I chose one of these towers and climbed its winding interior staircase while still morphed as the spearman Dolon.

The tower was built something like a minaret—although Islam was still millennia in the future—and I was the only one on the narrow, circular balcony when I stepped out onto it. The sun was in my eyes, but by polarizing my visual filters and magnifying the focus on my god-given contact lenses, I had a clear view of the reunion on the wall.

Andromache rushed down the rampart and flung herself at her husband, her feet twirling in the air as he lifted her and returned the hug. His polished helmet caught the rich evening light. Other soldiers and worried wives on the wall stepped away, giving their leader and his bride some privacy. Only Andromache’s nurse, holding the one-year-old boy, stayed close to the couple.

I could have eavesdropped on their conversation with my shotgun-microphone baton, but I chose just to watch them, seeing their mouths move, studying their expressions. After her rush of relief at seeing her warrior-husband alive and unharmed, Andromache frowned and began speaking quickly, urgently. I remembered from Homer’s tale the rough outline of what she was saying—a retelling of her own woes, her loneliness after Achilles’ murder of her father and brothers. I could actually read her lips on some of the words as she said, “You are my father now, Hector, and my noble mother as well. You are a brother to me now, my love. And you are also my husband, young and warm and virile and alive! Take pity on me, my husband! Do not abandon me. Do not go back out onto the plains of Ilium and die there and have your body dragged behind an Achaean chariot until your flesh is flayed from your bones. Stay here! Fight here. Protect our city by fighting on the ramparts, here.”

“I can’t,” said Hector, his helmet flashing as he slowly shook his head.

“You can,” I saw Andromache say, her face contorted with love and fear. “You must. Draw your armies up close to where that fig tree stands . . . do you see it? This is where our beloved Ilium lies most open to their attack. Three times the Argives have tried that point, hoping to overrun our city, three times their best fighters led the way—both Ajaxes, the big and little, and Idomeneus, and terrible Diomedes. Perhaps a prophet showed them our weakness there. Fight here, my husband! Protect us here!”

“I can’t.”

“You can,” cried Andromache, pulling away from his embrace. “But you won’t!”

“Yes,” I watched Hector say, “I won’t.”

“Do you know what will happen to me, Noble Hector, when you die your noble death and become food for the Achaean dogs?”

I saw Hector wince but stay quiet.

“I will be dragged off as some sweaty Greek commander’s whore!” shouted Andromache, her voice so loud that I heard it half a block away. “Carried off to Argos as booty, as some slave for Big Ajax or Little Ajax or terrible Diomedes or some lesser captain to fuck at his whim!”

“Yes,” said Hector, his gaze pained but steady. “But I’ll be dead, with the earth over me to muffle your cries.”

“Yes, oh, yes,” cried Andromache, weeping and laughing at the same time now. “Noble Hector will be dead. And his son, whom all the citizens of Ilium call Astyanax—‘Lord of the City’—will be a slave to the Achaean pigs, sold away from his slave-whore mother. That will be your noble legacy, oh Noble Hector!”

And Andromache called the nurse closer and grabbed the child, holding him up like a shield between herself and Hector.

Now I saw the pain on Hector’s face, but he reached for the tiny boy, holding his arms out. “Come here, Scamandrius,” said Hector, calling their son by his given name rather than by the nickname given him by the city’s folk.

The boy flinched back and started to howl. I could hear his cries from my perch on the tower half a dozen rooftops away.

It was the helmet. Hector’s helmet. Polished, shining bronze, streaked with blood and grime, reflecting the sunlight and the distorted parapet and the boy himself. The helmet with its flaming red horsehair crest and its monstrously shining metal guards curving around Hector’s eyes and covering his nose.

The boy screamed and cowered against his mother’s breast, afraid of his father.

At such a moment, one would expect Hector to be devastated—no final hug from his son?—but the warrior laughed, threw back his head and laughed again, heartily and long. After a minute, Andromache laughed as well.

Hector swept the battle helmet off his head and set it atop the wall, where it blazed in the light of the setting sun. Then Hector swept his son up as well, hugging him and tossing him and catching him until the boy shrieked not in terror but delight. Holding his son in the crook of his strong right arm, Hector hugged Andromache to him with his left arm.

Still grinning, Hector raised his face to the sky. “Zeus, hear me! All you immortals, hear me!”

All the guards and women on the wall had fallen silent. The streets hushed in an eerie calm. I could hear Hector’s strong voice from blocks away.

“Grant this boy, my son, with whom I am well pleased, that he may be like me—first in glory among Trojans and men! Strong and brave like me, Hector, his father! And grant, oh gods, that Scamandrius, son of Hector, may rule all Ilium in power and glory some day and that all men shall say, ‘He is a better man than his father!’ This is my prayer, oh gods, and I ask no other boon from thee.”

And with that, Hector handed the child back to Andromache, kissed both of them, and left the wall for the battlefield.

I admit that the hours right after Hector bid good-bye to his wife were a low point for me. It didn’t help my mood to know that in the next year, Andromache would, indeed, be driven from the burning city to the land where she would be an expensive slave for other men. Nor did it help to know that the Achaean who will capture her—Pyrrhos, destined to become ancestor to the kings of the Eperiote tribe of the Molossians and to be given a hero’s tomb at Delphi—would rip Hector’s child, Scamandrius (called Astyanax, “Lord of the City,” by the residents of Ilium), from his nurse’s breast and will fling the child from the high walls to his bloody death. The same Pyrrhos will murder Hector’s and Paris’s father, King Priam, at the altar of Zeus in his own palace. The House of Priam will become all but extinct in one night. The thought is depressing.

This is not a defense for what I did next, but I offer it as a partial explanation.

I wandered the streets of Ilium until nightfall and after, feeling more alone and depressed than any time in my nine years as a scholic there. No longer morphed as Dolon, I was still dressed as a Trojan spearman—with the Hades Helmet ready for donning at a second’s notice, the QT medallion at the ready for instant escape—and soon found myself back near Helen’s compound. I confess that I had come here often over the years, stealing time between my scholic observations, coming secretly to the city and to this place just on the off chance of seeing her . . . of seeing Helen, the most beautiful and alluring woman in the world. How many times had I stood across the street from this multistory compound, staring up like a lovestruck boy and waiting until the lights were lit in the upper apartments and terraces, hoping against hope for just a glimpse of the woman?

Suddenly my moonstruck reverie was broken by a more chilling sight—a flying chariot trolling slowly above the streets and rooftops, cloaked to mortal eyes but quite visible to my enhanced vision. Leaning over the railing, scanning the streets, was my Muse. I had never seen the Muse fly so low above the city or plains of Ilium before. I knew she was looking for me.

I pulled up the Hades Helmet in an instant, hiding myself—I hoped—from gods and man. The technology must have worked. The Muse’s chariot floated less than a hundred feet overhead and never slowed.