Troy has fallen, and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war --- including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface, and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester. Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one-time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles' slave, forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife, the defiant Hecuba, and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

In the spring of 1914, a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by a fellow student, Elinor Brooke. By the time he returns from World War I, Paul must confront not only the overwhelming, perhaps impossible challenge of how to express all that he has seen, but also the fact that life, and love, will never be the same for him again.