Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
13
The Fall of Troy
IT DIDN’T TAKE too long to see how the war would ultimately play out, though it took ten years for the final curtain to fall. Aphrodite had recruited Apollo, Artemis, and mighty Ares to help the Trojans. But arrayed against them were Athene and Hera (losers of the beauty contest), Aphrodite’s once-again estranged husband Hephaistos, Poseidon (who was still upset about losing Aphrodite at sea), and Hermes. Hermes is known today by the simple title of being a messenger god. But to me, he was a god most to be feared. He was the god of travelers and, oddly enough, the god of the satchel. He should have been my patron. If you’ve lost your luggage, appeal to Hermes. He’d had nothing to do with my own satchel and the infinity room, but I had no doubt he could unmake it if he knew about it. Worst of all, Hermes was a spy. You just never knew where he might show up. I just hoped Aphrodite would keep her mouth shut about the infinity room.
There was a lovely temple to Aphrodite in Ilium (the name of the city in the Kingdom of Troy). As in most of her temples, worshipers bearing gifts for the goddess could ask a question of a priestess and expect to get an answer during coitus. No, they were not prostitutes. That’s something the anal-retentive archeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth century arrived at because they considered any sex act with someone other than a spouse to be prostitution. Aphrodite was the goddess of sex, true, but not of prostitution.
If they had paid attention to what happened back on Cyprus with the Propoetides, they’d have figured that out. Those twelve priestesses of the goddess got it into their heads that they could make a pretty fortune by just selling sex and profiting from it. This was not long after Aphrodite and I arrived on Cyprus, so I was there when she put an end to the practice by turning them into stone. The last I saw of them was in the British museum.
But the priestesses of Troy were devoted to Aphrodite. They often blessed the warriors going out to meet the Greeks in battle. And lest you think that was an easy task, remember there were over 100,000 warriors on each side in this conflict! It was a bloody mess on the battlefield. But the priestesses rightly felt that no man should go to his death without having been laid. Recently. The soldiers retreated behind the city walls at night and many of them retreated into the embrace of the goddess, who felt the hot smell of sex was the best offering she could be given.
Nonetheless, Aphrodite came to me in a dream one night. I came, too. As we copulated, she wept on my shoulder because she knew the Greeks were going to win the war and her precious city would be sacked and ruined. Now, there is something else you need to realize. Just because she (and her priestesses) loved sex, didn’t mean that she wasn’t emotionally committed to the act and to the people involved. She had loved and lost many times. I saw the priestesses in the temple weep over the list of fallen published each day, touching the names of those they had blessed and, indeed, remembering their touch and love.
Aphrodite painted a picture of horror that would occur once the barbarian Greeks breached the city gates. Men would be slaughtered. Women would be raped… and then slaughtered. I was beginning to shrink out of her hot embrace when she entreated me to save her priestesses when the city fell. With my cock steeping in her juices, what could I do but agree? She knew I had the means as I could easily stuff them all into my infinity room.
I asked one boon. I asked that they gather together all the scrolls of Ilium they could collect so that when I rescued them, I would save the knowledge of the city as well. Aphrodite agreed and our bargain was sealed with another crashing orgasm.
There were details that needed to be worked out. I talked to Nimia and Josie, and they went to work preparing a place for the one or two hundred priestesses who would be joining our little world. That would double our population. The men in the harem were called upon to build housing for them and I did what I could to make their work lighter. Even the women could lift the stone blocks to build the housing. The infinity room was growing into a small city.
Of course, I had to figure out how I was going to escape when the city fell. I’d adopted the visage of an old man in my latest transfiguration, so that I could avoid being sent out to fight. I was still opposed to the senseless bloodletting of this war and wanted no part in the killing. I’d been given a job in Priam’s harem as a joke. I was told I was the last line of defense for the women—and then all his household laughed.
“If it comes down to Bob protecting the harem, they might as well strip and open their legs. There will soon be a Greek between them,” laughed Hector. I was too old even for Helen to want a ride.
Let me just mention that I bore no grudge against Hector. What he said was exactly what I wanted him to believe. I had nothing at all to do with that asshole Achilles drilling Hector with a spear the next day. I just want that to be clear.
After Hector’s death, when Paris went out to gain revenge for his brother and killed Achilles, Troy had renewed hope. Their warriors met the Greeks with renewed fervor and drove them back toward their boats. Day after day the battle raged. And then a day dawned clear and bright. The warriors marched out of the city and found no Greeks to meet them on the field. Of their thousand ships, perhaps half had not been burned, but those had loaded their soldiers and departed.
The Trojans went out to investigate and found only a huge wooden horse. You probably know the rest of the story from Virgil’s writing of the Aeneid, though he got most of the details wrong. Homer was dead set to make Odysseus out to be the hero of the Greeks, so he ignored the horse entirely. I think Athene was probably prompting him. I never understood why she liked him so much. The Greeks in their message wished Paris and all the other men of Troy enjoyment of Helen.
It was quite a celebration. Even the harem emptied to go party in the streets. Only Cassandra and a few children and nurses remained. Cassandra was cursed with being able to prophesy only the absolute truth, but to have no one believe her. Homer gave her short shrift in the Iliad. Virgil did slightly better in his telling of the story in the Aeneid.
First off, the girl—daughter of Priam and Hecuba and younger sister of Paris and Hector—was just plain cute. Helen might have been the most beautiful woman in the world, but if Cassandra had been allowed to grow up, she would have surpassed the legend by far. As a pubescent teen, she became the object of affection of Apollo who had been enlisted by Aphrodite to fight for Troy and had given enchanted arrows to the Trojan archers. Where they struck, if they did not kill instantly, they caused disease that eventually took the life of the wounded and spread to others in the Greek camp. But while he was in the city, Cassandra caught his eye and he fell in lust.
Cassandra was barely thirteen. Apollo was an old man to her and regardless of how glorious he looked in the temple, she had no interest in him at all. Apollo, thinking he would convince her with a rare power, gave her the gift of prophecy so that everything she said would come true. She was so horrified by what she saw in the future that she cursed Apollo and told him to bugger off. Not the way to win friends—especially gods. Apollo couldn’t revoke his gift, but to punish Cassandra—Punish! For not loving him!—he added to the gift a curse that no matter what she prophesied, no man or woman would believe her.
So, I found her in the harem, blubbering amidst the children, most of whom had been left behind. This is where Homer and Virgil both screwed up. Apollo’s curse was that no man or woman would believe her. But as she prophesied the destruction of Troy, the children of the harem were terrified. They believed her. And then Cassandra straightened and in the midst of her manic rantings pointed at me and told the children, “There lies your salvation. Go with Bob and you will be safe.”
I am neither man nor woman, either, lest you forget. I am a demon and Aphrodite had already told me Troy would fall. I opened a gateway to the infinity room and my women rushed to take the children and their nurses into my satchel. But nothing I could say would convince Cassandra to join them. She had been given a vision that she knew to be a true prophesy that she would be taken by Agamemnon after the fall and that she would see him die in Athens.
I found my way to the temple of Aphrodite to fulfill the rest of my commission. I asked the faithful priestesses of the goddess to gather up all their scrolls and come through the door I stood beside—a doorway into the infinity room. There was hesitance among some. They had a line of warriors outside the temple getting drunk and wanting to praise Aphrodite for their victory.
Then all hell broke loose. Greeks had been hiding in the horse and while most of the Trojans slept off their celebratory drunks, the hidden warriors threw open the gates of Ilium and the entire Greek army swarmed through to put every man to the sword. I shouted for the priestesses to hurry and grab as many scrolls as they could carry.
There were still some who scoffed at me. I am sorry to say these suffered a worse fate than the Propoetides. As representatives of the goddess who had fomented the war, the Greeks took particular pleasure in raping and killing them. Mostly in that order. I slipped away with over a hundred priestesses in my satchel and ten times that many books. There was nothing more I could do but hide. If the Greeks saw me, even disguised as an old man, they would do their best to kill me. If they discovered I was a demon, it was a sure bet that they would call on Hephaistos to hammer me into the ground.
I looked for a place to hide and dove behind Aphrodite’s altar in the temple, only to find another man hiding there as well. A Greek!
“What the hell are you doing hiding here?” I asked, taking an unnecessary risk of discovery.
“Are you kidding? It’s dangerous out there. Don’t hurt me! I was all for a sneak attack, but the damned Trojans are fighting back!” he whispered anxiously.
I couldn’t believe the gall of this fellow, hiding out in the temple of the goddess he’d made war on, hoping there would be some pussy left for him when the shooting died down!
“Did you see the tits on that one?” he asked excitedly as a priestess who had chosen to stay ran past with a scroll, hoping to find me. “I’ve got to get me some of that!”
He chose the wrong moment to stand from our hiding place and a stray arrow—shot from a Greek, of all things—nailed him through the neck. He fell beside me, unnoticed by the warriors still around. The priestess chose that moment to dive behind the altar and I opened a gateway just wide enough for her to slip through, then sealed it tight.
I saw my chance and decided to grab the body of the Greek to get me safely out of Troy. I laid my hands on him to absorb his memories and images and whispered the words of the transfiguration spell. In a matter of moments, I was Odysseus, a Greek, and he was an old Trojan man with an arrow through his neck. I grabbed his sword and bloodied it in the body, then emerged from the temple proclaiming our victory.
By that time, the battle was pretty much done, so I went to join my victorious allies.
Neither Homer nor Virgil adequately expressed the carnage the barbaric Greeks visited on the beautiful city of Ilium. Shakespeare actually came closer in Hamlet.
Pyrrhus at Priam drives; in rage strikes wide;
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
The unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium,
Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top
Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash
Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear: for, lo! his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam, seem’d i’ the air to stick:
So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,
And like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
Seeing the proud tower of Ilium fall, though it was long after Pyrrhus completed his murder of the King of Troy, was still like watching the symbol of a nation, its prosperity, its wealth, and its very soul suddenly collapse in a heap with whoever was inside it either trapped and crushed or falling to their death. I had no doubt that Hephaistos had hammered the foundations of Ilium into dust.
Centuries have changed the story, thanks in large part to Homer and his distorted tale. I was drinking with him a few centuries after the fall and told him about it, but that’s a different story.
Oh, what the heck. I’ll tell you now.
He was a wandering poet, singing on street corners when I found him. Nice voice, too. He had some cockamamie story about the hero Odysseus and how he almost single-handedly won the battle of Troy. I’m pretty sure Athene had a hand in inspiring Homer. First, because she isn’t a great poet herself. Not like Apollo. And second because she was totally enamored with Odysseus. You know, in the same way an abused girlfriend or the wife of an alcoholic defends her mate. “Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s got a heart of gold. He didn’t mean any harm. It doesn’t really hurt.” She needed counseling!
So, when I heard him patching together the story of great Odysseus, I intervened.
“That’s not the way it happened,” I declared as we sipped a mug of wine. I had to admit, for as barbaric as the Greeks had been at Troy, they were fine vintners. “Odysseus was a coward who died at Troy.”
“And how would you know anything about it? This is the story that has been told for generations!” Homer declared.
“Well, I’m older than the story,” I declared. I admit, I was a little drunk.
“Right. Prove it!”
I should have just walked away. I should have ignored him. I should have found a nice quiet spot and slipped into the infinity room for a century or so.
Instead, I shoved Homer into the satchel and took him to Troy. I traveled by land except the ferry across the straits between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara. It wasn’t that far from there to Troy, but it took me several days to find it. The Greeks had so totally destroyed the city of Ilium that there was only a fragment of wall with one stone on the next. I took him to the top and showed him the battlefield, where Hector fell, where Achilles was killed by Paris, and finally, where the horse came into the city and the Greeks carried out their sneak attack. No army claiming to surrender would ever be trusted again. The honor had evaporated with the cursed Greeks. Except Homer conveniently left that part out of the story. It was Virgil who put it in. Using my senses to examine the area and feel my way toward the center of the city, I found the crushed altar of Aphrodite and the place where Odysseus fell and I told Homer how the coward had been shot by his own men as he rose up to chase the women.
I suppose you are asking, “How did you ‘show’ the blind poet?”
I ask you, “If Homer was blind, how did he manage to write down all his stupid epic poems?”
Regardless of whatever else you believe, understand this: Homer was a novelist, not a historian. He took all the details I gave him, put them in a bag, and shook them up. Then he took them out of the bag in random order and wove a story from them all.
Never believe the words of a novelist. They lie for a living.
Sorry about that. I get a little wound up when I talk about Troy. They were noble and beautiful people, replete with the arts, poetry, music, and philosophy; destroyed by barbarians who could scarcely write their names. I had friends there and I found myself in the uncomfortable position of masquerading as Odysseus as we left the smoldering embers of Ilium behind and headed to our boats.
I saw Menelaus lead hairy Helen through the streets of Troy like a captured monkey, and heard him promise that he would let every soldier in the Greek army have a turn with her for her betrayal. I shook my head. The idiot couldn’t see how much that idea turned the little slut on. Agamemnon carried the weeping and still bleeding thirteen-year-old Cassandra under his arm, after she was raped by Ajax. Ajax who had committed sacrilege in the very temple of Athene who was patroness of the Greeks when he toppled her statue in order to drag Cassandra from it, in spite of the sanctuary she pled for. His own goddess! I could tell you right then he wasn’t going to make it home alive. What other Trojans survived—whether male or female or child—were shackled and taken as slaves, scattered among the many city-states of Greece.
And me? I had read the memories from Odysseus and met his men at his ship. The ships had all left the night before the treachery and dropped anchor beyond the point where they could not be seen from Ilium or the battlefield. They had returned after dark and crept up to the city. I had ‘my’ men, who all had their own spoils aplenty, including silent or weeping women taken from the city and surrounding countryside. I promised myself I would try to protect them as much as possible, but I knew they were destined to be raped repeatedly before the ship returned to Greece. I would attempt to spirit them away to the infinity room, blaming the disappearances on drownings or capture by the gods.
We cast off to head back to Ithaca, a place I had no desire to return to. I knew I’d have to tell Penelope her cowardly husband was dead and she should get remarried. It should only have taken a couple of weeks to sail from Troy to Ithaca, but that was not how it would be, thanks to that damned spy, Hermes.
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