by James Gunn
Sarpedon, king of Lycia and son, the pious say, of Zeus and Laodamia, kills Tlepolemus. I see Sarpedon's spear pass through his neck, but I feel the spear of Tlepolemus pass through Sarpedon's left thigh.
Hector finally comes for me, all dirt and bloodstains, with the stink of battle on him. I am sitting in my bedroom looking at my armor, trying to make up my mind to return to the field. He restrains himself from hitting me. I am responsible for the battle, he tells me. Why am I sitting here dallying with Helen?
He is right, I say. Helen has been urging me to return, I tell him, and if he will only give me a moment, I will arm myself—or he can go on, and I will join him soon.
Helen also scorns me. She knows my weaknesses, but she cannot stop loving me anyway. “I'm sorry I wasn't killed the day I was born,” she says. “Then none of this would have happened. But if it had to happen, I wish I'd found a better husband than this poor excuse for a man. But here we are, because of my shame and his wickedness. Things can only get worse. People not yet born will sing about how the gods tormented us."
So we go out to fight again, Hector and I, to kill and feel the nearness of death, and it is almost as sweet as making love. But our brother Helenus says that Apollo and Athene have decided to stop the battle for now and let Hector fight a duel with an Achaean champion. Hector is delighted. He steps between the two armies and shouts out his challenge.
At first no one accepts the challenge. Then Menelaus begins to put on his armor. Agamemnon stops him. Finally nine Achaeans volunteer, and they draw lots. Big Ajax wins. I think even Hector's savage heart pauses. They battle across the space between the armies, first with spears, then rocks, and finally swords until the sun casts long shadows across the plain from the hills bordering the Aegean. They agree to call it a standoff and exchange gifts, as if this were some game they were playing.
As the Achaeans return to their reed-thatched huts beside the hollow ships and we return inside the unbreached walls of Ilium, there is feasting and sacrifices to the gods.
In the meeting at the doors of my father's palace in the acropolis, Antenor voices the thought that coils in the hearts of all Trojans. “Let's give Helen back to the sons of Atreus along with all her property. What we are doing isn't right, and if we persist, we will all be destroyed."
At the thought of losing Helen my body turns cold. I leap to my feet. “I resent anybody giving my wife away. I'm not going to give her up. That's final. But I will return all the treasure I brought home from Argos. I'll even toss in something of my own.
Old Priam, too, won't give Helen up. “In the morning,” he says, “we will send Idaeus to present Paris's offer to Agamemnon and Menelaus. He will also suggest a truce so that both sides can burn their dead."
They make a great deal of death here for all the care they show for the dying. I think sometimes that they value the dead more than the living.
Nobody asks Helenus or sends to learn from Cassandra how the sons of Atreus will respond. Maybe they don't need prophecies to tell them what is in the hearts of the Achaeans. They will agree to a truce to burn the dead, but they will not call off their siege for half the gold in Ilium, no, not for Helen either. They are confident now that they will storm the walls of the citadel, that all the gold and all the women will be theirs, including Helen, and before that they will have all the lovely killing.
They do not reckon with my power over these events, nor with what unslakable desire I return to Helen.
* * * *
Samuel stood in the lobby of his building and looked at the murals on the walls depicting the victory of humanity over the symbolic representations of war, famine, disease, and death. He had been unable any longer to endure the womblike solitude of his room. That only reinforced his surrender to a persistent dream. He needed to breathe unconditioned air, to see unadjusted colors, to feel the neutrality of unattuned spaces.
Others found these areas cold or terrifying, but he was neither a poppet nor a hermit. He was an artist. He had created more than a hundred dreams. Everything was material for his art, and spaciousness, coldness, neutrality, hostility, danger were as good as enclosure, warmth, personalization, friendliness, safety.
No one else was in the uncluttered sweep of space encircling the central shafts. He had not expected anyone. He stood in the middle of the yellow carpet, tired and alone but pleased that he had fought his obsession and won. He turned slowly, thinking that he could succeed now. He could do anything. He could go through corridors to twenty-four other lobbies just like this one; he could even go through the bronze door, unused now for at least a generation, to judge by its appearance, to the world outside the urban center. But he didn't. That was material for another dream perhaps. Instead he went up the lift shaft to the seventy-fifth floor.
The room seemed almost twice as large as the lobby below, lacking, as it did, a central column. Here the carpeting was red instead of yellow. The floor was set with tables and chairs, but the room was as empty as the lobby. The fading light of sunset streamed through the windows on his left, while to his right the darkening sky was lined with red as if the claws of some celestial cat had raked across it, leaving it to bleed.
He knew what windows were, even though these were the only ones in the entire building, and he knew about the sky and the land. He had been here before, and he had dreamed them, too, as vividly as if they were real, and he walked toward the sunset and looked out upon the land, unafraid, and saw the fields below, carved out with machinelike precision from the soil; and fading into the distance, set here and there, other urban centers silhouetted against the western sky.
We have tamed the savage land, he thought, and the savages within us. We have humanized the earth, but everywhere we have cut ourselves off from those direct experiences with life that made us human: hunger, disease, pain, loss, and even death itself, which seldom comes unbidden. We know them now only through artists of experience like me, who imagine how these things must be and shape them into meanings that the computers code into subtle proteins and are finally consumed by adult fetuses in their mechanical wombs, sharing someone else's dream of distant passions they can never know.
And he stayed against the high window until the sky turned black and the stars came out. We might have had the stars, he thought. That was man's oldest dream. Instead we opted for the dream itself. How long can we subsist on dreams? Perhaps only until the dreamers are all gone—or consumed by their own dreams.
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam.
He left the top of the tower, consoled somehow by his knowledge that the world still existed outside these impenetrable walls, that his weariness with his world had not yet destroyed it all. He felt a kind of peace he had not known for what seemed like many cycles, and on an impulse he stopped at the commons on the thirty-fifth floor, not averse to the sight of his fellowman.
He almost turned back when he saw a kind of party in progress among the scattered tables, and then he decided that perhaps it was the company of his fellow human beings that he needed. They were all young. It was the young who wanted to dream together. Not yet removed from their adolescent identity problems, they seemed to need the reassurance of other identities around them. Later, like aging bears, they became content with their solitary dreams.
He didn't scoff. He had enjoyed their company until recently, and not just because, as he told himself, he wanted to stay close to his audience. He liked them. They were beautiful as only the innocent can be beautiful.
To his experienced eye the dream they shared seemed to be a fantasy. They floated, men and women, as if they were weightless, ethereal, bent on some otherworldly missions but tracing, as they went, some secret interrelationships between themselves. A midsummer night's dream, perhaps, with music by Mendelssohn, heard only by themselves. Here and there some of the group had separated from the rest to conduct some more intimate rites among themselves.
And there Samuel was surprised to discover a young woman seated apart from the
others. Even before he had recognized her, she had seen him and started toward him. It was Zoe. He turned to leave and then turned back.
“Samuel,” she said fondly. “I'm glad you came.” Her eyes searched his face with concern and compassion. “You don't look well.” She took his right hand in both of hers and held it to her breast.
He didn't try to retrieve his hand. “You haven't popped with the others."
“If you had noticed me more, you'd have seen that I seldom pop,” she said, pulling his hand closer. “Besides ... I'm still in love with you."
“Not that,” he said. He took his hand back. “You don't know what you're saying. I'm nobody to love. My life is my work. I can't love anybody."
She seemed not to hear his words. “What you need is something to take your mind off what's been bothering you lately. Diversion. People. A party. That's it. Let me have some people in to your place for a party. People like these. We'll work up something pleasant, something you'll like, I promise.” She gestured at the young people scattered around the room, oblivious of anyone else's presence.
“All right,” he said, anxious to get away now, filled with a sudden desire to return to Helen. “But say it—say you don't love me.
“I don't love you,” she said, but she smiled to show him she was lying.
* * * *
The Achaean fleet will be unable to sail from its windbound port at Aulis unless Agamemnon sacrifices his most beautiful daughter to Artemis.
The Achaeans have buried the bones of their dead in a single barrow in front of their black ships. On the barrow they have built a wall; in front of the wall they have dug a deep trench and planted the far side with stakes, as if they expect attack.
I suggest treachery. “Beware the Achaeans,” I say, and hear resonances I do not understand. But Hector is not devious, and he doesn't understand it in others. “We will attack,” he says, “for Zeus has determined that we will win today."
Why he is certain I don't know and am afraid to ask. I am beginning to fear that matters will not turn out the way I wish. But I push back the fear. I can control the events in my world, but why should I interfere now? Let my subconscious and the historic and poetic facts intertwine to shape a new masterpiece.
Apparently Hector is right. We cut our way through the Achaean troops. They flee before us. When they attempt to turn and fight, thunder rolls from the dark clouds hanging over Mount Ida, and as if at a signal from the gods they flee again.
I discover a joy to savagery that I have not appreciated until now. Victory surges through my veins as my arrows sink into the backs of terrified warriors or my spear bites deep into yielding flesh or my sword slices through skin, flesh, and bone and I feel hot blood spurt upon my hand.
We, too, suffer losses. Men fall on either side of me, men I have known, brothers. Hector loses two charioteers.
We fight until dark, until our arms grow weary with killing and our legs tremble from holding us up, but we reach the Achaean wall. The enemy is pinned inside. Hector calls a halt to the battle. We make camp to wait for dawn.
In spite of sentries, we sleep uneasily. The Achaeans are sly, and now they are desperate from their defeat. They would like to draw Achilles back into the battle. Agamemnon, at the urging of his leaders, is likely to promise him anything, gold, horses, women—even the one he took away—if Achilles will only save them from the Trojans.
In the morning I discover that I am right about the Achaeans. A couple of them sneaked out in the night and cut the throats of more than a dozen men, including Rhesus, the newly arrived king of the Thracians, and they stole his horses.
Troy will become invulnerable once the horses of Rhesus have eaten Trojan fodder and drunk the waters of the Scamander.
We renew the attack upon the enemy, who are penned inside their own stockade, their backs against the Hellespont. Dismounted from our chariots, we rush the gates, but the Achaeans are rested too and encouraged by the possibility that this may be their day for victory.
We are equally matched. Men fall on either side like tall trees toppling in the forest. But that sounds too clean and neat. Blood splatters, heads roll in the dirt, brains spatter the insides of helmets, and only a haze of dust raised in the air by scuffling feet keeps the sane from vomiting where they stand.
Today Agamemnon rages, forcing us back nearly to the Scaean Gate. He kills Trojan after Trojan, pausing each time to strip their armor as if he hadn't wealth enough in his hut and on his ships as well as in far-off Mycenae. The Achaeans are looters. They look on it as a way of keeping score, but it is mostly greed. They live on a basic level that admits no subtleties of behavior; for them life is fighting, looting, eating, drinking, and fornicating, in that order. Any alteration in that hierarchy of behavior is intolerable.
The Achaeans kill many Trojans today—even Hector barely escapes death when a spear glances off his helmet—but the battle swings to us once Coön wounds Agamemnon in the middle of his forearm with a spear. Hector slashes his way through the Achaeans as Agamemnon withdraws. They retreat once more toward their ships.
This is Hector's day. He storms his way across the battlefront, but I, too, do damage with my arrows. I tell myself that we may drive the Achaeans from the Troad today and, despite all the prophecies of doom, send them scattered to their kingdoms or to Hades. I realize that I may miss their presence nearby, the constant menace they provide, the darkness that defines the light, the siege that gives Troy meaning; but today I will kill them all if I can and regret it tomorrow if I must.
When we reach the trench in front of the Achaean wall, Hector ranges back and forth, exhorting us to cross the trench and scale the wall, but we see an eagle fly in front of us, from the left. He carries a blood-red snake in his talons. The snake writhes and bites the eagle on the breast. The eagle cries out in pain, drops the snake among the troops, and flies off downwind.
“Zeus speaks to us,” Polydamas says. He is a notorious barracks lawyer and a superstitious fool as well. “This is a portent that even if we breach the Achaean wall, we will have to retreat. They will kill many of us, and we will have to leave the bodies behind."
For once Hector resists his pious credulity, or maybe my skepticism touches him. “The gods have confused your brain,” he says. “Zeus already has told me we are going to win today, and all the portents in the world won't change that. The flight of birds—to the right toward the morning sun or to the left into the sunset—all these are nonsense compared to the word of Zeus. Let's fight for Troy. That's the only omen worth anything. You always hang back from the battle, Polydamas, but I warn you now: If you don't fight this time, I'll put this spear through you myself."
With a great roar, as if from the throat of Ares himself, Hector's company attacks the wall. I do not will it—or even think of it—but at that moment a gusty wind raises the dust and blows it straight into the eyes of the Achaeans.
Let them think it the work of Zeus.
* * * *
The guiltless boys and girls floated around Samuel's room like flower petals sailing on a gentle breeze. They wore no clothing, and their nakedness was without shame. They were innocent and beautiful; Samuel couldn't deny that. Their beauty almost hurt his eyes as he watched them dance and make love wherever the notion found two of them within reach. There were many of them in the room, more than Samuel could count, but they were not so much a crowd of individuals as a repetition of pairs.
He seldom had trouble identifying dreams; they were his business, after all. But he couldn't identify this one. All he was certain of was that he hated it. It was time wasted from the world of Ilium, time when he might have been with Helen; he was sorry he had agreed to let Zoe invite her friends to his room, and when they arrived he had not been courageous enough to send them away.
They were too young. He had not thought so once, he knew. He had admired their smooth, young bodies, their simple joy in dreams, their innocence and the way it had sometimes lightened his darkness. He had used them
—to obtain temporary absolution for his guilt, to forget for the moment his pursuit of the unattainable—and they didn't know it. Or if they knew, they didn't care.
Or they were not as innocent as they seemed. He did not think he was ever that young; he couldn't remember ever being guilt-free. Even in the crèche where they all grew up, nurtured by machines and volunteers who held them when they wanted love and reassurance, he had wondered why he was far from the father and mother who had brought him casually into this tidy world. The others never wondered, or if they did they would not admit it when he asked. Finally the volunteers made him stop because he was disturbing the others. Only he, it seemed, felt that he deserved the exclusive love of two adults and that there was something wrong with him because it had been denied him.
Perhaps that was what had made him a dreamer, that feeling of guilt, of worthlessness. Or maybe it all came later—in this world of dreams, all memories are suspect—when he had begun to dream himself and he had realized that other social arrangements were possible, even, with all their problems, desirable. But they were incompatible with life inside the urban centers.
For a time he had been satisfied that his darker self had made his position possible. His guilt had made him a dreamer, one of the central figures in his world, admired beyond others, privileged, welcome in any society. His suffering had made him famous, and he believed that it was worth it. But lately he had become bored with all of it, as if there were something more real, more vivid, more intensely satisfying than this. Perhaps that is what had pushed him into the world of Ilium, with barbaric warriors outside the walls lusting for his blood and Helen's guilty arms waiting for his lust.
“Do you recognize it?” Zoe asked.
She was standing beside him. Samuel had not noticed her approach. Like the rest she was naked, but she wore her nakedness with a consciousness of its effect on him that made it seem provocative, sinful. He was determined to have nothing more to do with Zoe, but he couldn't help being moved by her beauty. She was youthful and smooth, an exciting contrast of pink and cream and shadow, a face that was good to look at, with blue eyes that looked adoration at him, and his hands and lips remembered the touch of her cool flesh. Any other time he would have fallen in love with her for a period or a cycle, but he was already in love, in love beyond redemption.
