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knocked flat was scurrying away on hands and knees. Two more men, dressed identically to him, were stalking towards Anthony. Both carried rifles. Anthony couldn’t identify make or model – he was no expert in modern weaponry – but these were quality guns, that much he could tell. Nothing so vulgar as an AK-47. Sophisticated, lightweight, top-of-the-range. The men clearly knew how to use them. They were also exchanging positions, one advancing, the other covering. No amateurs, these.
    Another pair were zeroing in on him. They had descended from the bank on the other side of the clearing.
    Now a third pair, looming from behind.
    Anthony stood. Shakily, but he stood.
    “Do you know who I am?” he declared in his native tongue, Luwian. “I am Aeneas. Son of Anchises and Aphrodite. Survivor of the sack of Troy. Founder of the city of Rome. A champion. Second only to Hector in the esteem of the Hellenes. I have withstood the hatred of Hera. I have done the bidding of Zeus himself. You gentlemen, whoever you are, have just fucked with the wrong person.” His voice thrummed with self-belief and righteous anger. “I am a demigod, and I am about to make each and every one of you suffer for your impudence.”
    In response, the six men trained their rifles on him, centre of body mass.
    A seventh man appeared.
    Roy Young.
    He sauntered towards Anthony, managing to look respectful and contrite.
    “Anthony,” he said, “I told you you’re a good sort, and I meant it. Another time, another place, we’d have been friends, I reckon. But this isn’t that time or place.”
    Anthony was lost for words. “You... You...”
    “Take him down, guys.”
    Six rifles blurted simultaneously.
    Anthony knew only multiple impacts. Multiple sources of pain.
    Young stood over him. Anthony’s shattered chest heaved. He felt like a jigsaw inside, a mass of jumbled, unjoined pieces. He stared up.
    “You’re wasting your time,” he gasped. “This won’t kill me. Can’t.”
    “Maybe not.”
    Young held out a hand sideways. Someone passed him a hand weapon. A spear. No, a trident. No, only two prongs: a bident.
    It was bronze. Just metal.
    Yet it seethed. Anthony could sense the power radiating off it, like heat from magma. Rumbling, subterranean power.
    Young raised the bident aloft.
    “But this can,” he said. And he rammed it into Anthony’s heart.

 

    TWO
     
     
    Greenwich Village, Manhattan
     
    T HEO’S AGENT HAD chosen a hot new restaurant in the Village for their lunch meeting: Seoul Food, a Korean barbecue place that had got a rave review on the Huffington Post and was now taking bookings up to Christmas. How Cynthia had managed to secure them a table, Theo didn’t know, but she had. She could work small miracles like that. She had contacts, knew people.
    “You’ve something exciting to tell me,” he said after they had ordered. Around them diners chattered, all self-congratulatory smiles, while in the centre of the room an open grill sizzled and flared.
    “What makes you say that?”
    “I always get the nice-restaurant treatment when it’s good news. When it’s bad, we go for street-cart hotdogs.”
    “Am I that transparent to you?” Cynthia said.
    “After fifteen years, I’d say so.”
    “Fifteen? Has it been that long?”
    “Almost. Fourteen and change.”
    “And you don’t look a day older than when I first took you on.”
    “Oh, nonsense,” Theo said, deflecting the comment. He knew she had intended it as a compliment, nothing more, but it was a little too on-the-nose; if she had begun to notice, he would have to be ending their relationship soon, before she seriously started to wonder why he never aged – and that would be a shame, both professionally and personally. Cynthia Klein was a good literary agent. She was also a good human being.
    “But it’s true,” Cynthia said. “Most authors stay perennially young only in their publicity stills. With you, it happens in real life. How do you do