The sun has been up a long time but Paris is still in bed. Light streams in through windows generously large in his house far from the Walls. No fear of arrows or stray javelins here high up in the Citadel. He scissors his legs lazily through a tangle of silk sheets still damp from dawn's lovemaking. He likes watching his legs move. He runs his hands over his thighs and traces with his fingers the big muscles' divide. He stares at his belly. Sometimes it reminds him of his warrior brother's breastplate, rippled and ridged like a god's. As he stares the snake stirs, needing no attention but his. But it has attracted another's. She stands at the window wrapped in a robe his mother had embroidered a long time ago. "Somebody's awake," she says. She has a little lisp. He once thought, long ago, that it would drive him crazy. It never has. At least that way. She comes to the edge of the bed. Near its foot. He smiles lazily and, holding her eye, runs the tip of his index finger down his shaft. The snake leaves its bed on his thigh and starts to strain upwards. Her eyes leave his and drift down. The wall behind her is painted with a garden that never existed on this earth. Her head is garlanded with pigment lotus. "No war today?" she asks. Her painted fingernail traces his instep. "No war today." The snake is throbbing. He admires it. "You haven't heard the news?" "I won't know till you tell me what it is." The lisp gets a little stronger when she drops into baby talk. Her head dips and her tongue takes her finger's place, slipping between his toes and finally down the arch. He whimpers. "Achilles may be out of the war." Her head snaps up. "What?" "Come on," he laughs, "don't stop." Her head stays up. "Don't stop or I won't tell you." She dives back to his foot. Splayed fingers start working their way up his calf. "The spies told us last night. Agamemnon stole Briseis from him. He said it was only fair because he was king and he had to give up his girl to save the Greeks from the plague. Achilles went crazy. We doubt he'll raise a hand again for Agamemnon. Or his brother. Your ex-husband. Did you do this for him?" His voice is suddenly sharp with anxiety. "Never," she slurs around his big toe. "Good," he says. Relaxing against the cushions he wraps his hand around himself and squeezes. "So this is very good. The Greeks don't know what to do. And soon we will drive them into the sea." He starts to pump himself. "Let me see them." Obediently she releases his toe and sits up at the edge of the bed. She slips the robe from her left shoulder. Shrugging she exposes a breast. Even now, ten years later, it affects him as it did the first time he saw it. It is like a mountain, like Olympus itself, pure white and thrusting arrogantly from the plain of her ribs, its crest a peak of coral that tightens and darkens as he watches. Any larger and it would sag to her waist; big as it is on a woman nearly thirty its continuing firmness is widely viewed as a sign of divine favor on the Trojan cause. He whimpers again. "Both." She shrugs the robe off the other shoulder and it falls to her hips. "Touch them for me." She smiles and reaches for the pot of oil beside the bed. Filling her hands she anoints herself, delicately at first, then with a two handed grip that makes the coral crests turn an impossible blood red that he has never seen on another woman. Her breath begins to labor. She stops. She reaches for the oil pot again. She hands it to him. She smiles crookedly. "Touch him for me." He grins and fills his hands with unction. The sun is directly overhead. The only shelter is in the lee of a canted ship. Two veterans have found it, as veterans will always find comfort when it is there to be found. Cephales mends the strap of his shield. It does not need mending. He just wants to be sure; he does not want to go out to face the Trojans tomorrow or the next day to find himself one minute with a naked left and the next minute paying the Boatman to take him across the River Styx. As he works he wonders whether he is weakening the strap with his constant attention and he gnaws his beard with anxiety. He knows he has been in the lines too long and that his nerve is going if not gone. He prays that he will die before his friends know. Eumelus, not so long in the lines but long enough to find shade when he can, does nothing. He sits on the sand with his back flush against a hull out of water so long that the barnacles might be fossils. He watches the old soldier work the braided leather of his big old-fashioned figure-eight shield without guessing his purpose or his fear. Once he glances at his own shield, a nice modern three-foot circle, and decides that the strap will do. A third approaches. Lacademon. He plants his javelin point down in the sand and leans his shield against the long ship. He sits, plants his back against the hull. "Hot," he says. His friends grunt. "Heard the news?" The man doing nothing says nothing. Cephales, however busy, must ask. "What news?" "The boy wonder." "What about him?" Cephales stops altogether; Eumelus turns his head. "You heard that King Agamemnon took his girl?" "Right. Big deal," says Cephales. "Fucking right it's a big deal. Achilles is acting like Agamemnon fucked his father. He hasn't left his tent for two days and the smart money says that he's just going to sit out the war and get a nice tan while we get our asses killed." "No shit," says Eumelus. "No shit," says Lacademon. They sit in silence for a while. At last Cephales forgets his worrisome shield. "What does Achilles care about one piece of ass more or less? He has a dozen girls and Patroclus too." Lacademon shakes his head. "Brother, this isn't just some piece of ass. I haven't seen her but one of my buddies did. Fifteen years old if she's a day, tits like melons that stick straight out and a face like Pallas Athena." He shakes his head again. "What do you think it means?" He looks at the man with the shield. Cephales thinks. "I think we will have a very hard time without Achilles." Lacademon nods. He turns to the idle Eumelus. "You?" "I think I'm glad I'm not Patroclus." All three laugh. "Say, can he even sit down today?" They laugh again. Cephales stops before the others and starts working at his shield. The kings' tents are pitched on hills. Or the closest thing, dunes whose sand is anchored by tenacious long-rooted grass. Still each can sit on his little eminence and look down on his ships and men and see the other kings on their own dunes. There is an oxhide stool at Odysseus' canvas door. From where he sits he can look east to Achilles and west to Agamemnon. Last night he heard the gored heifer bellowings from the east. This afternoon he looks west and sees Agamemnon, crowned with a wreath of fieldflowers, strolling with his arm around Briseis' shoulders while a flutist pipes behind them. Odysseus sits alone and watches. He looks east towards Achilles' tent, from which no sound comes now, nor has it all day. He looks west to happy Agamemnon. He raises a bowl to his lips and takes a swallow of watered wine flavored with pitch. He spits it onto the ground before him. "Nice work, shithead," he says. He has been on the beach since just after the sun rose. As he raged and wept it traced its long course across the sky and now verges on drowning itself at the rim of the Western Sea. No one has dared disturb him in this rocky little cove a mile away from the farthest outpost of the shore-hugging Greek fleet. A few Myrmidons, his very best, nervous equally from Trojan proximity and their lord's despair, at first followed him covertly as he made his way up the coast. His stormtroopers, they thought themselves invisible even from him, dropping soundlessly to their faces or fading into brush whenever he appeared to sense their presence. So they thought they could post guard without his knowing. But just as he was about to climb down to the strand, at the beginning of the rocky descent from the trail, he turned without a word and loosed one of the twin javelins he carried. It landed, quivering, between the two men in the lead. They stood openmouthed staring at their lord. He raised his arm and pointed wordlessly back down the trail. One by one his commandos left rock clefts and trees and shamed, shambled back to camp. He has spent the day in grief. He would not let his men hear again what they heard last night to further compound his humiliation so he kept silent until he drove them away. Certain of his singularity he howls. At first he rages. Big rocks are raised overhead and shattered into gravel against unyielding cliff. The thundering surf cannot hear itself crash over his shrieks. An unlucky octopus, caught in a tidal pool, finds itself Agamemnon's voodoo effigy, its eyes plucked out, each foot-long arm torn off slowly as ink jets down the warrior's chest, finally its pulpy bag of a head sloppily vivisected with fingers and teeth. At last every thing that can be broken is broken and everything that lives has been killed. He is alone with himself. It is past noon. Achilles turns on Achilles. At first he is crude. He tears at his face and splashes salt water across the bleeding tracks. Shells crunch in his mouth to lacerate gums and tongue but he cannot make himself swallow. He strips and grinds his crotch across a boulder crusted with mussels and watches blood drip from his scrotum into the water. Twice he batters his head against rock, not because he wants to die but because he wants the shame to stop. Yet he lives, and so does his shame. At last he is exhausted but he cannot stop. When he shits he rubs his own filth into his hair and beard and cries out to Heaven to make it all end. Heaven remains stubbornly silent. Finally he sits in the sea and stares at the sinking sun, an orange semicircle gilding fat clouds surrounding it at the world's farthest margin. He is slumped. His forearms rest against his thighs, half submerged in surf growing colder with each wave. He feels sand shifting beneath him and knows that if he sits here long enough the tide will take him out to sea. This is not how it was supposed to end. Finally he speaks the words he knows he must. "Mother. Mother, please. Please. Please help me, Mother." He waits. He waits a long time. The sun is down to a quadrant, less, an octant, just one segment of an orange. The world before him is twilight, the world behind him dark. His head throbs with last night's wine and today's multiple stony trauma. He has given up hope and waits for the waves to take him away. He takes comfort in the knowledge that he will be asleep when the big fishes take off his toes and work their way up his legs. The cold water is now up to his sternum, and its icy kiss makes him tired. He tries one more time. "Mother, please." The water is over his nipples. He thinks about getting up and running back to his clothes and arms and walking back to the camp where there is a fire and wine. But there is shame there too and he is tired anyway and now he is beginning to feel warm rather than cold. So perhaps the glorious death he was promised was here in the water, with his last enemy an octopus not three feet across. The water is at his collarbone. He raises an arm out of the surf and notices that his fingers are blue. He is about to lean back, to recline as though at a banquet, and inhale salt water and drown his shame. But just as he rises up for a last backstroke the water in front of him erupts. Twenty yards offshore, a geyser. Steam jetting a hundred yards. Water boiling all around it. Alive again and astonished he sits straight up. "Mother? Mother? Is it you?" He stares into the heart of the geyser, now subsiding into a boiling fountain, knowing that that is where she is. Then just back from the jaws of death though he is he remembers what it means to look at an Immortal, even if you popped into this world between her legs, and throws a forearm over his eyes. The water boils. He can hear it. He steals a glimpse down past his forearm and sees that thighs livid from cold a minute before have grown boiled-lobster-red. If the water gets any hotter the flesh will blister and part from bone. But it does not. The roiling has stopped. So has the geyser's jet and crash. So too has the tide itself. Again he peeks at the water and sees it flat as a bath in which he has fallen asleep. He waits. He thinks an hour has passed but he knows enough not to expose his eyes. Never curious about anything other than war and appetite he finally notices that no matter how many times his heart beats the sky grows no darker. As though the movement of the sun stopped with the surf. He knows then that he is no longer in Time. He waits. Finally he can bear it no longer. His back shrieks with his prolonged half-crouch; his arm trembles with the effort of hiding the divine. Eyes screwed shut he drops his right arm into the water and begins to raise his left into its place. As he does something thick and wet and rubbery wraps itself around his left leg. Circles of cartilage hard as bone bite into his skin. His eyes pop open as a tentacle thick as his own arm spirals its way up to his groin and tightens hard enough to make him cry aloud. As though awaiting that signal the tentacle tightens further and pulls. He jerks forward against submerged sand and his head disappears under water. His mouth open from his cry takes in water like a siphon. His hands still above the surface claw at air and light. Another jerk from the tentacle and his hands submerge as well. The salt water bites his lungs. He flails and coughs, expelling the last of his air in a few pathetic bubbles that race to the shimmering surface and break and are gone. He does not notice that the dark has yet to gather in his eyes and so he fights, clutching at the sand and rocks speeding below him and kicking at the kidnapping tentacle. He snaps his head forward. Lungs and ears full of water his groan is something he can only feel rather than hear. He sees he has been taken by an octopus that must be the great-great grandfather of his afternoon's victim, fifty feet across with a head as big as an ox. Eyes the size of serving platters, human as his own, stare at him with neither pity nor reproach. He thinks that he has offended his mother by killing one of her creatures and knows himself to be a dead man taking the long way to Hell. He stops struggling. The octopus descends. The dim light roofing Achilles' new world fades. He wonders who he will see in the afterlife. Whether those he sent there himself will mock him, whether the friends who preceded will welcome him at whatever tables the dead can keep. Still the octopus dives. The light, rather than disappearing entirely, seems only to have shifted. Now it comes from below, a hazy point of brightness ahead and down. The octopus flexes and jets and pulses towards the light. They arrive. The tentacle around his leg relaxes and Achilles drifts down to find a seat on a rock. The octopus flaps once more and is gone. Ahead of him is what looks like a roofless temple. A dozen columns of coral, pink and white, arranged in a circle twenty yards across. Within is the source of light, a ball of lightning that rolls and dances from pillar to pillar. Knowing himself dead he dares to look directly. Inside the ambient electricity he sees what seems to be the shadow of a human form. He draws his eyes away. What looked like a temple now seems a military camp. Around it circle hundreds of great fish, orderly as cavalry patrols, each bigger than the biggest man and armed with serried rows of white teeth and pennonned with dimly glowing lights hanging from scalloped lips and fins. On the sand around are ranks of infantry, lobsters big as hunting dogs, crabs like wild boar. Clams the size of chariot cars snap open and shut in rhythm like drummers beating a march. Achilles sits and waits. Water seems to nourish a dead man's lungs just as well as air. Now that he is dead he has plenty of time. He stares at the rolling light in the roofless temple. At length it stills. A voice fills his head. I KNOW WHY YOU WEEP, ACHILLES, MY SON. Achilles is startled. He had expected the voice of Charon. I KNOW WHY YOU RAGE. The voice comes from the fireball. Achilles blubbers, his salt tears blending imperceptibly with the water around him. His mother has come through after all. The fireball grows brighter. He is bathed in warmth, not of water boiling from the divine presence but the radiance of her love. SPEAK, ACHILLES. YOU CAN. He opens his mouth. It is an effort for lungs and diaphragm to push water rather than air, for teeth and tongue to form words in this new medium, but she is right. "I hurt," he says. I KNOW. I KNOW, MY SON. "He has shamed me before the fleet, before all the lords, before all my men, before the Trojans, before the Gods." I KNOW, I KNOW. "How can I make him pay?" The fireball is silent. POOR BOY. MY POOR BOY. I BORE YOU FOR A SHORT LIFE BUT PROMISED YOU GLORY. NOT THIS. NOT SHAME BEFORE YOUR FRIENDS. BUT DON'T BE AFRAID. YOUR MOTHER WON'T LET THIS HAPPEN. I WILL SPEAK TO MY FATHER, YOUR GRANDFATHER, THE LORD OF THE LIGHTNING. HE WILL BRING AGAMEMNON GRIEF BEYOND TELLING. AND WHILE THIS HAPPENS YOU REST BY YOUR SHIPS. STAY OUT OF THE WAR. LET AGAMEMNON KNOW WHAT LIFE IS LIKE WITHOUT MY BOY. The fireball has grown brighter by degrees until he can barely look at it. The figure inside stands out in sharper contrast. It is as close to seeing her as he will ever come. Though the glare around her makes his head throb he forces himself to look anyway. DON'T WORRY, SON. DO AS I SAY AND AGAMEMNON WILL REGRET THIS. AND I PROMISE YOU THAT YOU WILL HAVE GLORY BEFORE YOU DIE. He is about to speak again. But the light winks out. For a fraction of a second he knows himself to be alone at the bottom of the sea and then darkness enfolds him as well. It is night when he awakens on the beach. Face down in gravel and sand fifty yards from the waterline, half covered with slimy weed. For a few seconds he lies there without moving. The beach is bright with a full moon. Little crabs like spiders dance a few feet from his eyes, wondering whether he is dead enough to eat. So does he. Not until the bravest scuttles close and brushes his ear does he move. He rolls fast and crushes it with his fist and crazed with rage and disgust spins and pounds three more into twitching pulp before the others scatter. Weaving and stumbling like a boxer in his last rounds he staggers to the water and kneeling in the surf rinses shell fragments and guts from his hands. Then he vomits gallons of seawater back into its source. Only then does he remember. He walks into the water until it has risen to his waist. He splashes chest and face. When he can stand the cold no longer he walks back onto the shore and towards the rocks where his clothes and weapons wait. He will do as his mother told him.