by Pat Barker
When he spoke I thought he was speaking to me and I opened my mouth, though I’d no idea what I was going to say. But then he spoke again, words bubbling from his mouth like the last breath of a drowning man. I understood none of it. He seemed to be arguing with the sea, arguing or pleading…The only word I thought I understood was “Mummy” and that made no sense at all. Mummy? No, that couldn’t be right. But then he said it again: “Mummy, Mummy,” like a small child crying to be picked up. It had to mean something else, but then “Mummy” is the same, or nearly the same, in so many different languages. Whatever it meant, I knew I shouldn’t be hearing it, but I didn’t move and so I crouched down and waited for it to stop. On and on it went, until at last the glutinous speech faded into silence.
The mist was beginning to burn off as the sun rose. I saw the first golden gleams of light find his wet arms and shoulders as he turned and walked along the beach, disappearing into the shadow of his black ships.
As soon as I was sure he’d gone, I ran as fast as I could through the dunes, but once inside the camp I was lost. I stood there, wet, bedraggled and terrified, with no idea of what to do or where to go. But then a girl came to the door of one of the huts and beckoned me inside. Her name, she said, was Iphis. She took care of me that morning, even filling a bath with hot water to wash the salt out of my hair. As I put my mantle to one side and prepared to step into the bath something fell onto the floor and I realized I’d brought the stone with me from the beach. My foot was still bleeding where it had cut me. It lay in the palm of my hand and I examined it minutely as people in shock will sometimes do, focusing their whole attention on a trifle. It was green, the bilious green of a stormy sea, but with one diagonal streak of white. Nothing remarkable about it, except that it was sharp. Very sharp. I raised it to my face and sniffed: seawater and dust. I licked it: felt grittiness, tasted salt. Then I ran my finger along the jagged edge: no wonder the cut was so deep. When I drew it across my wrist—exerting scarcely any pressure—it left a weal, beaded along its length with pinpricks of blood. There was a relief in that, making blood flow out of my numbed skin. But when I went to cut myself again, curious to know whether the relief would be repeated, something stopped me. I didn’t know why the sea had given me this gift, but I knew it wasn’t to hurt myself with. There were knives all over the camp if I wanted to do that. So I rested it again on the palm of my hand and looked at it, thinking of nothing else at all, just the colour and feel and weight of it. So many pebbles on that beach—millions—all of them worn smooth by the sea’s relentless grinding, but not this one. This one had stayed sharp.
It mattered to me, that obstinate little stone, and it still does. I have it here now on the palm of my hand.
When Iphis brought me clean, dry clothes and I put them on—or rather she did, I was standing there with no more feeling than a block of wood—I slipped the stone inside my girdle where it would press against my skin every time I moved. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was reassuring, reminding me of the sea and the beach—and the girl I’d once been and could never be again.
5
What I remember most—apart from the awful, straining, wide-eyed terror of the first few days—is the curious mixture of riches and squalor. Achilles dined off gold plates, rested his feet in the evenings on a footstool inlaid with ivory, slept under bedcovers embroidered with gold and silver thread. Every morning, as he combed and braided his hair—and no girl ever dressed more carefully for her wedding day than Achilles for the battlefield—he checked the effect in a bronze mirror that must have been worth a king’s ransom. For all I know, it may have been a king’s ransom. And yet, if he needed a shit after dinner, he took a square of coarse cloth from a pile in the corner of the hall and set off to a latrine that stank to high heaven and was covered in a pelt of black buzzing flies. And, on his way there and back, he would have to pass an enormous rubbish tip which was supposed to be burned off at regular intervals, but never was, and consequently had become a breeding ground for rats.
That’s the other thing I remember: the rats. Rats everywhere. You could be walking along the path between two rows of huts and suddenly the ground ahead of you would get up and walk—oh, yes, as bad as that! The skinny, half-wild dogs that roamed the camp were meant to control the rats, but somehow they never did. Myron, who was in charge of the upkeep of Achilles’s compound, used to organize the younger fighters into rat-hunting contests with prizes of strong wine for the winner. You’d see young men strutting about with rows of little corpses impaled on their spears: rat kebabs. But however many they killed, there always seemed to be plenty more.
I’m trying—rather desperately, perhaps—to convey my first impressions of the camp, though I was in no state to take anything in. In one way, it was a simple place: there was the sea, the beach, the sand dunes, a patch of scrubland and then the battlefield, which stretched all the way up to the walls of Troy. That’s what I could see, but of course we—the captive women—were confined to the camp. Fifty thousand fighters and their attendant slaves were crammed onto that strip of land. The huts were small, the paths between them narrow, everything cramped—and yet that space seemed infinite, because the camp was our entire world.
Time played curious tricks too: expanding, contracting, burrowing back into itself in the form of memories that were more vivid than daily life. Particular moments—like the few minutes I’d spent staring at the stone—expanded till they felt like years, but that would be followed by whole days that drifted by in a haze of shock and grief. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened on any one of those days.
Gradually, though, a routine began to emerge. My only real duty was to wait on Achilles and his captains at dinner. So I was on public view—not even veiled—every night, and that shocked me because I’d been used to leading a secluded life, away from the gaze of men. At first, I couldn’t understand why he wanted me there, but then I remembered I was his prize of honour, his reward for killing sixty men in one day, so of course he wanted to show me off to his guests. Nobody wins a trophy and hides it at the back of a cupboard. You want it where it can be seen, so that other men will envy you.
I hated serving drinks at dinner, though of course it didn’t matter to Achilles whether I hated it or not and, curiously, it soon stopped mattering to me. This is what free people never understand. A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s.
So, anyway, there I was, moving up and down the long trestle tables, pouring wine into men’s cups—and smiling, always smiling. Every eye was on me, and yet as I leant over their shoulders there was no groping, no whispered, obscene remarks. I was as safe here as I would have been in my husband’s palace; safer probably, because every man here knew if he overstepped the mark he’d have to answer to Achilles. To die, in other words.
Achilles sat at his table with Patroclus. They joined in the toasts and laughter until the conversation settled into a steady hum and then they spoke mainly to each other. If a quarrel broke out—and of course they did, frequently; these were men trained from earliest childhood to resent the slightest insult to their honour—Patroclus was on his feet at once, soothing, restraining, persuading the combatants to clasp hands, share a joke and, finally, sit down again as friends. Then he’d go back to Achilles and their conversation would start up again immediately. Theirs was not a relationship of equals, though Achilles always framed his orders courteously; always, at least in front of the men, he addressed Patroclus as “Prince” or “Lord.” Nevertheless, Patroclus was clearly second in command, subordinate. Only that wasn’t the whole story. Once, I saw them walking together on the beach, Patroclus resting his hand on the nape of Achilles’s neck, the gesture a man will sometimes make to a younger brother or a son. Nobody else in the army could have done that to Achilles and lived.
You seem to have spent a lot of time watching him.
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Yes, I watched him. Every waking minute—and there weren’t many minutes I allowed myself to sleep in his presence. It’s strange, but just then, when I said “I watched him” I very nearly added “like a hawk,” because that’s what people say, isn’t it? That’s how you describe an intent, unblinking stare. But it was nothing like that. Achilles was the hawk. I was his slave to do what he liked with; I was completely in his power. If he’d woken up one morning and decided to beat me to death, nobody would have intervened. Oh, I watched him all right, I watched him like a mouse.
The last part of the evening, after dinner, I spent in the company of Iphis, who was Patroclus’s girl, given to him by Achilles. We used to sit on the bed in the cupboard and wait to be summoned. Patroclus sent for her most evenings, which was scarcely surprising, given her pale, delicate beauty. She was like a windflower trembling on its slender stem, so fragile you feel it can’t possibly survive the blasts that shake it, though it survives them all. We talked a lot, but not about the past, not about the lives we’d led before we came to the camp, so in one sense I knew very little about her. That’s the way it was—we were all born again on our first day in the camp. She knew she was lucky to have been given to Patroclus, who was always kind. I noticed how gentle he was with her, though I suspected he preferred her to the other girls largely because she was a present from Achilles.
In those early days, I distrusted Patroclus’s kindness because I couldn’t understand it. Achilles’s brutal indifference made a lot more sense. He’d still barely addressed two words to me, though I often, as my wariness started to wear off, talked to Patroclus. I remember once, very early on, he found me crying and told me not to worry, he could make Achilles marry me. It was an extraordinary thing to say; I didn’t know how to respond, so I just shook my head and looked away.
My solace was my pre-dawn walks to the sea. I’d wade in up to my waist, until I was standing on tiptoe, feeling the tug of every retreating wave. Often, mist would roll in from the sea, sometimes thick enough to blind you. Shrouded like that, invisible to anybody who happened to walk past, I was at peace, or as close to peace as I could get. My brothers, whose unburied bodies must, by now, have been reduced to fragments of gnawed bone, seemed to gather round me. That strip of shingle at the water’s edge which, as the tides swept across it, belonged sometimes to the sea and sometimes to the land was our natural meeting ground. My brothers had become liminal in their very nature, since they belonged, now, neither with the living nor the dead. Which I felt was also true of me.
Though shrouded in mist and invisible, I was not alone. Achilles swam every morning before dawn, though there was never any contact between us. Either he didn’t see me or he chose to ignore me. He had no curiosity about me, no sense of me as a person distinct from himself. When, at dinner, I put food or drink in front of him, he never once glanced up. I was invisible except in bed. In fact, I’m not sure how visible I was there, except as a collection of body parts. Body parts, he was familiar with: they were his stock-in-trade. I felt the only time he’d actually seen me was that one brief moment of scrutiny when I’d been paraded in front of him—he’d certainly looked at me then, though only long enough to make sure the army was awarding him a prize commensurate with his achievements.
He didn’t speak to me, he didn’t see me—but he sent for me every night. I bore it by telling myself that one day—and possibly quite soon—that would all change. He’d remember Diomede, the girl who’d been his favourite before I arrived, and send for her instead. Or better still, he’d sack another city—god knows, his appetite for sacking cities seemed to know no bounds—and the army would award him another prize, another shocked and shivering girl. And then, she’d be shown off to his men, flaunted in front of his guests, and I’d be allowed to sink into the obscurity of the women’s huts.
Things did change—they always do—but not in the direction I’d been hoping for. I don’t know how long I’d been in the camp, probably about three weeks. Like I say, it was almost impossible to keep track of time in that camp, I seemed to be living in a bubble, no past, no future, only an endless repetition of now and now and now. But I think perhaps the change started in me. The numbness began to wear off, to be replaced by a pain so intense I could neither stand nor sit still. Up to this point, I’d been both passive and abnormally vigilant, but curiously lacking in emotion. Now, there were frequent moments of desperation, even despair. When, on the citadel roof, my cousin Arianna had stretched out her hand to me, before leaping to her death, I’d chosen to live, but if I’d had that choice to make again, now, knowing what I knew now…Would I still have made the same decision?
One night after dinner, instead of going to sit with Iphis in the cupboard, waiting to be summoned, I went down to the sea. Generally, once the men had finished eating, the women would snatch a quick bite, but I was sick to my stomach, I couldn’t bear the thought of food. I walked down the path between the dunes, each step scattering soft sand. At times, as I thought of my brothers, I felt something like exhilaration. As long as I lived and remembered, they weren’t entirely dead. And I wanted to live long enough to see Achilles sizzling on his funeral pyre. But such moments were brief and always followed by the realization that this was it, from now on this was my life. I’d share Achilles’s bed at night until he grew tired of me and then I’d be demoted to carrying buckets of water or cutting rushes to spread across the floors. And when the war was over I’d be taken to Phthia—because the Greeks would win, I knew they would, I’d seen Achilles fight. Troy would be destroyed just as Lyrnessus had been destroyed. More widows, more shocked and bleeding girls. I didn’t want to live to see any of it.
When I reached the beach, I walked straight into the sea as I usually did, but this time I kept on walking until the water closed over my head. Below me, shifting beams of moonlight gleamed fitfully on ribs of white sand. I tried to make myself take a breath, but it’s amazing how the body struggles to survive even when the spirit’s ready to depart. I couldn’t force myself to take that breath and after a while the tightening of the iron band round my chest became intolerable. Involuntarily, I thrust upwards, breaking the surface with a shriek of indrawn air.
When I got back to Achilles’s compound, bedraggled and downcast, Iphis was waiting for me. I was shaking as she pulled a clean, dry tunic over my head and twisted my hair into a knot at the back so its wetness wouldn’t be too obvious. All the while, she was muttering with concern, patting my shoulders and stroking my face and doing everything she could to make me look presentable, but then Patroclus called for her and she had to go.
I went on sitting there. In the next room, Achilles was playing the lyre, as he always did at this time of night. There was one particular piece of music that finished in a sequence of notes like the last few raindrops at the end of a storm. It sounded familiar, as if I’d always known it, but I couldn’t place it; I certainly couldn’t remember any of the words. I listened, and then he stopped playing—the moment I always dreaded. I heard him put the lyre down on the table by his chair. A minute later, he opened the door and jerked his head for me to come in.
Letting my tunic drop to the floor, I stood for a moment chafing my wet arms and then slipped between the sheets. He was in no hurry, sipping the last of his wine, picking up the lyre and playing the same sequence of notes again. I lay and listened, hating the delicacy of his fingers as they moved across the strings. I knew every gesture of those beautifully manicured hands—which still, however, had blood embedded in the cuticles; even perfumed baths won’t shift every stain. Because I’d been watching him so intently—from fear, not for any other reason—I felt I knew everything about him, more than his men, more than anybody, except Patroclus. Everything, and nothing. Because I couldn’t for one moment imagine what it would be like to be him. And, during the same time, he’d learnt nothing at all about me. Which suited me, perfectly. I certainly didn’t want to be understood.
And then he stopped. “What’s that smell?”
Those were almost the first words he’d spoken to me. I edged further away from him. I knew it was a mistake, but I couldn’t stop myself. He leant forward, sniffing my skin and hair. I was aware of how it must appear to him, the crust of salt on my cheekbones, the smell of sea-rot in my hair. I fully expected him to kick me out of bed or hit me—the violence that was always simmering beneath the surface turned on me at last.
What he actually did was far more shocking.
Groaning, he buried his face in my hair, then moved across my skin, mouthing and licking till he reached my breasts. When he started sucking my nipples, I arched my back with the shock of it, because this wasn’t a man making love to a woman—this was a starving baby, a baby who’s sucking so desperately it loses the breast and works itself up into a towering rage. He pummelled my chest with his clenched fist and then, restraining himself, began stuffing wet strands of my hair into his mouth. Then down to my breasts again, taking the whole nipple into his mouth and clamping down hard with his jaws. You may be thinking: Why did this shock you so much? I can only say again: this wasn’t a man, this was a child. By the time he let me go, he had that glazed, booby-drunk expression of a baby full of milk. An expression I’d never seen on a man’s face before—or since.