Hand of Fire

by Judith Starkston

  “It’s the aftermath,” he said. “When the battle madness passes. Every warrior with a heart goes through it—you can’t quite take in what you’ve done. There is a necessary horror. Let it shake you. You are strong.”

  He pulled on his clothes and his sword belt, then tied her clothes into a bundle. “You’ll need another skirt and tunic. These belong in the sea.” He looked at her. “Can you walk or shall I carry you?”

  She felt herself blush. He read her thought. “We might never get out of this wretched hut,” he said, laughing. “Walk, then.”

  On the way back, they walked down to the shore where the ripple of waves curled against the pebbles and dragged them with a soft rumble. He flung the bundle of bloodied clothes far out into the bay and suggested they take advantage of the dark cover of night and the sea water to rinse themselves off. She shivered at the idea of being wet on this cool autumn evening, but the desire to be rid of the blood won out.

  The sea actually felt warmer than the cold air, and the sensation of floating next to Achilles brought back her vision during the Spring Festival. She reached for him and enjoyed a watery embrace. When they left the water, Achilles bundled her in his thick, warm cloak and, without drawing anyone’s notice, she followed as he entered the courtyard and slipped into his shelter. She stood inside, unsure what to do about her nakedness under the cloak and her lost clothes, but he went to a chest in one corner and searched. He came back to her with a folded pile of rich fabrics.

  “See if any of these suits you. They are yours in some way in any case. Loot from the towns surrounding Troy. Your father gave you an eye for fine armor. My mother taught me a taste for fine weaving. Remember?”

  She took the beautiful garments and chose the least showy. Still, with its pleated, forest green skirt with crimson and lapis lazuli colored braid and matching tunic and belt, she wondered how the other women would react. Standing there holding her new clothes, she felt shy about revealing her nakedness again. He leaned down and tipped her face up to his, kissing her lightly.

  “You’ve been through a great deal tonight. Sleep in your accustomed place with Eurome to care for you.” He smiled. “She’ll raise an alarm if you don’t get back soon.”

  He turned away and busied himself in the back of his shelter while she quickly slipped into her clean clothes, enjoying their feel even while she felt guilty at the luxury. How was she going to explain them to Eurome?

  As soon as she had brought the water in the morning, she told Eurome she was going to visit Maira before the rest of the chores began. She had already told Eurome that Achilles had given her the clothes and been annoyed at Eurome’s knowing little smile. The tumult of last night left her confused. The feeling of exultation had worn off, and she both longed for it to return and feared it. She didn’t need any comments from Eurome.

  Maira had taken several hard blows last night. Briseis worried about her. With her healing satchel on her shoulder, Briseis received permission from the guard on duty at Agamemnon’s camp and entered the women’s area, but Maira wasn’t there. She walked around the cook fires, checking for her in the lean-to.

  “Looking for Maira?” one of the women asked. Briseis nodded. She had visited Maira often enough to be recognized, and the occasional healing work she’d done for Agamemnon’s other captives gave the guards good reason to allow her visits. They never challenged her at the gate anymore.

  The woman looked concerned. “Said she weren’t feeling well and stayed abed. There’s plenty here to do the work. She does more than her share most times, so we haven’t let on to them.” The woman tossed her head toward a group of soldiers bent over some armor they were repairing. “That hut, over there on the far side of the kitchen fires. Good thing you come today.”

  Briseis thanked her and went into the hut where Maira lay on a pallet not far from the door. Briseis left the door partly open for some light. As Briseis sat down next to her, Maira opened her eyes and smiled at Briseis.

  “How are you? Do you feel badly hurt?” asked Briseis, kneeling by her.

  “Sore, but not too bad.” Maira’s voice was low but she sounded like herself. “I’ll mend. Bruised—but not where it shows. Easy to pretend I’m just sick.”

  Briseis nodded. “You didn’t have trouble getting back inside the stockade?”

  “No, the gates were open. Agamemnon was expected back, I suppose. That’s how that swine got hold of me—I was fetching wood from the pile by the gate. He hauled me out and dragged me down to his hut.”

  Briseis thought of something else. “I better sew up your clothes as well as take care of you.”

  Maira nodded and pulled out a basket of sewing things. “Thank you—for everything. I couldn’t have...” Maira shrugged.

  Briseis understood. She found it hard herself to believe she’d stabbed a man. She was glad Maira didn’t know what came after—that had confused her even more. Achilles had said something about battle madness, and what they had done felt like a madness.

  “I’d been lucky so far,” said Maira. “Agamemnon’s left me alone.”

  Briseis looked carefully at Maira’s bruises. She began to lay poultices on the worst of them to speed the healing. “Let’s hope you stay lucky. He’s repulsive.”

  Maira shuddered. “True. I feel sorry for the unlucky. Do you see a small girl huddled by one of the fires—blonde and tinier than the others?”

  Briseis pushed the door open a little wider. She recognized the fair-haired girl first chosen by Agamemnon’s herald at the assembly. “That’s who he takes to bed?” Maira nodded. “She seems more a child than a woman.”

  “I think that’s the point,” said Maira, her tone grim. “Agamemnon likes his women timid and childlike. That poor girl isn’t strong like you and me.”

  Briseis finished checking Maira’s hurts, relieved that Maira could move without causing herself sharp pain. She threaded a bone needle to repair Maira’s clothes.

  “Who is she?” Briseis asked. “I noticed her at the assembly. She was dressed like a girl of royal birth.”

  “Not quite royal. Her name is Chryseis. Her father is a priest whom King Eetion of Thebes held in great esteem. Chryseis’s mother died when she was five, so the king invited her to live at court. I keep hoping Agamemnon will tire of her and choose another bedmate. Many of the women find the status they receive recompense enough, but they are the sturdy ones, used to hardening themselves to circumstances.”

  Briseis handed her the repaired tunic. “That’s lovely,” said Maira. “You made the repair look like decoration—like it was meant to be there.”

  “Mmm, it did come out well, didn’t it? The skirt’s a bigger job.”

  Maira seemed about to say something, but she stopped. Briseis kept her eyes on her sewing. She hoped Maira didn’t ask her about her own beautiful clothes.

  Instead Maira said, “Your poultices are soothing. Talking with you has helped also. You’re a good friend. I felt bewildered when I returned last night. You’ve put my feet back on the ground.”

  Briseis glanced at her. It was an odd expression, but she knew what Maira meant. For Briseis also, their conversation had returned her sense of stability. She wondered if her feet would stay on the ground when she saw Achilles again.

  She sewed while Maira rested, her eyes closed. When Briseis finished the mending, she laid it next to Maira and whispered a good-bye.

  Maira nodded and mumbled a sleepy farewell.

  Briseis walked back toward Achilles’ camp. Strong—Maira’s word echoed Achilles’—and she and Maira were strong. She’d prefer to think of her actions last night as strong, not bloodthirsty. She’d built strength all her life—from her healing work and from her family. Her new strength—being a warrior able to protect—felt akin to her previous experiences. She’d felt so trapped by Mynes, caught in a sticky cobweb of the fear he caused, that she’d lost this sureness somewhere. As a little girl she’d had it. She welcomed its return.

  She thought about t
he ordeal Chryseis had to endure. The girl seemed so frail by nature—of all the women, the cruelest choice for Agamemnon to make. She wondered why Chryseis did not have the inner strength she and Maira had found. They’d had similar noble upbringings. Briseis considered Antiope’s exacting expectations of her as she prepared her to be a healing priestess, her brothers’ reliance on her, the casual way her father had consulted her as they walked together about the estate: all these relationships grounded so firmly in love. She fought back tears. She missed them, but they were with her every day. She held them inside as fully as a honeycomb holds its sweet nectar.

  Briseis hurried along. She’d been gone a long stretch. Nonetheless, she stopped when a vine with yellowish fruit caught her eye, growing in a sloped area off the path. She stooped and gathered the fruits—colocynth, a strong purgative. Adding to her store of medicines was nearly impossible in the camp and she wouldn’t miss this opportunity.

  The army had not mustered for battle. She saw soldiers building pyres along the shore and surmised the two sides must have declared a truce for burials. It had happened before. She shuddered at the thought of one of the corpses that would burn—one who had not died on the battlefield but by her own hand. She kept away from the shore.

  The gates to Achilles’ courtyard were open as his men came and went. She thought her return would go unnoticed, but as she scooted across the courtyard toward the women’s area, juggling the colocynth in her arms, Achilles stepped out of the blacksmith’s lean-to into her path. He was pulling a long leather strap through a bronze loop and knotting it. She moved to the side to avoid running into him. He saw her and his face lit up. Her heart pounded.

  He held up the bronze loop. “A repair for my chariot.” He looked at her armful of fruits. “What have you got there?”

  “Colocynth. I’ll dry it and grind it.”

  He nodded. “Strong medicine. Careful how you use that. I hadn’t noticed it. Was it growing in the camp?”

  “On a kind of rough hillock by the path that goes through the middle of the camp.”

  “Oh, I always walk by the shore—or up on the ridge.” He smiled. “I’m about to go check on some of the men who were wounded yesterday. Why don’t you come with me? If the Trojans keep this up, we’ll need another healer.”

  Now her heart leapt—to work fully as a healer again! Then she frowned when she remembered how little she knew about wounds. She saw Achilles’ face fall.

  “I don’t know how to care for wounds,” she said in a hurry, so he wouldn’t think he’d made her angry bringing healing up again.

  He looked confused.

  “I’d like to learn,” she said. If she didn’t learn how to mend battle wounds, she’d have almost no healing to do here and she needed her work. It was part of her. Iatros would forgive because he would understand.

  “I would like to teach you.”

  She smiled. They each gathered their healing materials and went into the camp.

  As soon as Achilles knelt beside the pallet of the first wounded man, concern filled his face and his eyes burned with a fiery light. She wondered if he were angry at himself or someone else for the soldier’s obvious downturn. The man’s feverish flush worried her. Without thinking, she reached into her satchel for pounded willow bark and asked one of the nearby soldiers for boiling water. Achilles glanced at her and nodded.

  He lifted off what remained of a blood-soaked linen bandage. The man had knocked most of it off in his delirium. The bloody, angry gash across his thigh made her stomach roil, but she willed it quiet. Some birthings had been worse. The flesh that needed to close the wound gaped open. It would never heal like that. Achilles touched the wound as he checked for festering. The man’s groans mounted to screams.

  Achilles looked at her. “We’ll wash the wound again and try to seal this with better bandaging.” Achilles looked over his shoulder at the soldiers who shared the man’s hut. “You must keep him still when the fever makes him thrash. The bandage has to hold shut the wound.”

  Achilles showed her how to wash the wound with warm water. He ground a small root to dust between his palms and placed it into the gash, quieting both the man’s screams and the bleeding.

  “What is that root?” she asked.

  “One of Chiron’s immortal herbs. I don’t know if men have a name for it. Most physicians use astragalos root.”

  She nodded. She had some of that in her satchel. It had many uses around blood.

  Achilles added, “Both slow the blood, but only Chiron’s takes away the pain. Did you know a sword can wound the gods? They cannot die, of course, but they do not bear pain with patience, hence Chiron’s skillful cure. I have enough of my mother in me to work it.”

  “Astragalos for me, then,” she said. He shrugged in apology and nodded.

  Achilles took out a roll of fresh linen. He showed her how to bandage with thin strips crisscrossing the wound and tied together behind the leg.

  She realized why the man’s movement had loosened the bandage and caused the wound to gape again. Achilles had bound the wound firmly, but the linen could be shifted sideways too easily.

  “May I try strengthening the bind with some sewing?”

  Achilles’ eyebrows shot up in surprise, but he nodded. Briseis thought of the pattern of supporting pieces Milos used to hold together the bands of metal in chest armor. She folded linen into tight narrow strips several layers thick and stitched them into a firm support that she sewed along each side of the crisscrossing bandage. When she had added several bands under the man’s leg connecting these two supporting strips, she was able, with Achilles’ help, to pull the wound more tightly closed and keep it in place with her stitches on the bandaging.

  They both leaned back from their work. A lightness filled Briseis’s chest. She reached out and tucked under a bit of the bandage’s linen so that it wouldn’t catch on anything.

  Achilles took her hands and lifted them to his lips. “Stitches? That’s the trick?” He laughed. “No wonder we men never figured it out. Your sewing looks like the pattern on some chest armor. That’s what you copied, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, feeling proud but a little shy.

  “The stitching warrior. My fierce stitching warrior.” His face glowed. Then he sighed. “On to the next wound. Let’s hope this is the only man who’s sickened like this. It’s a bad sign.”

  They stood up and he spoke to the men standing behind them in the hut. “Keep him still. And give him more sips of this willow bark around nightfall.” Achilles clasped her hand tightly as they left the hut.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A Too-Brief Feast of Fire

  Achilles and Briseis traveled around the camp taking care of men with a disorienting array of wounds. Each one posed a new challenge, a puzzle of body and linen and suffering. The intense work absorbed her completely. She forgot her awkwardness around Achilles.

  “Will you feast with me and my friends around my fire this evening?” His question took her off guard despite their long day working side by side. Soon after dinner came bed. She remembered his naked beauty. He was giving her a choice if she could bring herself to refuse him.

  “I shall sing you another story.”

  She smiled. He understood her well.

  Briseis helped Iphis and the other women bring in and serve the meal. She knew she held a different status than the others, but she did not want to be separated from the women.

  While Achilles and she ate, Briseis described the medicinal herbs that grew by Mount Ida’s springs, and he told her about plants from his home in Phthia. They found many in common. The other men around the fire talked little, but from their pleased expressions, she guessed they had been waiting for her return. These men loved Achilles and wanted him to have whatever he wished in his life. She wondered if any of his friends understood why Achilles had waited for her to choose him when he could have taken her by force. She barely did herself, although his delight in her strength as a warrior, as
a healer—this respect could not countenance force. He gave her the honor he demanded for himself, sweet nectar for her soul.

  After dinner, Achilles took up his lyre and sang the tale of Peleus and Thetis. She remembered how it had stirred deep inside her when she first heard the bards sing it. Achilles had been part of her life even at her father’s hearth. This time her spirit rose up to meet the song. His version emphasized his father’s persistence and then Thetis’ delight when she accepted his love.

  Achilles stood after his song and the others rose to go. He took her hand and brought her onto the porch as he said goodbye to the men.

  “Will you walk with me?” he asked when they were gone. “The stars and moon are bright and I need the fresh air of the sea. I like the crisp chill of autumn nights.”

  She nodded, blushing at the thought of their nocturnal swim the night before. He reached inside for two of his cloaks, wrapped one of them around her shoulders, threw the other over his own and led them toward the trail onto the ridge. Even by moonlight the path was shadowy, but he had no trouble climbing and held her hand so that she would not stumble.

  They reached the top and the sea spread out below them, glistening in the moonlight. They walked to a spot where the rocky spine of the ridge formed a crescent. Inside this sheltered bowl the grasses flourished, creating a soft mat. He spread his cloak on the ground and seated her on it with a little bow as if she were a queen.

  He sat behind her, his legs and chest becoming her throne. She leaned back against his body, her arms resting on his thighs. She felt his face relax into her hair, heard an intake of breath and his moan of desire as he took in the scent of her. He kissed her ear, then her neck and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. She entwined her arms around his. A tingling rose from deep within. He rested his chin softly on her shoulder, and they both looked at the shimmering water.

  “I feared after the battle lust had waned, you might withdraw from me again. You haven’t, have you?”