ILL-MET IN ILIUM

by Gregory Frost

Bitten—Goddess sing of how the rescuing hand

was bitten by the radiant one it had rescued.

Taken from that son of Atreus who’d nursed and

encouraged

but starved her strangeness—

a half-living state fit only for

the hidden, nocturnal aspect of Apollo called Smintheus,

bringer of plagues, lover of vermin, mice and rats.

Lustful Paris mistook Helen’s unnatural beauty

as anyone would have done and, unwitting,

allowed that undisclosed unsavory characteristic

to fester in his embrace. It flowered, swelled,

consumed and conquered.

Had he known this,

would Menelaus have sailed forth

to the beach before Ilium to confront

those unyielding Trojans behind their walls?

Would he have comprehended the cost of success?

The gods, even they saw not the thing that ripened

in the dark of a hold, where it claimed, one

after the other, the will of many among

Paris’ crew, while the young prince, himself a mooncalf,

knew none of it. Well-fed, she ensorcelled him.

The ship sailed home, and slowly followed the war.

It was Thersites

That hideous warrior, shamed by Odysseus

for his effrontery and foul language,

who first of all the Achaean armies fell victim

through his treasonous rage.

Wandering from the camp in the night, he

met the Specter—

she who’d called Lacedaemon home

had escaped confinement

in the citadel, its victim

turned victimizer while Apollo,

their immortal guardian, slept.

Revenge, she would have it upon both sides.

Thersites recognized her not at all, having never set

eyes

upon her till then. He drew his sword against

the shape, as it drifted nearer.

Close up, like Paris he was smitten—

he, clubfooted and double-humped,

had little experience with the fair sex,

alive or undead.

“You,” she called him,

ghostly pale as a living moon. She hovered nearer.

“I sense your contention, your leashed anger toward

the leader of your band,” she whispered, and Thersites trembled at her iced touch,

and swallowed hard his own words.

This apparition then opened the brooch upon

her shoulder

and let the cloth covering her breasts drop.

For all her paleness, the tips of her breasts shown

ebony in the moon’s light. She, with a finger,

drew a curve above one nipple, and a black line

flowed behind it as if she’d painted upon herself.

“Drink your fill, oh, man,”

she said. And Thersites, quivering, dropped his blade

and bent his head to the wet rivulet. Feasted long.

A taste he wanted, a taste that any man

would have desired. And little would

they or he have realized that the liquor

of a plague now flowed past their lips.

So was Thersites changed

while all attention lingered elsewhere,

upon the warring Agamemnon as he abused

the prize he’d stolen from that

swift runner, Achilles.

Gods and men alike

watched the rage unfurl, the heated words

dividing them as the walls of Troy separated

their armies from the transformed goal.

“Dog-face!” Achilles named Agamemnon

and thereafter turned his back on war.

Scant secret and less shadow was necessary

for the theft of Thersites’ will by

the highborn revenant, that beauteous Helen.

Then as Dawn spread rosy fingers over the

sea,

the apparition evaporated with her power implanted

in the hunchback. When the time came,

he would do her bidding.

The battles raged, the daily slaughter

for one king’s greed and another’s honor.

Truces struck served to delay

the challenges. The Atrides’ hot words

betrayed their promises, until a son of Priam

slew Odysseus’ brave comrade Leucus

and the battle lust burst again.

Spears through temples, groin,

and back. Jaws unhinged and blood

erupting like a fountain’s deadly art.

Idomeneus’ men slew and stripped

the corpses. Days of battle, bloodied sand.

Then came Night who makes even lofty Zeus

tremble, and the Achaeans granted Ilium

the claim upon its fallen heroes, so that

the absence of the corpses come morning

did not seem to them odd at first, but of a process,

of honorable retrieval, while those of the city

assumed their enemies were playing cruelly

upon their grief in stealing the dead.

Only after the second or third time

that the same warrior, killed in previous battle,

was felled in a late skirmish, did the rumors spread

of something unnatural.

And did they, behind those wide gates,

know what plague lurked in their own midst?

It is spoken how Paris burst into action at the death

of his friend Harpalion, but not that the act

took place by torchlight, as night drew a blanket

over the sandy plain; or that Paris dropped

upon the soldier Euchenor, whose prophet father

had offered him a choice—to die of plague in his

own halls or at the hands of Trojans.

The old seer had got it right twice over.

Paris drained the life from Euchenor

without the need of lance or arrow’s tip.

He had been turned sometime before.

All this while Hector slept, as others did,

safe from one death, prey to another.

How quickly it did move no one can say,

although each day warriors aplenty

faced Ajax and Idomeneus,

charged the ships and beat the Argives

back. Time and again they struck,

and their ranks hardly dwindled, never

were exhausted. Thus cautiously did the revenants

ensure

their own continuance.

Patroclus, disguised, fell to Hector, else the

wretched contests might not have changed.

Hector, he the stallion-breaker, died

from Achilles’ spear, went down in the dust

and had to be ransomed back.

Epeus boxed for a mule and Cassandra stood

upon the battlements at dusk, most lovely daughter

of Priam, and foresaw the death of her city.

She laughed and fairly dared those princes and kings

spread out across the blood-drenched plain to

prove themselves better men. She was by then

already turned as well. She had witnessed her fate

and embraced it willingly, inviting Helen to her bed

where she bared herself for that most painful

pleasure.

The two of them next approached Hector’s

wailing widow, and fed upon her in her grief,

these two

sisters. Engaged in their lurid business,

they failed to detect innocent Aeneas, himself whisked

from Achilles’ wrath by the god of earthquakes.

Aeneas saw it all, that poor innocent, and his

martial will left him.

Weak with horror he withdrew to his family,

gathered them up and crept through the shrouded

city.

At fires he saw others whom he knew. The first few

rejected his pleas, his seemingly mad warnings

of doom at the hands of fanged Harpies.

Inured to fantastical notions after years of war,

of ceaseless slaughter, they laughed.

He saw that he would

never convince good friends of this and, instead,

proclaimed the city certain to fall now

that its towering hero, Hector, had been brought

down

by swift Achilles. Upon those words his number

grew, and swelling, drew the attention of Helen’s

undead league. In the end, unwittingly, his followers

carried the plague to their new land.

Through a hidden exit—

the very one that Helen had used to prey upon the

wounded and the dead upon the field—the swelling

cluster

escaped the city’s fate. When was brave Aeneas’ wife

stolen from him? Snatched certainly by those who

wrapped themselves in darkness. The moment

passed

in utter silence, so that he, brave man, didn’t notice.

He led his people, his children, only to discover,

finally,

her absence. Then he left his followers and raced

back into the city. There he encountered her shade,

both hungry for him and gifted now with profound

ight.

“You will be great,” she said, “and found a new

city in

a foreign land. I cannot touch you else unmake this

vision.” He could not raise his blade to her,

his wife, no matter what she had become.

He retreated from the horror, his only course.

Again, upon the beach,

he and his people eluded the Achaeans. They were

themselves

too busy, engaged in erecting the scheme set in

motion

by Helen through her abject slave, Thersites.

He, like a grotesque gnat, had buzzed into the ear

of clever Odysseus a scheme of great daring—

and in pretend penance, he gave credit

for the idea to that skillful one.

Thus it was that Aeneas and

most of his followers alone escaped the plague

delivered by Helen and her sisters

upon Priam’s city and citadel.

The corpse of that great hero,

Hector, lay twelve days in Achilles’ care

without decay nor any sign of death’s embrace,

so that when Priam kissed the hand of Achilles and

begged

for the body, both of them thought only that Apollo,

Troy’s protector, had preserved it until its return.

On this point the blind poet

ended his story, knowing full well that what

followed

was too horrible to relate. He left it

to others to tell—and those, coming so much later,

received and related only spoils,

replacing what was too impossible to state

with clever tales more likely to gain acceptance.

But here is how it truly went,

and how the blood-leeching creatures blended

into history.

The next day

only those in thrall like Thersites

roamed the streets, pushed back the broad Scaean

Gates,

and strode out upon the deserted plain

haunted as it was by the ghosts of so many

comrades,

to where the Argives had left their “gift.”

These servile citizens

of Ilium knew what to do, guided as they were

by the mind of Helen, her body

somnolent in the heat of day.

With ropes and tackle they hauled

the monstrous horse through the gates,

into the city. As if dazzled by the offering,

by its vanished creators, they left the gates unbarred.

Even ensorcelled by the blood

they had supped, these minions found it

difficult not to laugh at the wooden horse,

at the occasional sandal, the flash of breastplate,

that showed between its ribs.

Odysseus and his small army waited through

the warm afternoon, sealed in their own

stink till it was time. Then in the darkest

of the night, they would open the trap and descend,

just as Odysseus had described to them,

as Thersites had whispered it,

as most diabolical Helen had planned it.

Philoctetes, who’d arrived at the war

last of all, lay among them in the equine belly.

He shared his hydra-venomed arrows with that other

skillful archer, Odysseus, little knowing,

either of them, how these weapons—

gifts from Hercules—would save them.

The poison in those shafts, expertly shot,

exploded every fiend it touched.

The revenant horror called Hector died again thus

impaled.

Where most of the horse’s band fell to the guzzling

monsters,

the two brave archers fought back to back,

till Agamemnon’s army burst the gate to find them,

and upon Odysseus’ cry, set the torch to the enemy.

They overcame Helen’s horde while Apollo,

Sungod, slept in ignorance.

Afterward, Odysseus paid the price for this

as angry Apollo blotted out the day of his

oomecoming

for ten years. Many others, bitten by Ilium’s undead

yet seemingly alive, burst into flames aboard their

ships

where there were few places to hide from the golden

sun.

Only Agamemnon, because he was a king,

was

able to remain in the shadows once he was turned.

It was Cassandra who drained him.

She had locked herself in a cell

and pretended to be a poor victim of her father,

instead of one of the chief plague-bearers.

Agamemnon, foolish man, carried her off as

a trophy,

leaving it to his wife, Clytemnestra, to discover

what he’d become. She had taken a lover, but even

he doubted her story of her husband’s unnaturalness

and abandoned her to her fate.

For nights she kept him at bay.

But finally her husband fell upon the queen

and tore at her throat.

He would have drained her dry had not the god

Apollo

flung his rays just then upon the undead king,

driving him underground. She lived but would not

another morning survive without cunning and

resolve.

When Agamemnon awoke that next night

he found his wife at her bath. She stood

and welcomed him, her fine body so slick with oil

that he could not find purchase,

his fingers slipping as she sank back,

his hunger growing at her enticement as she drew him

down.

He did not see the spike she brought up

out of the frothy bath and plunged

through his chest. He toppled into the water,

his body melting away like a taper. After that,

Cassandra met the same swift fate, for no one there

cared for her cries or pitied her.

And Philoctetes, whose venomed points had

saved them all—he roamed ever after across

the wine-dark Aegean in search of those monsters

who had escaped the fire and death, and who spread

the plague of their kind into his world.

He, the first hunter of vampires,

came to rest gently years later in Sybaris.

He left his quiver of poisoned missiles

with the Sungod Apollo in his temple at Krimissa,

where the fiends dared not seek them,

and where they await the next archer even now.

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