Discord

Disclaimer: This is just a non-profit way to express my appreciation for the genius of Homer. No infringement intended.

Note: This can be read as a companion piece to Redemption.

Paris tried to rouse Helen from her position by the balcony, but she refused all his entreaties. The moon encased her glorious womanly form in a soft light that made her seem like some remote evening star that he would be forever sundered from. Her marble features were inscrutable and her blue eyes were silent and still like the sea the balcony looked over.

Only a few hours ago, they had been entangled in a fevered session of lovemaking after he had, with the connivance of Aphrodite, fled from Ares favourite and Helen's spurned husband, Menelaus of Sparta. Aphrodite once more blessed him by swaying a disappointed and humiliated Helen to his bed, but once Paris rolled off her, Helen turned away from him and hunched into a ball.

When he tried to encircle her in his lean, bronzed arms that he was inordinately proud of, she rebuffed his advances and stole away to the balcony with an Egyptian cotton sheet wrapped loosely around her.

"My love—" Paris attempted to caress her bare shoulder. She shrugged away as if his touch was like a scalding iron upon her flawless skin. "My love, what weighs upon you?"

Helen did not reply at first.

"My love?" prompted Paris.

Helen sighed. She leaned out over the railing as the wind lightly kissed her golden hair. "I wonder what he is thinking of us at this very moment?"

Paris stiffened.

He knew whom his lover referred to.

Menelaus.

"Probably which way he would like to disembowel me in order to give me the greatest torture and then how he would like to cook my innards," tightly replied Paris.

Helen snapped around to face her paramour, her eyes blazing like the hot fires of Hephaestus. "And rightly so, Paris! This all should have ended on the battlefield between the pair of you!"

"Helen, you did not see the look of murderous rage in his eyes. He would have cleaved me in two had Aphrodite not whisked me away in time. He is a man spurned—he will go to any lengths to satiate that desire for revenge devouring him!"

"As any man robbed of a fair combat would feel!" retorted Helen. "I am the most wretched woman alive, Paris. Today, your cowardly flight humiliated me and displayed to all those men down there that I took flight with a prancing foal who has no more substance to him than a sweetmeat."

Paris recoiled from her. "Has the moon affected your wits, Helen? Why do you speak such poison?"

"Poison?" Helen repeated incredulously, her voice becoming shrill. "Poison?"

"Does my defeat unman me in your eyes? Are you that changeable?" He gave a short, mirthless laugh. "But why should I be surprised? After all, you did leave your husband for me."

"How dare you!" Helen hissed. "Today showed me that you are an empty boaster. Did you not tell me over and over again that you could beat my spurned Menelaus into the dust and spit on his sword? Yet as soon as you saw my lord in all his glorious warrior form, as soon as you saw his kingly bearing, you trembled like an errant slave before his raging master."

Paris stumbled back. "You are a faithless woman, Helen of Sparta. Your love is as fickle as the Love Goddess herself! If I had won today, would you still be elegising your cuckolded husband and vilifying me?"

"Do you not understand? Are you that empty-headed? You ran from my lord like a bleating lamb. You did not even stay to challenge him! I'm surprised that you did not soil yourself as you stood before him!"

"If you think your abandoned husband is so grand, then why don't you flee to his camp and throw yourself on your mercy?"

Helen took a sharp intake of breath. "Don't think I haven't tried, but each time I do, Aphrodite blocks my way. I have tried to throw myself off the battlements, hang myself from my gowns and impale myself on an ornamental sword, but each time Aphrodite thwarts my purpose. I am the bane of mankind—I despise myself."

Paris found he could not reply. Helen was trembling violently. "This face, this face, has caused so much grief—if I could disfigure it, I would. If I could leave this golden prison, I would—but I cannot."

Paris could only look dumbly on. His mind was a garbled haze.

Helen sank to the floor, tears streaming down her crystalline face. "Every time I think of the daughter I abandoned like an empty wanton, the dagger of shame twists deeper into me and I cannot bear it."

"You knew what you were giving up when you eloped with me," said Paris hoarsely, unable to bring himself any closer to this woman who had become so alien to him.

Grief was etched into her face. Paris could not hold her gaze. His eyes dropped to the floor.

"I was thoughtless, vapid and vain. I did not realise until I fled, how much I loved my little Hermione and my lord Menelaus. I did not like the duty he thrust upon me, I resented him dragging me to dull committees and civil hearings…and now, I miss them. Menelaus made me feel useful and not like a mere ornament on his arm but I was too self-centered to appreciate it then…"

"Hush!" Paris cried. "I will not listen this!"

"You will!" Helen gasped, "You will indeed listen to what I have to say. After the humiliation you have subjected me to, you will listen to me!"

Paris shook his head and stumbled to his bed.

Helen let out a tremulous sob and continued talking regardless of Paris. "Some evenings, Hermione would nestle in her father's lap, and I would sing to them as I played the harp. Menelaus would sit there enraptured by me and Hermione would clap her hands in glee…and do you know what is most heinous? That I had thought it the most tedious event! Now I long for those intimate evenings by the burning fire…"

Her voice trailed off and she pulled herself off the ground to peer through tear-blurred eyes into the darkness from the balcony at the Greek camp on the beaches below. Bright torches shone from the camp and she could see soldiers milling around like little ants in the distance. Shouts, raucous hoots and the grinding of weaponry rang in the air.

She imagined where Menelaus would be.

She wondered if he was thinking about her now.

Paris was near tears himself. He held his hands out entreatingly. "Helen, you can't abandon me now. Everyone loathes me for today. Hector cannot even look at me and says I have shamed the very name of Trojan…he even berated me and said I should be more like your beloved Menelaus."

Helen could not look at him. She felt bile rise up in her throat. She was sure all the gods above were laughing mockingly at her for her previous pre-occupation with the falsities of appearances and veneration. How bitterly had she learnt her lesson!

Paris was a mirror image to all her own failings and she could not bear to face her reflection in him.

Menelaus did not treat her like an idol to be worshipped but as a real woman who could be his consort of Sparta, his beloved wife and mother of his children. On the other hand, Paris lavished jewels, perfumes and silks on her like she was something to be gazed upon in worshipful adoration and nothing else.

"You may romanticise your absent spouse, but remember, he has sired a son off one of his lowly slaves! He has been no pining, celibate husband."

"You don't need to remind me," snapped Helen bitterly. "I hardly expected a virile man such as my husband to completely swear away from a woman's bed! That slave has given him a son that I was never able to bear him."

"There must have been something lacking in him to compel you to flee with me," persisted Paris, breathing hard.

"I mistook tenderness for dullness and duty for oppression. We became distant from each other after the miscarriage of our child that the mystics said was going to be a son and heir to Sparta. He lost himself in his duties and I in clothes and jewels. Then you came along…you were like a breath of fresh air to me. You did not expect me to bear more children to secure the royal line against discontents…you were uncomplicated…"

Paris buried his face in his arms.

Helen could not comfort him. Her pain was nearly tearing her in half.

"I see your brother Hector and his beloved Andromache, and it makes me feel ill. What they have is true and constant, whereas you and I…"

Paris raised a tear-stained face to hers. "I love you, Helen. I love you. I gave you passion and adoration, youth and vigour while that warhorse of your husband gave you nothing."

"You don't love me, Paris. You love that I am the most beautiful woman in the world. You love that I am the daughter of the lord of Mount Olympus and Leda. I can't see you being faithful to me in my dotage—you are only a youth and will eventually want a woman who is lithe and your age."

"Get out," commanded Paris in a dead voice, "Get out. If you find my company so loathsome, you can find your own sleeping arrangements!"

Helen fumblingly slipped on her night shift and her robe, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her throat was tight and her tongue seemed to have swollen to twice its size in her mouth. She nearly tripped over her gown in her haste to flee Paris' rooms.

Wandering down the dimly lit halls, Helen could feel servants' hostile eyes burning into her and she knew that if she had not been under the protection of Priam, one of them would gladly have slit her throat and tossed her lifeless body over the walls to the Greeks below.

How she longed to bare her breast and coax one of the servants—anyone!—to plunge a dagger into her heart and swivel it in while blood poured from the gaping wound as she slid to the floor. The pain would be minor compared to the frenzied guilt that was consuming her.

Her inner voice howled for the Gods to take pity on her wretched self and end her sorry life so that this cursed war could end.

But she knew that the Gods were not merciful and enjoyed playing with the hapless mortals' lives for their own entertainment to ever give her reprieve.

The end. I hope you all enjoyed it. Please review and tell me what you think as it would be most appreciated!