Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  Damn—another gray hair, another weed in the garden of her pulchritude. She reaches toward the villain—and stops. Why bother? These hairs are like the Hydra’s heads, endless, cancerous, and besides, it’s high time Paris realized there’s a mind under that coiffure.

  Whereupon Paris comes in, sweating and snorting. His helmet is awry; his spear is gory; his greaves are sticky with other men’s flesh.

  “Hard day, dear?”

  “Don’t ask.” Her nonhusband unfastens his breastplate. “Pour us some wine. Looking in the speculum, were you? Good.”

  Helen sets the mirror down, uncorks the bottle, and fills two bejeweled goblets with Chateau Samothrace.

  “Today I heard about some techniques you might try,” says Paris. “Ways for a woman to retain her beauty.”

  “You mean—you talk on the battlefield?”

  “During the lulls.”

  “I wish you’d talk to me.”

  “Wax,” says Paris, lifting the goblet to his lips. “Wax is the thing.” His heavy jowls undulate as he drinks. Their affair, Helen will admit, still gives her a kick. In the past ten years, her lover has moved beyond the surpassing prettiness of an Adonis into something equally appealing, an authoritative, no-frills masculinity suggestive of an aging matinee idol. “Take some melted wax and work it into the lines in your brow—presto, they’re gone.”

  “I like my lines,” Helen insists with a quick but audible snort.

  “When mixed with ox blood, the dark silt from the River Minyeios is indelible, they say. You can dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula.” Paris sips his wine. “As for these redundant ounces on your thighs, well, dear, we both know there’s no cure like exercise.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Helen snaps. “Your skin is no bowl of cream. Your head is no garden of sargasso. As for your stomach, it’s a safe bet that Paris of Troy can walk through the rain without getting his belt buckle wet.”

  The prince finishes his wine and sighs. “Where’s the girl I married? You used to care about your looks.”

  “The girl you married,” Helen replies pointedly, “is not your wife.”

  “Well, yes, of course not. Technically, you’re still his.”

  “I want a wedding.” Helen takes a gluttonous swallow of Samothrace and sets the goblet on the mirror. “You could go to my husband,” she suggests. “You could present yourself to high-minded Menelaus and try to talk things out.” Reflected in the mirror’s wobbly face, the goblet grows weird, twisted, as if seen through a drunkard’s eyes. “Hey, listen, I’ll bet he’s found another maid by now—he’s something of a catch, after all. So maybe you actually did him a favor. Maybe he isn’t even mad.”

  “He’s mad,” Paris insists. “The man is angry.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  Heedless of her royal station, Helen consumes her wine with the crude insouciance of a galley slave. “I want a baby,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You know, a baby. Baby: a highly young person. My goal, dear Paris, is to be pregnant.”

  “Fatherhood is for losers.” Paris chucks his spear onto the bed. Striking the mattress, the oaken shaft disappears into the soft down. “Go easy on the vino, love. Alcohol is awfully fattening.”

  “Don’t you understand? I’m losing my mind. A pregnancy would give me a sense of purpose.”

  “Any idiot can sire a child. It takes a hero to defend a citadel.”

  “Have you found someone else, Paris? Is that it? Someone younger and thinner?”

  “Don’t be foolish. Throughout the whole of time, in days gone by and eras yet to come, no man will love a woman as much as Paris loves Helen.”

  “I’ll bet the plains of Ilium are crawling with camp followers. They must swoon over you.”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” says Paris, unwrapping a plumed-soldier condom.

  If he ever says that to me again, Helen vows as they tumble drunkenly into bed, I’ll scream so loud the walls of Troy will fall.

  The slaughter is not going well, and Paris is depressed. By his best reckoning, he’s dispatched only fifteen Achaeans to the house of Hades this morning: strong-greaved Machaon, iron-muscled Euchenor, ax-wielding Deichos, a dozen more—fifteen noble warriors sent to the dark depths, fifteen breathless bodies left to nourish the dogs and ravens. It is not enough.

  All along the front, Priam’s army is giving ground without a fight. Their morale is low, their esprit spent. They haven’t seen Helen in a year, and they don’t much feel like fighting anymore.

  With a deep Aeolian sigh, the prince seats himself atop his pile of confiscated armor and begins his lunch break.

  Does he have a choice? Must he continue keeping her in the shadows? Yes, by Poseidon’s trident—yes. Exhibiting Helen as she looks now would just make matters worse. Once upon a time, her face had launched a thousand ships. Today it couldn’t get a Theban fishing schooner out of dry dock. Let the troops catch only a glimpse of her wrinkles, let them but glance at her aging hair, and they’ll start deserting like rats leaving a foundering trireme.

  He’s polishing off a peach—since delivering his famous verdict and awarding Aphrodite her prize, Paris no longer cares for apples—when two of the finest horses in Hisarlik, steadfast Aithon and intrepid Xanthos, gallop up pulling his brother’s war chariot. He expects to see Hector holding the reins, but no: the driver, he notes with a pang of surprise, is Helen.

  “Helen? What are you doing here?”

  Brandishing a cowhide whip, his lover jumps down. “You won’t tell me what this war is about,” she gasps, panting inside her armor, “so I’m investigating on my own. I just came from the swift-flowing Menderes, where your enemies are preparing to launch a cavalry charge against the camp of Epistrophos.”

  “Go back to the citadel, Helen. Go back to Pergamamos.”

  “Paris, this army you’re battling—they’re Greeks. Idomeneus, Diomedes, Sthenelos, Euryalos, Odysseus—I know these men. Know them? By Pan’s flute, I’ve dated half of them. You’ll never guess who’s about to lead that cavalry charge.”

  Paris takes a stab. “Agamemnon?”

  “Agamemnon!” Sweat leaks from beneath Helen’s helmet like blood from a scalp wound. “My own brother-in-law! Next you’ll be telling me Menelaus himself has taken the field against Troy!”

  Paris coughs and says, “Menelaus himself has taken the field against Troy.”

  “He’s here?” wails Helen, thumping her breastplate. “My husband is here?”

  “Correct.”

  “What’s going on, Paris? For what purpose have the men of horse-pasturing Argos come all the way to Ilium?”

  The prince bounces his peach pit off Helen’s breastplate. Angrily he fishes for epithets. Mule-minded Helen, he calls her beneath his breath. Leather-skinned Lakedaimon. He feels beaten and bettered, trapped and tethered. “Very well, sweetheart, very well …” Helen of the iron will, the hard ass, the bronze bottom. “They’ve come for you, love.”

  “What?”

  “For you.”

  “Me? What are you talking about?”

  “They want to steal you back.” As Paris speaks, Helen’s waning beauty seems to drop another notch. Her face darkens with an unfathomable mix of anger, hurt, and confusion. “They’re pledged to it. King Tyndareus made your suitors swear they’d be loyal to whomever you selected as husband.”

  “Me?” Helen leaps into the chariot. “You’re fighting an entire, stupid, disgusting war for me?”

  “Well, not for you per se. For honor, for glory, for arete. Now hurry off to Pergamos—that’s an order.”

  “I’m hurrying off, dear”—she raises her whip—“but not to Pergamos. On, Aithon!” She snaps the lash. “On, Xanthos!”

  “Then where?”

  Instead of answering, Paris’s lover speeds away, leaving him to devour her dust.

  Dizzy with outrage, trembling with remorse, He
len charges across the plains of Ilium. On all sides, an astonishing drama unfolds, a spectacle of shattered senses and violated flesh: soldiers with eyes gouged out, tongues cut loose, limbs hacked off, bellies ripped open; soldiers, as it were, giving birth to their own bowels—all because of her. She weeps openly, profusely, the large gemlike tears running down her wrinkled cheeks and striking her breastplate. The agonies of Prometheus are a picnic compared to the weight of her guilt, the Pillars of Herakles are feathers when balanced against the crushing tonnage of her conscience.

  Honor, glory, arete: I’m missing something, Helen realizes as she surveys the carnage. The war’s essence eludes me.

  She reaches the thick and stinking Lisgar Marsh and reins up before a foot soldier sitting in the mud, a young Myrmidon with what she assumes are a particularly honorable spear hole in his breastplate and a singularly glorious lack of a right hand.

  “Can you tell me where I might find your king?” she asks.

  “By Hera’s eyes, you’re easy to look at,” gasps the soldier as, arete in full bloom, he binds his bleeding stump with linen.

  “I need to find Menelaus.”

  “Try the harbor,” he says, gesturing with his wound. The bandaged stump drips like a leaky faucet. “His ship is the Arkadia.”

  Helen thanks the soldier and aims her horses toward the wine-dark sea.

  “Are you Helen’s mother, by any chance?” he calls as she races off. “What a face you’ve got!”

  Twenty minutes later, reeling with thirst and smelling of horse sweat, Helen pulls within view of the crashing waves. In the harbor beyond, a thousand strong-hulled ships lie at anchor, their masts jutting into the sky like a forest of denuded trees. All along the beach, Helen’s countrymen are raising a stout wooden wall, evidently fearful that, if the line is ever pushed back this far, the Trojans will not hesitate to burn the fleet. The briny air rings with the Achaeans’ axes—with the thud and crunch of acacias being felled, palisades being whittled, stockade posts sharpened, breastworks shaped, a cacophony muffling the flutter of the sails and the growl of the surf.

  Helen starts along the wharf, soon spotting the Arkadia, a stout penteconter with half a hundred oars bristling from her sides like quills on a hedgehog. No sooner has she crossed the gangplank than she comes upon her husband, older now, striated by wrinkles, but still unquestionably he. Plumed like a peacock, Menelaus stands atop the forecastle, speaking with a burly construction brigade, tutoring them in the proper placement of the impalement stakes. A handsome man, she decides, much like the warrior on the condom boxes. She can see why she picked him over Sthenelos, Euryalos, and her other beaus.

  As the workers set off to plant their spiky groves, Helen saunters up behind Menelaus and taps his shoulder.

  “Hi,” she says.

  He was always a wan fellow, but now his face loses whatever small quantity of blood it once possessed.

  “Helen?” he says, gasping and blinking like a man who’s just been doused with a bucket of slop. “Is that you?”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve, er … aged.”

  “You too, sweetheart.”

  He pulls off his plumed helmet, stomps his foot on the forecastle, and says, angrily, “You ran out on me.”

  “Yes. Quite so.”

  “Trollop.”

  “Perhaps.” Helen adjusts her greaves. “I could claim I was bewitched by laughter-loving Aphrodite, but that would be a lie. The fact is, Paris knocked me silly. I’m crazy about him. Sorry.” She runs her desiccated tongue along her parched lips. “Have you anything to drink?”

  Dipping a hollow gourd into his private cistern, Menelaus offers her a pint of fresh water. “So what brings you here?”

  Helen receives the ladle. Setting her boots wide apart, she steadies herself against the roll of the incoming tide and takes a greedy gulp. At last she says, “I wish to give myself up.”

  “What?”

  “I want to go home with you.”

  “You mean—you think our marriage deserves another chance?”

  “No, I think all those infantrymen out there deserve to live. If this war is really being fought to retrieve me, then consider the job done.” Tossing the ladle aside, Helen holds out her hands, palms turned upward as if she’s testing for raindrops. “I’m yours, hubby. Manacle my wrists, chain my feet together, throw me in the brig.”

  Against all odds, defying all logos, Menelaus’s face loses more blood. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” he says.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “This siege, Helen—there’s more to it than you suppose.”

  “Don’t jerk me around, lord of all Lakedaimon, asshole. It’s time to call it quits.”

  The Spartan king stares straight at her chest, a habit she’s always found annoying. “Put on a bit of weight, eh, darling?”

  “Don’t change the subject.” She lunges toward Menelaus’s scabbard as if to goose him, but instead draws out his sword. “I’m deadly serious: if Helen of Troy is not permitted to live with herself—she pantomimes the act of suicide—“then she will die with herself.”

  “Tell you what,” says her husband, taking his weapon back. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll go to my brother and suggest he arrange a truce with your father-in-law.”

  “He’s not my father-in-law. There was never a wedding.”

  “Whatever. The point is, your offer has merit, but it must be discussed. We shall all meet face-to-face, Trojans and Achaeans, and talk it out. As for now, you’d best return to your lover.”

  “I’m warning you—I shall abide no more blood on my hands, none but my own.”

  “Of course, dear. Now please go back to the citadel.”

  At least he listened, Helen muses as she crosses the weatherworn deck of the Arkadia. At least he didn’t tell me not to worry my pretty little head about it.

  “Here comes the dull part,” says whiny-tongued Damon.

  “The scene with all the talking,” adds smart-mouthed Daphne.

  “Can you cut it a bit?” my son asks.

  “Hush,” I say, smoothing out Damon’s coverlet. “No interruptions,” I insist. I slip Daphne’s papyrus doll under her arm. “When you have your own children, you can edit the tale however you wish. As for now, listen carefully. You might learn something.”

  By the burbling, tumbling waters of the River Simois, beneath the glowing orange avatar of the moon goddess Artemis, ten aristocrats are gathered around an oaken table in the purple tent of Ilium’s high command, all of them bursting with opinions on how best to deal with this Helen situation, this peace problem, this Trojan hostage crisis. White as a crane, a truce banner flaps above the heads of the two kings, Priam from the high city, Agamemnon from the long ships. Each side has sent its best and/or brightest. For the Trojans: brainy Panthoos, mighty Paris, invincible Hector, and Hiketaon the scion of Ares. For the Achaean cause: Ajax the berserker, Nestor the mentor, Menelaus the cuckold, and wily, smiling Odysseus. Of all those invited, only quarrelsome Achilles, sulking in his tent, has declined to appear.

  Panthoos rises, rubs his foam-white beard, and sets his scepter on the table. “Royal captains, gifted seers,” the old Trojan begins, “I believe you will concur when I say that, since this siege was laid, we have not faced a challenge of such magnitude. Make no mistake: Helen means to take our war away from us, and she means to do so immediately.”

  Gusts of dismay waft through the tent like a wind from the underworld.

  “We can’t quit now,” groans Hector, wincing fiercely.

  “We’re just getting up to speed,” wails Hiketaon, grimacing greatly.

  Agamemnon steps down from his throne, carrying his scepter like a spear. “I have a question for Prince Paris,” he says. “What does your mistress’s willingness to return to Argos say about the present state of your relationship?”

  Paris strokes his jowls and replies, “As you might surmise, noble King, my feelings for Helen are pr
edicated on requitement.”

  “So you won’t keep her in Pergamos by force?”

  “If she doesn’t want me, then I don’t want her.”

  At which point slug-witted Ajax raises his hand. “Er, excuse me. I’m a bit confused. If Helen is ours for the asking, then why must we continue the war?”

  A sirocco of astonishment arises among the heroes.

  “Why?” gasps Panthoos. “Why? Because this is Troy, that’s why. Because we’re kicking off Western Civilization here, that’s why. The longer we can keep this affair going—the longer we can sustain such an ambiguous enterprise—the more valuable and significant it becomes.”

  Slow-synapsed Ajax says, “Huh?”

  Nestor has but to clear his throat and every eye is upon him. “What our adversary is saying—may I interpret, wise Panthoos?” He turns to his Trojan counterpart, bows deferentially, and, receiving a nod of assent, speaks to Ajax. “Panthoos means that, if this particular pretext for war—restoring a woman to her rightful owner—can be made to seem reasonable, then any pretext for war can be made to seem reasonable.” The mentor shifts his fevered stare from Ajax to the entire assembly. “By rising to this rare and precious occasion, we shall open the way for wars of religion, wars of manifest destiny—any equivocal cause you care to name.” Once again his gaze alights on Ajax. “Understand, sir? This is the war to inaugurate war itself. This is the war to make the world safe for war!”

  Ajax frowns so vigorously his visor falls down. “All I know is, we came for Helen, and we got her. Mission accomplished.” Turning to Agamemnon, the berserker lifts the visor from his eyes. “So if it’s all the same to you, Majesty, I’d like to go home before I get killed.”