Ilium

“The gods have given me the ability to do so,” I said.

  “Why?” The tip of the dagger blade was only inches from my bare skin through the robe.

  I shrugged, but then realizing that shrugs weren’t used by the ancients, I said, “They lent me this ability for their own purposes. I serve them. I watch the battle and report to them. It helps that I can take the shape of . . . other men.”

  Helen did not seem surprised by this. “Where is my Trojan lover? What have you done to the real Paris?”

  “He’s well,” I said. “When I abandon this likeness, he will return to what he was doing when I morphed . . . when I took his shape.”

  “Where will he be?” asked Helen.

  I thought this was a slightly strange question. “Wherever he would have been if I hadn’t borrowed his form,” I said at last. “I think he’d just left the city to join Hector for tomorrow’s fighting.” Actually, when I morph out of Paris’s form, Paris will be exactly where he would have been if he’d continued on during the time I had his identity—sleeping in a tent, perhaps, or in the midst of battle, or shagging one of the slave girls in Hector’s war camp. But this was too difficult to explain to Helen. I didn’t think she’d appreciate a discourse on probability wave functions and quantum-temporal simultaneity. I couldn’t explain why it was that neither Paris nor those around him wouldn’t necessarily notice his absence, or how it was that events might reconnect to the Iliad as if I hadn’t interrupted the probability wave-collapse of that temporal line. Quantum continuity might be sewn up as soon as I canceled the morph function.

  Shit, I didn’t understand any of this.

  “Leave his form,” commanded Helen. “Show me your true shape.”

  “My Lady, if I . . .” I began to protest, but her hand moved quickly, the blade cut through silk and skin, and I felt the blood flow on my abdomen.

  Showing her that my right hand was going to move very, very slowly, I opened the glowing functions and touched the icon on the morphing bracelet.

  I was Thomas Hockenberry again—shorter, thinner, gawkier, with my slightly myopic gaze and thinning hair.

  Helen blinked once and swung the dagger up fast—faster than I thought any person could move. I heard the ripping and tearing. But it wasn’t my stomach muscles she had sliced open, only the tie of the robe and the silken material itself.

  “Don’t move,” she whispered. Helen of Troy flung my robe open, using her free hand to slide it off my shoulders.

  I stood naked and pale in front of this formidable woman. If a dictionary ever needed a perfect definition of “pathetic,” a photograph of this moment would suffice.

  “You may put the robe back on,” she said after a minute.

  I tugged it back up. The sash was torn, so I held it together with my hand. She seemed to be thinking. For several minutes we stood there on the terrace in silence. Even as late as it was, the towers of Ilium glowed from torchlight. Watchfires flickered along the ramparts on the distant walls. Farther to the south, beyond the Scaean Gate, the corpse fires burned. To the southwest, lightning flashed in the towering storm clouds. There were no stars visible and the air smelled of the rain coming from the direction of Mount Ida.

  “How did you know I was not Paris?” I asked at last.

  Helen blinked out of her reverie and gave a small smile. “A woman may forget the color of her lover’s eyes, the tone of his voice, even the details of his smile or form, but she cannot forget how her husband fucks.”

  It was my turn to blink in surprise and not just at Helen’s vulgar speech. Homer had literally sung the praises of Paris’s appearance—comparing him to a “stallion full-fed at the manger” when describing Paris’s rush to join Hector outside the city this very night, sure in his racing stride . . . his head flung back, his mane streaming over his shoulders, sure and sleek in his glory. Paris was, in the teenagers’ parlance of my previous life, a hunk. And while I had been in Helen’s bed, I had owned Paris’s streaming hair, his sun-bronzed body, his washboard belly, his oiled muscles, his . . .

  “Your penis is larger,” said Helen.

  I blinked again. Twice this time. She had not used the word “penis,” of course—Latin was not yet a real language—and the Greek word she had chosen was slang closer to “cock.” But that made no sense. When we were making love, I’d had Paris’s penis . . .

  “No, that wasn’t how I knew you were not my lover,” said Helen. She seemed to be reading my mind. “That is just my observation.”

  “Then how . . .”

  “Yes,” said Helen. “It was how you you bedded me, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  I had nothing to say to this, and could not have spoken clearly if I’d had anything to say.

  Helen smiled again. “Paris first had me not in Sparta, where he won me, nor in Ilium, where he brought me, but on the little island of Kranae on the way here.”

  There was no island that I knew of named Kranae, and the word merely meant “rocky” in ancient Greek, so I took it to mean that Paris had interrupted their voyage to put into some small, rocky, unnamed island to have his way with Helen without the watching presence of the ship’s crew. Which would mean that Paris was . . . impatient. So were you, Hockenberry came the voice of something not totally unlike my conscience. Too late for a conscience.

  “He’s had me—and I’ve had him—hundreds of times since then,” Helen said softly, “but never like tonight. Never like tonight.”

  I was adither with confusion and smug with pride. Was this good? Was this a compliment? No, wait . . . that’s absurd. Homer sings of Paris as nearly godlike in his physical beauty and charm, a great lover, irresistible to women and goddesses alike, which must mean that Helen only meant —

  “You,” she said, interrupting my confused thoughts, “you were . . . earnest.”

  Earnest. I clutched the robe tighter and looked toward the coming storm to hide my embarrassment. Earnest.

  “Sincere,” she said. “Very sincere.”

  If she didn’t shut up soon and quit hunting for synonyms for “pathetic,” I thought I might wrestle the dagger away from her and cut my own throat with it.

  “Did the gods send you here to me?” she asked.

  I considered lying again. Certainly not even this strong-willed woman would gut someone on an errand from the gods. But again I chose not to lie. Helen of Troy seemed almost telepathic in her ability to read me. And telling the truth for a change felt good.

  “No,” I said. “No one sent me.”

  “You came here just because you wanted to bed me?”

  Well, at least she hadn’t used the f-word again. “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”

  She looked at me. Somewhere in the city, a man laughed loudly, then a woman did the same. Ilium never slept.

  “I mean—I was lonely,” I said. “I’ve been here for the whole war by myself, with no one to talk to, no one to touch . . .”

  “You touched me enough,” said Helen.

  I couldn’t tell from her tone if it was sarcasm or an accusation. “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you married, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

  “Yes. No.” I shook my head again. I must sound like a total idiot to Helen. “I believe I was married,” I said, “but if I was, my wife is dead.”

  “You believe you were married?”

  “The gods brought me to Mount Olympos across time and space,” I said, knowing she would not understand but not caring. “I believe I died in my other life, and they somehow brought me back. But they did not return all my memory to me. Images come and go from my real life, my former life . . . like dreams.”

  “I understand,” said Helen. I realized from her tone that somehow, amazingly, she did understand.

  “Is there a particular god or goddess you serve, Hock-en-bear-eee?”

  “I report to one of the muses,” I said, “but I learned just yesterday that Aphrodite controls my fate.”

  Helen looked up in surprise. “And so has she controlled mine,”
she said softly. “Just yesterday, when the goddess saved Paris from Menelaus’ fury and brought him back here to our bed, Aphrodite ordered me to go to him. When I protested, she flew into a rage and threatened to make me the butt of hard, withering hate—her words—of both Trojans and Achaeans.”

  “The goddess of love,” I said softly.

  “The goddess of lust,” said Helen. “And I know much about lust, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  Again I didn’t know what to say.

  “My mother was named Leda, called the daughter of Night,” she said in conversational tones, “and Zeus camed to her and fucked her while he was in the shape of a swan—a huge, horny swan. There was a mural in my home showing my two older brothers and an altar to Zeus and me as an egg, waiting to be hatched.”

  I couldn’t help it—I barked a laugh. Then my stomach muscles clenched, waiting for the dagger’s blade to rip through it.

  Instead, Helen smiled broadly. “Yes,” she said. “I know about abductions and being a pawn of the gods, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  “Yes,” I said. “When Paris came to Sparta . . .”

  “No,” interrupted Helen. “When I was eleven, Hock-en-bear-eeee, I was carried off—abducted from the temple of Artemis Orthia—by Theseus, uniter of the Attica communities into the city of Athens. Theseus made me pregnant—I bore him a girl child, Iphigenia, whom I could not look upon with love and handed over to Clytaemnestra, to raise with her husband, Agamemnon, as their own. I was rescued from this marriage by my brothers and returned to Sparta. Theseus then went off with Hercules in his war against the Amazons, where he took time to invade hell, marry an Amazon warrior, and explore the Labryinth of the minotaur in Crete.”

  My head was spinning. Every one of these Greeks and Trojans and gods had a story and had to tell it at a drop of a hat. But what did this have to do with . . .

  “I know about lust, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” said Helen. “The great king Menelaus claimed me as his bride even though such men love virgins, love their bloodlines more than life, even though I was soiled goods in a man’s world that loves its virgins so. And then Paris—spurred on by Aphrodite—came to abduct me again, to take me to Troy to be his . . . prize.”

  Helen stopped the recitation and seemed to be studying me. I could think of nothing to say. There was a bottomless depth of bitterness beneath her cool, ironic words. No, not bitterness I realized, looking into her eyes—sadness. A terrible, tired sadness.

  “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” continued Helen. “Do you think I am the most beautiful woman in the world? Did you come here to abduct me?”

  “No, I did not come here to abduct you. I have nowhere to take you. My own days are numbered by the wrath of the gods—I have betrayed my Muse and her boss, Aphrodite, and when Aphrodite heals from the wounds Diomedes inflicted on her yesterday, she will wipe me off the face of the earth as sure as we’re standing here.”

  “Yes?” said Helen.

  “Yes.”

  “Come to bed . . . Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  I wake in the gray hour before dawn, having slept only a few hours after our last two bouts of lovemaking, but feeling perfectly rested. My back is to Helen, but somehow I know that she is also lying awake on this large bed with its elaborately carved posts.

  “Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

  “Yes?”

  “How do you serve Aphrodite and the other gods?”

  I think about this a minute and then roll over. The most beautiful woman in the world is lying there in the dim light, propping herself up on one elbow, her long, dark hair, mussed by our lovemaking, flowing around her naked shoulder and arm, with her eyes, pupils wide and dark, intent on mine.

  “How do you mean?” I ask, although I know.

  “Why did the gods bring you across time and space, as you say, to serve them? What do you know that they need?”

  I close my eyes for a moment. How can I possibly explain to her? It will be madness if I answer honestly. But—as I admitted earlier—I’m terribly tired of lying. “I know something about the war going on,” I say. “I know some of the events that will happen . . . might happen.”

  “You serve an oracle?”

  “No.”

  “You are a prophet, then? A priest to whom one of the gods has given such vision?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t understand,” says Helen.

  I shift on my side and sit up, moving cushions to be more comfortable. It is still dark but a bird begins to sing in the courtyard. “In the place whence I came,” I whisper, “there is a song, a poem, about this war. It’s called the Iliad. So far, the events of the actual war resemble those sung about in this song.”

  “You speak as if this siege and this war were already an old tale in the land you came from,” says Helen. “As if all this has already occurred.”

  Don’t admit this to her. It would be folly. “Yes,” I say. “That is the truth.”

  “You are one of the Fates,” she says.

  “No. I’m just a man.”

  Helen smiles with wicked amusement. She touches the valley between her breasts where I had climaxed just a few hours earlier. “I know that, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  I blush, rub my cheeks, and feel the stubble there. No shaving in the scholics barracks for me this morning. Why bother? You only have hours to live.

  “Will you answer my questions about the future?” she asks, her voice terribly soft.

  It would be madness to do so. “I don’t really know your future,” I say disingenuously. “Only the details of this song, and there have been many discrepancies between it and the actual events . . .”

  “Will you answer my questions about the future?” She sets her hand on my chest.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Is Ilium doomed?” Helen’s voice is steady, calm, soft.

  “Yes.”

  “Will it be taken by strength or stealth?”

  For God’s sake, you can’t tell her that, I think. “By stealth,” I say.

  Helen actually smiles. “Odysseus,” she murmurs.

  I say nothing. I tell myself that perhaps if I give no details, these revelations will not affect events.

  “Will Paris be killed before Troy falls?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “By Achilles’ hand?”

  No details! clamors my conscience. “No,” I say. Fuck it.

  “And the noble Hector?”

  “Death,” I say, feeling like some vicious hanging judge.

  “By Achilles’ hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Achilles? Will he go home from this war alive?”

  “No.” His fate is sealed as soon as he slays Hector, and he has known this all along . . . knew it from a prophecy he has carried with him like a cancer for years. Long life or glory? Homer said that it was . . . is . . . will be, the decision he must make. But, the prophecy goes, if he chooses long life, he will be known only as a man, not as the demigod he will become if he kills Hector in combat. But he has a choice. The future is not sealed!

  “And King Priam?”

  “Death,” I say, my whisper hoarse. Slaughtered in his own palace, in his private temple to Zeus. Hacked to bloody bits like a heifer being sacrificed to the gods.

  “And Hector’s little boy, Scamandrius, whom the people call Astyanax?”

  “Death,” I say. I close my eyes against the image of Pyrrhos flinging the screaming infant down from the wall.

  “And Andromache,” Helen whispers. “Hector’s wife?”

  “A slave,” I say. If Helen keeps up this litany of questions, I’m pretty sure I’ll go crazy. It was all right from a distance—from a scholic’s disinterested observer’s stance. But now I’m talking about people I have known and met and . . . slept with. It strikes me that Helen has not asked about her own fate. Perhaps she never will.

  “And will I die with Ilium?” she asks, her voice still calm.

  I take a breath. “No.”

  “But Menelaus will
find me?”

  “Yes.” I feel like one of those black Crazy-8 tell-your-fortune toys that were popular when I was a kid. Why hadn’t I answered her like that black ball would have? That would be more like the Oracle at Delphi—The future is cloudy. Or Ask again. Am I showing off for this woman?

  It’s too late now.

  “Menelaus finds me but does not kill me? I survive his anger?”

  “Yes.” I remember Odysseus’ telling of this in the Odyssey—Menelaus finding Helen hiding in Deiphobos’ quarters in the great royal palace, near the shrine of the Palladion, and of the cuckolded husband throwing himself upon her, sword drawn, fulling intending to kill this beautiful woman. Helen will uncover her breasts to her husband, as if inviting the blow, as if willing it—and then Menelaus will drop his sword and kiss her. It’s not clear whether Deiphobos, one of the sons of Priam, is killed by Menelaus before this or after he . . .

  “But he takes me back to Sparta?” whispers Helen. “Paris dead, Hector dead, all the great warriors of Ilium dead or put to the sword, all the great women of Troy dead or dragged off to slavery, the city itself burned, its wall breached, its towers dragged down and broken up, the earth salted so that nothing will ever grow here again . . . but I live and am taken back to Sparta by Menelaus?”

  “Something like that,” I say, hearing how lame it sounds.

  Helen rolls out of bed, stands, and walks naked to the courtyard terrace. For a minute I forget my role as Cassandra and just gaze in something like awe at her dark hair tumbling down her back, at her perfect buttocks, and at her strong legs. She stands naked at the railing, not turning back my way as she says, “And what about you, Hock-en-bear-eeee? Have the Fates told you your own destiny through this song of theirs?”

  “No,” I confess. “I’m not important enough to be included in the poem. But I’m pretty sure I will die today.”

  She turns. I expect Helen to be weeping after all I’ve told her—if she believes me—but she’s smiling slightly. “Only ‘pretty sure’?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will die because of Aphrodite’s wrath?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve felt that wrath, Hock-en-bear-eeee. If she takes a whim to kill you, she will.”