A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

  Of all the humiliations which had rained down upon her in the last few days – the proprietary hands, the lascivious looks, the mocking laughter – this one was (she thought afterwards) the worst. Because as she looked around the corner of the tent, to see what all the fuss was about, she saw her father, standing in front of the Argive king, his staff in his hand and his ceremonial headdress covering his hair. He was probably a year or two younger than Agamemnon, she thought: he and her mother had tried for many years to have a child, but they had always been unlucky. Chryseis had been their last chance, her mother’s final stroke of luck. But he looked old, and small among these Greeks. A sullen crowd of Argive soldiers had gathered behind him.

  Chryseis was almost paralysed with fear and shame. She felt her enslavement more keenly now than she had during the days when she washed and skivvied for the Greek king, and the nights when she drugged him and slept on the furthest side of his tent, on the hard ground. That her father – who had barely seemed to tolerate her – should have come to ransom her. It contradicted everything she had believed of him: he would not come begging to a Greek for anyone, least of all Chryseis. And now he was so close that she could call out to him and apologize for all the mistakes she had made which had led them both to this moment, the father she had believed she would never see again. Her eyes itched with an unfamiliar sensation, and she realized that tears were on the verge of spilling down her face. And at the same time, she felt an acute shame that her father looked so small. In her mind, he was a match for any, for all of the Greeks. But as he stood among them, she could see he was only a man. Only a priest.

  But he was a priest who knew his worth to the god he served. Humility had never been in Chryses’ character, and although he was a suppliant for his daughter’s freedom, he would not beg. As Agamemnon stood before him, he bowed his head, but only briefly. He did not drop to the ground. Instead, he spoke as though they were transacting business.

  ‘King Agamemnon, I ask you to return my daughter,’ said Chryses. His tone was reasonable, mild even. But Agamemnon – as Chryseis knew but her father did not – would not respond well to quietness. He was a man to whom shouting came more readily than talking, and he distrusted anyone who behaved differently.

  ‘I don’t have your daughter, priest. Who told you I do?’

  ‘Apollo told me.’

  A murmur ran through the crowd. Some of the men were openly derisive of her father, a crazy old priest with an inflated view of his own importance and his safety. But some of them stood still, trying to hear more.

  ‘Then you misread Apollo’s message, old man,’ said Agamemnon. ‘Sacrifice another goat or two and see if it improves your accuracy.’ Again, men laughed. Everyone knew that Troy had few animals left for sacrifices. A besieged city was limited in her offerings, which only added to the Greek belief that the gods favoured them over the Trojans.

  Chryseis felt the shame on her father’s behalf. Her cheeks flushed red, she could feel the heat creep up her face. Why could he not be more – she searched in her mind for the word but could not find it. Why could he not be less like himself? That was what she wanted to ask. He had demanded that she change her behaviour countless times (though she had rarely obeyed). But he – she saw it with the newfound clarity of an outsider – was the same. The same as her. She held her fingers up to her cheek. Perhaps not all of the heat came from shame.

  ‘You cannot deceive the Archer and you will not deceive me,’ replied her father, anger shading into his calm voice. Chryseis had heard this tone many times before. ‘You have Chryseis, and I demand her return.’

  At the mention of her name, the Argive soldiers looked less comfortable in their derision. Agamemnon did have a Trojan girl, didn’t he, from that last division of spoils? And hadn’t someone called her by that name?

  ‘You dare to demand anything of me?’ Agamemnon laughed. But there was no mirth in his voice, and though she could see only the back of his head, Chryseis knew there would be no merriment in his eyes. ‘You are an unwelcome guest in this camp,’ Agamemnon continued. ‘It is thanks to my good will to your god that you do not already lie dead on the ground. Do not try my patience further.’

  ‘Apollo will punish any man who injures his servants,’ Chryses said. Chryseis found herself almost pitying Agamemnon, having been faced with her father’s immovable nature many times before. She knew that, desperate as she was to leave the Greek camp and return to her home, the punishment from her father would be so terrible that she could not imagine what it would be. He had beaten her for disobeying him in the past when the scale of her misdemeanours had been relatively minor. What would he do if Agamemnon suddenly softened and allowed Chryseis to leave with him? Chryseis wanted nothing more than to return to Troy. But she could not deceive herself about the consequences her father would demand for this humiliation of his priestly self before an invading army.

  ‘Apollo will not punish any man who has you marched out of this camp for your impudence and folly,’ Agamemnon said. ‘No man can offend the patience of his enemies in this way, and expect nothing to happen in return.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Chryses, standing a little taller. He looked almost relieved, Chryseis thought. Her father preferred conflict to compromise, preferred a battle to a discussion. ‘That is your answer? You will not return my daughter, as Apollo demands?’

  ‘I will not return your daughter. I think you blaspheme, old man: you are not as pious as you would have us all believe. They are not Apollo’s demands you throw around my camp, they are your own.’

  ‘If you prefer to believe that, of course I cannot convince you otherwise.’ Her father was almost whispering now. This quiet part of his anger had been the most frightening for Chryseis as a child. ‘I cannot. But Apollo will.’

  Agamemnon barked orders at two of his men. ‘Take him to the other side of the fortifications. I will not kill a priest, even when he deserves it. Do you hear that?’ he shouted at Chryses. ‘You will leave my camp unharmed, even though your arrogance is intolerable.’

  Chryses stood for a moment, until the two soldiers came up behind him and seized him by the arms. As they manhandled him away, his eyes suddenly flicked to Chryseis, almost hidden behind the fabric of the tent. She felt the colour suffuse her cheeks once again, as surely as if he had slapped her. ‘I will take you home,’ he said to her, and in that moment it sounded (even in her humiliation) not like the threat of a chastising parent to his wayward child, but like the promise of a father to a daughter. When she thought of it at night, as the Greek king slept like the dead across his filthy tent, she could not have explained how Chryses had known she was there, or how she could hear him, when no one else seemed to notice that he had spoken.

  *

  Briseis sat on the low couch, and combed her hair. Achilles’ friend, Patroclus, was staring at her, as he had every night since she arrived in the Myrmidons’ camp.

  ‘I’ve never seen hair that colour,’ he said quietly. ‘It looks like honey being poured from a jar.’

  Briseis had heard these compliments – and many more like them – since she was a child. Men and women alike had stopped in their tracks to touch her hair and remark upon its extraordinary colour. She had her beauty to thank for her husband, her enslavement and her life, she knew. If her husband had not sought her hand, if the Greek men had not noticed her, she might have remained a free woman. Or she might have been slaughtered where she stood.

  ‘Did you always look so sad?’ he continued. She repressed the urge to scream.

  ‘Do you have a sister?’ she asked instead. He shook his head. ‘A mother, then?’ she suggested.

  ‘She died when I was young,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember her.’

  ‘Who do you love most?’ she asked.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Achilles.’ He shrugged. ‘We have been close since we were children.’

  ‘Can you imagine for a moment how you would feel if he were taken away from you?’ Briseis asked.r />
  ‘I’d like to see someone try,’ Patroclus smiled. ‘It would be a swift death at his hands.’

  ‘What if someone took you from him?’ she asked. ‘Your sword hand is not quite as fast as his, perhaps?’ She thought the man would colour when she reminded him of his inferiority, but he did not. His devotion to Achilles precluded envy.

  ‘Then I would feel as you feel,’ he said. ‘Deprived of my greatest happiness.’

  ‘I watched your beloved friend slaughter my greatest happiness,’ she said. ‘I watched them bleed into the sand. How can you ask me if I was always sad?’

  ‘I didn’t ask if you were always sad,’ he corrected her. ‘I asked if you always looked sad. You have a face which is enhanced by suffering. You have a hollowness here.’ He reached out and touched her cheekbones and then her collar-bones, one after the other. ‘I wondered if you had always looked like that, or if it is a consequence of your enslavement.’

  ‘Freedom matters less to me than grief,’ she said. ‘I would gladly have given up my freedom to keep my husband and my brothers safe.’

  ‘But you lost everything instead,’ he said. ‘The gods favour Achilles. Your city should have acknowledged its place in his story, and surrendered. Now, all that is left of Lyrnessus will be half a line in the bard’s song about this war.’

  Briseis glared at him but saw he was not trying to goad her. The Greeks were all the same: they saw no worth in any but their own. ‘The lives of my family cannot be measured by their deaths. And your friend should hope the bards treat him so kindly. Many men would see no glory in the murder of an old man and his wife. Perhaps they will sing of his senseless cruelty and lack of honour.’

  Patroclus laughed. ‘They will call him the greatest hero who ever lived,’ he replied. ‘What are the lives of your kin, against the hundreds he has killed already?’

  ‘Is that the only measure of greatness? Killing so many that you have lost count? Making no distinction between warriors and unarmed men and women?’

  ‘You argue well for a woman,’ Patroclus said. ‘Your husband must have been a patient man.’

  ‘Don’t speak of my husband,’ she said. ‘Or I will not speak to you at all.’ The silence lay between them, as they both wondered what Patroclus would do in the face of her anger. He sat in silence for a moment, then jumped to his feet and strode across the tent. He took the comb from her hands and placed it on the couch beside her.

  ‘I don’t know what Achilles gave those guards, to prevent Agamemnon from claiming you,’ he said. ‘But it would have been worth double.’

  Briseis did not reply.

  *

  The following day, the first goats died. This was not so unusual, as the goats on the Trojan peninsula were scrawny things, with none of the sleekness or sturdiness of their Greek counterparts. So no one thought it was anything important. But the next day, the pens held more dead goats than live ones, and the heifers – which the Greeks had stolen from every smallholding nearby – were sickening too. The cows were made of sterner stuff than the goats, and it took them correspondingly longer to die. In fact, the first Greek soldier was dead almost half a day before the first cow collapsed to the ground and sputtered its last foaming breath.

  The fever came on so suddenly it was hard to detect. By the time a man understood he was ill, and not simply hot because the sun beat down on them from above and there was so little shade in the camp, he was moments from death. Even the healers could do little. They were battle-trained, and their skills were in binding cuts and cauterizing wounds. Their herbal concoctions had no effect on this blight, which swept across the camp like the hot south wind. Men scratched at phantom insects which crawled over their skin, tearing weals into their arms and ulcerating their legs. Blisters formed in their mouths and on their eyelids, and sharp nails soon opened these up into raw wounds. Like the goats, the cattle and even the few dogs which had made the camp their home, the men were dying. First their comrades prayed, and then they wept. When neither of these helped, they went to their king.

  *

  Chryseis was sitting in her usual hiding place, behind Agamemnon’s tent, when the men made their appeal. She knew something was wrong, some illness. One of the women who washed clothes at the river in the mornings had died the previous day, and now another was ill. No one had seen Briseis or any of the women from the Myrmidon camp for several days. The thought of her beautiful friend lying stricken was more than Chryseis could bear. After everything she had lost – everything they had both lost – were their lives the next thing to be taken from them? She wanted to send a message to Briseis, but there was no one she trusted to take it. Besides, the rumour among the other women at the water’s edge was that the Myrmidons were refusing to meet with the other Greeks. No one in the Myrmidon camp had yet been afflicted, so people said. The blight must be like the swords of his enemies: nothing touched the godlike Achilles.

  Agamemnon at first refused to see the men who gathered outside his tent demanding an audience. But they did not disperse, and the hum of the crowd grew louder as they waited. Chryseis knew he would have to face them sooner or later, but she had already noticed that Agamemnon was a coward. He was desperate to avoid arguments with his men because he could rarely best a man with words; but his petulance forced the arguments into being, just the same. Chryseis’ only first-hand experience of living with a man was with her father. And although she had often thought him cold and inflexible, she now realized that he was also a strong, principled man who did not shirk his responsibilities.

  Agamemnon, she could see, was not. He spent a great deal of time telling everyone about his unparalleled importance, but he rarely wished to make the choices that a king must. How such a weak and petty man had risen to such a position of authority, she had wondered more than once. She had concluded that the Greeks’ selfishness was the cause: every man looked out for himself first and his men second, and the other Greeks after that, if at all. Merit was decided by what a man had, not what he did. Chryseis contrasted the Argive king with her father, who would never permit such shallowness in himself or his daughter. So although she was afraid of Agamemnon’s pawing hands and his vicious temper, she found herself feeling oddly superior to the man who now owned her.

  From within the tent, she heard the frantic murmurs of his advisers cease. Agamemnon walked out to angry jeers from the men who had been waiting in the suffocating heat to hear him speak. But he was not in a conciliatory mood.

  ‘Go back to your tents,’ he shouted. ‘We have seen the summer fever before: this is no different. In a day or two it will all be over.’

  ‘It’s not the summer sickness,’ a man called out from the middle of the crowd. ‘This is something else.’

  The murmuring increased, like the chatter of frightened birds. ‘Go back to your tents,’ Agamemnon said again.

  ‘Tell him what you told us,’ another man shouted, and with that Chryseis could no longer wait out of sight. She needed to see what was happening. She crept on her knees to the space between two tents so she could see. ‘Tell him,’ more voices were saying. Finally, someone stepped forward. A priest, Chryseis knew immediately. She saw the arrogance behind his eyes and the ornate robes he wore in service of the god, which also served to emphasize his own importance.

  ‘What is it, Calchas?’ Agamemnon said. ‘What would you have me sacrifice today?’

  It was an odd turn of phrase, Chryseis thought. He must have known that only a few meagre calves were left in the pens: a choice of sacrificial victims belonged to happier men than this mottled band of Greeks.

  ‘I have spoken with the gods,’ Calchas said. ‘And the men are right: this is no ordinary sickness. It is a punishment sent to us by Apollo.’

  The chattering was growing ever louder, until Agamemnon raised his fist.

  ‘A punishment from Apollo? Then sacrifice a hecatomb,’ he said to derisive snorts. If the men gathered every cow in the camp, they would not have a fifth of the hundred require
d.

  ‘We could sacrifice two hundred cows and it would have no effect,’ said Calchas. ‘The Archer has one demand, and that is for you to return the daughter to her father, the priest.’

  Chryseis felt a thickening in her throat. Had her father done what he had threatened and called down the wrath of Apollo on the Greeks?

  Agamemnon’s face flushed a bright, sickly red. ‘Give away my prize?’ he said. ‘Never.’

  ‘It is the only cure for the blight,’ Calchas replied. ‘The priest wants his daughter back and he has called down the curse of the god he serves. The plague will not be lifted until we return her.’

  ‘We?’ shrieked Agamemnon. ‘She doesn’t belong to us. She belongs to me. And why would Apollo demand that only one man gives up his prize? Why should that man be me, king of all the Greeks? Why shouldn’t Odysseus give up his prize, or Ajax?’

  There was a long pause. ‘Because your prize is the daughter of Apollo’s priest,’ said Calchas.

  ‘You have always been plotting against me,’ Agamemnon said. ‘Even before we sailed from Greece. Your conniving ways have already cost me my daughter, my oldest child.’ His voice cracked, and suddenly Chryseis understood why Briseis had advised her to mention his daughter when he seemed likely to harm her, all those nights ago. The man had lost his own child, and he could not stand to think of it. ‘And now you would take away my prize. Mine, out of all the leaders of the Greeks. Get out of my sight, or I will kill you myself.’

  ‘I assure you, king, that I do not mean to be the bearer of ill tidings,’ Calchas said, and Chryseis was immediately certain that the man enjoyed nothing more. He was almost smacking his lips together. ‘But the girl must be returned to her father, or the Greeks will all pay the price.’

  ‘Give her back,’ shouted someone. ‘Give her back.’ The cry was taken up by others, and soon spread across the crowd. Agamemnon looked from one group of men to another, but could not see any hint of disunity. They were of one mind, and that mind was set against him. And Chryseis saw that her time in the Greek camp was at an end. Her father had done exactly as he had sworn he would do. She should have known that he would force even an invading army to bow to his will.