Читать книгу Reality by Other Means - James Morrow - Страница 10

Arms and the Woman

“What did you do in the war, Mommy?”

The last long shadow has slipped from the sundial’s face, melting into the hot Egyptian night. My children should be asleep. Instead they’re bouncing on their straw pallets, stalling for time.

“It’s late,” I reply. “Nine o’clock already.”

“Please,” the twins implore me in a single voice.

“You have school tomorrow.”

“You haven’t told us a story all week,” insists Damon, the whiner.

“The war is such a great story,” explains Daphne, the wheedler.

“Kaptah’s mother tells him a story every night,” whines Damon.

“Tell us about the war,” wheedles Daphne, “and we’ll clean the whole cottage tomorrow, top to bottom.”

I realize I’m going to give in — not because I enjoy spoiling my children (though I do) or because the story itself will consume less time than further negotiations (though it will) but because I actually want the twins to hear this particular tale. It has a point. I’ve told it before, of course, a dozen times perhaps, but I’m still not sure they get it.

I snatch up the egg timer and invert it on the nightstand, the tiny grains of sand spilling into the lower chamber like seeds from a farmer’s palm. “Be ready for bed in three minutes,” I warn my children, “or no story.”

They scurry off, frantically brushing their teeth and slipping on their flaxen nightshirts. Silently I glide about the cottage, dousing the lamps and curtaining the moon, until only one candle lights the twins’ room, like the campfire of an army consisting of mice and scarab beetles.

“So you want to know what I did in the war,” I intone, singsong, as my children climb into their beds.

“Oh, yes,” says Damon, pulling up his fleecy coverlet.

“You bet,” says Daphne, fluffing her goose-feather pillow.

“Once upon a time,” I begin, “I lived as both princess and prisoner in the great city of Troy.” Even in this feeble light, I’m struck by how handsome Damon is, how beautiful Daphne. “Every evening, I would sit in my boudoir, looking into my polished bronze mirror …”

Helen of Troy, princess and prisoner, sits in her boudoir, looking into her polished bronze mirror and scanning her world-class face for symptoms of age — for wrinkles, wattles, pouches, crow’s-feet, and the crenellated corpses of hairs. She feels like crying, and not just because these past ten years in Ilium are starting to show. She’s sick of the whole sordid arrangement, sick of being cooped up in this overheated acropolis like a pet cockatoo. Whispers haunt the citadel. The servants are gossiping, even her own handmaids. The whore of Hisarlik, they call her. The slut from Sparta. The Lakedaimon lay.

Then there’s Paris. Sure, she’s madly in love with him, sure, they have great sex, but can’t they ever talk?

Sighing, Helen trolls her hairdo with her lean, exquisitely manicured fingers. A silver strand lies amid the folds like a predatory snake. Slowly she winds the offending filament around her index finger, then gives a sudden tug. “Ouch,” she cries, more from despair than pain. There are times when Helen feels like tearing out all her lovely tresses, every last lock, not simply these graying threads. If I have to spend one more pointless day in Hisarlik, she tells herself, I’ll go mad.

Every morning, she and Paris enact the same depressing ritual. She escorts him to the Skaian Gate, hands him his spear and his lunch bucket, and with a tepid kiss sends him off to work. Paris’s job is killing people. At sundown he arrives home grubby with blood and redolent of funeral pyres, his spear wrapped in bits of drying viscera. There’s a war going on out there; Paris won’t tell her anything more. “Who are we fighting?” she asks each evening as they lie together in bed. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” he replies, slipping on a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box.

Until this year, Paris had contrived for her to walk the high walls of Troy each morning, waving encouragement to the troops, blowing them kisses as they marched off to battle. “Your face inspires them,” he had insisted. “An airy kiss from you is worth a thousand nights of passion with a nymph.” But in recent months Paris’s priorities have changed. As soon as they say good-bye, Helen is supposed to retire to the citadel, speaking with no other Hisarlikan, not even a brief coffee klatch with one of Paris’s forty-nine sisters-in-law. She’s expected to spend her whole day weaving rugs, carding flax, and being beautiful. It is not a life.

Can the gods help? Helen is skeptical, but anything is worth a try. Tomorrow, she resolves, she will go to the temple of Apollo and beg him to relieve her boredom, perhaps buttressing her appeal with an offering — a ram, a bull, whatever — though an offering strikes her as rather like a deal, and Helen is sick of deals. Her husband — pseudohusband, nonhusband — made a deal. She keeps thinking of the Apple of Discord, and what Aphrodite might have done with it after bribing Paris. Did she drop it in her fruit bowl … put it on her mantel … impale it on her crown? Why did Aphrodite take the damn thing seriously? Why did any of them take it seriously? Hi, I’m the fairest goddess in the universe — see, it says so right here on my apple.

Damn — another gray hair, another weed in the garden of her pulchritude. She reaches toward the villain — and stops. Why bother? These hairs are like the Hydra’s heads, endless, cancerous, and besides, it’s high time Paris realized there’s a mind under that coiffure.

Whereupon Paris comes in, sweating and snorting. His helmet is awry; his spear is gory; his greaves are sticky with other men’s flesh.

“Hard day, dear?”

“Don’t ask.” Her nonhusband unfastens his breastplate. “Pour us some wine. Looking in the speculum, were you? Good.”

Helen sets the mirror down, uncorks the bottle, and fills two bejeweled goblets with Chateau Samothrace.

“Today I heard about some techniques you might try,” says Paris. “Ways for a woman to retain her beauty.”

“You mean — you talk on the battlefield?”

“During the lulls.”

“I wish you’d talk to me.”

“Wax,” says Paris, lifting the goblet to his lips. “Wax is the thing.” His heavy jowls undulate as he drinks. Their affair, Helen will admit, still gives her a kick. In the past ten years, her lover has moved beyond the surpassing prettiness of an Adonis into something equally appealing, an authoritative, no-frills masculinity suggestive of an aging matinee idol. “Take some melted wax and work it into the lines in your brow — presto, they’re gone.”

“I like my lines,” Helen insists with a quick but audible snort.

“When mixed with ox blood, the dark silt from the River Minyeios is indelible, they say. You can dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula.” Paris sips his wine. “As for these redundant ounces on your thighs, well, dear, we both know there’s no cure like exercise.”

“Look who’s talking,” Helen snaps. “Your skin is no bowl of cream. Your head is no garden of sargasso. As for your stomach, it’s a safe bet that Paris of Troy can walk through the rain without getting his belt buckle wet.”

The prince finishes his wine and sighs. “Where’s the girl I married? You used to care about your looks.”

“The girl you married,” Helen replies pointedly, “is not your wife.”

“Well, yes, of course not. Technically, you’re still his.”

“I want a wedding.” Helen takes a gluttonous swallow of Samothrace and sets the goblet on the mirror. “You could go to my husband,” she suggests. “You could present yourself to high-minded Menelaus and try to talk things out.” Reflected in the mirror’s wobbly face, the goblet grows weird, twisted, as if seen through a drunkard’s eyes. “Hey, listen, I’ll bet he’s found another maid by now — he’s something of a catch, after all. So maybe you actually did him a favor. Maybe he isn’t even mad.”

“He’s mad,” Paris insists. “The man is angry.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Heedless of her royal station, Helen consumes her wine with the crude insouciance of a galley slave. “I want a baby,” she says.

“What?”

“You know, a baby. Baby: a highly young person. My goal, dear Paris, is to be pregnant.”

“Fatherhood is for losers.” Paris chucks his spear onto the bed. Striking the mattress, the oaken shaft disappears into the soft down. “Go easy on the vino, love. Alcohol is awfully fattening.”

“Don’t you understand? I’m losing my mind. A pregnancy would give me a sense of purpose.”

“Any idiot can sire a child. 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 it once possessed.

“Helen?” he says, gasping and blinking like a man who’s just been doused with a bucket of slop. “Is that you?”

“Right.”

“You’ve, er … aged.”

“You too, sweetheart.”

He pulls off his plumed helmet, stomps his foot on the forecastle, and says, angrily, “You ran out on me.”

“Yes. Quite so.”

“Trollop.”

“Perhaps.” Helen adjusts her greaves. “I could claim I was bewitched by laughter-loving Aphrodite, but that would be a lie. The fact is, Paris knocked me silly. I’m crazy about him. Sorry.” She runs her desiccated tongue along her parched lips. “Have you anything to drink?”

Dipping a hollow gourd into his private cistern, Menelaus offers her a pint of fresh water. “So what brings you here?”

Helen receives the ladle. Setting her boots wide apart, she steadies herself against the roll of the incoming tide and takes a greedy gulp. At last she says, “I wish to give myself up.”

“What?”

“I want to go home with you.”

“You mean — you think our marriage deserves another chance?”

“No, I think all those infantrymen out there deserve to live. If this war is really being fought to retrieve me, then consider the job done.” Tossing the ladle aside, Helen holds out her hands, palms turned upward as if she’s testing for raindrops. “I’m yours, hubby. Manacle my wrists, chain my feet together, throw me in the brig.”

Against all odds, defying all logos, Menelaus’s face loses more blood. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” he says.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“This siege, Helen — there’s more to it than you suppose.”

“Don’t jerk me around, lord of all Lakedaimon, asshole. It’s time to call it quits.”

The Spartan king stares straight at her chest, a habit she’s always found annoying. “Put on a bit of weight, eh, darling?”

“Don’t change the subject.” She lunges toward Menelaus’s scabbard as if to goose him, but instead draws out his sword. “I’m deadly serious: if Helen of Troy is not permitted to live with herself” — she pantomimes the act of suicide — “then she will die with herself.”

“Tell you what,” says her husband, taking his weapon back. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll go to my brother and suggest he arrange a truce with your father-in-law.”

“He’s not my father-in-law. There was never a wedding.”

“Whatever. The point is, your offer has merit, but it must be discussed. We shall all meet face to face, Trojans and Achaeans, and talk it out. As for now, you’d best return to your lover.”

“I’m warning you — I shall abide no more blood on my hands, none but my own.”

“Of course, dear. Now please go back to the citadel.”

At least he listened, Helen muses as she crosses the weatherworn deck of the Arkadia. At least he didn’t tell me not to worry my pretty little head about it.

“Here comes the dull part,” says whiny-tongued Damon.

“The scene with all the talking,” adds smart-mouthed Daphne.

“Can you cut it a bit?” my son asks.

“Hush,” I say, smoothing out Damon’s coverlet. “No interruptions,” I insist. I slip Daphne’s papyrus doll under her arm. “When you have your own children, you can edit the tale however you wish. As for now, listen carefully. You might learn something.”

By the burbling, tumbling waters of the River Simois, beneath the glowing orange avatar of the moon goddess Artemis, ten aristocrats are gathered around an oaken table in the purple tent of Ilium’s high command, all of them bursting with opinions on how best to deal with this Helen situation, this peace problem, this Trojan hostage crisis. White as a crane, a truce banner flaps above the heads of the two kings, Priam from the high city, Agamemnon from the long ships. Each side has sent its best and/or brightest. For the Trojans: brainy Panthoos, mighty Paris, invincible Hector, and Hiketaon the scion of Ares. For the Achaean cause: Ajax the berserker, Nestor the mentor, Menelaus the cuckold, and wily, smiling Odysseus. Of all those invited, only quarrelsome Achilles, sulking in his tent, has declined to appear.

Panthoos rises, rubs his foam-white beard, and sets his scepter on the table. “Royal captains, gifted seers,” the old Trojan begins, “I believe you will concur when I say that, since this siege was laid, we have not faced a challenge of such magnitude. Make no mistake: Helen means to take our war away from us, and she means to do so immediately.”

Gusts of dismay waft through the tent like a wind from the underworld.

“We can’t quit now,” groans Hector, wincing fiercely.

“We’re just getting up to speed,” wails Hiketaon, grimacing greatly.

Agamemnon steps down from his throne, carrying his scepter like a spear. “I have a question for Prince Paris,” he says. “What does your mistress’s willingness to return to Argos say about the present state of your relationship?”

Paris strokes his jowls and replies, “As you might surmise, noble king, my feelings for Helen are predicated on requitement.”

“So you won’t keep her in Pergamos by force?”

“If she doesn’t want me, then I don’t want her.”

At which point slug-witted Ajax raises his hand. “Er, excuse me. I’m a bit confused. If Helen is ours for the asking, then why must we continue the war?”

A sirocco of astonishment arises among the heroes.

“Why?” gasps Panthoos. “Why? Because this is Troy, that’s why. Because we’re kicking off Western Civilization here, that’s why. The longer we can keep this affair going — the longer we can sustain such an ambiguous enterprise — the more valuable and significant it becomes.”

Slow-synapsed Ajax says, “Huh?”

Nestor has but to clear his throat and every eye is upon him. “What our adversary is saying — may I interpret, wise Panthoos?” He turns to his Trojan counterpart, bows deferentially, and, receiving a nod of assent, speaks to Ajax. “Panthoos means that, if this particular pretext for war — restoring a woman to her rightful owner — can be made to seem reasonable, then any pretext for war can be made to seem reasonable.” The mentor shifts his fevered stare from Ajax to the entire assembly. “By rising to this rare and precious occasion, we shall open the way for wars of religion, wars of manifest destiny — any equivocal cause you care to name.” Once again his gaze alights on Ajax. “Understand, sir? This is the war to inaugurate war itself. This is the war to make the world safe for war!”

Ajax frowns so vigorously his visor falls down. “All I know is, we came for Helen, and we got her. Mission accomplished.” Turning to Agamemnon, the berserker lifts the visor from his eyes. “So if it’s all the same to you, Majesty, I’d like to go home before I get killed.”

“O, Ajax, Ajax, Ajax,” moans Hector, pulling an arrow from his quiver and using it to scratch his back. “Where is your aesthetic sense? Have you no appreciation of war for war’s sake? The plains of Ilium are roiling with glory, sir. You could cut the arete with a knife. Never have there been such valiant eviscerations, such venerable dismemberments, such — ”

“I don’t get it,” says the berserker. “I just don’t get it.”

Whereupon Menelaus slams his wine goblet on the table with a resounding thunk. “We are not gathered in Priam’s tent so that Ajax might learn politics,” he says impatiently. “We are gathered so that we might best dispose of my wife.”

“True, true,” says Hector.

“So what are we going to do, gentlemen?” asks Menelaus. “Lock her up?”

“Good idea,” says Hiketaon.

“Well, yes,” says Agamemnon, slumping back onto his throne. “Except that, when the war finally ends, my troops will demand to see her. Might they not wonder why so much suffering and sacrifice was spent on a goddess gone to seed?” He turns to Paris and says, “Prince, you should not have let this happen.”

“Let what happen?” asks Paris.

“I heard she has wrinkles,” says Agamemnon.

“I heard she got fat,” says Nestor.

“What have you been feeding her?” asks Menelaus. “Bonbons?”

“She’s a person,” protests Paris. “She’s not a marble statue. You can hardly blame me …”

At which juncture King Priam raises his scepter and, as if to wound Gaea herself, rams it into the dirt.

“Noble lords, I hate to say this, but the threat is more immediate than you might suppose. In the early years of the siege, the sight of fair Helen walking the ramparts did wonders for my army’s morale. Now that she’s no longer fit for public display, well …”

“Yes?” says Agamemnon, steeling himself for the worst.

“Well, I simply don’t know how much longer Troy can hold up its end of the war. If things don’t improve, we may have to capitulate by next winter.”

Gasps of horror blow across the table, rattling the tent flaps and ruffling the aristocrats’ capes.

But now, for the first time, clever, canny Odysseus addresses the council, and the winds of discontent grow still. “Our course is obvious,” he says. “Our destiny is clear,” he asserts. “We must put Helen — the old Helen, the pristine Helen — back on the walls.”

“The pristine Helen?” says Hiketaon. “Are you not talking fantasy, resourceful Odysseus? Are you not singing a myth?”

The lord of all Ithaca strolls the length of Priam’s tent, plucking at his beard. “It will require some wisdom from Pallas Athena, some technology from Hephaestus, but I believe the project is possible.”

“Excuse me,” says Paris. “What project is possible?”

“Refurbishing your little harlot,” says Odysseus. “Making the dear, sweet strumpet shine like new.”

Back and forth, to and fro, Helen moves through her boudoir, wearing a ragged path of angst into the carpet. An hour passes. Then two. Why are they taking so long?

What most gnaws at her, the thought that feasts on her entrails, is the possibility that, should the council not accept her surrender, she will have to raise the stakes. And how might she accomplish the deed? By what means might she book passage on Charon’s one-way ferry? Something from her lover’s arsenal, most likely — a sword, spear, dagger, or death-dripping arrow. O, please, my lord Apollo, she prays to the city’s prime protector, don’t let it come to that.

At sunset Paris enters the room, his pace leaden, his jowls dragging his mouth into a grimace. For the first time ever, Helen observes tears in her lover’s eyes.

“It is finished,” he moans, doffing his plumed helmet. “Peace has come. At dawn you must go to the long ships. Menelaus will bear you back to Sparta, where you will once again live as mother to his children, friend to his concubines, and emissary to his bed.”

Relief pours out of Helen in a deep, orgasmic rush, but the pleasure is shortlived. She loves this man, flaws and all, flab and the rest. “I shall miss you, dearest Paris,” she tells him. “Your bold abduction of me remains the peak experience of my life.”

“I agreed to the treaty only because Menelaus believes you might otherwise kill yourself. You’re a surprising woman, Helen. Sometimes I think I hardly know you.”

“Hush, my darling,” she says, gently placing her palm across his mouth. “No more words.”

Slowly they unclothe each other, methodically unlocking the doors to bliss — the straps and sashes, the snaps and catches — and thus begins their final, epic night together.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so judgmental,” says Paris.

“I accept your apology.”

“You are so beautiful. So impossibly beautiful …”

As dawn’s rosy fingers stretch across the Trojan sky, Hector’s faithful driver, Eniopeus the son of horse-loving Thebaios, steers his sturdy war chariot along the banks of the Menderes, bearing Helen to the Achaean stronghold. They reach the Arkadia just as the sun is cresting, so their arrival in the harbor becomes a flaming parade, a show of sparks and gold, as if they ride upon the burning wheels of Hyperion himself.

Helen starts along the dock, moving past the platoons of squawking gulls adrift on the early morning breeze. Menelaus comes forward to greet her, accompanied by a man for whom Helen has always harbored a vague dislike — broad-chested, black-bearded Teukros, illegitimate son of Telemon.

“The tide is ripe,” says her husband. “You and Teukros must board forthwith. You will find him a lively traveling companion. He knows a hundred fables and plays the harp.”

“Can’t you take me home?”

Menelaus squeezes his wife’s hand and, raising it to his lips, plants a gentle kiss. “I must see to the loading of my ships,” he explains, “the disposition of my battalions — a full week’s job, I’d guess.”

“Surely you can leave that to Agamemnon.”

“Give me seven days, Helen. In seven days I’ll be home, and we can begin picking up the pieces.”

“We’re losing the tide,” says Teukros, anxiously intertwining his fingers.

Do I trust my husband? Helen wonders as she strides up the Arkadia’s gangplank. Does he really mean to lift the siege?

All during their slow voyage out of the harbor, Helen is haunted. Nebulous fears, nagging doubts, and odd presentiments swarm through her brain like Harpies. She beseeches her beloved Apollo to speak with her, calm her, assure her all is well, but the only sounds reaching her ears are the creaking of the oars and the windy, watery voice of the Hellespont.

By the time the Arkadia finds the open sea, Helen has resolved to jump overboard and swim back to Troy.

“And then Teukros tried to kill you,” says Daphne.

“He came at you with his sword,” adds Damon.

This is the twins’ favorite part, the moment of grue and gore. Eyes flashing, voice climbing to a melodramatic pitch, I tell them how, before I could put my escape plan into action, Teukros began chasing me around the Arkadia, slashing his two-faced blade. I tell them how I got the upper hand, tripping the bastard as he was about to run me through.

“You stabbed him with his own sword, didn’t you, Mommy?” asks Damon.

“I had no choice.”

“And then his guts spilled, huh?” asks Daphne.

“Agamemnon had ordered Teukros to kill me,” I explain. “I was ruining everything.”

“They spilled out all over the deck, right?” asks Damon.

“Yes, dear, they certainly did. I’m quite convinced Paris wasn’t part of the plot, or Menelaus either. Your mother falls for fools, not maniacs.”

“What color were they?” asks Damon.

“Color?”

“His guts.”

“Red, mostly, with daubs of purple and black.”

“Neat.”

I tell the twins of my long, arduous swim through the strait. I tell them how I crossed Ilium’s war-torn fields, dodging arrows and eluding patrols.

I tell how I waited by the Skaian Gate until a farmer arrived with a cartload of provender for the besieged city … how I sneaked inside the walls, secluded amid stalks of wheat … how I went to Pergamos, hid myself in the temple of Apollo, and breathlessly waited for dawn.

Dawn comes up, binding the eastern clouds in crimson girdles. Helen leaves the citadel, tiptoes to the wall, and mounts the hundred granite steps to the battlements. She is unsure of her next move. She has some vague hope of addressing the infantrymen as they assemble at the gate. Her arguments have failed to impress the generals, but perhaps she can touch the heart of the common foot soldier.

It is at this ambiguous point in her fortunes that Helen runs into herself.

She blinks — once, twice. She swallows a sphere of air. Yes, it is she, herself, marching along the parapets. Herself? No, not exactly: an idealized rendition, the Helen of ten years ago, svelte and smooth.

As the troops march through the portal and head toward the plain, the strange incarnation calls down to them.

“Onward, men!” it shouts, raising a creamy white arm. “Fight for me!” Its movements are deliberate and jerky, as if sunbaked Troy has been magically transplanted to some frigid clime. “I’m worth it!”

The soldiers turn, look up. “We’ll fight for you, Helen!” a bowman calls toward the parapet.

“We love you!” a sword-wielder shouts.

Awkwardly, the incarnation waves. Creakily, it blows an arid kiss. “Onward, men! Fight for me! I’m worth it!”

“You’re beautiful, Helen!” a spear-thrower cries.

Helen strides up to her doppelgänger and, seizing the left shoulder, pivots the creature toward her.

“Onward, men!” it tells Helen. “Fight for me! I’m worth it!”

“You’re beautiful,” the spear-thrower continues, “and so is your mother!”

The eyes, Helen is not surprised to discover, are glass. The limbs are fashioned from wood, the head from marble, the teeth from ivory, the lips from wax, the tresses from the fleece of a darkling ram. Helen does not know for certain what forces power this creature, what magic moves its tongue, but she surmises that the genius of Athena is at work here, the witchery of ox-orbed Hera. Chop the creature open, she senses, and out will pour a thousand cogs and pistons from Hephaestus’s fiery workshop.

Helen wastes no time. She hugs the creature, lifts it off its feet. Heavy, but not so heavy as to dampen her resolve.

“Onward, men!” it screams as Helen throws it over her shoulder. “Fight for me! I’m worth it!”

And so it comes to pass that, on a hot, sweaty Asia Minor morning, fair Helen turns the tables on history, gleefully abducting herself from the lofty stone city of Troy.

Paris is pulling a poisoned arrow from his quiver, intent on shooting a dollop of hemlock into the breast of an Achaean captain, when his brother’s chariot charges past.

Paris nocks the arrow. He glances at the chariot.

He aims.

Glances again.

Fires. Misses.

Helen.

Helen? Helen, by Apollo’s lyre, his Helen — no, two Helens, the true and the false, side by side, the true guiding the horses into the thick of the fight, her wooden twin staring dreamily into space. Paris can’t decide which woman he is more astonished to see.

“Soldiers of Troy!” cries the fleshly Helen. “Heroes of Argos! Behold how your leaders seek to dupe you! You are fighting for a fraud, a swindle, a thing of gears and glass!”

A stillness envelops the battlefield. The men are stunned, not so much by the ravings of the charioteer as by the face of her companion, so pure and perfect despite the leather thong sealing her jaw shut. It is a face to sheathe a thousand swords — lower a thousand spears — unnock a thousand arrows.

Which is exactly what now happens. A thousand swords: sheathed. A thousand spears: lowered. A thousand arrows: unnocked.

The soldiers crowd around the chariot, pawing at the ersatz Helen. They touch the wooden arms, caress the marble brow, stroke the ivory teeth, pat the waxen lips, squeeze the woolly hair, rub the glass eyes.

“See what I mean?” cries the true Helen. “Your kings are diddling you …”

Paris can’t help it: he’s proud of her, by Hermes’s wings. He’s puffing up with admiration. This woman has nerve — she has arete and chutzpah.

This woman, Paris realizes as a fat, warm tear of nostalgia rolls down his cheek, is going to the end the war.

“The end,” I say.

“And then what happened?” Damon asks.

“Nothing. Finis. Go to sleep.”

“You can’t fool us,” says Daphne. “All sorts of things happened after that. You went to live on the island of Lesbos.”

“Not immediately,” I note. “I wandered the world for seven years, having many fine and fabulous adventures. Good night.”

“And then you went to Lesbos,” Daphne insists.

“And then we came into the world,” Damon asserts.

“True,” I say. The twins are always interested in hearing how they came into the world. They never tire of the tale.

“The women of Lesbos import over a thousand liters of frozen semen annually,” Damon explains to Daphne.

“From Thrace,” Daphne explains to Damon. “In exchange for olives.”

“A thriving trade.”

“Right, honey,” I say. “Bedtime.”

“And so you got pregnant,” says Daphne.

“And had us,” says Damon.

“And brought us to Egypt.” Daphne tugs at my sleeve as if operating a bell rope. “I came out first, didn’t I?” she says. “I’m the oldest.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Is that why I’m smarter than Damon?”

“You’re both equally smart. I’m going to blow out the candle now.”

Daphne hugs her papyrus doll and says, “Did you really end the war?”