Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

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, and 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 Pergamos.”

      “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, Helen 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, her 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 beaux.

      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