The veteran gazed out between the shifting roof-tents to Casablanca’s wave-chopped shoreline, where the Mediterranean and vast Atlantic mix and mate. “I knew you were going to cry for peace, but I expected it to sound naïve, cowardly. It doesn’t. Your words sound like good sense. Actually, the world you paint makes better sense than mine, since, in your world, all this repetition would achieve something, instead of just leading us back to the slaughter-fields again and again. And you have every reason to believe in that world, since no one but me and Mycroft have really seen the counterevidence.” He met her eyes. “I notice you avoided the word ‘karma.’ ”

“You avoided answering my question.”

“Apologies, Lady.”

She scowled. “I know my gender fetish is public knowledge now, but feigning antiquated chauvinism is not a fruitful shortcut to convincing me you are what you say you are.”

“No offense intended,” Achilles answered quickly. “It’s habit, that’s all. You remind me very much of Athena, and my mother.”

Kosala made a face neither goddess ever would have. “Both of them at once?”

Achilles shrugged. “They’re the only women who’ve spoken to me in such a competent and imperious way. I’m not from your time. I’m not used to women in council, trading words and plans as you do. In my world only a goddess or a queen would speak like you, or an Amazon perhaps, though I mainly met the Amazons in battle, not council.”

“I thought you’d been living in our world more than a decade.”

Achilles frowned across to where I leaned against a breeze-kissed railing. “Hiding in a junk-heap with a squad of all-male soldiers, a child, and no visitors apart from Mycroft and Thisbe Saneer has not given me many opportunities to interact with what the last millennia have made of womankind. I’ve seen your sort of modern woman in media, in books, but you’ve seen—or read about—men like me too; that’s not the same as meeting one.”

“I guess not.”

Kosala looked the Great Soldier over anew, studying his toil-hardened arms and shoulders, which he had bared to let his skin enjoy the salt touch of his grandfather, the Old Man of the Sea—a god who has either guarded the fish-rich depths since Earth began, or never existed.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” she pressed. “Will you help me make peace?”

The most violent man alive—as Homer once had Agamemnon call Achilles—shook his head. “It’s not going to work. There will be war.”

“And then there will be peace. Wars end when somebody makes peace. I’m going to start making that peace right now. There may be a bit of war first, but the peace that will come afterward is the important part.”

“You…” He peered. “You’re not trying to prevent the war?”