by John Shirley
Her doom, and that of the Achaeans. Her kindred and countrymen, her people.
The fierce competition by her suitors had been only the beginning. There would have been bitter strife then, had not clever Odysseus suggested that those whose suit did not succeed swear a pledge to defend the rights of whichever of them won her. Yet it was that selfsame pledge causing these years of wretched violence.
The doom of the Achaeans.
And of the Trojans. Who blamed her, the cause of all these their troubles, bringer of war to their shores.
She was Helen, doom of men.
Doom of men, bane of widows, orphan-maker.
For Paris. All for Paris, and her own weak-willed desires.
How many deaths to be laid at her silver-sandaled feet? How large a basin to hold the tears of wives and children, and mothers weeping for their sons?
Whenever she tried to leave, Paris always somehow stopped her. Never by force, always with reason and persuasion. What would she do, he’d ask, caressing her lovely hair, her cheek. Return to Menelaus, in humble contrition, and beg his forgiveness? If not that, where would she go? The pride of Sparta and its king had been so stung, Menelaus would follow her to the ends of the earth. Or beyond it, should she do something so foolish as to drink of poison, or hurl herself from a high tower … did she think Tartarus itself would be far enough to escape? Would death stop her embittered husband from pursuing her even there, past the River Styx’s shores?
And she, Paris inevitably told her, was made for life, which was for the living, for the pleasures of the mortal world. For love-making and luxury, and basking in drowsing passion’s warm after-glow. Not for the gloomy Underworld, not to be a bleak, unhappy shade.
He would say these things, and, next she knew, they’d be once more in his great carven wood bed together. Only later, long after the heat-sweat cooled and Helen was alone again, did the dark thoughts return.
She was often alone, when Paris was not with her. The men of Troy admired or desired her, their women were envious and resentful, and while she was never shunned or sneered at, in all, they avoided her.
This was not her city. This was not her home. These were not her people.
The gods worshiped and offered sacrifice in the temples of Ithilium were not her familiar gods. Within these walls, there was no place for Zeus, gatherer of clouds, or Hera, Olympus’ queen. Apollo, the striker from afar, was not welcome here. Grey-eyed Athena and Aphrodite of the milk-white shoulders received no wind-borne smoke and savor, no libations of wine and oil.
No.
Not here.
Here were darker offerings made, black beasts cut and eaten raw. Here were unspeakable rituals held when strange stars wheeled in moon-dark skies. Here were guttural chants raised to Dagon of the deep trenches, to Azathoth the blind and idiot lord of all things, to yellow-robed Hastur and that she-goat of the greasy teats, Shub-Niggurath with her thousand young.
And what blood ran in their veins, these people of Troy, these sons and daughters of Ithilium?
Helen shuddered to think of it.
She had heard but not heeded, known but not believed. Not until Paris brought her to his father’s palace and she’d seen the aged Trojans in their grotesque varieties. Some families seemed untouched. In others, the changes came only with advancing years. They spoke of minglings, and immortality, and chaos all-consuming, and gifts of glistening gold from great cities in the dark depths.
Chief among them were the king and queen, Priam, tamer of shoggoths, and Hecuba, his wife. She, fierce devourer of livers, went with her brow opened into a bony, thorny crown and her bent legs cloven-hoofed beneath the hem of her rich and trailing garments. Priam himself was hunched of stature, thick of body, and scaled of skin, his broad mouth almost lipless and eyes bulging.
It was Priam who, led cloaked in deception by crawling Nyarlathotep, ventured by stealth into the camp of the Achaeans to sway the heart and mind of Achilles, begging that Hector’s body be returned.
So it was done, and the days allotted for funeral games and feasts were to be let to pass in truce. The dead of both sides were fetched back from the fields of battle, where they lay dirt-covered and thick with dried blood, so that it had to be washed from them and their identities be known. Throughout high-walled Ithilium, corpse-pyres smoldered, and likewise did they smolder beside the beach-drawn ships.
And, those days, Helen, alone but for a handmaiden, walked here and there about the city. She thought of Menelaus, whom she had not loved but who was the better man than Paris by far … Paris, shrinking in doglike cowardice from strong confrontations.
She thought of the half-grown daughter she’d left behind with barely a backward glance, pretty Hermione, who would be by now a woman in her own right, of marriageable age. She thought of her sister, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife. And their brave brothers, Castor and Pollux of the twin likenesses … had they come to the war? She had not seen them from the high walls, with her friends and kinsmen.
She thought of these things as she walked, and her heart was heavy.
Truce though there was, amid the games and feasting, fear held thick in the streets of Troy. The walls stood, but with brilliant Hector gone, Ithilium’s defender, how long could those walls withhold the onslaught of the Greeks?
Helen found herself wishing that the gods let it somehow fall soon. If only, in some or any way, she could hasten it along! Just to let this suffering trial at long last be at an end!
Then it was, in her wanderings, she glimpsed a face and form oddly familiar, and saw that it was crafty Odysseus, going in disguise to spy among the Trojans. She secretly approached him, and addressed him in winged words.
“Son of Laertes, equal to the gods in cleverness, are you come on behalf of Menelaus of the loud war-cry, my wedded husband, to retrieve me?”
He looked on her with kind sorrow and replied, “Fair Helen, loveliest of women, it is no longer for your lamentation that the Greek armies seek to destroy Ithilium. Menelaus, once your lord, would rather now bring you death with his own hands.”
She, tearful, inclined her head. “Then let him come and do it. I will part my robe for him and bare my breast, that he does not ruin the fine cloth with sharp bronze.”
The shaggy brows of Odysseus rose at that, and a wry smile curved his lips. “Such might, if nothing else, give him cause to reconsider. But, first of all, we must find some way to breach the high walls without much more loss of life. Too many good sons of the Achaeans have gone already to the dark houses of Hades.”
Helen caught at the mantle he wore. “Hear me, then, Odysseus of the devious mind.”
They spoke a while in hushed urgency, devising between them a plan. Then did Odysseus, wiliest of men, go back to the hollow ships, where he would call together an assembly and present that plan to them.
And then did Helen return to Priam’s palace, where she found golden-skinned Paris waiting with desire much upon him. She went again to his bed, surrendering to his eager lusts.
The alloted truce-days passed, twelve of them in all. On the morning of the thirteenth, when rosy-fingered Dawn scattered light across the sky, she revealed not the armies of the enemy standing shield-ranked and bristling with spears. The far-flung plains were empty, the swift ships gone from the beach-strands of the Hellespont.
And there, in their place, stood a most majestic offering. Great and tall and wide it was, a massive thing, immense and hulking, built of wood and tar-covered, dotted with myriad pustules of eyes, limbs protruding in profusion. The Trojans, seeing their foes absent and this great shoggoth they had left, marveled.
“Is it trick, or tribute?” they wondered.
“It is a gift,” Helen said. “A gift from the Greeks to honor their valiant foes, to placate the gods of Ithilium, and to beg that Dagon of the deep-sea trenches grant them safe passage home.”
This overjoyed them. They brought the shoggoth through the gates, and garland-bedecked it. The maidens of the city danced
in rings around it. The wine flowed all that day in revelry and celebration.
That night, as they slept and dreamed their wine-sodden dreams, the belly of the shoggoth opened. Hidden within it, as Helen and Odysseus had planned, were thirty of the best Achaean warriors. Unstoppable Diomedes emerged, and Philoctetes of the stinging arrows, and Idomeneus, and Anticlus, and Neoptolemus, the young son of famed Achilles.
They sprung the gates, admitting the full strength of their armies, who’d sailed their ships only beyond the headland to wait in hiding out of sight.
The Greeks fell upon the Trojans, slaughtering them in their beds. The sons of Priam were cut down. Their wives were seized as concubines, their children hurled howling to their deaths. Priam himself, Neoptolemus killed at the very altar of Azathoth. Paris, from a safe distance, slew Achilles with an arrow to the heel, laced with poison given him by the Black Goat of the Woods. But Paris was himself in turn shot by the bow of Philoctetes.
In the panic, Helen waited for her fate to be decided. Menelaus, wrathful, found her in the courtyard by Priam’s palace. He drew his bronze blade to stab her through the heart. So Helen, as she had told Odysseus she would, parted her robe, baring her fair breasts to him.
“Strike quickly, if ever you loved me,” she said to Menelaus.
The sight of her beauty so stunned him that his sword fell from his hand. He forgave, and spared her.
But, for the people of the city, no such mercy was to be had. The streets ran thick with their strange blood.
And Ithilium burned.
THE SINKING CITY
BY KONSTANTINE PARADIAS
The tiny, hard-limbed thing that I am using as a vessel is paddling in its wooden craft, beating furiously at the churning, frothing waters. It moves with the terrified speed of a creature that knows it is about to die, its thoughts churning in red-black fear.
My name is Robert Bendis, it keeps babbling in its mind. And this is all a dream, nothing but a dream.…
It fights me even now, as we reach the shores of R’lyeh, kicking and clawing against my grip on its mind. Its struggles have become fiercer now, more feral. The monkey that is its lower brain snarls and claws, screeching at me.
I have a wife, Denise it drones on. Two children: Randolf and Millward. Randolf is six, Millward is eight … it goes on, repeating names and numbers like a mantra. It has become the core of its thought-process, the center of its being.
No matter. It will be dead soon, after all. I will probably follow it into oblivion.
The vessel I am possessing reaches out its stocky, hairy arms as we reach the shores of R’lyeh and attempts to focus its eyes into a single coherent point. The shore is a mass of fused obsidian, the stone blossoming outward into dimensions that its brain cannot comprehend. To me, the rock-face appears like the roots of some strange plant-form, radiating from the shore in every possible direction, each branch festooned with wicked barbs. To the vessel, it seems like a whirling vortex without shape, beginning or end. It does not know in which direction it should steer the wooden craft that has led us here.
This is a dream it whimpers; I’m not seeing this. There is no shore, there is no sea. I am lying in my bed and no one will wake me.…
I keep trying to shift its perceptions, to make it see a fraction of what I see by tapping into its higher-brain functions. Its fight-or-flight instinct flares up, throwing me off. It is only moments before I reach down through its brain, deciding to risk a full lobotomy, that the vessel is finally distracted by the trail of blue-green fire above us, smashing its way past the invisible barrier of R’lyeh and setting its obsidian face ablaze.
To the vessel, the fire means divinity. To me, it is the sign that the Hierarchy has abandoned me and opted for the standard approach. The full frontal bombardment of R’lyeh, despite all indications toward the futility of this plan.
And I saw fire descend from the Heavens and a third of the trees and the crops were reduced to ash, it prays, thinking itself caught in the throes of some apocalyptic vision. And the damned, which dwelt upon the forsaken Earth, bore witness to it and suffered.
Jolting the movement centers of the vessel’s brain, I assume control of its arms, making it pick up the length of twined hemp with the knotted end in its arms. Before it has a chance to stop me, I move its arms in a clumsy fashion and toss it almost blindly. It latches on to a protrusion that appears to me like a polyp-claw. The vessel’s struggling helps to fasten the knot. We have reached the shores of R’lyeh.
Above us, the monolithic face of Cthulhu’s citadel turns at a downward-inward angle. The intricate murals (invisible to the vessel’s eyes) begin to flow like mercury, shifting their forms into long protruding spirals, many miles across. I hear the steady humming of unseen faith-generators as they begin to gather power through the collective prayer of the citadel’s denizens. Knowing what is about to follow, I force the vessel to jump into the waters. They burn like the heart of Cthugha himself, the heat affecting even my thought-form.
In the reaches above, the spirals begin to heat up, their brightness reaching the intensity of the furnace-heart of stars, before releasing their charge in a moment of quiet pandemonium. The sea around us parts. The super-heated air blisters the vessel’s skin and propels its body over the beach and to the shore. I feel its skin blister, its bones cracking as it crashes against (what appears to it) empty space. The bundle strapped on its back remains unharmed in its metal casing. Behind us, the charge has been released, its trajectories visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. I needn’t look out for the crashing cacophony of its impact to know that the city of Ponape (the frontal line of our assault) has been wiped from the face of the planet.
I am not hurt, this is not true pain. I am not in Hell, I’m only dreaming. I’m only dreaming and no one will wake me … it whimpers; then, looks at the white-red jagged edge protruding through the skin of its arm.
The vessel screams its hoarse cry as it looks at the bone protruding from the skin of its arm. Its terror and shock are too much for me to overcome, so I excite areas of its brain that stimulate fear. The vessel soils itself, but it is now more malleable. Before it has a chance to inspect its surroundings, I reach out into its remaining arm and make it slide the bone back into place. The vessel’s pain is too much for it to handle, so it blacks out. I shut off its higher-brain functions and assume command, forcing it to get up on its feet and lurch up the hewn obsidian staircase upon the face of R’lyeh.
We move through unknown corridors that exist in the direction known as vur-mat, which is the direction of inside, radiating outward. Scaling the angles and branches of the fractal architecture of Cthulhu’s citadel, I move in the manner that the oceanic vertebrates do through coral, although in a far less graceful manner. Around us, the slave-soldiers of Cthulhu, children of Dagon and Hydra, spill out from the parapets, riding on their writhing, hissing mounts. The mounts swim across the air by extending pseudopods from their bodies, latching onto spaces in the direction of vur-fal, which is the direction of outside, radiating inward.
We remain unseen by the growth-like probes that constitute the defenses of R’lyeh. Within this vessel, I am invisible to them, my anatomy a riddle that is designated as mammalian-vertebrate but, most importantly, non-intelligent. To the defense systems, I am little more than a desperate trilobite, scaling the unknowable heights in search of food. Finding the fruits of my labors to my liking, I move upward a few meters further, closer to one of the flyers’ parapets. Somewhere in the distance, the children of Dagon are swarming, scaling the reaches of the atmosphere to dive down into the ruins of Ponape and eliminate any stragglers of my race.
I have been a sinner, an unclean man. I am suffering now for my doubt and for my violence. I am cast into Hell, my soul ridden by a devil. I am asleep and no one will wake me.…
The vessel begins to stir and waken, as I force it to climb up the parapet. Its conscious brain restores itself to function as I am hauling us upward, the interior of R’lyeh co
ming into view. In my eyes, I am looking into the beating heart of the city of my enemy. In the vessel’s eyes, however, it is a sight that crushes its mind. I temporarily cease the function of its lungs, to stop the scream that is escaping its lips and the vessel collapses, soundlessly. Looking through its eyes, I can see the expanding, terrible geometry of it all: the churning, tar-black depths that have been tapped by the machines devised by Cthulhu and his kin to tap into the core of the planet; the cathedral-factories, where the sons and daughters of Dagon and Hydra are sacrificed in great meat-grinders, their screams drowned out by the babbling prayers of the priesthood to power the faith-generators. I see the sprawling, screaming factories that churn out the war-machines which Cthulhu will unleash on my kin across the star-system, manned by creatures whose form does not wholly exist within the current Universe. I see pathways that seem like malignant growths, interconnecting the abodes of the mad-eyed zealot-warriors of R’lyeh.
And in the absolute center of it all, I see the kelp-choked fortress of Cthulhu himself, to which all pathways lead and from which all things in R’lyeh radiate, where the arch-priest of the nuclear Sultan Azathoth himself sits on a throne hewn from granite, himself tall as a mountain, his voice booming in the speech of its birthplace of Xoth.
No angles or turns, no reason or design. Only nightmare, nightmare hewn in black rock, in the heart of the world, and I am stuck in this place, where reason comes to die surrounded by monstrosities. This is Hell and I am the least among the damned it whimpers and cries in the confines of its own mind, even as it is slowly asphyxiating.
My vessel struggles and finally ceases. I wait until it is on the brink of death (moments before serious brain damage occurs) and then restore the function of its lungs, to ensure it is broken. Its willpower is considerable but I will only need a very short amount of time to achieve my goal. Removing the package from its back, I tap a series of hidden buttons. A click-clacking noise begins to sound from the interior of the package. The displacement-bomb is primed. One of the automated defense-probes crawls into my line of sight and turns its solitary eye to look at the hunched form, examining the package. It ponders on it, cross-referencing the simple cubic design in the knowledge-base it shares with its kin. Finding it harmless after a few moments of careful deliberation, it skitters away. My plan is working, for now.
