Suddenly her brother Ares arrives in a blazing flying chariot, shoving aside Trojans and Greeks alike as he widens the ship’s plasma footprint to land by his sister. Aphrodite is blubbering and wailing in pain, trying to explain that Diomedes has gone mad. “He’d fight Father Zeus!” screams the goddess, collapsing in the war god’s arms.

“Can you fly this?” demands Ares.

“No!” Aphrodite does swoon now. She falls into Ares’ arms, still cradling the injured left hand and wrist in her bloody—or ichorish—right hand. It is strangely disturbing to watch. Gods and goddesses don’t bleed. At least not in my nine years here.

The goddess Iris, Zeus’s personal messenger, flicks onto the battlefield between the chariot and Apollo’s forcefield where the god still protects the fallen Aeneas. The Trojans have backed away now, eyes bugging, and Diomedes is being held at bay by the overlapped energy fields. The Achaean is radiating heat and fury in the infrared, looking all the world like a warrior made out of pulsing lava.

“Take her to her mother,” commands Ares, laying the unconscious Aphrodite on the floor of the chariot. Iris lifts the energy-craft skyward and phase-shifts it out of sight.

“Amazing,” says Nightenhelser.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I say. It is the first time in my more than nine years here that I have seen a Greek or Trojan successfully attack a god. I turn to see Nightenhelser staring at me in shock. I forget sometimes that the scholic is from a previous decade. “Well, it is,” I say defensively.

I want to follow Aphrodite to Olympos and see what happens between her and Zeus. Homer had written about it, of course, but there already has been enough disparity between the poem and real events here today to pique my interest.

I begin edging away from Nightenhelser—who is watching events so raptly that he does not notice my departure—and ready myself to don the Hades Helmet and twist the personal QT medallion’s controls. But something is happening on the battlefield.

Diomedes lets out a war cry almost as loud as Aphrodite’s still-echoing scream of pain, and then the augmented Achaean charges Aeneas and Apollo again. This time, Diomedes’ nano-strengthened body and phase-shifted sword hack through Apollo’s outer layers of energy shield.

The god stands motionless as Diomedes hacks and cuts his way through the shimmering forcefield like a man shoveling invisible snow.

Then Apollo’s voice rings out with amplification that must be audible two or three miles away. “Think, Diomedes! Back off! Enough of this mortal insanity—warring with the gods. We’re not of the same breed, human. We never were. We never will be.” Apollo grows in size from his imposing eight feet of stature to become a giant more than twenty feet tall.

Diomedes halts his attack and backs away, although it is impossible to tell whether it is out of temporary fear or sheer exhaustion.

Apollo bends down and opaques the forcefields around him and the fallen Aeneas. When the black fog disappear a minute later, the god is gone but Aeneas is still lying there, wounded, hip shattered, bleeding. The Trojan fighters rush to form a circle around their fallen and abandoned leader before Diomedes slaughters him.

It is not Aeneas. I know that Apollo has left a tensile hologram behind and carried the real wounded prince to the heights of Pergamus—Ilium’s citadel—where the goddesses Leto and Artemis, Ares’ sister, will use their nanotech god-medicine to save Aeneas’ life and mend his wounds in minutes.

I’m ready to flick away to Olympos when suddenly Apollo QT’s back to the battlefield, shielded from mortal view. Ares, still rallying Trojans behind his defensive shield, looks up when the other god arrives.

“Ares, destroyer of men, you stormer of ramparts, are you going to let that piece of dogshit insult you like that?” Invisible to the Achaeans, Apollo is pointing at the panting and recovering Diomedes.

“Insult me? How has he insulted me?”

“You idiot,” thunders Apollo in ultrasonic frequencies audible only to the gods and scholics and the dogs in Troy, who set up a fearsome howling in response. “That . . . that mortal . . . has just assaulted the goddess of love, your sister, slashing the tendons of her immortal wrist. Diomedes even charged me, one of the most powerful of the gods. Athena has made him into something superhuman to make Ares, war god, reeking of blood, into a laughingstock!”

Ares’ head swivels back toward the panting Diomedes, who has been ignoring the god since his attempt to cut through the forcefields failed.

“He makes fun of me!?” screams Ares in a shout everyone from here to Olympos can hear. I’ve noted over the years that Ares is rather stupid for a god. He’s proving it today. “He dares make jest of me!!??”

“Kill him,” cries Apollo, still speaking in the ultrasonic. “Cut out his heart and eat it.” And the god of the silver bow QT’s away.

Ares is going crazy. I decide I can’t leave yet. I desperately want to QT to Olympos and see how badly injured Aphrodite is, but this is just too interesting to miss.

First, the war god morphs into the runner Acamas, prince of Thrace, and runs to and from among the milling Trojans, urging them back into the battle to push the Greeks out of the salient they have created following Diomedes into the Trojan lines. Then Ares morphs into the form of Sarpedon and taunts Hector—the hero is holding back from the fight with rare reticence. Shamed by what he thinks are Sarpedon’s accusations, Hector rejoins his men. When Ares sees that Hector is rallying the main body of Trojan fighters, the god becomes himself and joins the circle of fighters holding the Greeks away from the hologram of unconscious Aeneas.

I confess I’ve never seen fighting this fierce during my nine years here. If Homer taught us anything, it is that the human being is a frail vessel, a fleshly flagon of blood and loose guts just waiting to be spilled.

They’re spilling now.

The Achaeans don’t wait for Ares to get his second wind, but rush in with chariot and spear behind the wild leadership of Diomedes and Odysseus. Horses scream. Chariots splinter and tumble. Horsemen drive their steeds into a wall of spearpoints and gleaming shields. Diomedes flames to the front again, calling his men forward even while he kills every Trojan who comes within his reach.

Apollo flicks back to the battlefield in a swirl of purple mist and releases the healed Aeneas—the real Aeneas—into the fray. The young man has been healed and more—he flows with light the way modified Diomedes did when Athena had finished with him. The Trojans, already rallying behind Hector, let out a massed yell at the sight of their resurrected prince and launch their counterattack.

Now it is Aeneas and Diomedes leading the fighting on opposite sides of the line, killing enemy captains by the bucketful, while Apollo and Ares urge more Trojans into the fray. I watch as Aeneas slaughters the carefree Achaean twins, Orsilochus and Crethon.

Now Menelaus, recovered from his own wound, shoves past Odysseus and rushes toward Aeneas. I hear Ares laugh. The war god would love it if Agamemnon’s brother, Helen’s real husband, the man who started this war by mislaying his wife, was cut down dead this day. Aeneas and Meneleus come within arm’s reach of each other, the other fighters backing away in respect for aristeia, the two warriors’ spears thrusting and feinting, thrusting and feinting.

Suddenly Nestor’s brother, Antilochus, good friend to the all-but-forgotten Achilles, leaps forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Menelaus, obviously afraid the Greek cause will die with their captain if he does not intervene.

Confronted with two legendary killers rather than one, Aeneas backs away.

Two hundred yards east of this confrontation, Hector has waded into the Achaean line with such ferocity that even Diomedes falls back with his men. With his augmented vision, Diomedes must see Ares—invisible to the others—fighting at Hector’s side.