‘I will not be left without a prize,’ he said. ‘You!’ He pointed at Odysseus. ‘Go to Achilles and tell him that I claim his girl. If mine is taken from me, then I will have his.’
The shouts turned to silence. The king could not mean what he had just said, could he? Odysseus was leaning against the trunk of a long-dead tree, his brow creased in confusion. ‘Are you quite sure that’s what you want me to do?’ he asked, straightening his back slowly.
‘Of course.’ Chryseis could hear the doubt behind the bluster. So could his men, she was sure. But he would not back down. ‘Fetch me his girl, and someone escort mine back to her cursed father.’
*
Briseis had once promised the Trojan girl that she would not let these Greeks see her weep, and it was a promise she kept far longer than she had anticipated. She had not wept for her family, and she had not wept when Achilles chose her as his reward for looting her town. She did not weep when Patroclus took her to his bed, even though the memory of her husband was still so raw that she could sense his presence, hovering behind her, refraining from judgement. Her husband had always been a kind man. And so would Patroclus have been, in other circumstances.
She did not weep when Odysseus arrived in the Myrmidon camp and told Achilles that Agamemnon had claimed his girl. Achilles wept, from impotent rage, and Patroclus wept to see his friend so angered. But Briseis, carried away to another man’s tent, and another man’s bed, did not. She also did not resent Chryseis, whose father had the ear of the god and who had taken her back to Troy. What would be the point in that?
The Myrmidons’ war came to an abrupt halt on the day she was moved to Agamemnon’s tent. In fury at the Argive king’s behaviour, Achilles withdrew himself and his warriors from the battlefield. Briseis listened to the other tribal leaders – Diomedes, Ajax, Odysseus, Nestor – counsel their king. Don’t worry, they said. His wrath cannot last long. He will miss the killing, the warmth of blood on his hands. Agamemnon did not care what the Myrmidon prince did or did not do, he claimed. The Greeks did not need him when they had so many heroes who fought on their side, and the gods, who understood that a man could not seize another man’s wife and expect to go unpunished. They did not need him, for all his speed and the sharpness of his sword.
Briseis also heard the counsellors when they left Agamemnon’s quarters, as they murmured to one another that Achilles would never soften his rage against their leader. He had sworn not to fight and he would not. They did have many other warriors, all anxious to return to battle, now the blight had passed over. But the men saw Achilles as more than a warrior; he was a talisman, a figurehead. First the plague and now the loss of their greatest fighter: it was not clear to everyone that the gods were still on their side.
Nonetheless, they returned to the plains with their spears and their swords, and they fought. Every day they came back blood-spattered, carrying their comrades on makeshift stretchers. After sixteen days of the worst losses the Greeks had known in more than nine years of war, Agamemnon’s advisers told him he must act. The Greeks needed a wall built to protect their ships. Without it, there was a grave risk that the Trojans, emboldened by Hector’s recent victories, might push the Achaeans back into their camp, back to the water’s edge, back to their tall ships. If the Trojans reached the ships, they would set them ablaze. And this was the greatest horror of every Greek who marched out each morning to fight for Agamemnon. If the ships were burned, no one would ever return home.
At first, as was his habit, Agamemnon refused to listen. But then his brother Menelaus arrived, red hair turned sandy by the sun, red face turned purple by the embarrassment. He could no longer guarantee his own men – the Spartans – if the Greeks did not build a wall. No quantity of threats nor bribes could persuade them to stay if there was a chance they might end up stranded on the Trojan peninsula, to be picked off by their enemies. His men had not set sail ten years ago to die far from home. He could not promise that they would not rise up against him and the war, and set sail for Sparta without him. At this, Agamemnon wailed like a child whose favourite toy had been smashed. But he gave in and agreed to build the wall.
A day after building was completed, Hector and his Trojans pushed the Greeks back so hard that they nearly lost the wall, and their lives, and their ships. The men were now openly mutinous and many were gathering their few belongings, ready to sail home at last, and dismiss the past decade as an unfortunate mistake. Nestor, the oldest man in the camp, and the one who held the greatest sway over Agamemnon, persuaded him to send an embassy to Achilles. Return his girl, the men urged. Give him ten more girls. Beg him to return to the battle.
Agamemnon resisted this too, but not for long. Even his monstrous vanity could see that the Greeks were asking for the only thing that could save them. Achilles sent away the men who went to plead Agamemnon’s case. Eventually, they sent Nestor, thinking that a young man could not spurn the pleas of an old one. But he continued to refuse to fight, even while the greatest of the Greeks were begging him on bended knees. Nestor turned his attention to Patroclus, whose rage was not so terrible as that of his friend. Eventually, he persuaded the lesser man to step back onto the battlefield in Achilles’ stead, if Agamemnon would return Achilles’ prize. No one was happy, but some professed themselves content.
After eighteen days in the tent of Agamemnon, witness to every twist in his temper as he was overcome first by the advances of the Trojans and then by the advice of the Greeks, Briseis was relieved to be sent away from the vicious, petulant commander. She was returned to Achilles, and therefore to Patroclus, the night before the latter went to battle the Trojans. Patroclus combed her hair for her carefully, almost lovingly.
The following evening, when Patroclus’ body was returned, stripped of the armour which had once belonged to Achilles but had been stolen from his friend’s still-warm body by Hector, Briseis was waiting for him. While Achilles raged with grief, she washed Patroclus, and laid him out in his finest clothes. She was able to do for this man, her captor and her owner, what she had not been permitted to do for her husband. But she did not weep.
She did not weep when Patroclus was placed on his funeral pyre. Nor did she weep when Achilles, raging like a mountain lion deprived of its young, returned to battle to avenge his dead friend, although everyone knew that the tide of the war had now changed: you could smell it in the air, like a storm coming in from the sea. And she did not weep when Achilles returned from the battlefield with a battered corpse tied to the back of his chariot wheels, having dragged the body of the slain Hector around the walls of the city three times.
Achilles left the Trojan hero rotting outside his tent and Briseis thought of sneaking out in the early hours to wash Hector’s body and prepare him for burial, or the funeral pyre, but she did not dare. Three nights later, she was listening when the aged king of Troy, a man she had heard of but never seen, came begging Achilles to return his son’s body to him. She heard Priam’s voice crack as he pleaded for mercy from this most merciless killer, and she was astonished when Achilles softened and let the old man buy back his dead son with a pile of treasure.
Having held off for so long, she thought her eyes would not remember what to do. But many days later, standing in front of the funeral pyre of Achilles – cut down in battle by Apollo, they said – she did weep. And she wept for everyone but him.
11
Thetis
Tears did flow for Achilles, but they mingled imperceptibly with the seawater which surrounded them. Thetis wept for her son at his death as she had done countless times during his life. Indeed she had wept long before he was born. The other sea nymphs had always mocked her propensity for tears: the deep, green waters of Ocean himself were replenished by Thetis and her endless sorrows. Had she been a wood nymph, another Nereid spitefully remarked, her forest grove would have soon become a bog.
She had first wept when Peleus, a mortal man and nowhere near the equal of a Nereid, had claimed her hand in marriage. She
sobbed again when it became clear that Zeus would not save her from the degrading union. A prophecy had foretold that Thetis’ son would be greater than his father and, mindful of his own impervious hide, Zeus was determined that the boy be half-mortal.
She had always known that her son would cause her grief. Greater than his father? What man would not be? She despised the mortal blood of her husband, loathed to think of it running through the veins of her son, where ichor should flow instead. She longed for him to be a god, so she bathed him in the waters of the Styx to thicken his thin human skin. And she tried to keep him safe when the war came. She knew, had always known, that if Achilles went to Troy he would not return home; Zeus was not the only one to hear prophecies. She hid Achilles away when the Greek commanders came for him, but they rooted him out nonetheless. The pestilent Odysseus was too clever to fall for her tricks. It was a grudge which she would nurture in her breast for as long as Odysseus lived. The sea would never be safe for the king of Ithaca, not while she dwelt in its murky depths.
But through nine long years Achilles had stayed safe. The list of his dead grew longer and more glorious, but he remained unhurt. She had let a brief moment of hope flare up when Achilles withdrew himself from battle in the tenth year of the war, some trivial dispute over a mortal girl. But whenever he asked for her advice, she could not refuse to tell him. She left the warm dark sea and told her son what she had always known: that he must choose between a long life and brief renown, or a short life and eternal glory. Only half of him was a god, after all. He could not have both.
She knew as soon as her damp words dripped into his ears that the decision was already made. Her son would never choose life over fame. His godly heritage rejected any such notion. And so she persuaded Hephaestus to forge new armour, a new shield for Achilles, after his had been stolen by the filthy Trojans from the body of his friend. With the protection of the gods, she thought, Achilles would have a little longer to carve his name into stone.
Still, she knew that once Hector was slaughtered, and once Penthesilea was added to the long list of heroes whom Achilles had left on the cold ground, her boy would soon follow them across the River Styx. And when her son was cut down by Apollo (his disguise as the adulterous Paris might fool some, but not Thetis), she wept even though she had known the day was coming. His body was so lovely that she had scarcely believed he was dead. A tiny wound, a single arrow from the toxic Archer was all it had taken to kill her beloved son. And now he dwelt on the Isle of the Blessed, and she knew that he wished he had made the other choice. One day, Odysseus would find him in the Underworld and he would ask him what death was like, and her son would reply that he would rather be a living peasant than a dead hero. And this filled her with anger and shame. He truly was mortal, her son, if he valued his precious life more than anything else. How could he be so stupid, so ungrateful, when she had given him so much? Sometimes the thought slid into her that she could not truly know her son’s mind, because she would never die. But this only made her despise him more: the blood of his father ran through his veins more thickly than she had believed. And so she wept, but her tears tasted of nothing.
12
Calliope
If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him. The presumption of these men is extraordinary. Does he believe I have nothing else to do with my time than sit around being his muse? His. When did poets forget that they serve the muses, and not the other way around? And if he can remember new lines of verse during his recitations, why can’t he remember to say please?
Does everyone have to die, he asks, plaintive like a child. Perhaps he thought he was writing about one of those other wars. Devastation is what happens in war: it is its nature. I murmur to him in his dreams sometimes (I do have other things to do, but I like how he looks when he sleeps): you knew Achilles would die. You knew Hector would die before him. You knew Patroclus would die. You’ve told their stories before. If you didn’t want to think of men cut down in battle, then why would you want to compose epic verse?
Ah, but now I see the problem. It’s not their deaths he’s upset about. It’s that he knows what’s coming and he’s worrying it will be more tragedy than epic. I watch his chest rising and falling as he grabs a fitful rest. Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.
If he truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren’t just the ones who die. And that a death off the battlefield can be more noble (more heroic, if he prefers it that way) than one in the midst of fighting. But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.
I will teach him this before he leaves my temple. Or he will have no poem at all.
13
The Trojan Women
The high tide was shifting the seaweed fronds against the sand, as the women continued to wait on the rocks. The Greek guards had disappeared a while ago, after one of them had run up to the others from further down the coast, insisting they follow him immediately. But the women didn’t think of trying to escape. What would be the point in gathering their feeble belongings and running? There was nowhere for them to go. The Greek ships lined the bay, drawn up and ready to leave. All they could see that wasn’t now in Greek hands were the smoking remains of their city.
‘You know Achilles would still have fought, even if it hadn’t been for Briseis,’ Hecabe said. ‘He lived to kill, to torment and to torture. It wasn’t enough for him to slaughter my son.’
No one asked her which son. She always meant Hector, even though Achilles had killed many of his brothers too. ‘He had to defile him. Had to make Priam beg for the return of Hector’s body on bended knee. An old man, begging on his knees. That is who Achilles was: he would have fought again alongside the other Greeks, even if Agamemnon had taken his woman and slit her throat where she stood. Butchery was everything he was.’
Cassandra gazed up at the sky, where the gulls were starting to gather and wheel. She had watched them doing the same thing at the same time yesterday. Polyxena had noticed, years ago, that her troubled sister took comfort in repetitive things. The gulls would soon start diving, one after another, into a shoal of fish in the shallow waters.
Further along the shore, above the place where the guards had gone, another cluster of the birds were hovering, waiting. Cassandra already knew why.
‘Do you think that’s true?’ Polyxena asked her mother. ‘Achilles was destined to be a killer?’
Hecabe shrugged her shoulders, but the cool breeze coming off the sea turned it into a shudder. Polyxena unwound her stole – once a fine wool, dyed a bright, saffron yellow before it was smeared with grey streaks – and stood up to wrap it around her mother. She did not expect to be thanked, and Hecabe said nothing.
‘If you think of him like that,’ Polyxena said, ‘it means he had no choice in what he did. So how can we hate him, if he was just acting as the Fates demanded? If he had no more say in his life than you or I?’
‘He had a choice,’ Hecabe replied. ‘To butcher my sons or some other woman’s sons. But slaughter was all he was good for.’
Cassandra nodded, and whispered her words into the sand. ‘He’s not finished, he’s not finished, he’s not finished.’
14
Laodamia
The heat was intense in Phylace, even this early i
n the day. Nestled in the lower reaches of Thessaly, between the Gulf of Pagasae to the east and the Phthiotis Mountains to the south and west, it was always hot. The sun burned down so relentlessly on Protesilaus’ small kingdom that no trees ever grew tall enough or verdant enough to provide anything more than a spindly, ineffectual shade. The mountains in the distance climbed in sharp, straight zigzags, and Laodamia had often wished she could roam them like a she-goat. It must surely be cooler up there, where the trees grew more thickly. As it was, she felt sweat forming at her temples and on the back of her legs. Her parents had told her bedtime stories when she was a child, and the one that stuck in her mind even now was that of Helios, the sun-god, pausing to rest his horses every day right over the city she called her home.
Laodamia walked in a loop – out from the palace, down to the city walls, to the road which led away from Phylace towards the sea. There she would wait each day, until the sailors and traders who were coming inland had arrived. How many days did it take a man to sail from Troy to Thessaly? Clipping the island of Lemnos, before crossing the dark Aegean and hugging the coast of Euboea into the Pagasean Gulf. She had the whole route fixed in her mind because in the days before he left, Protesilaus had talked of little else but how he would get home.
‘Don’t cry, little queen,’ he said, as her tears flowed so freely that she thought they would drown her. He reached out his hand – long, slender fingers, better suited to playing the lyre than wielding a sword – and wiped them away with his thumb. ‘I will be back before you have time to miss me. I promise.’
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