He woke up before dawn and spent thirty seconds convinced he was late for a lecture.
The panic was specific and academic: third-year students, Bronze Age collapse, he'd promised them primary sources—
Then the smell hit him.
Salt. Stone. Animal. Woodsmoke from somewhere below.
And the sounds — not Cairo traffic, not the neighbour's television through a thin wall, not the distant prayer call that had been the backdrop of his entire life. Instead: wind moving through stone gaps. Somewhere, a rooster making its opinion known. The low creak of wood settling in the cold.
Karim opened his eyes.
The ceiling was stone, close and yellowed in the grey pre-dawn light.
Right, he thought. Troy.
He lay still for a moment and let the previous day arrange itself into some kind of order. The training ground. The trainer and his paddle. Cyclopean walls. The Aegean at night. A girl in a corridor who had looked at him and said three words that should have been impossible.
He pressed his hands flat against the sleeping mat — rough wool, scratchy, real — and stared at the ceiling.
Okay.
Day two.
The first problem arrived before he'd been awake five minutes.
A boy appeared in the doorway — young, maybe twelve, with the look of someone whose entire job was to be in places slightly before they were needed. He said something. Karim caught exactly one word:
Water.
The boy was holding a clay basin. He set it on the floor near the wooden chest and looked at Karim with the patient expression of someone waiting for a response that was taking longer than expected.
Karim sat up.
"Thank you," he said.
In English.
The boy's expression didn't change. He said something else — a question, from the upward tilt at the end — and Karim realized, with a cold drop in his stomach, that he had no idea what was being asked.
Name. He might be asking my name. Or if I need anything. Or when I want breakfast. Or whether I'm going to training this morning. Any of those. All of those. I have no idea.
He nodded.
The boy seemed to accept this as a sufficient answer and left.
Karim sat on the edge of the mat and looked at the basin of water.
First priority, he thought. Language. Everything else is secondary. You are completely blind without language. You cannot make a single move until you can communicate.
He stood, splashed water on his face — cold, shockingly cold — and started getting dressed in the clothes from the chest. Linen tunic, rough against skin that was still calibrating to a body that wasn't his. Leather sandals that laced up the ankle. A short cloak for the early morning cold.
He had worn suits for his lectures. He had argued about footnotes in faculty meetings. He had eaten microwaved pasta at eleven pm while reading about Mycenaean grain distribution.
He was now putting on Bronze Age sandals in a palace that would not survive the decade.
Acceptable, he thought, and finished dressing.
He found the main hall by following noise.
The palace complex was larger than it had seemed yesterday — a maze of corridors and courtyards and staircases that connected rooms of vastly different sizes, all of it stone, all of it painted in that same vivid style that made the walls feel less like architecture and more like a continuous argument about heroism. Warriors everywhere. Ships. Hunts. Processions with figures carrying offerings toward figures who were larger and more important and usually depicted in profile.
He catalogued as he walked. Memorizing routes. Counting doorways. Building a map in his head the way he'd built maps of lecture rooms and library stacks in a life that felt, this morning, like something he'd read about rather than lived.
The main hall was large, colonnaded, smelling of the previous night's fire and the morning's bread. Long stone tables. People already moving through it — servants mostly, from their clothing and their purpose, carrying things to and from a kitchen that was somewhere nearby and producing smells that reminded Karim he hadn't eaten in what was probably thirty-six hours across two different time periods.
He sat at the end of a bench and a woman put a clay bowl in front of him without being asked.
He looked at the contents.
Barley porridge, thick and pale. A piece of flatbread. A small cup of something that smelled like diluted wine.
He ate it all. The porridge was dense and slightly salty and tasted like nothing he'd had before and absolutely nothing like he'd imagined Bronze Age food would taste. The bread was good. The wine-water was strange.
He ate and watched the room and listened.
He was building the language in layers.
The bottom layer was what he already had — his academic Mycenaean, the fifty-odd words he'd known before yesterday, the ones used in tablet inscriptions to describe grain and sheep and bronze and the movements of palace goods. Useful for an ancient economy. Less useful for navigating a royal family's breakfast routine.
The second layer was yesterday — the fragments he'd caught during training. Strike. Again. Wrong. Position. Better. Lysander. Operational vocabulary. Things people said when they wanted you to do something or stop doing something.
The third layer was everything he was hearing right now, pressed against the other two, looking for overlaps.
A woman across the hall said something to another woman and they both laughed. One word from that exchange matched something in his tablet vocabulary. Iko — a coming, an arrival. Someone is coming, or something arrived.
A man near the door called out to someone. Short, directive. He caught asaminto — a bath or bathing — and the end of a name.
A boy said something that was clearly I don't want to in any language, judging by the tone, and an older woman said something back that was clearly I don't care what you want.
Good, he thought. Keep going.
He ate his porridge and listened and built his third layer one word at a time, and he was so focused on this that he didn't notice the hall had gone quieter until the quiet was already there.
He looked up.
The man in the doorway was tall.
That was the first thing. In a room full of people who were, on average, several inches shorter than twenty-first century humans, this man was tall — not freakishly, not in the way that draws stares, but in the way that meant he occupied more space than other people without seeming to try. Broad shoulders. The unhurried, slightly rolling walk of someone who had been carrying heavy things since childhood and whose body had built itself accordingly.
He was wearing a plain tunic. No armor. His hair was dark and cut short and he had a jaw that looked like it had been designed specifically to absorb punishment.
He was maybe twenty-five or twenty-six years old.
And the way the room reacted to him — the small adjustments, the subtle straightening, the shift in how people held themselves — told Karim everything he needed to know before the man's face came fully into view.
Hector.
He knew it the way you know something you've studied for years — not from a single feature but from the composite, the whole that added up to a person he'd read about more times than he could count. First son of Priam. Greatest warrior of Troy. The only person on either side of the war who everyone, friend and enemy alike, seemed to agree was actually good.
In every account. In Homer's Iliad. In Virgil. In every academic paper and pop history book and documentary Karim had ever consumed.
Hector was the one who died for a city he couldn't save, fighting for a cause his brother started, and he'd done it anyway because walking away wasn't something he knew how to do.
He was standing ten meters away, saying something to a servant, and he was completely, utterly real.
Karim sat very still and said nothing and tried to control his face.
Hector scanned the room — a quick, habitual check, the kind of sweep a person does when they're responsible for a lot of things and have learned to read the temperature of a room in two seconds. His gaze moved across the tables, the servants, the handful of other people eating—
And stopped on Karim.
Not for long. A second, maybe two. The look of someone noting a fact: my brother is here, eating, apparently fine.
Then he started walking over.
Oh, thought Karim. Okay. Here we go.
Hector sat down across from him.
Not beside him — across, where he could see him properly. He put both forearms on the table and looked at Karim with a straightforward attention that had no performance in it. Not searching for weakness, not asserting dominance. Just looking. The way you look at something you want to understand.
He said something.
Karim caught two words: yesterday and the negative particle he'd learned from Cassandra.
You weren't [something] yesterday.
Or possibly: Yesterday you weren't [something].
He had no idea what the something was.
He kept his expression neutral and said nothing.
Hector's eyes moved across his face with that same patient attention. Then he said something else — slower this time, each word given more space, the way people instinctively speak to someone who's having trouble following.
Karim caught more this time: head and fall and a word he thought meant hurt or pain.
Your head. The fall. Are you hurt?
The cover story he'd decided on yesterday — head injury, explains everything — was apparently already in circulation. The trainer must have reported the fall. Or someone had seen it.
He touched the side of his head and made a small expression that he hoped communicated: a bit, but I'll survive.
Hector watched him do this.
Then he said one word. Short. A question, from the tone.
Karim didn't know it.
He shook his head slightly — I don't understand — and immediately saw the problem with that response: Lysander would have understood. Lysander had spoken this language from birth. If Karim shook his head at basic words too often, someone was going to notice that the head injury had apparently removed his ability to understand his native language.
Hector's eyes narrowed slightly. Not with suspicion — more like recalibration. He sat back a fraction.
Then he did something unexpected.
He pointed at Karim's bowl.
"Wa-na-ka," he said, and made an eating gesture.
Karim looked at the bowl, then at Hector.
Wa-na-ka. He knew that word. Everyone who had ever studied Mycenaean tablets knew that word.
It meant king.
Hector had just pointed at his breakfast bowl and said king.
Karim stared at him.
Hector said it again, this time with what was unmistakably a smile — small, contained, but there — and tapped the table, and pointed at the bowl, and said something that from the rhythm and the context could only mean: eat your food before the king comes and takes it.
It was a joke.
Karim almost laughed.
Not at the joke itself, which barely landed across the language gap, but at the simple human reality of it — that Hector, son of Priam, future hero of Troy, greatest warrior of the Bronze Age, had sat down across from his quiet younger brother on an ordinary morning and made a small stupid joke about breakfast.
He pressed his lips together to keep the sound in.
Hector saw it anyway — saw the almost-laugh — and something in his expression shifted. Subtle. Like a key fitting a lock that hadn't been opened in a while.
He said something else. Shorter this time. Karim caught nothing except his own name — Lysander — and a word he thought might be again or still or something in that territory.
Still Lysander. Still here. Something.
He nodded.
Hector looked at him for another moment.
Then he stood, gathered himself with the efficient economy of someone whose body was a tool he'd been maintaining his whole life, and said one final thing before walking away.
Four words.
Karim only knew one of them.
Today.
He spent the next hour in the corner of the hall with a piece of broken clay shard and a sharp stone, scratching marks.
Not writing — he had nothing to write on and nothing to write with that wouldn't be immediately confusing to anyone who saw it. Instead he was making a phonetic catalogue. Every sound he'd heard in the last day with a small mark for each, a system only he could read, designed to hold sounds in an order his memory could retrieve.
Fifty-three distinct sounds so far. Seventy-eight word fragments. Nine that he was confident about. Fourteen more he was sixty percent on.
He scratched and listened and built.
A woman walked past and said something to another woman and he caught a new word — a verb, he thought, from the way it inflected at the end. He scratched a mark.
A child ran through the hall shouting something that was clearly stop chasing me in any language, followed by another child who was clearly not going to stop chasing him. Karim caught two words from the chase and added them.
He worked.
This was what he was good at. Not heroism. Not combat. Not the physical things that this world valued above everything else. But this — sitting in a corner and paying attention and building structure out of noise. He had done it with primary sources for ten years. He could do it with a language.
Give me a week, he thought. Two weeks. A month.
Give me enough time and I can talk to you.
He was still working when the shadow fell across his clay shard.
He looked up.
The trainer from yesterday was standing over him. The wooden paddle was in his hand. His expression was exactly as it had been yesterday — the permanent displeasure of a man who had seen too many years of inadequate performance and had stopped expecting improvement.
He said something.
From the context — the paddle, the timing, the way he was already half-turned toward the door — Karim translated it as: training. Now.
He stood, pocketed his clay shard, and followed.
The training ground was already occupied.
Six boys from yesterday, plus three new ones Karim hadn't seen before, plus one person who wasn't a boy at all.
He was standing at the far end of the ground, moving through a sword drill alone, and Karim recognized the set of his shoulders before he saw his face.
Hector.
In armor this time — bronze breastplate, leather greaves, the full weight of it worn with the ease of someone who'd been putting it on since he was twelve. He moved through the drill slowly, deliberately, each motion complete before the next began, and even at that reduced speed there was something in how he moved that was different from everyone else on the ground.
Efficiency, Karim thought. No wasted motion. Every movement exactly as large as it needs to be and no larger.
He'd read about this. The ancient accounts described Hector as powerful but controlled, the opposite of Achilles's burning intensity. Homer had him speak to his wife, kiss his son, pick up a sword, and face the man he knew was going to kill him — all with the same steady, undecorated attention.
Watching him drill in the morning light, Karim believed it.
Hector noticed him arrive the way he'd noticed everything — a brief glance, a note taken, focus returned to his own work. The trainer shouted something and the training began.
Karim had spent all of yesterday performing badly.
Today he had a different problem: he needed to perform slightly less badly in a way that could be explained by the head injury improving, without demonstrating abilities that Lysander had never shown before.
This required calibration.
He knew, academically, the principles of Mycenaean close combat — shield wall, short sword work, the importance of the front rank's stability over individual heroics. He had read every scholarly reconstruction of Bronze Age fighting technique written in the last fifty years.
He could not use any of it. Not yet.
He moved through the drills at exactly the level of yesterday, maybe five percent better. The trainer shouted at him twice. The boy with the wide brown eyes — who had a name that sounded like Damos or Demas, Karim still wasn't sure — caught a strike that Karim should have blocked and gave him a look of theatrical despair.
Karim shrugged.
Damos-or-Demas shook his head and attacked again.
They broke midway through the morning.
Karim found a corner of the wall and sat with his back against the warm stone, watching the others drink water and argue about something. He was pulling out his clay shard to add three new words he'd caught during the drills when he became aware that Hector had sat down beside him.
Not across from him this time. Beside him.
Close enough that Karim could see the small scar along his jaw — a fighting scar, already healed white, he must have had it for years — and the way his hands rested loosely on his knees when he wasn't holding anything. Large hands. Work-worn palms.
Hector said something quietly.
Karim looked at him.
Hector nodded toward the clay shard in Karim's hand.
He said something else — a question, from the shape of it.
Karim looked at the clay shard. Then at Hector. Then back at the shard.
He had two options. Hide it — shove it in his belt, pretend he was doing nothing, invite the question of what he was hiding. Or show it.
He held it out.
Hector took it.
He looked at the scratched marks for a long moment. His expression was unreadable in the way that very controlled people's expressions are unreadable — not blank, just managed, information going in without information coming out.
He said one word.
Karim knew it.
What.
Just: what.
Not angry. Not accusing. Genuinely asking: what is this.
Karim thought fast.
He took the shard back gently. Pointed at his own ear. Made a listening gesture — cupped hand, turned toward the training ground, the sounds of the other boys. Then pointed at the marks.
Sounds. I'm writing sounds.
Hector looked at him.
Karim pointed at one of the marks and said, carefully, the Mycenaean word he was most confident about:
"O-u."
No.
He pointed at the mark again. Then at his ear. Then at the mark.
I heard this. I wrote this.
Hector said nothing for a moment.
Then he pointed at a different mark on the shard and looked at Karim with a question in his eyes.
Karim looked at the mark and thought back to when he'd scratched it — the trainer, dismissing them for the water break, a single sharp syllable that had sounded like a command.
He said it: "A-ke."
Hector's eyebrows moved. The smallest possible movement.
He said the word back to Karim, correct, but then added a second word after it.
Karim didn't know the second word.
He scratched it onto the shard.
Hector watched him do this.
Then, slowly, he pointed at the training paddle lying on the ground nearby and said a word.
Karim scratched it.
Hector pointed at the water jug.
Karim scratched it.
Hector pointed at his own breastplate.
Karim scratched it.
They did this for the rest of the break — Hector pointing, Karim scratching — in complete silence, no explanation given or asked for, with the quiet practical focus of two people doing a job that needed doing.
When the trainer called them back, Karim had fourteen new words.
He had also, without quite knowing when it had happened, had his first real conversation in this world.
That evening, sitting in his room with the window open and the Aegean dark beyond the walls, Karim counted his vocabulary.
Ninety-one words. Up from fifty.
At this rate — if he kept the pace, if he found ways to keep extracting — he'd have functional conversation in three weeks. Basic fluency in two months.
He had six months before Paris sailed.
Comfortable margin, he thought.
Then he thought about the way Hector had pointed at things, patient and unhurried, asking nothing and offering no explanation, simply doing what was useful because it was useful.
He thought about the scar on his jaw and the steady hands and the controlled, efficient way he moved through drills designed for men half his level.
He thought about what he knew was going to happen to this person. The specific morning it was going to happen. The gates of the city, and Achilles outside them, and a decision that Hector had already made — in some future Karim could see and he couldn't — to go out anyway.
Stop, he told himself.
That's not useful yet. File it. Move on.
He lay back and closed his eyes and ran through his ninety-one words in order, attaching each one to the context he'd heard it in, building a web of meaning that would hold the next word when it came.
He was still running through them when he fell asleep.
He dreamed of nothing.
Or rather — he dreamed of a corridor, stone-floored, lamp-lit, and a girl standing in it with dark eyes that didn't reflect the light properly.
In the dream she said the three words again:
You are not him.
And this time he answered her, in perfect Mycenaean Greek, with everything he should have said:
No. But I'm trying to be something better.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she said, very quietly: "You have less time than you think."
He woke up.
The palace was silent. The window was still open. The Aegean moved in the dark outside, steady and indifferent, keeping its own time.
He sat up.
Less time than I think.
He didn't know if that was a real warning from a real prophet, processed through the medium of a dream.
Or just his own anxiety.
Either way — same answer.
Work faster.