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
