I turn to look at the younger woman. She is blonde and anorectic, but somehow still stunningly beautiful. Cassandra’s fingernails are bitten short and bloody, and her fingers are always twitching and intertwining. She can’t stand still. Her eyes are as red-rimmed as her nails. Looking at her reminds me of photos I’ve seen of gorgeous movie starlets in rehab for coke addiction.

“I have not dreamt of you, weak-looking man,” she says.

I ignore the insult and say nothing.

“But I ask you this,” she continues. “I once dreamt of King Agamemnon and his queen Clytaemnestra as a great royal bull and cow. What does this dream say to you, O Prophet?”

“I’m no prophet,” I say. “Your future is merely my past. But you see Agamemnon as a bull because he will be slaughtered like an ox upon his arrival home to Sparta.”

“In his own palace?”

“No,” I say. I feel like I’m in the crucible of oral exams at Hamilton College, my undergraduate alma mater. “Agamemnon will be killed in the house of Aigisthos.”

“By whose hand? At whose will?” presses Cassandra.

“Clytaemnestra’s.”

“For what reason, O Non-prophet?”

“Her anger at Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia.”

Cassandra continues to stare at me, but she nods slightly to the other women. “And what do you dream of me and my future, O Seer?” she asks sarcastically.

“You will be savagely raped in this very temple,” I say.

None of the women appears to be breathing. I wonder if I’ve gone too far. Well, this witch wants the truth, I’ll give her the truth.

Cassandra seems unfazed, even pleased. I realize that the young prophetess has been seeing this rape for most of her life. No one has listened to her warnings. It must be refreshing for her to hear someone else confirm her vision.

But her voice sounds anything but pleased when she speaks again. “Who will rape me in this temple?”

“Ajax.”

“Little Ajax or Big Ajax?” asks the woman. Cassandra looks neurotic and anxious, but also very lovely in a vulnerable way.

“Little Ajax,” I say. “Ajax of Locris.”

“And what will I be doing upstairs in this temple, Little Man, when Big Ajax of Locris ravages me?”

“Trying to save or hide the Palladion,” I answer. I nod toward the small statue just ten feet from me.

“And does Little Ajax go unpunished, O Man?”

“He’ll drown on his way home,” I say. “When his ship is wrecked on the Gyraean Rocks. Most scholars think this is a sign of Athena’s wrath.”

“Will she bring doom to Ajax of Locris out of anger at my rape or to avenge the desecration of her temple?” demands Cassandra.

“I don’t know. Probably the latter.”

“Who else will be in the temple upstairs when I am raped, O Man?”

I have to think a second here. “Odysseus,” I say at last, my voice rising at the end like a student’s hoping his answer is correct.

“Who else besides Odysseus, the son of Laertes, will be witness to my defilement that night?”

“Neoptolemus,” I say at last.

“Achilles’ son?” interrupts Theano with a sneer. “He’s nine years old back in Argos.”

“No,” I say. “He’s seventeen years old and a fierce warrior. They will call him here from Skyros after Achilles is killed, and Neoptolemus will be with Odysseus in the belly of the great wooden horse.”

“Wooden horse?” says Andromache.

But I can see from the dilated pupils in Helen, Herophile, and Cassandra that these women have had visions of the horse.

“Does this Neoptolemus have another name?” asks Cassandra. She has the tone and intensity of a dedicated public prosecutor.

“He will be known to future generations as Pyrrhos,” I say. I’m trying to remember minutiae from the BD scholia, from the Cyclic poets, from Proclus’ Cypria, and from my Pindar. It’s been a long time since I read Pindar. “Neoptolemus will not sail back to Achilles’ old home on Skyros after the war,” I say, “but will land in Molossia on the western side of the island, where later kings will call him Pyrrhos and say they are descended from him.”

“Will he commit any other acts on the night the Greeks take Troy?” presses Cassandra.

I look at my jury of Trojan women—Priam’s wife, Priam’s daughter, Scamandrius’ mother, Athena’s priestess, a Sibyl with paranormal powers. Then this vision-accursed child-woman and Helen, wife of both Menelaus and Paris. On the whole, I would prefer OJ’s jurors.

“Pyrrhos, known now as Neoptolemus, will slaughter King Priam that night in Zeus’s temple,” I say. “He will throw Scamandrius down from the walls and dash the baby’s brains out on the rocks. He will personally drive Andromache to the slaveship. This I have told the others already.”

“And will this night come soon?” presses Cassandra.

“Yes.”

“In months and years or days and weeks?”

“Days and weeks,” I say. I try to estimate how many days it will be before Achilles will kill Hector and Troy will fall if and when the Iliad time-table reasserts itself. Not many.

“Now tell us—tell me, O Man—what my fate will be after the rape of Ilium and Cassandra,” snaps Cassandra.

Here I hesitate. My mouth goes dry. “Your fate?” I manage.

“My fate, O Man of the Future,” hisses the beautiful blond. “Surely, ravaged or not, I’ll not be left behind when Andromache is dragged off to slavery and noble Helen is claimed again by angry Menelaus. What is to become of Cassandra, O Man?”

I try to lick my lips. Can she see her own fate? I have no idea if Apollo’s gift of prophecy goes beyond the fall of Troy. Someone, I think it was the poet-scholar Robert Graves, translated Cassandra’s name as ‘she who entangles men.’ “ But she’s also someone who has been cursed by the gods always to tell the truth. I decide to do the same.

“Your beauty will result in Agamemnon claiming you as his concubine,” I say, my voice barely audible. “He’ll take you home with him, as his . . . concubine.”

“Will I bear him children before we arrive?”

“I think so,” I say, sounding preposterous even to myself. I keep getting my Homer mixed up with my Virgil, my Virgil mixed up with my Aeschylus, and all of the above mixed up with Euripides. Hell, even Shakespeare took a whack at this story. “Twin sons,” I say after a pause. “Teledamus and . . . uh . . . Pelops.”

“And when I arrive at Sparta, Agamemnon’s home?” prompts Cassandra.

“Clytaemnestra will kill you with the same axe she murders Agamemnon with,” I say, my voice more shrill than I meant it to be.

Cassandra smiles. It is not a pleasant smile. “Before or after she beheads Agamemnon?”

“After,” I say. Fuck it. If she can take it, I can. I’m probably dead anyway. But I’ll use the taser on as many of these bitches as I can before they drag me down. “Clytaemnestra has to chase you for a while,” I say. “But she catches you. She cuts your head off as well. And then she kills your babies.”

The seven women look at me for a long, silent moment, and their gazes are unreadable. I tell myself never to play poker with any of these dames. Then Cassandra says, “Yes, this man knows the future. Whether his vision and presence here are a gift to us from the gods, or a trick of the gods to uncover our treachery, I do not know. But we must trust him with our secret. The time before the end of Ilium is too short to do otherwise.”

Helen nods. “Hock-en-bear-eeee, use your medallion to go to the camps of the Achaeans. Bring Achilles back to the foyer of the nursery in Hector’s house at the time of the next changing of the Ilium guards.”

I think. The guards on the wall change and the gongs ring at what would be 11:30 a.m. That’s about an hour from now.

“What if Achilles doesn’t want to come with me?” I ask.

The collective gaze the women pour on me now is four parts contempt combined with three parts pity.

I QT the hell out of there.