“Stop this fighting now,” orders Athena. “Take your hand off your sword, Achilles. Curse Agamemnon if you must, but do not kill him. Do what we command now and I promise you this—I know this is the truth, Achilles, just I see your fate and know the future of all mortal men—obey us now and one day glittering gifts three times this will be yours as payment for this outrage. Defy us and die this hour. Obey us both—Hera and me—and receive your reward.”

Achilles grimaces, twists his hair free, looks sullen, but resheaths his sword. Watching Athena and him is like watching two living forms amidst a field of statues. “I can’t defy both of you, Goddess,” says Achilles. “Better if a man submits to the will of the gods, even if his heart breaks with anger. But it is only fair then that the gods hear the prayers of that man.”

Athena twitches the slightest of smiles and winks out of existence—QTing back to Olympos—and time resumes.

Agamemnon is ending his harangue.

Sword sheathed, Achilles steps into the empty circle. “You drunken wineskin of a man!” cries the man-killer. “You with your dog’s eyes and your deer’s heart. You ‘leader’ who’s never led us into battle or gone into ambush with the best of the Achaeans—you who lack the courage to sack Ilium and so must sack the tents of his army for plunder instead—you ‘king’ who rules only the most worthless husks among us—I promise you this, I swear a mighty oath this day—“

The hundreds of men around me take in a breath almost as one, more shocked by this promise of a curse than if Achilles had simply cut Agamemnon down like a dog.

“I swear to you that someday a great yearning for Achilles will come to all the sons of Achaea,” shouts the man-killer, his voice so loud that it halts dice games a hundred yards away in the tent city, “to all of them, throughout your armies here! But then, Atrides, stricken to your soul though you’ll be, nothing you do will save you—scythed like so much wheat by the man-murdering Hector. And on that day you will tear out your own heart and eat it, desperate, raging that you chose to do such dishonor to the best of all the Achaeans.”