[What Might Have Been 03] Alternate Wars Read online

  Recollection began making sense again about sundown. Cleland had taken charge of their survivors. An orderly found Payne at an offside spot, slumped on the ground, resting, emptily staring into empty air. His wounds, miraculously minor, were bandaged and didn’t hurt too much. Exhaustion deadened that sort of thing some.

  The orderly said that General Houston would like to see him if the lieutenant felt up to it.

  Certainly the lieutenant did! A measure of excitement in him, Payne limped after the man.

  The western sky turned the waters as luminous a gold as itself. The soldiers had herded prisoners together under guard, fixed hospital tents for their badly hurt, made bivouac. They’d begun collecting the dead of both sides. That job wouldn’t be finished today, though. Payne wondered about burial. It wasn’t very good practice in these parts. But how can you build tombs for so many before they rot?

  Nor was this a pleasant ground to camp on; and with fuel low, fires were sparse, food cold. Tomorrow they’d have better quarters, in and about the city. Tonight must be endured. Nonetheless, Payne went between serried arrays and saw men cleaning their outfits as best they were able. He didn’t suppose the camp of those who had come from New Orleans was anything like so neat.

  A tent with a plank floor had been raised for Kearny. The floor extended a ways beyond it. He stood on this, under open heaven, with Houston. The light made gilt of the gray in their hair. Their cigars waxed and waned, small red demon stars. A hush had fallen, camp noises the merest undertone, so that Payne heard their voices clearly as he approached.

  “Gallant youngster,” Houston was saying. “I want to promote him on the spot, right this evenin’. It’ll do his men good, too, after all they been through.”

  “Whatever’s left of them,” Kearny replied. “I’m sorry now I let them go. They did screen my horse, which did loosen up that flank of the enemy, but the results weren’t worth the cost.”

  “You can’t reckon such things just by countin’. A regiment lives by its battle honors. That’s why we sallied to help you today, whatever your opinion of the move.”

  “And whatever the consequences when the French steam up the river.” Kearny sighed. “Well, I guess we can cope with them regardless.”

  “And go on from here.” Excitement throbbed in Houston’s throat. “We can take all Texas, I swear.”

  Payne halted at the deck and stood unnoticed, diffident.

  “Given sufficient and adequate troops,” Kearny said.

  Houston stiffened. “The South has plenty, suh.”

  Kearny turned to face him head on. “Sir, no offense. Your men are brave. Their leaders are often brilliant. And … I do understand what it means, names on regimental flags, the names of fields where, win or lose, men fought well. Forgive me if I said the wrong thing. It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

  Not altogether mollified, Houston replied quietly, “I’d still like to know just what you meant.”

  Kearny drew breath. “Why, simply this. We, the United States of America, have the Empire to cope with. The end of these hostilities, the next peace treaty, won’t buy us more than time to make ready—time equally available to them. We can’t go on relying on professional cadres, volunteers, and whatever higgledy-piggledy lot of service requirements the various states have enacted. The Jackson Constitution needs further work. The Northwestern militia are our best from the standpoint of organization and preparedness, but I admit they are not good enough either. We need a stricter code. Start boys drilling when they start school. Give men longer active duty hitches each year. Provide for the quick-mobilization not only of units but also of industry and the press. And we need these laws the same for all Americans.”

  “I don’t know as how I like that,” Houston said slowly.

  Kearny’s tone went low. “I can’t say with all my heart that I do. But look at what happened today.”

  “Yes, I’ll grant you that,” Houston said. “Your regiments were … Cromwell’s Ironsides reborn.”

  No, thought Payne, somewhere in his weariness and exaltation. His glance went beyond the tent, on into the ranked shelters and ordered guns bulking across this land. No, they weren’t, they aren’t any such thing. They are the future.

  ARMS AND THE WOMAN

  James Morrow

  “What did you do in the war, Mommy?”

  The last long shadow has slipped from the sundial’s face hours ago, 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, dusting the lamps and curtaining the moon, until only one candle lights the twins’ room, like the campfire of some small, pathetic army, an army of mice or scarab beetles.

  “So you want to know what I did in the war,” I intone, singsong, as my children climb into their respective 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 with 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 crenelated 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 long, 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 it a sudden tug. “Ouch,” she cries, more from despair than pain. There are times when Helen feels like tearing all her lovely tresses out, 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 quick 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 wanted her to walk Troy’s high walls each morning, waving encouragement to the troops, blowing them kisses as they marched off to battle. “Your face inspires them,” he would insist. “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 one, 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 she 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 Château 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 sexuality 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 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 the remainder of 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 Achaians to the house of Hades this morning: strong-greaved Machaon, iron-muscled Euchenor, ax-wielding Deichos, 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 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, Aithon and 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 sharp 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 breast-plate. Angrily he fishes for epithets. Mule-minded Helen, he calls her beneath his breath. Leather-skinned Lakedaimon, runs his internal invective. 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 some 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 plays itself out, 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 breast-plate. 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.