“I have to find Priam… Andromache…” said Helen between coughs. “I have to find Hector!”

“You go look after your people here, Helen,” I said between coughs. “I’ll go down to the beach in search of Hector.”

I turned to go but Helen grabbed my arm to stop me. “Hock-en-bear-eeee… what did this? Who did this?”

I told her the truth. “The gods.”

It had long been prophesied that Troy could not fall until the stone above the huge Scaean Gate was dislodged, and as I pushed my way out with fleeing crowds, I noticed that the wooden gates had splintered and that the great lintel had fallen.

Nothing was as it had been ten minutes earlier. Not only had the city been destroyed in an instant of encircling fire, but the surrounding area had changed, the sky had changed, the weather had changed. We weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I had taught the Iliad for more than twenty years at Indiana University and elsewhere, but I had never thought to go to Troy—to the ruins of Troy along the coast of Turkey. But I’d seen photos enough of the place at the end of the Twentieth Century and beginning of the Twenty-first Century. This place where Ilium had crash-landed like Dorothy’s house looked more like the ruins of Troy in the Twenty-first Century—a small area named Hisarlik—than like the busy center of empire that had been Ilium.

As I looked at the changed scenery—and changed sky, since it had been early afternoon when the Greeks were fighting their last stand, and it was now twilight—I remembered a Canto of Don Juan by Byron, written when the poet had visited this place in 1810 and had felt both the connection here to heroic history and the distance from it—

High barrows without marble or a name, A vast, untilled and mountain-skirted plain And Ida in the distance, still the same, And old Scamander (if ‘tis he) remain; The situation seems still formed for fame—A hundred thousand men might fight again With ease; but where I sought for Ilion’s walls, The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.

I saw no sheep, but when I looked back at the toppled city, the ridge-line was much the same—although obviously five feet two inches lower where the city had just fallen onto the rubble of amateur archaeologist Schliemann’s ruins. A memory struck me that the ancient Romans had sheared off yards of the top of that ridgeline to build their own city of Ilion more than a millennium after the original Ilium disappeared, and I realized that we’d all been lucky to fall just five feet two inches. If it hadn’t been for Roman rubble on top of Greek ruins, the fall would have been much worse.

To the north where the Plain of Simois had stretched for many miles, a low grassland perfect for pasturing and running the famous Trojan horses, there now grew a forest. The smooth Plain of Scamander, the area between the city and the shoreline to the west, the plain where I’d watched most of the fighting take place during the last eleven years, was now a gully-riddled riot of scrub oak, pine, and swampy marsh. I headed for that beach, climbing what the Trojans had called Thicket Ridge without even recognizing where I was, but as soon as I reached the low ridgeline I stopped in amazement.

The Sea was gone.

It’s not just the mile or so of receded shoreline that I knew about from the memories of my Twenty-first Century previous life, the entire fucking Aegean Sea was gone!

I sat down on the highest boulder I could find on Thicket Ridge and thought about this. I wondered not only where Nyx and Hephaestus had sent us, but when. All I could tell right now in the failing twilight was that there were no electric lights visible anywhere inland or along the coast and that the bottom of what should be the Aegean here was overgrown with mature trees and shrubs.

Toto, we’re not only not in Kansas anymore, we’re not even in Oz anymore.

The evening sky was completely covered over by clouds, but it was still light enough that I could see the thousands upon thousands of men packed together in a half-mile arc along what had been the beach just fifteen minutes earlier. At first I was sure that they were still fighting—I could see thousands more fallen on each side—but then I realized that they were just milling around, all lines of combat, trenches, defenses, communication, and discipline lost. Later I’d discover that almost a third of the men down there, Trojans and Achaeans alike, had broken bones—mostly leg bones—from the five-foot fall onto rock and into gullies that hadn’t been there a second earlier. In places, I’d soon learn, men who had been trying to slash each other’s guts and skulls to bits a few minutes earlier were now lying moaning together or trying to help each other up.

I hurried to get down the hill and to cross the mile of alluvial plain that had been so much easier to cross when it had been so worn-down and bare from battle. By the time I reached the rear of the Trojan lines—such as they were—it was almost dark.

I started asking for Hector immediately, but it was another half hour before I found him, and by then everything was being done by torchlight.

Hector and his wounded brother Deiphobus were conferring with the temporary commander of the Argives—Idomeneus, son of Deucalion and commander of the Crete heroes, and Little Ajax of Locris, son of Oileus. Little Ajax had been carried to the conference on a litter, since he’d been slashed to the bone on both shins earlier in the day. Also there conferring with Hector was Thrasymedes, Nestor’s brave son whom I’d thought had been killed earlier in the day—he’d gone missing in the battle for the last trench and had been presumed dead down among the corpses there, but as I’d discover in a minute, he had only been wounded a third time, but it had taken him hours to dig his way out of the corpse-filled trench, then only to find himself among the Trojans. They’d taken him prisoner—one of the few acts of mercy this day or any day of the almost eleven years of war between the two groups—and now he was using a broken lance as a crutch as he negotiated with Hector.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” said Hector, apparently and oddly happy to see me. “Son of Duane! I am glad you survived this madness. What caused this? Who caused this? What has happened?”

“The gods caused this,” I said truthfully. “To be specific, the fire god Hephaestus and Night—Nyx—the mysterious goddess who lives and works with the Fates.”

“I know you were close to the gods, Hock-en-bear-eeee, son of Duane. Why have they done this thing? What do they want us to do?”

I shook my head. The torches were ripping and tearing at the night in the strong breeze coming in from the west—coming from the direction of what had once been the Mediterranean but which now bore smells of vegetation on the wind. “It doesn’t matter what the gods want,” I said. “You’ll never see the gods again. They’re gone forever.”

The hundred or two hundred packed men around us said nothing and for a minute there came only the sound of the torches and the moans of the many injured in the dark.

“How do you know this?” asked Little Ajax.

“I just came from Olympos,” I said. “Your Achilles killed Zeus in hand-to-hand combat.”

The murmurs would have grown to a roar if Hector had not silenced everyone. “Continue, son of Duane.”

“Achilles killed Zeus and the Titans returned to Olympos. Hephaestus will rule eventually—Night and the Fates have decided this already—but for the next year or so, your Earth would have been a battlefield on which no mere mortal could have survived. So Hephaestus sent you—the city, its survivors, you Achaeans, you Trojans—here.”

“Where is here?” asked Ideomeneus.