that ruse had worked wonderfully well. But now the war with the gods was over and it looked as if the Trojan War was in its final hour.

Hockenberry didn’t want them to reach the apartment itself; there had been male Cicilian guards there as well. Now he bent and lifted a heavy, smooth, oval stone, just the size of his palm, and curled his fist around it.

Am I really going to kill Helen? He had no answer to that. Not yet.

Helen and Hypsipyle were pausing at the gate that led into the courtyard to the secret house when Hockenberry moved up quietly behind them and tapped the big Lesbos slave-woman on her brawny shoulder.

Hypsipyle whirled.

Hockenberry hit her in the jaw with a roundhouse uppercut. Even with the heavy rock in his fist, the big woman’s bony jaw almost broke his fingers. But Hypsipyle went backward like a toppled statue, her head striking the courtyard door on the way down. She stayed down, clearly unconscious, her big jaw looking broken.

Great, thought Hockenberry, after ten years in the Trojan War, you finally joined the fighting—by suckerpunching a woman.

Helen stepped back, the little hidden dagger that had once found Hockenberry’s heart already sliding down from her sleeve into her right hand. Hockenberry moved fast, clutching Helen’s wrist, forcing her hand and arm back against the rough-hewn door, and—his bleeding, bruised right hand barely working—pulling his own long knife from his belt and thrusting the point of it into the softness under her chin. She dropped her knife.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she said, her head back but his knife drawing blood already.

He hesitated. His right arm was shaking. If he was going to do this, he needed to do it quickly, before the bitch began to speak. She had betrayed him, stabbed him in the heart and left him for dead, but she had also been the most amazing lover he’d ever had.

“You are a god,” whispered Helen. Her eyes were wide, but she showed no fear.

“Not a god,” gritted Hockenberry. “Just a cat. You took one of my lives. I’d already been given one extra. I must have seven left.”

Despite the knife point cutting into her underjaw, Helen laughed. “A cat having nine lives. I like that conceit. You always did have a way with words… for a foreigner.”

Kill her or not, but decide now… this is absurd, thought Hockenberry.

He pulled the point of the blade away from her throat, but before Helen of Troy could move or speak, he grabbed a fistful of her black hair in his left hand, held the dagger to her ribs, and pulled her down the alley with him, away from Andromache’s apartment.

They’d come full circle—back to the abandoned tower overlooking the Scaean Gate wall where he’d discovered Menelaus and Helen hiding, where Helen had stabbed him after he’d QT’d her husband to Agamem-non’s camp. Hockenberry shoved Helen up the narrow, winding staircase all the way to the top, to the mostly open level now atop the tower that had been shattered by the gods’ bombing months ago.

He pushed her toward the open edge, but out of view of anyone on the wall below. “Strip,” he said.

Helen brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Are you going to rape me before you throw me over the edge, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“Strip.”

He stood back with his knife ready as Helen slipped out of her few layers of silky garments. This morning was warmer than the day on which he’d left—the wintry day when she’d stabbed him—but the breeze up this high was still cool enough to cause Helen’s nipples to stand on end and to bring out goosebumps on her pale arms and belly. As she let each layer fall away, he told her to kick them over to him. Watching her carefully, he felt through the soft robes and silky under-shift. No other hidden daggers.

She stood there in the morning light, legs slightly apart, not covering her breasts or pubic region with her hands but just letting her arms hang naturally at her sides. Her head was high and there was the slightest line of blood visible under her chin. Her gaze seemed to mix calm defiance with a mild curiosity about what was going to happen next. Even now, filled with fury as he was, he saw how she could have set these hundreds of thousands of men to killing one another. And it was a revelation to him that he could be so angry—close-to-killing angry—and still feel sexual desire for a woman. After the seventeen days in the 1.28-Earth-gravity acceleration field, he felt strong here on Earth, muscular, powerful. He knew that he could lift this beautiful woman in one arm and carry her wherever he wanted to, do whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted.

Hockenberry threw her clothes back to her. “Get dressed.”

She watched him warily as she picked up her soft garments. From the wall and Scaean Gate below came shouts, applause, and the banging of wooden spear shafts on bronze-and-leather shields as Priam ended his speech.

“Tell me what’s happened in the seventeen days I’ve been gone,” he said gruffly.

“That’s all you’ve come back for, Hock-en-bear-eeee? To ask me about recent events?” She was securing the low bodice across her white breasts.

He gestured her to the fallen piece of stone and when she’d taken a seat, he found another slab for himself about six feet away. Even with a knife in his hand, Hockenberry did not want to get too close to her.

“Tell me about the last weeks since I left,” he said again.

“Don’t you want to know why I stabbed you?”

“I know,” Hockenberry said tiredly. “You’d had me QT Menelaus out of the city but you decided not to follow him. If I was dead, and the Achaeans overran the city—which you were sure they were going to do—you could always tell Menelaus I refused to take you with me. Or something like that. But he would have killed you anyway, Helen. Men—even Menelaus, who’s not the sharpest sword in the armory—can rationalize being betrayed once. Not twice.”

“Yes, he would have killed me. But I hurt you, Hock-en-bear-eeee, so that I would have no choice… so that I had to stay in Ilium.”

“Why?” This didn’t make any sense to the former scholic. And his head hurt.

“When Menelaus found me that day, I realized that I was happy to go with him. Happy almost to be killed by him, if that had been his pleasure. My years here in Ilium as a harlot, as Paris’s false wife, as the reason for all this death, had made me mean in every sense of the word. Base, brittle, empty inside—common.”