Helen of Troy (104 page)

“A bit late for that,” he said. “A bit late. Have you not wondered why I have not sought your bed as is my right after all this time?”

“I heard you call Cassandra polluted, and I thought you felt the same about me.” I had not tried to change his mind, either. It served my purpose well.

“It is hard to look at you and think that. It is harder to look at you and know I have this . . . this impediment.” Ashamed, he covered the vivid scar and said, “Now you will tell everyone, tell them that Menelaus has lost his manhood—twice!”

“I shall tell no one anything,” I said. “We are siblings in our misfortune, playthings of the gods. Neither of us has deserved what we got.”

“You deserved it. You brought it about, for all of us.”

Should I speak what was in my heart, even though it would hurt? “I meant, I did not deserve the glory, the beauty, and the love of Paris; nor did you deserve being branded a cuckold and a lesser warrior than your violent brother.”

“Always Paris!” he cried. “Always he is here!” He put his hands on my head and squeezed. “If only I could squeeze him out, crush him out of your head.”

I pulled myself away. “He is a part of me; you cannot.”

He turned and flung himself on his bed, lying stiffly to accommodate his disability. “He paces Hades!” he muttered. “Why can he not find peace?” He coughed. “And leave
us
in peace?”

* * *

The pharaoh announced that we were to be transferred upriver to Thebes, where we would be more comfortable. What he meant was that we would be more remote, the better to hold us prisoners. But as far as we knew, he had not attempted to raise any ransom money for us, or even told anyone we were there.

We rode in a long ceremonial boat, gilded at its bow and stern, with a fragrant cedarwood canopy where we could watch the land slide by under our blessed shade. The sun baked the riverbanks, crocodiles languishing upon them, tails trailing in the cool water. It was several days’ sail, but at sunset on the fourth day we saw huge temples on the left bank, glowing red in the dying light. They seemed to stretch out forever, row upon row of columns. From our boat I could hear deep, rumbling chanting from across the water, as priests performed their nightly rites.

A nervous official showed us the largest temple, after we had been settled into our quarters and received by the pharaoh’s deputy. Across the Nile lay tombs, elaborate secret burial vaults. The pharaoh was already constructing his, even though he was still young, our guide told us. “For we must be prepared for that next world,” he said solemnly.

We picked our way through the vast temple, where columns larger than any tree on earth supported stone roofs. There were statues so tall their heads almost touched the ceiling—some were of pharaohs and others of their strange gods with heads of crocodiles, jackals, or hawks, bigger even than the horse of Troy. All these were tended by robed priests and priestesses with shaven heads.

“Look.” Menelaus pointed to one that had the head of a crocodile.

Farther up the Nile there is a vast city where the priests have a temple that is
bigger than Troy. It has statues five times the size of a man. We must go there. As
soon as this war is over.
Paris. Paris had wanted to come here, and see these things, and—

Now I could not see them, not without him. I could not bear it. I turned and ran from the temple.

That night I dreamed of him. He was standing right beside me, sorrowed that he was not here.
I know as well as you it cannot be,
he said, repeating his words of long ago.

“Hush.” Menelaus was sitting awkwardly on my bed, shaking me. His big hands were on my shoulders, but he did not caress me.

Paris faded, slipping away in the dark.

“I heard you cry out,” said Menelaus. “It is but a dream.”

He must have heard me cry
Paris,
and yes, Paris had been but a dream.

“I thank you,” I said, touched that he would try to wake and comfort me, even though he must have heard me call his rival’s name.

Even though I had fled from the temple the day before, when Menelaus was summoned to meet with some officials I returned to it. Painful as it was, I felt that somehow Paris was here, or rather, that even his glaring absence from a place he had longed to see somehow made me feel closer to him. I was wandering in the cool dimness—even at scorching midday—when a boy appeared, taking my arm and pulling me to one side of the temple. I could not understand him, but he seemed sure that I had come for some purpose, and that he knew what it was.

“Seer—very wise,” he said, or rather, that was all I understood. I took my place in a little room in the vastness of the temple and waited. A woman came into the room. “Helen? I know of you.”

How could I understand her? But I did. I was not sure what language she spoke, or how I knew it. I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

“We are honored that you walk amongst us, if only for a short time.” What age was she? I could not tell. “Now”—her voice turned brisk—“you have sought me out for what I can give, the famed elixir.”

I had not sought her out, nor did I know of this elixir, but I would not contradict her. “Yes,” I agreed.

“We in Egypt have long been masters of potions,” she said. “We can make you young, old, astute, forgetful—”

“Oh, give me that one, for I would forget much!”

She smiled. “Only those who have lived intensely want this potion. Those who have not lived enough desire something else to make what they have done more meaningful, magnify it.”

What if I told her?
I have caused a fearful war. I have caused thousands of
deaths. I am in custody to the man I fled.
“Give me the elixir of forgetfulness!” I begged her. “Teach me to make it, so that I may replenish it as long as I live, for I shall have need of it forever!”

“It is very powerful,” she said. “So powerful that should you see your mother and father and children slain before your eyes, you would feel no pain.”

My mother had slain herself already, and what of Paris, dying? What of Troy, blazing? Was it truly strong enough to blot those out?

“I want it!” I said.

“As you wish,” she said, and fell to her preparations. The vial she handed me was filled with a warm golden liquid. I drank it all, quickly, as instructed. I could feel little besides a warm tingling inside where the elixir was caressing my stomach.

“Only wait,” she said. She began cleaning her implements, putting away her bottles and jars.

I reached out and touched her arm. “You promised to teach me,” I reminded her.

While she took the bottles of syrup and dried grains and little pieces of bark and explained the proportions and the order in which they must be mixed, I felt a carelessness stealing through me, a lightness. I hoped I would remember what she was telling me, for suddenly it all seemed sublimely unimportant. Yet at the same time I knew it was vitally important.

Her delicate fingers stoppered the bottle. “Now think on those painful things,” she whispered. “It is time to test it.”

I took a deep breath and thought of Troy. I could see the flames and smell the smoke, even hear the cries of the doomed, but it was as if I were beholding a wall painting. It did not send stabs of pain through me. But those were buildings and people I did not know. Bracing myself, I thought of Paris. Oh, there was still grief there, still a piercing of the heart. “It is not enough!” I said. “Give me more.”

She looked surprised. “You can still feel it? I fear more would be dangerous. Is the pain muted enough that you can endure it?”

I nodded. Perhaps it would be a betrayal of Paris were it to vanish altogether.

We remained in Egypt for seven years—impossible to believe, but that was how many times the Nile overflowed its banks, and that was how they measured years, so it was true. Who could have thought it would drag on for so long, who could have thought we could have endured it? But the elixir . . . the elixir gave me the power. It compressed and collapsed time, so that the seven years flitted away like seven days.

Menelaus was able to extricate himself from the pharaoh’s grasp after many negotiations, and we were on our way, floating down the Nile, the sail folded away, the current hurrying us along toward the sea. The women carrying water jars down the steep banks stopped to look at us, as people always did when a boat passed by. They stood, tall and erect, watching as we left their world.

Menelaus took my hands. “It seemed to me that you belonged here, that you had stayed here all through the war. Yes, that the real Helen—you—had come to Egypt, where you waited for me. What went to Troy was not the true Helen but a double, a phantom. In that way, I hate to leave. This Helen who has been here with me, that is the Helen I competed for, the Helen whose loss I grieved.” Thus he had found a way to live with it.

It seemed the opposite for me. The real Helen had gone to Troy, the Helen who had passed seven years here was a phantom, a ghost. Now that ghost would fade and disappear, and the real Helen must face Sparta at last.

LXXV

W
e landed at Gytheum. That was very hard. It had all begun there: that innocent day I had gone with Gelanor and encountered Aphrodite; the nine days later I sailed away with Paris. As we swung into the harbor, I cast a forlorn look at Cranae, riding tantalizingly in the waves, beckoning. Our night there . . . I felt waves of remembrance surging through me, more than remembrance, desire and longing. It was no more. All vanished, all come to this: a penitent, chastised return to Sparta for the erring, captive wife.

Menelaus mounted the gangplank and stepped ashore. He bent down and poured a libation to the gods. “I thank you,” he said, “for bringing me home.” He knelt for a long time, while the men waited to secure the ship.

“Come.” He held out his hand to me. It was a command. I was to obey, go back where I had been, take that place I had left so many years ago.

Night fell. We should have stayed in Gytheum, set out in the morning for Sparta. Chariots were waiting, but they could have waited longer, until dawn. Instead Menelaus mounted one and ordered, “To Sparta! I have waited a generation, I can wait no longer! Girls born the day I left are long since mothers!” He held out his hand to me and I took my place by his side.

Going back. Going back, along the road I had thought never to travel again. Menelaus encircled my waist with his arm. “Now it all begins again,” he whispered close in my ear. “Everything is erased. It is as if it never happened.”

I looked at him, at his face covered with wrinkles, his thinning hair. “It happened,” I said. But I had no wish to make him unhappy. “What will we find?” I murmured. “I am fearful.”

“We cannot know,” he said. He clutched the hand grip of the chariot and stared straight ahead. The chariot lurched forward.

Cresting the last rise, we saw Sparta before us: Sparta, sleeping beside the Eurotas, calm and beautiful. The swift-flowing river caught the moonlight sparkle and tossed it back at us, laughing. The citadel, the hilltop palace, was easy to see from where we stood.

I clutched Menelaus’s arm. “Let us wait here. It would be better to ascend in daylight, when the palace is up and stirring.”

He frowned. “Wait outside our own palace? How foolish!”

He flicked the reins and the horses moved forward, up the hill.

It was still dark when we reached the gates. The doors were fastened shut. I saw that they were still the same red-painted wood ones I had left. Menelaus called for the guards, and they, sleepy-eyed, swung open the gates, not really caring who we were.

The grounds were quiet, the only sounds the crunching of our chariot wheels. Everything was bathed in moonlight, the sinking moon painting all it touched in cold white light.

You will return in moonlight.
Yes, as I had left Sparta in moonlight, now I returned to it in the same way, as foretold.

We dismounted. Before us it was utterly still, waiting.

I walked slowly toward the building where I had lived. It was horrible that it was still the same. It should not have been. All that had passed should have been reflected in its stones. But how could it have been?