The Greeks responded to the flood of Trojan warriors bursting through the downed gate by climbing high on the ships nearest the wall. From that height the Greeks jammed huge pikes into upturned Trojan faces and searched out the tender spot where neck and shoulder join. Trojans fell in piles below the ships’ hulls.
Then, Briseis saw bright torches, carried forward from the back of the Trojan army, heading toward the Greek ships. With a triumphant roar, Hector’s men placed a brand in their leader’s hand, and Briseis saw the first ship catch fire.
The flames consumed the ship, dry and brittle from being beached so long. How could the Greeks stop the whole fleet from becoming a bonfire? The clouds of smoke and towering flames clogged her breath with remembered ash.
Then, even as the first ships burned, a cheer went up from the Greek side. The captives on the hill looked back and forth in confusion.
“Look, Briseis,” Maira cried. “It’s Achilles!”
Achilles’ glistening chariot, his immortal horses, the familiar armor and shield charged toward the battlefield. Behind him thundered the Myrmidon warriors in such tight formation that their shields and helmets seemed to meld into one creature bent on fighting. Held back against their will for so long, they leaned toward the battle with one mind and purpose. No wonder his exhausted comrades had cheered. The greatest of the Achaians had rejoined the fight.
Briseis studied the heft of shoulder, the legs braced wide as the chariot barreled through the camp, the tilt of helmeted head. Something was wrong—it was not Achilles inside that protective bronze. Patroklos had taken Achilles’ place. No one else had realized it, but she understood what had happened.
Patroklos and Achilles had bound themselves so closely together that Patroklos could become Achilles. She had seen him do so when Achilles’ anger at Agamemnon had filled him. Now he would fight with Achilles’ extraordinary strength. Mistaken for his friend, he would drive back the Trojans. Yet just as Achilles lost all control in the midst of battle except when Patroklos’s presence guided him to restraint, so now Patroklos would become ungovernable—and there would be no friend to bring him back.
Briseis turned to Maira. “That’s Patroklos, not Achilles.” Her heart felt cold as fate took Achilles and her in its inextricable grip. Sorrow and loss whirled toward them, a destructive maelstrom she feared neither of them would be able to survive.
She had reason to fear. Backed by the fresh Myrmidon warriors, Patroklos slaughtered Trojans across the battlefield. Immersed in Achilles as she had also been, she could feel with him the reveling in his borrowed, limitless strength. It was a complete rout. Trojan bodies lay scattered across the plain like autumn leaves in the wind. No one could stop Patroklos. No one Briseis could see. But some other force was at work.
Patroklos made three sallies, cutting down nine men each time, impossible deeds. As he swept in for a fourth time, he stopped as if he had collided with an unseen foe. Achilles’ helmet flew off his head and fell into the dust. He whirled in search of his enemy. No one stood near him—not even his own men. His sallies had taken him forward of his fellow Myrmidons.
His spear shattered into splinters in his hand. He looked about dumbfounded. Some hidden force buffeted him back and forth with blows. The mighty shield dropped to the ground, its shoulder strap snapped in two. The front and back pieces of his corselet fell away until he stood naked. Naked, defenseless, alone.
Briseis watched in horror. Some god of Troy had stripped Patroklos. Patroklos searched again for his assailant, but none was visible. Not until a slender Trojan boy broke from the Trojan line, slipped up behind Patroklos and jabbed him in the back with his javelin. A shudder ran through everyone on the plain, Trojan and Greek alike. Then, as though terrified at the sight of the naked and unarmed Patroklos, the boy ran.
She watched as Patroklos, stumbling in pain and confusion, tried to shrink back into the protection of his companions as the Trojans closed in on him. The Myrmidons surged forward, but Hector had seen him. Hector, stalking like a lion toward a herd of sheep, came close and rammed his spear deep into Patroklos’s belly. Patroklos fell as Hector vaunted over him. Patroklos lay gored and slaughtered. Even so, he turned his head up and stared into Hector’s face before he died. He appeared to speak. Briseis hoped he called Hector a coward for killing an unarmed, wounded man—even one who had left the Trojan dead strewn across the plain.
Briseis wept. The waves of sorrow rose up, choking her in agony. She felt his death to her core. Patroklos had been kind to her, one of the gentlest people she had ever known. With far greater grief, though, she wept for Achilles. He had lost his dearest friend, more than a friend—half of himself. She feared Achilles would rage into battle to get revenge, pursue Hector at any cost. His fury at Agamemnon would be a dim flicker to what would now come. His death must surely follow. Grief-driven, he would be careless of everything, all restraint gone, so that fate would easily destroy what no one could before: a man, more god than man, possessing beauty, grace and fatal anger.
During the long afternoon, through eyes made blurry with tears, Briseis watched the battle over Patroklos’s body. First Hector’s men held off the Myrmidons while Hector put on Achilles’ immortal armor, glorying in his spoils. Then the Myrmidon’s first shock wore off and they gathered their strength to prevent Hector from seizing Patroklos’s body. Like a ritual dance in honor of some jealous god, the fight over which side would carry the body off the field reenacted the bloody ebb and flow of the war. One moment Hector stood triumphant over Patroklos’s stripped body; the next the Greeks shielded the corpse and tried to carry it to their side.
Then, when all seemed lost, and the Trojans had hold of Patroklos’s body and would at any moment carry it back to their city to be a source of revenge for their dead, food for dogs and vultures, Achilles appeared on a mound at the edge of the battlefield. Hector had taken his armor. He could not fight. As he stood there, he gave off a golden light, fearful and sacred. His hair became flames climbing high into the sky. The battlefield fell silent. Into that awe, he shouted three times, wordless cries of agonized rage.
With each cry, Trojans fell dead until the body of Patroklos was left undefended. At last the Greeks were able to carry the body of their fallen comrade away from the Trojan battle line. They lifted it gently onto a litter, placing the arms across the bloodied torso. There was nothing to cover the torn flesh, only their tears falling from grim faces consecrated the body. Four heart-heavy warriors lifted the litter and walked to the mound where Achilles stood, his body bent and weighted by grief. The sun, as though reluctant to witness such sorrow, fell below the horizon, one last golden glow shimmering for a moment on the rippling waves of the sea before darkness descended.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Implacable
During the night, the Greek army filled the air with the sounds of lamentation for Patroklos. Forced to stay in Agamemnon’s camp, Briseis grieved alone. She pictured Patroklos caring for the injured. His kind and generous spirit had touched everyone—the cries rising up on all sides proved that. She remembered their momentous conversation on the shore. Patroklos had thought that she could quiet Achilles’ turmoil. How had he put it—fire calmed by fire? Sometimes. But her fire had also fed his fire. When Achilles needed her most, she had failed him. Patroklos intervened and lost his life.
Even in the midst of Achilles’ battle lust, Patroklos had been able to forestall Achilles’ fated death. Now death would stalk Achilles with the sure step of a hunting dog on the scent of its prey—the death his goddess mother had dreaded from the moment of his birth. She saw how intimately linked the two men were, how essential to each other. Together they were indestructible, but fate had found this way to separate them.
Caught in a trance of desolation through the night, she gradually became aware of familiar sounds as the camp awoke around her. She found it difficult to grasp that it had been only yesterday that she had seen Patroklos struck down. How could the sun have brought a ne
w morning to the Trojan plain with the weight of such a death fresh upon its soil?
What would this day hold? She pushed herself up from the ground, her limbs stiff and awkward. The women worked around the kitchen lean-to in their usual morning routines, but Agamemnon’s courtyard was strangely empty of soldiers. No guards stood by the open gates. Even with all the Greek losses, someone should be left on guard duty. Something had drawn them away.
Briseis slipped through the gate and no one yelled at her. She continued down toward the shore where she saw soldiers muttering in worried clusters. A strange wind trilled around her, otherworldly and terrifying. This sound had pulled the men here. She avoided Agamemnon’s men and went further down the shore toward Achilles’ camp. The sun rose over the water, making it glow. White caps leapt across the bay’s usually tranquil surface. Waves rose up from the blue-green depths and bowed in translucent, shimmering splendor as though paying homage to their god.
The strange wind became in her ears a chant of grief rising from the sea, an echo of her sorrow. It seemed to rise simultaneously from inside of her, and its strangeness did not disquiet her. Female voices lapped against her heart in wordless threnody. From Achilles’ descriptions and the consonance with her own sorrow, she recognized the voices; this was the lament of his mother Thetis and her immortal attendants, daughters of Nereus, ancient ruler of the sea.
An immortal mother had begun her eternal mourning. How strange, it used to anger me that I could not hear a goddess’s voice, and now, sharing a goddess’s grief, I hear her so clearly it breaks my heart and I wish I didn’t.
On the shore in front of the Myrmidon ships, the waves curled back, forming a dry path that stretched from the depths of the sea to the land. The melancholy voices grew louder. Briseis shielded her eyes as a golden brilliance rose from the sea: radiant, as if held aloft by invisible hands, a glowing armor appeared before them. The one thing Achilles would have asked from his mother—the only thing that prevented him from returning to battle—now glistened before them. And such armor! Only the blacksmith of the gods, Hephaistos, could have fashioned it—and in a single night. She heard a cheer from the soldiers on the shore. Now Achilles could fight for them again. That was all they saw or cared about. What anguish it must have cost Thetis to bring her son new armor, knowing she brought him closer to the death she had foretold. The bitter whip of fate must have scarred her every step.
Achilles walked down that divinely swept path and returned with the armor clutched against his chest. Briseis shivered as the sea closed over the path. The sound of the Nereid lament echoed around her even after the bay had returned to calm. Perhaps Achilles would receive solace from their mourning for his friend—and for him—but their chant had only deepened her own human grief. They expressed all that had been lost, all that soon would die.
Briseis leaned against a ship’s hull, exhausted by her grief and sleepless night. She heard a herald calling the men to the assembly. Soldiers moved past her, heading toward the field where the army gathered. Their faces showed relief now that Achilles had returned to them. They had grieved during the night for Patroklos, but their sadness had passed. Everyone had loved Patroklos, but they loved their own lives more. They did not understand how brief a span of life Achilles clung to.
She was startled to hear Achilles’ voice, bellowing for the men to come to the assembly. She ran toward the sound. There he was, ranging back and forth, driving the men in front of him toward the assembly. His armor awaited. His impatience was palpable. His fierce glare, the chiseled stone of his muscles, the radiance of enflamed rage all told her his mortal self was submerged deep inside—if indeed it had survived the furnace of his grievous anger. The beautiful shell contained only a god of war and vengeance who would slake his thirst on the blood of Hector and his Trojans.
She was close enough to call out to Achilles, but she did not. She wanted to feel his love for her now, but that wasn’t possible. It was true that if he returned to the fight as he clearly meant to do, she would be given back to him. They could be together again. But Patroklos’s death had ignited a greater fury. This godlike creature would not return her love. Looking at him, she was reminded of the metals in Milos’s workshop. They had two states: hard and immovable, or molten and dangerous.
She followed him to the assembly field where he climbed onto the speaker’s mound. Was he driving so hard toward his death that this glimpse was all she would have as farewell? She came closer to get a better look, hiding behind the curve of a ship’s hull so that the Greek leaders did not see her.
Achilles addressed the assembly. “I have called you here, my brothers in arms, to act as witness as I revoke my oath to withdraw from the fighting. Agamemnon and I will declare our reconciliation. Agamemnon, was it good for either of us to engage in this heart-gnawing quarrel over a woman? I wish that Artemis, the goddess whose deadly arrows strike down mortal women, had killed her on that day I destroyed Lyrnessos. That way my comrades would not have been laid in the dust while I stayed apart in my wrath. The only ones who gained were the Trojans. Though it is difficult for me, I am putting aside my anger at your insult. It’s time to fight. Let’s order the men into battle.”
Briseis fell back against the ship’s hull. He preferred her dead? Would he wipe her from his life like words written in error upon a damp clay tablet, to be scraped away, obliterated forever?
She stumbled back to the women’s huts, instinctively heading for Maira.
“What’s happened?” Maira asked when she saw Briseis’s tears.
“He said he wished I had been killed instead of taken captive.”
“Who said that? Agamemnon?” Then Maira’s face lit with understanding. “No! He can’t mean that.” She hugged Briseis tightly.
Not long afterwards, Odysseus came with a group of young men to gather Agamemnon’s gifts and bring them to Achilles: tripods and cauldrons, the talents of gold, the horses, the seven women, and Briseis. Maira slipped into her hut. She returned quickly, carrying Briseis’s possessions.
The sack of possessions looked oddly depleted. Then Briseis realized why. Maira had pulled Iatros’s satchel out of the sack, and she held it along with Briseis’s own healing satchel. Maira lifted the straps of each of the satchels over Briseis’s head so that both rested across Briseis’s chest.
“Remember who you are,” Maira said.
This betrayal by Achilles froze Briseis’s heart—she knew Eurome would excuse it, say it came from his grief for Patroklos, his guilt over so many dead comrades. He chose to stay out of the fighting, she countered in her mind, as if her nurse were actually talking with her. And he’d let Patroklos go in his place. The force of what that must mean to Achilles hit her. He would never forgive himself. All that anger turned against himself.
She didn’t notice anything outside her as they walked, and so she was unprepared when they arrived at the wide, sandy area along the shore by Achilles’ camp. There she saw Patroklos’s bier, his corpse lying underneath a white shroud. Achilles stood nearby with his hands on his divine armor, and she started toward him, but then stopped. His eyes were locked on the armor—that was his only beloved now, his means toward vengeance against Hector.
Instead she walked up to Patroklos and gently pulled back the linen cover to see him. So many gashes rent his flesh. Had every Trojan stabbed him? Even though his body had been washed, his wounds filled with unguents, she felt the horror of so many spear thrusts as if she too had been struck. She slipped her arm under his shoulders and pulled his body close, rocking him as if he were a child. Tears flooded down her cheeks, and she shook with grief.
She looked again toward Achilles, longing to have her sorrow comforted by the person who would understand it best. His gaze lay now on his dead friend, but he showed no sign he even recognized her. Briseis wanted to be held in the shelter of his arms, but he stood like a statue, neither wanting nor giving human solace. Around him the other kings and his henchmen tried to draw him up to his shelte
r to take nourishment before the battle, but he refused to do anything but arm. He had vowed not to eat until he had killed Hector. Odysseus signaled the kings and they left Achilles to his fast.
Achilles’ face was hard set and even his hands, those deft and gentle hands, formed unyielding fists. She could not imagine them embracing anything. She thought his eyes, fiery abysses, could kill if he looked too long upon her, as his shout had struck down men the day before. His henchmen drew back a cautious distance, waiting for his orders.
Beside him she saw the extraordinary armor his mother had brought. It gleamed so brilliantly that it was painful to look at. The figures depicted on the shield moved as though alive. The circling designs upon the shield contained the whole world. Hephaistos knew the choice Achilles would make when he put on this armor: to give up life. She wondered if Thetis had asked him to depict life in such fullness that it would be impossible for Achilles to put on this armor and fight, knowing that he would die as a result. Whether at Thetis’s request or his own vision, Hephaistos had portrayed every aspect of life, not simply the buildings and places of human habitation, but the natural universe also, and the rites of passage in mankind’s years, the give and take, the making and the destruction that fills the world.
Hephaistos had depicted the troubles and the joys in life, wars as well as weddings. She’d heard Hephaistos was a lame god, thrown from the heavens by his own mother. That must be why he understood mortals so well. He himself had suffered. Briseis thought it might be the perfect shield—any opponent would run from the sight of it because he would understand in a flash what the cost of fighting truly was.
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