Tuesday, May 21, 2019

4.17: I Wanna Walk But I Run Back To You

1191 BCE - Outside the South Wall of Troy.

“What are you?” Helen asked as the sun set behind Adresteia, “And why do you look like me?”

“I'm a friend,” Adresteia said.


Helen looked up at the cut rope above them, “That seems obvious enough.” People on top of the wall were searching for them; the deep shadow cast by the wall in the setting sun made them very difficult to spot. Helen couldn’t tell whether the people searching from the wall were angry Trojans or guards. Right now, it didn’t really make a difference. She turned and started walking west.

Adresteia hadn’t lived in Troy long, but she knew that the south gate was much closer to their current location than the west gate. “Where are you going?” Adresteia asked.

“The Achaean camp. Don’t try to stop me.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Adresteia said.

Helen stopped and looked at her for a second, “Whose side are you on?”

“Right now, yours,” Adresteia answered.

“Well… I hope you can jog, because I’m faster than I look.” Helen took off, not running, but doing the double-time paced march of a Spartan with somewhere important to be. Adresteia jogged after her, adjusting the shape of her eyes to see better in the light of dusk.

“What are you going to do when we get to the Greeks?”

“Grovel, probably,” Helen said, “And hope my husband believes the truth.”

“What is the truth?” Adresteia pressed.

“That the necklace Paris gave me in Sparta is cursed. It forced me to love him.”

“You realized this when it was pulled off in the market?”

“No,” Helen stopped to look both ways down a dirt road before sprinting across it and then resuming her jog through the brush. “I figured it out a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you take the necklace off?”

Helen wheeled around, hands raised, “Don’t you think I tried?! That necklace makes it feel like I’m dying whenever I’m away from Paris, but taking it off does the same. I could only stand to have it off for a few moments. I tried, over and over again to smash it, but it’s stronger than it looks. So then I tried throwing it places I wouldn’t be able to get it back. That just ended with me getting very good at climbing Trojan roofs and crawling through Apollo’s sewer. The last thing I tried was feeding it to a random goat. I ended up tearing four goats in half before I found the one that had swallowed the necklace.”

“Maybe you should try feeding it to Paris?”

“Heh,” Helen smiled, “Yeah, maybe. But I think… I think I’d rather just put as much distance between me and that infernal noose as I can. I just hope Menelaus believes me when I tell him what happened.”

“He already does,” Adresteia assured her.

Helen studied her companion closely in the dark, “Do you know my husband?”

“To a degree,” Adresteia said, “I work with Odysseus.”

Helen raised an eyebrow, “Does Odysseus’s wife know he works with you?”

“Penelope knows quite a lot more than I will be sharing with you tonight,” Adresteia smiled, “But, as to the matter of your husband, he had already come to the conclusion the necklace was cursed. And Odysseus and Agamemnon also believe him.”

“So… so that’s it?” Helen laughed, “I just walk into the Achaean camp and… I can go home? Just like that?”

“The Greeks have been suffering from a malady inflicted upon them by Lord Apollo, but the likes of us are immune, so I expect you needn’t fear for yourself.”

“Is my husband well?” Helen asked as she resumed walking with purpose, “Has he contracted the disease?”

“Not last I saw,” Adresteia said, “but I know it has spread beyond the troops who attacked Apollo’s temple, so it seems the god of surgeons is not striking surgically.”

“So, even if I get back to the Greeks, we can’t leave until that curse is lifted, then.”

“No, but that will be easier to manage with you back among the Achaeans than imprisoned within Troy.”

“What did you mean when you said the likes of us?” Helen asked, “I saw you change when you rescued me … what are you?”

“I was a goddess, Nemesis, punisher of hubris, bringer of divine retribution. Now I’m just Adresteia; same powers, less pretense of divinity.”

“Nemesis? What happened to you?”

“I lost my station on Olympus when I spared a toddler that Zeus sent me to murder. He stripped me of my rank, hunted me, found me – somehow, I still don’t know how – and with Aphrodite’s help he raped me.”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said, “That’s terrible.”

“Yes,” Adresteia said, “but to be fair I think it’s preferable to what Aphrodite’s subjected you to.”

“No…” Helen shook her head, “Paris has never used physical force to get what he wants.”

“I know,” Adresteia said, “Wouldn’t it be reassuring if he had?”

Helen looked at her uncomfortably.

“Make no mistake, you’ve been wronged just as much as I have,” Adresteia said, “Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

Helen seemed to ponder something for a moment, “Would it be… too much for me to ask, when Zeus… raped you?”

“Oh, about nine to ten months before you were born.”

“How…?”

“You’re wanting me to teach you about the birds and the bees?” Adresteia asked.

“No. Well, yeah. For our kind. My mother said we were found in a pair of eggs? Do you lay eggs? Do we lay eggs?”

“No,” Adresteia sighed. This was an interesting conversation to have while on the move. “The truth is… after what happened, I couldn’t bear the thought of giving birth to you. I’m sorry I know that must sound…”

“Don’t be,” Helen said, “Don’t be sorry. If I had to carry Paris's child I'd... well, I understand completely.”

“Oh, I really wish you didn’t” Adresteia shook her head, “Anyway, Persephone and Hades determined that, given the parentage involved, it wouldn’t be possible to … terminate my pregnancy. So, they came up with a rather crazy idea. They used their... we'll say, 'magic', to transfer the contents of my uterus to an artificial womb to finish gestating, and they then gave this ‘egg’ they’d created to a Spartan couple – evidently, your parents Tyndareus and Leda. I didn’t know their names at the time, but apparently a favor was owed, and Leda had conceived about the same time I had, so with a little finesse, they could convince everyone Leda had birthed twins.”

“But then she really did birth twins…” Helen said.

“And in a moment of grand irony, so did the egg they were given. Two sets of fraternal twins, one pair mortal, and the other pair immortal.”

“If Pollux and I were your children, how is it we looked as much like Clytemnestra and Castor as we did when we were little?”

“Our kind are consummate shapeshifters,” Adresteia said, “Although you’ve never learned to use your powers deliberately, you still have them, and your instinct as a newborn would have been to mimic your new family. As you aged you probably favored me a bit more with time, but it’s frankly amazing to me that you and I look as much alike as we do.”

Helen started to ask something else, but Adresteia heard something and stopped her silently.

“What is it?” Helen whispered as they crouched down in the long grass.

“I hear Achaean voices.”

“Oh, well in that case,” Helen started to stand and cry out but Adresteia pulled her back down and wagged a finger.

“There’s something wrong with them,” she whispered. Almost on cue, there were screams in a Trojan accent, begging for mercy.

Adresteia led Helen around a log and they carefully peaked over to see what was happening. Six Achaean soldiers garbed in black cloaks and carrying crude butcher’s weapons were crucifying a Trojan farmer. They hoisted him up into the air like a scarecrow and then filled wooden cups from the bleeding cuts to his tendons.

“What are they doing?” Helen was appalled, “What has happened to Greece since I left?”

“It’s not Greece. This happened here. Some of the men stricken by Apollo’s plague have embraced it. They shun the sunlight and worship Dionysus at night.”

Helen pointed across the clearing where the soldiers were enjoying themselves. There was an overturned cart, and next to it, a woman and two small boys bound wrists-to-heels. “We can’t leave them.”

“Can you fight?” Adresteia asked.

“I don’t know; I guess?”

“You’re a Spartan and a goddess, and you don’t know?”

“I didn’t know I was a goddess until a few minutes ago.”

“But you still trained for combat, right? Penelope did.”

“Penelope, I assume, didn’t need to worry about accidentally snapping someone in half while sparring. I avoided that sort of risk as much as possible.”

“Well, don’t avoid it now,” Adresteia said, “I’m still weak from landing on that iron-rich rock.”

“Iron?”

“Oh gods, this is why I should have raised you,” Adresteia growled, “Iron, it’s a rare metal. I mean, it’s abundant, but most people don’t know how to smelt it. Iron’s one of the few things that hurt us. Pure iron’s the worst, but that rock around the base of Troy’s walls had enough in it to burn me.” She showed Helen the welts on her back, “Some of that junk is still under my skin.”

“It hurts?”

“Like hell, so I’m going to be off my game.”

“I’m not feeling so hot myself, to be honest,” Helen rubbed her chest where the necklace had hung, “But I don’t think I need to be Achilles to deal with these schlubs.” Helen scrambled around and found some smooth round rocks that fit neatly in the palm of her hand.

“What are you doing?” Adresteia asked.

“Menelaus and I used to love playing cornhole as children. As we got older, we had to keep raising the difficulty level. Ended up tossing overhand at targets on the archery range.” Helen singled out one man whom none of the others were looking towards at that moment. She popped up over the log and threw one of the stones gracefully. Though the motion was perfectly fluid, she threw the stone with such force there was an audible fwip before it struck the man in the side of the head and blew his brain out the other side of his skull.

Adresteia was impressed and, in a twisted way, very proud.

The other five men noticed when Helen’s victim when he collapsed, but in the dark their first thought was that he’d simply fallen ill or something, and began trying to rouse him. One of them finally held a torch over the man and screamed when he saw the obliterated skull. Helen, now showing off for her biological mother, lined up her second shot and threw with her godly strength. Her small meteor cleaved through the burning torch and struck the its bearer in the side of the face, immediately silencing him. At that point the remaining four men realized they were under attack. Helen managed to nail one in the forehead before he could get his helmet on, bringing it down to three.

One of the surviving men kicked the broken torch head into the bushes where they were hiding, “Alright, come on out now. Those were good shots, but your luck’s run out. Come out here and let’s have a polite chat.”

“Yeah, no foolin’,” another one said, “We could use someone who can use a sling like that.”

“Are they seriously trying to recruit me?” Helen whispered.

“Apparently. Must not have liked those guys much.”

Helen stood up and stepped into clear view, juggling her remaining stones nonchalantly, while Adresteia shrouded herself in darkness and circled around behind the men.

“Holy shit buckets,” the first man said, “You’re Menelaus’s wife!”

“We’ll live like kings if we bring her back!” the second man said.

“Nonono…” the third man shook his head, “We take her back the war’s off, innit? You want that? You? I don’t want that, Lord Dionysus sure doesn’t want that.”

“Well, what do we do when we’re not sure what’s right?” the first man said, “We ask ourselves…”

“What would Dionysus do?” the two other men recited in unison.

“Right, so let’s bind her up good and take her to the temple.”

“You men are really biting off more than you can chew,” Helen said, “the only reason I haven’t killed you all already was because I was feeling a measure of mercy.”

“Oh what? You going to throw more rocks at us?”

Helen snarled and loosed one at the man. He calmly dodged the projectile and picked up his shield.

“It’s not so easy when you don’t have the advantage of surprise, I think.”

“Very true,” Adresteia said as her veil of darkness swallowed the men. What followed was several seconds of nightmarish noises – screams, wet tearing noises, and gurgling. When her veil lifted, Adresteia had the crucified Trojan man in her arms, and the three remaining soldiers were impaled on the arms of their cross. Helen snapped the bindings holding the man’s wife and children, but held onto the kids while the woman begged Adresteia to help her husband.

“Is he…?” Helen started.

Adresteia stretched the man out on the ground, - he was warm, but he had no breath, and his chest was still.

“Please save him! Restore him!” the man’s wife begged.

Adresteia held a hand over the man’s chest. She’d thought about that child she’d saved some 35 odd years ago many, many times. She’d thought about how she’d done what she’d done, and how she could do it better, but she hadn’t actually tried it again. “Listen… what’s your name?”

“Ostania,” the Trojan woman said.

“Okay, Ostania, I did this once and it worked but, there’s no guarantee here, okay?”

“Please, if you can even try, you must!”

Electricity snaked out of Adresteia’s finger tips. The current agitated the ferric slivers in her back, producing a sickening sizzling sound, but Adresteia pushed through the pain and built a charge up in her hand. She put her empty hand against the man’s ribs, and then placed the charged hand over his heart. With a gentle nudge she willed the electrical charge to travel between her hands with a snap. The man’s body bucked off the ground, and his wife screamed. Adresteia did it twice more, and on the third attempt, the man’s mouth opened and he gasped deeply, then began coughing and crying in pain.

“You did it!” the woman shouted, “You saved him!”

“For the moment,” Adresteia said as she ripped apart her tunic and started tying the strips across his extremities as tourniquets, “I restarted his heart, but I can’t heal those cuts, and now that his heart’s beating, that’s a problem. Can you sew?”

The woman went pale.

Can you sew?

“I’m a seamstress.”

Good,” Adresteia said. The woman’s reverence and the dead soldiers had given the Adresteia a bit of a boost, so she held out a hand and produced a ball of silk thread and a silver needle.

“You can’t be serious…”

“Ostania, he’s literally going to bleed to death if you don’t do this. You’re not going to make the situation worse, so there’s no downside to trying, and between you and me, I’ve never sewed a damn thing in my entire life.”

“I just… I just sew him up like a torn cloak?”

“Yes, and we don’t have much time, so don’t worry about keeping the stitches small or neat.”   
The woman had never handled silk thread before, let alone sewed with it, but she adapted quickly, starting with the deep wound on the back of her husband’s left leg. She tied it off into a knot, but didn’t have a way to cut it - after half a moment's hesitation she snipped the thread the old fashioned way - with her teeth. Adresteia conjured some clean cloth, and wrapped the dressing tightly around the suture before removing the tourniquet on that limb.

“One down,” Adresteia said, “three more to go.”

They worked as quickly as they could. The man didn’t recover consciousness, but his breathing seemed to become steadier as Adresteia removed the last tourniquet, and the bindings on the wounds held fast.

“Keep the wounds as clean as you can,” Adresteia said, “Don’t rinse them with water straight from the river. Boil the water, let it cool, and then use that to rinse his wounds.”

“Will he… will he ever walk again?” Ostania asked.

“It may be difficult, but I think so. It’ll be a while though.”

Helen righted the heavy cart and helped them load the injured man into it.

“Lady Helen,” Ostania asked, “Are you going to return with us to Troy?”

“No, not tonight,” Helen said, “Travel safely, and may the gods keep you close.”

They parted ways, and Adresteia and Helen resumed their trek to the Achaean camp. They began to slow, though, as Helen seemed to become tired and clumsy.

“What’s wrong?” Adresteia said as she helped Helen up from a nasty fall.

“Nothing, I’m fine, I’m fine…”

“You’re not fine. I doubt I have a shred of maternal instinct, but I can still tell you are not fine.”

“I just,” Helen hit herself in the head multiple times, “I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Paris?” Adresteia asked.

“Yes, I… I thought the further I got away from the necklace, perhaps the weaker its magic would become, but the further I get away, the more I want to run back to him. Oh my gods he must be worried sick right now. I bet he’s out here, somewhere, looking for me…”

It was difficult for Adresteia to listen to, “Do you love him?”

“Ye-” Helen stopped herself, “No, it’s just Aphrodite’s hex talking. I love my husband. Menelaus. And our daughter, Hermione. I love my sisters and my brothers, my parents – old and new. I do not love..." Helen seemed to have a great deal of trouble finishing the sentence, but pushed through it, "I do not love Paris.”

Helen stood up straight, took a deep breath, and resumed their march. They made it about a half mile before she stumbled again. Adresteia propped Helen up in her arms and looked at her through owl eyes. The night air on the coast was chilly, but Helen was sweating.

“I hate him,” Helen said, “and I hate myself for loving him.”

“Don’t…” Adresteia held her, “Don’t hate yourself. Aphrodite’s magic has felled even the strongest of us. It perverts the best things in life – happiness, contentment, passion – and turns it into toxic rot.”

“Can you… can you carry me to the camp? To Menelaus?”

Adresteia hefted her up and carried her until they were, finally, in sight of the camp’s sentries. Adresteia subtly altered the shape of her ears to better listen – she could hear Menelaus and Odysseus, neither of them too far away.

“Menelaus is near, Helen,” Adresteia assured her, but Helen was completely silent. Adresteia laid her down. Her breathing was fast but faint. Her eyes had rolled back into her head. Tears wet her cheeks, but her lips were dry from dehydration.

There was a faint glow of light behind Adresteia and she turned to see a dark figure standing with her. It was Apollo. At night, his golden tattoos and hair dimmed to a faint blue light, and small pin pricks of white and blue light appeared scattered across his skin.

“Where were you when that Trojan farmer needed help?”

“Projecting my will into Ostania’s mind, to steady her hands as she did what needed to be done. Then I followed them down the road a ways until I had an opportunity to put a blessing on the man to stop any internal hemorrhaging and ward off infection. But now, you two have my undivided attention.

“Can you help her?” Adresteia asked, “Can you help Helen?”

“I can’t lift the curse, Nemesis,” Apollo said, “but I can tell you, she can’t tough this out. There is no enduring the pain and coming out the other side. Without that charm around her neck, and Paris in her arms, Aphrodite’s witchcraft will kill her.”

“I… I can’t take her back to him…” Adresteia said.

“Then she will die,” Apollo said, “Which might be her preference. But right now, the decision is yours. If you take her into the camp now, she will be dead by the next sunset, but she may regain lucidity long enough to say goodbye to Menelaus.”

“But if I take her back, there’s at least a chance. A chance we’ll find a way to lift the curse, so she can go home.”

“Yes, return her to Paris now and there remains a chance she will one day see her beloved Hermione again. What would you endure to see your daughter?”

“I’m the wrong woman to ask about that.”

“I don’t think so,” Apollo said, “Come, I’ll help you get her back to Troy, and then I’ll help you pull that iron crap out of your back.”


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