by Amanda Elyot
Nine days’ observance was the funerary custom. Menelaus would be gone for at least that long, and it would take him an additional couple of days to travel. Taking two of the palace guard and a small retinue of servants, he made for his flagship at the port of Gythium, giving me a cursory farewell. I did not know whether to look upon his absence as a blessing or a curse. I wanted to remain a good wife, and yet desire was fast becoming a more formidable opponent than fidelity was my ally. Then there was the wild and foolish promise I had made to Paris Alexandros on Mount Taygetos. I entered the guests’ quarters where a dark-haired Egyptian serving girl was bathing the Troyan prince. “Leave us,” I said.
I knelt beside the tub and drenched the sea sponge in the fragrant water. “You honor me, daughter of Zeus,” said Paris as I leaned over him to wash the dust from his chest.
“The honor is mine. You are beautiful enough to be a son of Aphrodite.”
The prince smiled. “That honor belongs to my kinsman Aeneas.”
“Truly?”
Paris Alexandros nodded.
I drizzled water over his shoulders and watched the rivulets trickle down the sunkissed plains of his chiseled torso.
“The goddess took a fancy to his father but made him promise never to tell a soul about their coupling. However, the ecstatic Anchises couldn’t keep a secret like that, and so she left him.”
“Your kinsman hides his beauty with his beard.” Unlike Paris, who was irresistibly exquisite.
Drawing me closer, he clasped my wrist, plunging my forearm into the water, guiding my hand to the most evident source of his desire for me. “Join me,” he whispered, his eyes daring me to meet the challenge.
“Not here,” I said, but I could not release my prize. “By all the gods—and by the ancient Goddess, too—you will undo me.”
“You will be your own undoing, Helen, if you do not believe as I do that we are each other’s anake. If you agree that we are destined to be lovers, then your fate is beyond your own grasp. You are powerless to control it or to alter your destiny.”
“It is too convenient an explanation for me to embrace with ease,” I told him. “Forgive my Laconian pragmatism, but I am not convinced that I should trust in dreams, particularly when they do not come to me.” By my own reckoning, it was techn¯e—the combustible fusion of my free will, my imagination, and my power—and not my destiny, that compelled me to explore his flawless anatomy with my licentious hands. Never was a man so thoroughly and lovingly bathed.
“When?” asked Paris Alexandros, breathless.
“Tonight.”
“Here?”
“No. Not in the palace. That I cannot do. I will take you somewhere else.”
And so, after the Third Night feast, disguised as Kronian revelers, I brought Paris Alexandros to the sacred grove. And on the remnants of the altar where my mother received the seed of Zeus, we consummated our lust.
We needed no torches to light our way. Selene, the goddess of the moon, was full-bellied, silhouetting the trees against the sky. The cool and gentle breeze that rustled through the leaves made them whisper like illicit lovers. I unclasped the brooches that closed my chiton and let the fabric puddle to my feet. Alexander’s fingers fluttered like swallow’s wings across my throat and breasts as he explored their contours, bringing me to the brink of ecstasy with his kisses alone, each impression from his soft mouth creating a delicious burning as though they were imprints of gently warmed wax. With our lips and tongues we honored every atomy of each other’s bodies. With his fingers and his mouth, Paris Alexandros worshipped at the altar between my thighs, drinking the sticky-sweet nectar he elicited as a tribute to the undulations of his tongue. When he entered me, his sex reminded me what it meant to be a woman and to give and receive the greatest bounty known to mortals. For hours, I swam in the winedark waters of Eros and Himeros, receiving the seed of Alexander’s loins. Our fingers danced in each other’s golden hair, creating tingles of ecstasy like fractured bolts of lightning. My lover took my strawberry-tipped nipples into his mouth, nibbling them into a ripe hardness, and my womb became ready to embrace his length once more. “You have robbed me of words and now you rob me of breath,” I told him, crying my pleasure yet again into the crisp night air.
A rustle of leaves and murmured voices warned us that we were in danger of discovery if we did not quit the grove immediately. The ruined temple of the Goddess was a popular spot for romantic assignations, particularly during Kronia. We dressed in haste, redonned our disguises, and slipped between the trees, where Selene’s cool gaze could not penetrate. I explained the deeply personal significance of the sacred site to Paris Alexandros. “The progeny of Leda and the great swan, I was conceived upon that plinth. It was there that Zeus ravished my mother in a consecrated ritual honoring the Goddess. And it was there, too, where as a child I found her pendant body, her final offering to the source of all life. The grove is my favorite place in all of Sparta and the only one where Menelaus cannot disturb my peace.” I told the Troyan prince that my stepfather had ordered the shrine demolished after he discovered my mother’s unusual infidelity, a decision that was fully sanctioned by Menelaus once we were wed. “My husband even desecrated the temples of his own gods,” I added, disclosing to Paris Alexandros how he had ordered the bronze to be stripped from all the shrines and altars. “But after he dared to rob the tomb of the House of Tyndareus of its brazen treasures, I refused to share his bed. I never loved Menelaus, but I always showed him proper wifely respect. When he despoiled my family’s tomb, he lost that as well. Such a man was no longer deserving of my honor. The Atridae live for personal gain and aggrandizement. At any cost.”
Arm in arm we walked across the valley toward the palace. “Mene-laus was right about one thing,” whispered Paris Alexandros, breathing softly into my ear.
“And what is that?”
“That if I stayed in Sparta for your Kronia festival, I would receive the best of everything.”
For the next few days, Paris Alexandros and I were nearly inseparable. We swam naked in the cool waters of the Eurotas and feasted on cold roast meats and olives in the open air. We returned to the plains below Mount Taygetos with our horses and rode through the mountain trails. In every desolate location, we made love. At night, we would return to the sacred grove and anoint the altar with the spendings of our desire.
The first half of Kronia was drawing to a close. Soon, Menelaus would be returning home, the nine days of Kronian abstinence and atonement having already commenced by the time he arrived in Sparta.
“I must leave in two days,” Paris Alexandros told me as we lay satiated in each other’s arms in the coolness of the grove. “Tomorrow morning I will give the order to my men to be sure the ships are prepared to sail.”
“I wish you never had to leave,” I confessed, blinking back the moistness in my eyes. “I wish that every day could be the beginning of Kronia.”
The Troyan prince was silent for several moments. “It can be,” he said, nibbling at my lips. “Come with me.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I have never been more so,” he replied, gazing directly into my eyes. “You are Aphrodite’s greatest gift. To mankind and to me.”
“I am a married woman, Paris. With children. Nico is all I have left of my sons; in a few years’ time, he, too, will be taken from me and I shall never see him again until he is taller than his father. And Hermione . . . I cannot abandon my young daughter. She is barely nine summers old. Insofar as my husband’s treatment of me, he has been everything from merely neglectful to overtly hostile . . . perhaps I can conscience leaving him, as there is nothing left for me in our marriage except a dull and doleful stalemate of affections. But I cannot abandon my children.” I began to weep, thinking of Iphigenia. “To rip either child or mother from each other before the child is fully grown is against the laws of nature.”
Aethra clucked and chided when I confided my dilemma. “I want to go with him,” I
said.
“Do you love this barbarian prince?” she asked me.
“Beyond all measure. Beyond what I ever imagined it was possible to feel. Perhaps Paris Alexandros speaks the truth. Perhaps it is my destiny and I am free to fuss and fret and try to fight it, but not to change it or alter its course.” Reason and desire warred within my psyche.
Aethra spared no love for Menelaus, but she counseled me nonetheless to remain in Sparta. “If nothing else, you owe a duty to your people as their queen,” she reminded me. Perhaps she was annoyed, despite her old ambivalence about my love for her son, that another man had displaced Theseus from his aerie atop the summit of my affections. “It will come to no good end,” was all she added. It was then that I recalled the words she had spoken on the Athenian pergamos when I was saying my final farewell to Theseus. He had promised me that one day a man would come who would love me as much I did him. Aethra had inserted her unsolicited oar with a portentous invocation. And may the gods help you, she had said.
I reasoned myself into the elopement. The gods were punishing Menelaus for his desecration of their temples. The arrival of Paris Alexandros, who had been promised by Aphrodite that I would be his, was proof of their vengeance. If I took little Nico with me, it would be a further embarrassment to the royal family, depriving Sparta of another future hoplite. Hermione’s remaining behind was the only way to assure Menelaus’s security on the Spartan throne. He was king only by virtue of his marriage to me. If I was gone, my children would provide his tenuous link to power. I could deprive my husband of my body and my presence, but I could not bring myself to deliver the blow that would strip him of his right to rule Sparta. Besides, Hermione was the shining light in Menelaus’s eyes, his favorite child, and to take her to Ilios would be to blind him. Even Aethra could not accompany me because she was needed to stay behind and care for the children. They loved and trusted her, and she would have to be the bulwark between them and any attempts by Menelaus to punish the offspring of my loins for my transgression.
My pacing must have worn a path in the cool stone flooring of my rooms. Like my father Zeus, I was ruled by my sudden, almost violent, sexual passions, so how else could I be expected to behave when all was said and done? In disobeying my lawful husband, I was only obeying my nature.
Clearly, we had to leave before Menelaus returned; his absence made my departure—and the choice to abscond at all—an easier one. I would be relieved of having to find a way to say good-bye. But how would I bid farewell forever to my children? This prospect terrified me; I rethought my decision to leave them in Sparta many times over. Hermione, you were always far closer to your father than you ever were to me, so I don’t believe you can begin to imagine how painful my determination was. I had hoped that as you grew to womanhood I would teach you its secrets and our bond would finally strengthen. In making the agonizing decision to abandon you, I knew I was risking your hatred for the rest of your days. Never had I anticipated that a man would come from across the sea and imprison my heart. I had no choice but to follow it, for without it I was an incomplete soul. Had your mother remained in Sparta, she would have been a heartless woman. My immortal beauty has been called perfection, but in all things I am not perfect. They reflect the half of me that is all too human.
I went to Paris Alexandros and told him that I would sail with him for Troy. He was overjoyed. Coming to him had the effect of strengthening my resolve. Held by his gaze, and in his embrace, I was once again spellbound and could not imagine spending life without him, condemned to an existence of modest and passionless comportment in a loveless royal marriage, deprived of my sons by the Spartan elders, and raising a daughter who cared little for me.
On the Ninth Night of Kronia, I kissed my children good night and enveloped them in my arms with an even greater tenderness. Nico was too young to realize that he would most likely never see me again, so there was no point in trying to explain that his mitera was leaving him. To you, Hermione, I remember saying simply, I am going on a voyage. I tried to keep the tears out of my voice. You shrugged and did not ask when I might return; but like a dutiful daughter, you let me embrace you and kissed my cheeks before clutching your doll and shuffling off to bed. To Aethra, I reaffirmed my trust in her wisdom and her affection for my young children.
I had packed my robes, my cosmetics, and my jewels. Paris Alexandros warned me that there was not enough room aboard his ship for all of my possessions as well as the trunk that had belonged to my mother. I despaired of leaving her legacy behind and reluctantly selected a few items that were most precious to me, including the garments she had worn as a priestess, her jewels, and the swan’s feather that remained on the altar after my father flew away from the sacred grove. The rest I left in my rooms, consoling myself by reasoning that as Leda was a true daughter of Sparta, she belonged there and not in Troy.
Yet I, too, was a daughter of Sparta, as well as its rightful queen. I cursed the gods for placing before me a temptation so irresistible that I became willing to forfeit not only my family and my crown, but also my homeland—to bid farewell forever to my beloved Mount Taygetos and the muddy banks of the sparkling Eurotas . . . to never again seek the solace of the sacred grove. My heart ached with sacrifice.
Under cover of darkness, Paris Alexandros, Aeneas, and I rode to Gythium. I took Aeneas’s horse while he carried my trunk in a chariot belonging to Menelaus, which he had managed to covertly liberate from our stables. By the water’s edge lay the pomegranate-hued hull of the Troyan prince’s ship and another belonging to his kinsman. Aeneas boarded his vessel and Paris carried me onto on his pentekonter like a conquering hero. At his command, the sail was raised and fifty oars in unison sliced noiselessly through the winedark waves of the Great Sea. The wind captured my veil and claimed it as a forfeit. Enfolded in his embrace, my mouth met Alexander’s in a lingering kiss. The only sound to penetrate the silence of the night air was the slapping of the water against the bloodred hull that drew me farther and farther from Achaea, from marriage and motherhood, into strange and uncharted territory.
EIGHTEEN
“What country is this?” I asked upon waking, stiff and groggy-eyed from an uncomfortable night in cramped quarters. I had not recalled the Minotaur being as claustrophobic as this vessel was. Perhaps it was, but I was a mere slip of a girl then and sea voyages were a new and exciting adventure. The terrain just beyond our bow was similar to the Peloponnese. Surely this could not be the bustling port that bestrode the eastern and western worlds.
“This is Cyprus,” answered Paris Alexandros. “The Hittites of Anatolia, who claim it as their territory, call it Alasiya. We will anchor here before we continue on to Wilusa. I wish to make sacrifices to Aphrodite on the island of her birth. She must see how pleased we are at the fulfillment of her promise.”
His desire to propitiate our patron goddess made sense, although I would have preferred to have been heading straight for Troy. Having made the agonizing decision to go to Ilios with Paris Alexandros, I now wished to get there as soon as possible. “How long would it take if we were to have sailed directly from Gythium?”
“From Gythium? Four days, perhaps five if the winds were favorable.” Paris Alexandros steered my gaze back to the prow of his ship. “See the dolphins leading our way? It is a sign that we are favorably starred.”
I seemed to recall that Theseus and I had enjoyed a similar escort and things did not end well for us. “If you lay such store by superstition, then what of the omen that warned your expectant mother that you would bring ruination upon Troy—the portent that caused your parents to expel you from Ilios when you were but a few days old?” I was already allowing fear and regret to tinge my love for the Troyan prince. Perhaps the stop in Cyprus was a good idea after all. I would pray to Aphrodite to guide me. Yet how could I place the bounty of my trust in her when I was not certain I had done the right thing in accompanying Paris Alexandros to his homeland?
We remained in sunkissed Cyprus until the m
oon was once again full, then hoisted the sail for Anatolia. Or so I thought. We were beset by heavy seas and a great north wind that blew us off course; within two days, we had landed in Sidon, well to the south of our intended destination. I had heard tales of the great Phoenician port and of the land renowned for its cedarwood, used in vast quantities to build the greatest navy ever known to man. Sidon was a bustling center of commerce, even larger than Piraeus was, as I remembered it from my travels with Theseus. After so many years in peaceful, provincial Sparta, I was unused to such crowds, the cacophony of man and beast—and the filth. The entire city wanted a good whitewashing, from the facades of the tightly packed dwellings to the dirt-encrusted skin of the ragamuffins who prowled the port seeking to relieve its visitors and denizens alike from their pouches of gold and precious stones.
I noticed that Paris Alexandros did not appear terribly inconvenienced by what I believed was an unexpected detour. “Why are we here?” I asked him. “Was the seduction of Helen merely a stop along your trading route?” I was not feeling terribly well; life upon my beloved sea was not as companionable as it once had been, and I admit to having been extremely irritable then. I had not abandoned my homeland and children for this. “Was that your true embassy? Woo the queen of Sparta; propitiate Aphrodite for having enabled you to do so; buy ships and lumber?” I accused my lover of being as insensitive as Menelaus, and stung by my words, Paris Alexandros promised to conclude his business with the Sidonian merchants as quickly as practicable. He sought to appease me by securing several elaborately wrought robes for my wardrobe; nevertheless, we spent nearly two moons there before we were once again under way for Troy.
