Chapter 69: Trying Not to Lie

I THINK IT WAS all the traveling around the world and all the keeping different characters straight as I met women that made me do what I did with my next contestant. Or it could have been the setting in which I found her. Sonia Lind was a twenty-seven-year-old PhD candidate in archaeology, completing her thesis at the Çanakkale University in Turkey. Yes, an American woman with a Swedish name, studying in Turkey. What’s more, she was completing her dissertation while assisting on further excavations of Troy.

“It’s been years since I was last here,” I breathed as I stopped to look at a bit of rock she was examining. She started and looked at me, then snorted.

“Couldn’t have been that many years, could it?” she asked. “You can’t be more than thirty.”

“I look much younger than I am,” I sighed. “Who wants to go around looking like an old man?”

“O-kay,” she said. “So, when was the last time you were here?”

“Hmm. I think it was with Alexander. He had a great fascination with Achilles and Patroclus. I showed him where the tomb was and he and Hephaestion placed flowers there.”

“I’ve heard that story, but while there is evidence of many wars in this area, there is nothing that points to an actual tomb of Achilles or the legendary battle of Troy,” she said.

“Oh, there was, indeed, a battle of the Greeks against the Trojans over the trivial insult of Paris stealing Helen away from Menelaus at his very wedding. I’ve no doubt you disbelieve it because Homer made a mash of it and Virgil did little better. I brought Homer here to show him the site, but he was far more interested in heroes and gods than in history.”

“You brought Homer here. You visited with Alexander. You are such a liar,” she laughed.

“I assure you I am telling the truth, but you could never write it in your thesis. If the stones could talk, they would tell you the story,” I said.

“Really? What story would this stone tell, oh instructor of Homer?”

“Ah. This stone once knew Helen intimately,” I said. I could say that about nearly any stone in Troy.

“It is not shaped like a dildo. Or as contemporary archaeologists like to say, ‘a ritual object of unknown use.’”

“Oh, no, of course not. But this stone was part of the structure of the master’s bed in a household of Ilium.”

“So, this was part of Paris’s bed?”

“No. This was part of the bed of a local baker.”

“Now you have me intrigued. How did the bed of a local baker know Helen of Troy intimately?”

“She was a slut. One of the things that got her so excited about coming to Ilium with Paris was that it was a whole city of men she hadn’t yet fucked.”

“Oh, come now.”

“Seriously. She ran off with Paris so Menelaus would not discover that his new virginal bride was anything but virginal. While she was in Ilium, she discreetly worked her way through every man she came in contact with. Including the baker.”

“So, Helen was a slut, hence her favor with Aphrodite.”

“Shh. Please do not refer to My Lady Goddess as a slut. A goddess of sex and lust, yes, but not a loose woman. I can think of scarcely twenty men and gods Aphrodite had sex with. In a life of thousands of years. I don’t know how she managed such restraint. I couldn’t. Helen would have sex with twenty men in a month.”

“Usually, such beautiful women withhold sex from men in order to control them. They don’t need to sleep with so many.”

“Need in the sense that you use it is very different from raw lust. Helen simply never saw a man she didn’t lust for. With the possible exception of Menelaus,” I said.