Dreamers

by James Gunn

“It is. It's nothing at all like this life we live within our towers, the towers no one attacks. Their world is open to the sky. The rain beats in upon them; the summer heat bakes them. Their food spoils if they don't eat it quickly. They live close to nature. Their life is real. And the importance of all the fighting and the brutality—artistically, anyway—is that it's about a woman. Thousands of warriors fighting one of the world's great wars—all for a single woman!"

  “And Helen,” Zoe asked, touching her own blonde hair with an unconscious appeal, “is she real, too?"

  Samuel's eyes grew distant. “As real as you,” he said. He could have said, as truthfully, “more real,” but it wouldn't have mattered. When he looked at the bed again, she was gone, and he did not know when she had left, and he had only the faint recollection that she was crying.

  * * * *

  Paris must be put to death at once, or Troy will perish!

  Better that Troy shall fall than that my wonderful son should die.

  The lines of battle are drawn up on the plain of Troy. The Achaeans have marched swiftly from the ships. Their feet and the hooves of their horses and the wheels of their chariots have raised a cloud of dust as dense as mist, and we have gone forth to meet them through all the gates of Ilium. I counseled the wisdom of defending our walls from within, but Hector, as always, considered that the advice of a coward. Moreover, he said, Iris, the messenger of Zeus, had appeared to him in the guise of Priam's son, Polites, and told him to lead our forces into battle.

  Maybe Polites is a little off in the head, too, I grumbled to myself.

  Hector is an honest man, a lion in combat, and a man of honor in peace, but I don't think he is too bright. A man cannot fight the gods, he says. “Fate is a thing that no man born of woman, whether coward or hero, can escape. No man is going to send me down to Hades before my time.” And all that sort of thing.

  He says he would be ashamed to appear before the Trojan men and the Trojan ladies in their trailing gowns if he shrinks from the battle like a coward. Sure, he believes that Ilium is doomed, but he fights on with a kind of blind courage that I honor, though I do not understand it.

  Still my sympathies go out to these men on either side who are ready to stab and hack each other into bloody meat for honor's sake, while I am ready to fly back to Ilium and Helen's arms, as little afraid of being thought a coward as they are of pain and death.

  In spite of all this I relish the murmur of the Trojans behind me and the voices that call me “godlike” as I step from the forefront of the Trojan ranks. A panther's skin is on my back, a curved bow and a bronze sword are slung from my shoulders, and I brandish two bronze-headed spears in my hand. Godlike indeed I look and feel as I challenge to single duel any one of the Achaeans.

  I do not understand what has provoked me to such rashness.

  When I see Menelaus step down from his chariot, eager to get at the man who has wronged him, all my courage leaks away. I know that this is a dream and all these savages are only the dream-flesh my sleeping mind has given to the bare bones of myth and history.

  What do I have to fear? But against my will and better judgment I slip back into the Trojan lines, trying to pretend that no one has accepted my challenge, until Hector confronts me.

  “You sick fool,” he said. “Are you nothing but a pretty face? Why were you ever born? Why didn't our mother, Hecabe, kill you that day? Why didn't we kill you before your wedding day? Far better to die than to disgrace us all and make yourself an object of contempt. You're nothing but a girl-crazy seducer. I can't believe that you're the man who sailed off with a crew of friends, abducted a beautiful woman from a far-off land and warlike family, and brought a curse to your father, to the city, to the whole people. And now you're too cowardly to stand up to the man you wronged."

  I looked at his square-jawed face and his shining helmet—no one could have counted the hours Andromache spent polishing it—and I recall that he was always bigger and better than me at sports and battle. Except for that one time when I came to the games at Ilium, an unknown herdsman, and beat them all. Priam's sons, Hector and Deiphobus included, would have killed me in their shame and envy, but Agelaus, the king's herdsman, who had raised me as his own son, rushed forward, shouting, “Your majesty, this is your long-lost son.” That's the way it happens in myths. Because of the prophecy, the priests still wanted to kill me, but Priam wouldn't hear of it.

  I could tell Hector that he's had it easy, being raised at court, trained in combat and the ways of warriors. He wasn't cursed before he was born, taken to a hilltop to die, suckled by a she-bear, and raised among cattle. I could tell him that I knew more about dung than honor, but he wouldn't understand. Instead I say, “You're right. You're always right when it comes to matters of war and spirit. But you mustn't reproach me for the things Aphrodite gave me. The gifts of the gods should never be despised, even if they aren't what we might ask for. I'll tell you what—if I'm going to fight Menelaus, let's arrange it so that we fight for Helen and her wealth. Winner take all."

  Hector likes the idea. He steps forward to arrange it with the Achaeans, while I tell myself that this is the way to end it. I will kill off Menelaus. If the Achaeans are honorable men—and honor means more to them than life—they will sail away, and I can enjoy Helen in peace.

  While sacrificing to the gods, Tyndareus overlooked Aphrodite, who took her revenge by making his three daughters—Clytemnestra, Timandra, and Helen—notorious for their adulteries.

  Before I am quite ready, I am standing in my armor between the two battle ranks, and Menelaus is not far away. Too close, in fact. He is an older man, but his hair is still red; he is tall and broad, and his arms look as if they were molded in bronze.

  Hector and Odysseus have drawn lots from a helmet, and I won. I raise my spear, shake it in the air, and cast it with all my dreamlike strength, guiding it toward Menelaus as it falls. It strikes his round shield and pierces the layers of oxhide that cover it. The point almost reaches him—but is stopped by the bronze shield itself. I am shaken. I cannot believe that my will is so ineffectual.

  Then Menelaus casts. The spear hurtles through the air, and I will it away, but it strikes my shield anyway, pierces the oxhide, goes through the bronze, penetrates my breastplate. I can feel it tear the tunic beside my flank as I turn my body. As I am avoiding the spear, Menelaus is upon me with his sword. He strikes my helmet. I shatter his sword into four pieces. He grabs the horsehair crest of my helmet and drags me toward the Achaean lines. I am strangled by the embroidered strap that holds my helmet in place. I make it part.

  Menelaus hurls the helmet toward the Achaeans and turns to kill me with his spear, but I have had enough of this. I will myself back to Helen. She looks at me, unsurprised, and tells me she wishes I had died there on the battlefield, killed by the great warrior who had been her husband. She reminds me of my boast that I am a better man than Menelaus and asks me to challenge him again. Or maybe I shouldn't, she says, lest I fall to his spear.

  “That's enough,” I tell her. “Menelaus won; I don't know why.” Perhaps, I thought, I didn't want this dream to end so soon. An artist has to trust his subconscious. “You're always blaming the gods for this and that, your mother's pregnancy, your own adulteries—blame Athene for Menelaus's victory. Maybe next time Apollo or Aphrodite will help me, and I'll win. But let us leave war to the fools. Love is the only game we know. Being in battle like this, being so close to death, I've never wanted you as much as I do now, not even the first time when I carried you off from Sparta and we spent the night on the island of Cranaë, drunk with love in each other's arms. I've never been so much in love with you or wanted you so much."

  Even as I speak, I lead Helen toward the wooden bed and the moments that are as close to paradise as either of us will ever know.

  * * * *

  “How long was I asleep?” Samuel asked the console, his voice ragged with weariness.

  “Eleven hours and thirty-three minutes,” the conso
le said. It spoke in a woman's voice, husky and soft. He would have to have it changed, Samuel thought. Every woman's voice reminded him that it was not Helen's. But he wouldn't do it now. He was too tired.

  He sagged in his chair, feeling as if he had been sick for a long time. “Am I ill?” he asked.

  “Generally you are in good physical condition,” the console said, “but your metabolism has been speeded up lately, and you may be feeling the aftereffects of too much adrenaline and too much soporific."

  The console was programmed to keep him asleep during the progress of an episode but to wake him periodically for conscious contemplation; if he stayed under too long, he might become no better than a poppet. It was good that he had been awakened: eleven and a half hours! That was three times as long as he had ever dreamed before.

  Eleven and a half hours, and he felt too tired to move, as if he really had been battling Menelaus and consoling himself in Helen's passionate arms. Dreams didn't usually affect him like this. Besides, dream time was much faster than real time. A few minutes was long enough to dream an episode that seemed to last for hours. In half a day he could dream a lifetime.

  No wonder he was tired. What he needed was sleep without dreams—or at least with only the rapid-eye-movement dreams that people seem to find necessary to work out their waking conflicts. What he needed was to sleep without dreaming of Helen.

  His muscles tightened at the thought of Helen. He had dreamed of her and the world of the Trojans three times now; it was more than he had ever dreamed of anything, and he was not a casual dreamer. He was thorough, a craftsman, working out a dream until it was right. But it did not do to rework dreams too often; they lost sparkle, spontaneity, became artificial, brittle, refined beyond experience into art for art's sake. Leave that for the aesthetes.

  He was not one of those. He dreamed too vividly for that—in color and with a full range of sounds, from the twittering of birds and the hum of insects to the rush of wind and the distant rumble of thunder. When he was at his best, he even dreamed tactilely—the thought brought to his fingertips the incomparable feel of Helen's skin—and with a wide gamut of odors and tastes that he continually worked to expand.

  He was like Homer himself, he thought, recording a complete imaginative human experience out of myth. Did Homer fall in love with Helen?

  It was too much. He was not shaping the dream but living it. Each time, he relived the experience from its beginning, like an apprentice dreamer unable to control his sleeping mind.

  Helen comes to me as she came that first night at Cranaë....

  Each time the experience was the same, unchanged by repetition, except that he progressed a little further into it, as if it were already complete and he was just unveiling it scene by scene.

  He felt almost like those savages—trapped in a pattern of actions woven by the Fates, tormented at the whim of the too-human gods, and yet, like Achilles, slashing his predestined way through the resistant world to his own ... death.

  Brightness falls from the air,

  Queens have died young and fair;

  Dust hath closed Helen's eyes.

  Death? Did that await him?

  He rejected the notion. It was the product of his weariness. He was tired and depressed, but he was, after all, a dreamer. He shaped dreams for others, and none of them ended in the dreamer's death. He was not that kind of dreamer. There were some, he knew, who dreamed that sort of thing, and there were some death-wish poppets who went in for it. But he dreamed too vividly for that; death might not be just a dream. Danger and the threat of destruction might add savor. But not death.

  He looked around the empty room. He lacked the strength even to order the bed lowered into the floor and sanitized. The room was sanitary, sterile, barren. The furniture that appeared and disappeared, cleaned in their niches for their next use. The lift shaft and the drop shaft, sealed now against intrusion.

  There was the lavatory, spotless, empty; this time he had been too tired even to refresh himself. He felt grimy and sticky, but it was mostly imagination. And the little kitchenette. How long had it been since he had eaten? All he remembered now was half-cooked mutton and ox thigh wrapped in fat; in his dream he had eaten ravenously, but now the thought of food made him feel a bit sick. He didn't want to eat.

  This room was his home. This was reality. Comfortable, convenient, safe. He came to it with a sense of relief. And yet, he could not help comparing it with Helen's world, with all its crowded humanity, its crude vitality, its wind and rain, its cold and heat, its passions and fears, its dirt, disease, and never-ending stenches. Unendurable—and unforgettable.

  But he could not return to that. Not soon. He could not let himself be drawn so completely into that world.

  ... the most beautiful woman in the world...

  He looked at the console, smooth, blood-red plastic over mysterious and complicated apparatus, and he wondered why he had overlooked it in his inventory. This was the central fact of his existence and his art.

  He roused himself to ask, “Have there been any messages while I was dreaming?” Somehow he would drag himself back to the real world.

  “A woman called. She identified herself as Zoe. She called several times."

  Samuel sighed. “Let me hear them."

  The first message said that she never wanted to see or speak to Samuel again. The second one said to disregard the first message and ended, “Samuel, I've got to talk to you.” The third one became hysterical and demanded that the console wake Samuel. “Samuel, Samuel,” Zoe shouted, “you've got to talk to me.” And then, in a pleading voice, she said, “Call me. Please call me."

  The console waited a decent interval for some response from Samuel. When there was none, it went on, “There is also a message from a man named Regi."

  ... her face like alabaster lit from within...

  “Let me hear it,” Samuel said, as if his palms were pressed to his ears.

  “Samuel, old man, isn't it about time for that commission of mine to be completed? You said you'd get right on it, and it's been several days now. Never been this slow before."

  ... her eyes dark with mystery, her body smooth and youthful...

  “Is there an answer?” the console asked.

  “No,” Samuel said. “But if Regi calls again, tell him that it isn't ready yet. The dream isn't finished."

  ... her passion and skills in lovemaking as great as those of Aphrodite herself...

  Samuel pulled himself to his feet as if drawn by an attraction stronger than his will, dragged his feet toward the round bed, and arranged his body on it, arms and legs outstretched for the needles, in the position for dreaming.

  * * * *

  If Paris takes this voyage to Sparta, Troy will burn.

  The battle is not going the way it should.

  Crazy Pandarus broke the truce. He shot an arrow at Menelaus. If he had been successful, perhaps the war would have ended there, but the arrow hit Menelaus's belt buckle and only grazed the skin. Pious fools will spread stories that Athene saved the king's life, perhaps even that she persuaded Pandarus to break the truce, but Pandarus was dumb enough to do it without prompting.

  Later, as the battle wages back and forth across the plain, Pandarus redeems his folly by wounding Diomedes in the right shoulder—and by his own death. His death is unpleasant. Diomedes’ spear strikes him on the nose beside the eye and passes through his teeth, cuts off his tongue at the roots, and comes out the base of his chin before he crashes from Aeneas's chariot into the dust.

  All death is unpleasant here; nothing is bloodless and romantic. Diomedes rages through the Trojan ranks in his chariot, slaughtering our best warriors in spite of everything I can do. At times like these I almost believe in the gods myself. But what gods would glory in the deeds of these savages?

  The battle madness grips them, and they kill each other in bestial ways, with spear and sword and rock, through eyes and cheeks and throat, through breast and flank and thigh. Blo
od runs across the land in red rivulets, severed heads tumble through the battle lines, limbs lie in the mud still clutching for life, entrails strew the field like blind bloody worms.

  They kill the injured and those who plead for life, their arms wrapped around the knees of men panting with the blood lust. And yet, crazed with killing, the victors never forget spoils. They pause to steal horses and chariots; they strip corpses of their armor as they lie in blood-thickened mud, even while spears fall around them and armed men charge to prevent the dishonoring of the dead.

  The vultures cannot wait for the battle to stop before they land to thrust their naked necks into the carrion, and the dogs on either side dash in to snatch at bloody scraps as soon as the fray sways in another direction. The stench is almost unendurable even within the walls of Ilium, where I lie with Helen, conscious of the battle, aware of everything that goes on as if with another part of me. Am I not the dreamer? I am unwilling to risk myself again so soon, and Helen is more desirable than ever, but I see men die and I sense their pain as if it were mine. Surely that is enough. What more can they ask of me?

  I see Aeneas—son, they say, of Anchises and Aphrodite—defend the corpse of Pandarus from the giant Diomedes. I see Diomedes raise overhead a rock I think no man can lift, and I feel it shatter the hip joint of Aeneas. But he does not fall. He must not die. He must live, I sense, for another purpose, perhaps to save Ilium and me.

  Aeneas is destined to survive and to save the House of Dardanus from extinction. The great Aeneas shall be king of Troy and shall be followed by his children's children in the time to come.

  I remove him from the battle as I had removed myself, leaving Diomedes to wonder what god has intervened. I will the hip healed and send a phantom Aeneas to fight upon the plain lest the Trojans be discouraged.