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 Labyrinth 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.”