Running from her brother through the old city in the early morning when the shadows were sharp and her skin iridescent in the sun she found a refuge in the temple of Apollo. Within it was dark and cool and the silence was a comfort--she lay down and put her head on her arms, watching the statue of the god, who seemed lost in thought. She fell into that middle sleep where everything is grey stillness and stayed there until the grey coalesced into a beautiful man speaking softly of an island full of cattle whose death would be many men's undoing, of a mother wading in the river Styx and holding her infant son by the heel that would one day blossom into his ruin, of the inexorable tightening of fate's net. She woke up and found Apollo regarding her thoughtfully. He said, ``Never mind. No one will ever believe you."
Thereafter, whenever she looked at the sun long enough she could hear Apollo as he talked to himself, a slow, endless monologue touching on all things under his far-reaching gaze, and in that way she knew the future. With staring, sun-blind eyes she learned the sad ends of Hector her brother and Priam her father and wept for them even as they sat beside her. She begged them to flee, to pray, to stay inside on inauspicious days but they only smiled, kissed her, brushed her aside. She saw that the war that was coming to Troy could not be won, that it could only end in flame and fields sewn with salt, but no one would be persuaded. She heard her own fate, to warn but be disbelieved, to inveigh against the horse as it was pulled through the city gates, finally to be a slave in a distant country. She thought of fleeing but knew from the fall of the city wall's shadow, from the voice of the wind sighing through the towers and from the shapes of the bright clouds overhead, always changing, that it would not be so, that her fate was elsewhere, that for once the god had lied.