The Silence of the Girls

by Pat Barker

  At last, the diatribe seemed to be coming to an end. When it was clear there’d be no more, Patroclus shifted in his chair. Up to that point, he’d neither moved nor spoken, just gone on staring into the fire. From a distance, he might have seemed relaxed; close to, you could see a muscle throbbing in his jaw.

  After a brief silence, Achilles reached for his cloak. “I think I might go for a walk.” He seemed to notice me for the first time. “I won’t be needing you tonight.” He touched Patroclus briefly on the shoulder as he passed his chair. Seconds later, the door banged shut behind him.

  I got up to go. Patroclus caught the movement. “Oh, sit down, for god’s sake! Have some wine. You look done in.”

  “Thanks.”

  We were easy with each other now. All those hours of grinding herbs together—and of observing Achilles, alert for any change in his mood—had forged a bond at last. I’d started to trust him, to the point where it was an effort to remember that he too had taken part in the sacking of Lyrnessus.

  Now, he got up, refilled his cup and handed one to me.

  “Will you wait up?” I asked.

  “I expect so, I generally do.”

  I can’t tell you why Patroclus dreaded the nights Achilles met his mother. I only know he did.

  The fire had burned low. He threw on another log, which smoked for a time before the flames took hold. A silence fell, broken only by the sound of a dog scratching its neck. Further away, barely perceptible, came the murmur of waves creaming over on the beach. The unnatural stillness continued; even at high tide the sea barely encroached upon the land. I looked at the walls and sensed beyond them the straining immensity of sea and sky. I felt the hot darkness pressing in, and thought how easily all this could be swept away—this hut, so solidly built, a man and woman sitting together by the fire.

  “I heard him once,” I said. “Talking to her. I couldn’t understand what he was saying.” I waited. When he didn’t comment, I said, “Does she talk back?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Are they close?”

  “Hard to say. She left when he was seven.” A pause. “Apparently she looks younger than he does now.”

  I was feeling my way. “It must’ve been difficult leaving a child that age.”

  “I don’t know, perhaps. The thing is, she hated the marriage, it wasn’t her choice, nobody asked her…I think she found it all a bit disgusting. And she passed it on too.” He glanced at me. “Well, you must’ve noticed? A certain…distaste?”

  I had, more than a bit, but I was wary of pursuing the subject. I felt he was saying too much and might regret it later.

  He was smiling. “You remind him of her.”

  “I remind him of his mother?”

  “You should be flattered. She is a goddess.”

  “I’m trying.”

  He was still smiling. Somehow, when he smiled, his nose looked much more obviously broken. Every time he looked in a mirror, he must be reminded of the worst day of his life.

  “You know I could make him marry you?”

  I shook my head. “Men don’t marry their slaves.”

  “It’s been known.”

  “He could marry a king’s daughter.”

  “He could—but equally he doesn’t need to. Mother a goddess, father a king—he can please himself.” A sigh—caught and held. “We could all sail home together.”

  I wanted to say: You burned my home.

  That night, lying beside Iphis on a pallet bed in one of the women’s huts, I went back over what he’d said. Men don’t marry their slaves—oh, I suppose now and then they might, if she’d given birth to a son and there was no legitimate heir—but how often does that happen? No, it was ridiculous. But then I remembered the glimpse I’d had of Achilles leaning against Patroclus on the beach. I knew he wasn’t exaggerating his influence.

  Would you really have married the man who’d killed your brothers?

  Well, first of all, I wouldn’t have been given a choice. But yes, probably. Yes. I was a slave, and a slave will do anything, anything at all, to stop being a thing and become a person again.

  I just don’t know how you could do that.

  Well, no, of course you don’t. You’ve never been a slave.

  14

  Shortly after dawn, Achilles sent his heralds round the camp. He could, of course, have stood in the stern of his ship and simply bellowed the message. One shout from Achilles and the whole army would have heard, but like all the leaders he was meticulous in observing the correct forms. They were all hypersensitive to any failure to acknowledge their exalted status and meetings between them were generally conducted with elaborate courtesy.

  I spent the first part of the day in the hospital hut, pouring pain-killing draughts into the mouths of dying men. Three new patients arrived while I was there, one of them so far gone his friends had to carry him in on a stretcher. They dumped him on the floor and left immediately, their battle shirts pulled up to cover their mouths. After attending to him as best I could, I went across to the hall, where Alcimus and Automedon were sitting with a group of Achilles’s close companions, passing round a jug of wine. Here, the talk was all of the assembly, of how Achilles intended to demand—not ask, demand—that the girl Chryseis be sent back to her father. “And he’ll not get a ransom for her this time,” somebody said, with evident satisfaction. There was a rumble of agreement. “Be bloody lucky if he doesn’t end up paying to be shot of her.”

  By mid-afternoon, the paths were crowded with men making their way to the arena. I was just about to set off when a little girl came running up to me. Breathless with the importance of her mission, she gabbled, “Hecamede says, ‘Can you come to Lord Nestor’s hut?’ ” Without waiting for an answer, she seized my hand and dragged me along the narrow path that led to Nestor’s compound.

  By the time we got there, Nestor, his son Antilochus and their attendant lords had already left for the assembly. Hecamede, carrying a jug of wine, came to the door to welcome me. As I stepped over the threshold, I saw Chryseis, chalk-white and shaking. Uza, who’d been trying to get her to eat something, looked up when I came in and shook her head. I went straight across and touched Chryseis’s forehead—if anybody looked ill in those days your first thought was: Plague. But she felt cool, although her skin was moist. No fresh injuries, I was glad to see.

  Nestor’s hut was very close to the arena. Standing on the veranda, we could see the statues of the gods and the kings’ chairs clearly. A buzz of conversation rose from the assembled crowd, dying away to a respectful hush whenever one of the kings, preceded by his heralds and flanked by his advisers, took his seat. They sat in a huge semicircle facing Agamemnon’s empty chair, which had been placed under the statue of Zeus from whom, ultimately, Agamemnon derived his authority. The sun was half hidden behind a gauze bandage of mist, as it had been every day since the plague began. The painted statues of the gods cast scarcely any shadows on the sand.

  To the sound of drums and trumpets, Agamemnon entered, the last of the kings to arrive, and settled himself into his throne-like chair. Achilles was sitting directly opposite, apparently at ease—hands clasped lightly in his lap—though even at a distance I could sense the whole tormented, pent-up energy of the man. He was sharing a joke with Patroclus, laughing, or pretending to, but suddenly he stopped and turned to watch the last stragglers file into the back of the arena. He was outwardly placid, inwardly seething with rage—and when he stood up the tension showed, because he kept all his weight on the balls of his feet, as a man does when he’s poised to fight or flee—though I doubt if fleeing often crossed Achilles’s mind. Every eye in the arena was on him, though he addressed himself exclusively to Agamemnon.

  “Well,” he began, “Trojans on one side—plague on the other. We can’t fight both, we may as well go home.” A canine-baring grin. “That’s
true, isn’t it?”

  Agamemnon didn’t reply.

  “Or…” Achilles held up his hand to quell the murmurs of speculation. “We can try to work out why all this is happening. There must be somebody, a seer, who can tell us what we’ve done to offend Apollo? Because clearly it’s Apollo who’s sent the plague. And if we know what we’ve done—or not done—we can put it right.”

  He sat down. A confusion of movement in the front ranks subsided to reveal the seer Calchus, on his feet, looking distinctly nervous. Calchus was not, at the best of times, a prepossessing figure: pallid, etiolated, with a quite exceptionally long neck. His voice box, prominent enough to cast its own distinct shadow, was jerking spasmodically as he tried to speak, though when he finally succeeded the words came out in a croak. He seemed to be saying that should his prophecy implicate one man, one extremely powerful man, would Achilles undertake to protect him?

  Achilles half rose. “Go ahead, tell us. Nobody’s going to hurt you while I’m alive.” He paused, but he couldn’t resist. “Even if you mean Agamemnon, who claims to be the greatest of the Greeks.”

  There it was: the challenge to Agamemnon’s authority flung down, in full view of gods and men, while thousands of Agamemnon’s own fighters looked on.

  Calchus then “prophesied,” at considerable length, what everybody in the crowd already knew, that Apollo had sent the plague to punish Agamemnon for the insult to his priest—and that the only way, now, for Agamemnon to appease the god was to send the girl back to her father, with the sacrifice of a hundred bulls. And, obviously, without the ransom—

  Before Calchus finished speaking, Agamemnon’s finger was jabbing at him. Pathetic, miserable, whining little runt, when had he ever prophesied anything good? And now here he was again, shouting—hardly an accurate description of Calchus’s stumbling delivery—that Agamemnon was responsible for the plague, because he’d refused to send the girl Chryseis back to her father. “And it’s absolutely true,” he said. “I don’t want to lose her.”

  In the room behind me, I heard Chryseis say, hopelessly, “There you are, you see?”

  “I’ll be honest, I prefer her to my wife. She’s every bit as skilled at the loom and in other ways she’s a whole lot better: height, beauty—build.” Here a ripple of amused sympathy ran through the crowd. “But of course, as commander-in-chief, I accept full responsibility; I don’t want to see my own men dying…So yes, obviously, yes, I’ll send her back.”

  Hecamede whooped with joy. I turned, expecting to see Chryseis transformed, but she looked even paler than before.

  “He doesn’t mean it.” Clenched fists, a small, fierce voice. “It’s a trick.”

  “Well, I think he means it,” Hecamede said.

  Uza spread her hands, looking from face to face. “Am I the only one here with an ounce of sense? He prefers her to his wife! She should be begging him to let her stay.”

  “Shut up, Uza,” I said. “For god’s sake.”

  “Oooh, sorry I spoke.”

  I turned back to the arena. Agamemnon was still speaking, though his words were drowned by the cheering of the men. When, finally, the roar died down, he said, “But I’m afraid that leaves us with a bit of a problem. I have no prize. Everybody else keeps theirs, I’m left with nothing. I want a replacement.”

  Achilles stood up. “And where are we supposed to find you that? Does anybody know of a stock of undistributed treasure? I don’t. Everything we got from Lyrnessus was shared out weeks ago. You’ll just have to wait till we take Troy.”

  “No, Achilles, you don’t treat me like that. I’m not going to be left with nothing—and if you don’t give me a prize, all right, I’ll take one. Perhaps your prize, Odysseus?”

  Uza pumped her fist in the air. “Yes!” She wasn’t pretending either. I liked Uza, but she didn’t give a damn whose dick was up her so long as she had a comfortable life. And to be Agamemnon’s prize…It didn’t come more comfortable than that.

  But Agamemnon was already moving on, pointing round the semicircle of kings lined up in front of him. “Or yours,” he said. “Or yours.” All this was pretence. His eyes were already fixed on one man and his jabbing finger soon followed. “Or yours, Achilles.”

  For one insane moment, I thought there was a mistake. I was Achilles’s prize, he couldn’t mean me. I didn’t dare look at the other women, I just stood staring fixedly into the arena.

  “But all that’s for the future,” Agamemnon said. “First, I have to send Chryseis back to her father and persuade him to use his influence with Apollo to lift the curse. Now, who can I trust with this delicate mission? Idomeneo, King of Crete, respected wherever he goes? Or Lord Nestor, renowned for his wisdom? Or Odysseus, perhaps, clever, eloquent, a skilled negotiator? Or you, Achilles—the most violent man on earth?”

  I wasn’t interested in their insults, their constant jostling for power, I only wanted to know what was going to happen to me.

  Hecamede put a hand on my arm. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “He won’t do it.”

  I shook my head.

  In the arena, Achilles took several steps towards Agamemnon; not far, but the space between them seemed to shrink to nothing. “I fought for that girl,” he said. “She’s my prize, awarded by the army in recognition of my services. You have no right to take her. But it’s always the same; I bear the brunt of the fighting and you get the lion’s share of everything we take. All I ever get’s a scrap, a trifle—when I go back to my hut exhausted from the fighting—while you sit there on your fat arse ‘guarding the ships.’ ”

  Behind me, Uza burst out laughing. “Scrap,” she said. “Trifle.” Even Hecamede was smiling, though her smile faded when she saw my face. Chryseis came running up and hugged me. “It won’t happen,” she said. “He does this, he sets traps for people, but it won’t happen.”

  Agamemnon was shouting, “I’ll fetch the bloody girl myself, I won’t send anybody else, I’ll go myself—and then you’ll all see what happens to a man who dares to pretend he’s my equal!”

  “I won’t fight for her,” Achilles said. “The army gave her to me and the army’s taking her away, because not one of you—” Here he looked round the semicircle of kings. “Not one of you has the courage to get up on your hind legs and tell him he’s wrong. Well, all right, then—he gets the girl, but don’t expect me to go on fighting. Why should I risk my life—or my men’s lives—for that pile of steaming dog shit over there?”

  After that, any pretence of mutual respect was abandoned. At one point, they very nearly came to blows; Achilles had his sword halfway out of its scabbard, but at the last moment he pulled back. After that, Nestor rose to his feet and tried to persuade them to make peace, but by then I’d stopped listening, I didn’t care anymore. My hands were at my face, fingers trying to work the numb and rubbery flesh into a more acceptable expression, though I needn’t have bothered. Silently, Hecamede wrapped her arms round me. I always remember that she wept for me when I couldn’t weep for myself.

  Only Uza tried to cheer me up. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “I know what he likes. Anyway, push comes to shove, there’s always the goose-fat jar.”

  There wasn’t much to say after that. The fighters were subdued as the meeting broke up: worried looks, muttered speech, more often, silence. Achilles had withdrawn from the fighting, the coalition was broken—and, for the moment, at least, nothing had been solved; the hospital huts were still full of men suffering from the plague.

  The heralds had begun clearing a path for Agamemnon through the crowd, but he lingered, talking to Odysseus, who’d been chosen to lead the delegation that took Chryseis home.

  Hecamede grasped Chryseis’s arm. “Run, go on, run. They’ll be coming to get you.”

  Chryseis seemed dazed. She hadn’t dared hope and she was afraid, even now, that it could all be snatched away from her. She g
ot as far as the door, then turned and ran back to me. “Briseis, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be, I’ll be all right. Go on, go.”

  I dragged my way back to Achilles’s compound. He wasn’t going to fight for me, he’d made that perfectly clear. Oh, he’d fight to the death—Agamemnon’s death—for any of his other possessions, but not for me. As I walked through the camp, I looked at the common women, noticing a split lip here, a bruise there. One girl, young and otherwise pretty, had a star-burst scar on her forehead where a spear butt had struck. Had she been one of Agamemnon’s girls, one of those he’d tired of and thrown out of his huts?

  Neither Patroclus nor Achilles had returned from the assembly. Somebody said they were walking along the beach, no doubt planning what they were going to do—or refrain from doing—when Agamemnon arrived to claim me. I wandered around the living quarters—not crying, I couldn’t cry—just picking up things and putting them down again. I came to the mirror and leant in towards my reflection. For a moment, my breath misted the gleaming bronze and then it was gone—my existence in these rooms as fleeting, as insubstantial, as that. I retreated to the cupboard and sat on the bed. After a while, Iphis came in and held my hand. Neither of us spoke. At last, we heard footsteps in the hall: Achilles and Patroclus returning from their walk.

  Achilles burst into the living quarters, still fighting the battle that had raged in the arena. “So have we got this straight? When he comes, you don’t let him in. Stop him at the gate. You can take Briseis out to him there. I don’t want to see him—if I see him, I’ll kill him.”

  “He won’t come.”

  “He said he would.”

  “I heard what he said.”

  “I’ll kill him.”

  “Yes, I know, and he knows too. Which is precisely why he won’t come.”