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.