By the time Pandarus had finished explaining to Troilus about his werewolf-family, the sky had faded from black to grey, and it was starting to be rippled with pink, and Cressida-the-werewolf was howling with grief as she heard what had happened to her family. Troilus knelt down on the floor beside her to cuddle her, and Pandarus patted her head and said, 'I'm sorry, I should've told you years ago about your grandparents being dead, but I just didn't want to upset you. But anyway, you didn't know them, and, honestly, you haven't missed anything by not knowing my father. He really, really wasn't a nice man. But it's a pity you didn't have a chance to know my mum, she was wonderful, and she'd have been really proud of you. But anyway, you've got me and you've got Troilus, and we love you. You be a good girl – shush! Lie down! – good girl, and I'll find you a nice bone. And is it okay if I make breakfast for Troilus and me?'

Cressida broke off howling for long enough to nod 'okay', but then she went back to howling, and Troilus started to cry as well.

'Don't be such a baby!' said Pandarus. 'You've got to have a good breakfast, both of you, because I'll need to let you out of Troy and be back on guard duty before dawn. And you won't just be saving yourselves, you'll be doing vital top-secret reconnaissance work for the whole of Troy. So just eat, and listen, okay?' And, while Cressida gnawed her bone and Troilus and Pandarus ate their porridge, Pandarus began explaining The Plan.

'You see, with all these Greeks trying to reduce your city to ashes and rubble, some of the Trojans have noticed it isn't a good idea to put all their eggs in one basket by having Trojan civilisation concentrated in one place. So a few of us were thinking of branching out, and finding a new colony. Not just people from Troy itself, mind: I've got nothing to take me back to Zeleia, and Sarpedon doesn't plan to go back to Lycia, either. But from Troy itself, several of Antenor's sons want to come, Achates is happy to come, as long as Aeneas can lead the expedition…'

'Aeneas?' repeated Troilus. 'But his dad's really old and frail these days, and his little boy's only five, and his wife's such an idiot that if she walks more than two streets from her house, she gets lost! Aeneas isn't really thinking of taking them all to a foreign country, is he? And where are they – I mean you – I mean where are we going, anyway?'

'We haven't quite decided. I think our best bet would be North Africa – probably Tunisia – but Aeneas thinks we ought to go to Europe. And yeah, I know he's got quite enough on his plate without trying to found a new nation, but, after all, his mum is the goddess Aphrodite, and you know how ambitious gods can be for their families.'

Troilus nodded. The gods quite often used to have affairs with humans, and so quite a lot of people in those days had at least one divine parent. Achilles, in the Greek camp, was the son of a sea-goddess called Thetis. Because the Greeks were camping by the seashore, she used to come up the beach every few days to visit him, and Achilles never quite knew whether to be proud of being visited by a goddess, or embarrassed that his mum kept dropping in all the time.

'Anyway,' Pandarus continued, 'we haven't yet sorted out where we're going, and we can't really afford to send lots of people away as colonists in the middle of a war. But if one brave prince, and one very brave werewolf, travelled round the Mediterranean, and had a good look at the Middle East and North Africa and southern Europe, they could find a good place, preferably one where the locals are a bit more tolerant of werewolves than they are in Troy or Zeleia, and come back to tell everyone where it was. And in the meantime' – he added hastily, because Cressida had begun howling with fear when he said the word 'brave' –'it won't really be very dangerous – safer than staying here, at any rate. After all, most country people are kind and hospitable, and the'll be a lot more sympathetic to a lad and lass running away to get married – or, better still, a wandering lad with his faithful dog – than to a lot of people with weapons who looked as though they might turn into an invading army.' He bent down and stroked his niece's head, and said, 'You stay a wolf by daylight until you're well away from Troy, okay? You can turn back into a girl at night, but it's going to be easier walking on four legs than on two.'

Cressida nodded, but her eyes looked sad. Pandarus tickled her behind the ears, and said, 'Come on, let's go to your room and put together a few bits and pieces, shall we? You stay there, Troilus, we won't be a minute.' Troilus nodded, and went to the kitchen to wash up the dishes, and, when Pandarus was alone with Cressida, he said to her very softly, 'I didn't want to tell you in front of Troilus, but years ago, when he was a child, his sister Cassandra made a prophecy about him. She said that if he lived to the age of twenty, the city of Troy would never fall. Well, he's nineteen now, and if the Greeks know about the prophecy – which seems pretty likely, with your father defecting to the Greek side – they'll be going all-out to kill him in the next year. So if you lead him well away from Troy, and keep him safe until his twentieth birthday, you'll have saved him so that he can save Troy, but if you let him stay here, to go on fighting for the city until he's killed, you are the falsest whelp alive – false to Troilus, false to me, and false to the whole of Troy. So you will look after him, won't you?'

Cressida nodded. She had a feeling that maybe there was something wrong in what Pandarus was saying, and maybe Cassandra hadn't really meant that the city would be safe if Troilus was nowhere near it, but her thoughts were always a bit fuzzier when she was a wolf than when she was human, and in any case, she couldn't argue when she couldn't talk. So she chose a dress, a pair of sandals and her favourite necklace, so that she'd have something pretty to put on when it was safe to be human again, and Pandarus tied them up in a bundle, and filled a backpack with bread and biscuits and porridge oats and cheese and dried fruit and nuts. Troilus asked if he shouldn't be taking some dog-food as well, but Cressida wagged her tail and flashed her sharp teeth, as if to say, 'Don't worry about me!'

So they set off in the grey before dawn, and when they reached the gates, Pandarus looked around quickly to check that he couldn't see anyone, and then unlocked the gates. He hugged Troilus and said, 'Goodbye; take good care of my niece,' and bent down and scratched Cressida behind the ears again, and kissed her on her cold, wet nose, and said, 'Goodbye; take good care of my friend.' And then the two lovers set off, and Pandarus locked the gate after them, and went back to his position on sentry duty as if nothing had happened. But when they'd gone and he was sure there was nobody around to see him, he cried, because the two people he loved most were going away and he couldn't be sure if he'd ever see them again.

Meanwhile, in the Greek camp, quite a few of the Greeks had noticed how pretty Cressida was, and were starting to wonder which of them Calchas would give her to. And if this sounds sexist, it is because both the Greeks and the Trojans were sexist. When we read the story of Troilus and Cressida today, we are bound to think, 'I wouldn't date a boy because my uncle told me to!' or 'If I fancied a girl, I wouldn't ask her uncle to ask her out for me!' But for Cressida, it must have seemed a comparatively liberating arrangement. Her own mother had had an arranged marriage to a man she had never seen before, and, as a wife, had been expected to hand all her property over to her husband and promise to obey him forever. Queen Helen, having left her husband for Paris, was now stuck in a besieged city, without much choice over whether she stayed or went back to Greece.

Under the circumstances, Cressida had decided, long before she met Troilus, that neither marriage nor living with a man looked much fun. If Pandarus had not persuaded her to fall in love with Troilus, I think she might have become a nun serving one of the three virgin goddesses: Hestia the goddess of the hearth, Athene the goddess of wisdom, or Artemis the goddess of virginity. She had considered the idea several times, but had always drawn back, because the idea of not having a man to protect her frightened her so much. The truth was that, although Cressida liked to think of herself as a feminist (or whatever the Trojan equivalent was), she was much more conventional than she liked to admit, and the idea of doing without men terrified her even more than the idea of marriage. So, having an arranged secret love affair had seemed an ideal compromise, allowing her to love, and to be loved and protected by, a gallant prince, without having to promise to obey him.

The Greek men's attitude to women was, on the whole, even more old-fashioned. After all, they had been away from their wives for nine years by now, and the only women they were used to seeing in the camp were slaves. From time to time, a Greek king like Diomedes or Achilles would go out with his soldiers and attack one of the smaller towns surrounding Troy, kill all the men, capture the women and children to be slaves, and loot anything valuable in the town, and then they'd share out the treasure and the prisoners among all the Greek kings, with Agamemnon getting first choice because he was the leader. Not long before Cressida came to visit the Greek camp, Achilles had conquered a town called Eëtion, and taken as his share of the prize a beautiful young woman called Briseis, and a silver lyre, but Agamemnon had taken most of the rest of the prisoners and treasure for himself.

So now, the morning that Cressida was running away with her boyfriend, Agamemnon called a meeting of all the Greeks, and announced that the first business they had to settle was the question of finding a husband for Calchas's daughter. After all, he said, Calchas had been their friend for a good many years, and, since he loved his daughter enough to summon her from the Greek camp, he would certainly want to show his loyalty to the Greek side by giving her to a Greek nobleman as a wife.

Calchas's stomach churned with fear when he heard this. He knew Cressida hadn't been in his tent when he woke up that morning, but he couldn't be sure whether she'd just gone out for the night while she was a werewolf, and would be back in his tent now that it was day, or whether she'd gone for good. Not that it helped either way, of course, because if she was coming back, he would be in trouble if he offered a Greek king a werewolf as a wife, but if she'd gone back to Troy, they could accuse him of being a double agent who was using his daughter to smuggle Greek secrets back to Troy. 'Uh, she's – she's not well at the moment, and – uh – she's just having a bit of a sleep,' he stammered. 'But I'm sure when she's better she'll be happy to choose her own husband, because, you know, we Trojans don't believe in forcing a woman to marry a man she doesn't love. So, uh, I'll ask her when she's up and about again, shall I?'

Agamemnon glared at him. 'How dare you talk about Trojan customs?' he spat. 'After the way you ran away from Troy, do you think they'd take you back now? Well, because our Greek civilisation is built on hospitality, you can have three days to change your daughter's mind. But if you haven't given her to me by then, I'll cut your head off.'

At that point Achilles jumped up and shouted at Agamemnon, 'You drunken old lecher, how dare you talk like that to someone who talks to the gods? Why are you talking about giving Cressida away, as if she was a slave and prisoner like my Briseis? She came to us as our guest, and if she wants to marry one of us, she's free to choose a husband for herself. But if she's got a sweetheart back in Troy, then we must let her return to her love. Or do you think that because your brother's wife decided to leave him for a Trojan, that gives us the right to steal one of their women? And anyway, what's all this about you wanting to marry her? You've got a wife and two children – and you would have three, if you hadn't murdered your daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis. If that's what you call Greek civilization, I'd rather fight for the Trojans.'

A lot of people cheered at Achilles' speech, and a man called Thersites shouted, 'Good on you! You see, Agamemnon? Even a faggot like Achilles knows more about civilization than you do!'

Achilles plunged through the crowd to punch Thersites and growl at him, 'I – am – not – gay, okay?'

'Yeah, course not!' sniggered Thersites. 'You and Patroclus are just good friends, and you only wear women's clothes cause they're more comfortable, right?'

Achilles swung at Thersites again, but he ducked out of the way.

'ALL RIGHT!' roared Agamemnon, above the chaos. 'We're going to settle this NOW! Talthybius and Eurybates, go to Calchas's tent and get Cressida, and tell her she's my wife as of now! I'm divorcing Clytemnaestra now, she can have custody of Orestes and Electra, and the ashes of Iphigenia – whom I did not murder, by the way, if it's a sacrifice to a god it doesn't count as murder – and Cressida is my new wife, and we'll tell Clytemnaestra about it when we get back to Mycaenae. Now get on with it!'

Talthybius and Eurybates, Agamemnon's two heralds, went off to look for Cressida, and in the meantime Patroclus dragged Achilles off Thersites and whispered, 'Stop beating him up, he's not worth it,' and Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, managed to calm the crowds down, and they waited. Things were relatively peaceful for about twenty minutes, until Talthybius and Eurybates returned and said, together (because they'd rehearsed their story on the way back):

'Your majesty, the lady doth confess

She finds herself most indisposed to rise,

But we suspect that this is but a ruse.

She seems distract, yet crafty to conceal…'

Agamemnon had heard enough, and broke in: 'She wasn't there, was she?'

Talthybius wondered why they had bothered to lie when they were so useless at it, and whom Agamemnon was going to blame, and he hoped desperately that it wouldn't be them. 'My liege, I do confess, she was not there,' he admitted miserably.

He wondered whether Agamemnon would punish him for lying, but Agamemnon was more interested in shouting at Achilles: 'This is all your doing, isn't it? All that guff about letting her choose her own husband was just to give her time to escape. Well, you say she's not a slave or a prisoner: fine! I'll take one who is! After all, from what I've heard, you haven't got much use for a slave-girl.'

Achilles began to draw his sword to kill Agamemnon there and then, but Patroclus reached out a hand to stop him, and said, 'Come on; we'd better go and tell Briseis the bad news.'

'Very well,' growled Achilles: 'as I and my followers are no longer part of your army, we'll leave this assembly. We'll go to our tents to begin packing our fifty ships to go home, and leave at dawn tomorrow. And I warn you: if you take anything other than Briseis, I'll kill you. As it is, you can have her, but you'll have to fight without Patroclus and me and the rest of the Myrmidons.' And with that he strode off, followed by all his soldiers.