He stamped his foot on the dying man’s chest and tensed himself to wrench out the spear.
‘I see you what you are,’ whispered Hector, his voice barely audible now. ‘A heartless dog yourself. Very well, you can join your own kind in savaging my corpse. But every dog has its day, and yours is coming soon, I can see it. You will die at the walls of Troy when the hand of Paris, with Apollo’s aid, brave warrior as you are, will smite you down.’
‘Fuck you!’
Achilles yanked hard and the gush of blood followed. Hector was a corpse. His killer ripped off the armour and invited the Myrmidons to step up.
‘Go on, every man – have a fucking stab!’
Most of them wouldn’t have had the balls to face Hector alive and man to man, but a number of them accepted Achilles’ invitation, stabbing him in one place or another and cracking jokes.
‘Remember when he set the ships on fire?’
‘He’s not so fucking hot now, is he?’
‘The cunt’s gone cold.’
Then Achilles dishonoured Hector’s body, and dishonoured himself in the process. He slit the tendons of the dead man’s feet from ankle to heel, passed thongs through the slits and tied them to his chariot, letting the head drag behind, then lashed the horses, which galloped across the plain, dragging the body of Hector behind them, the head that was once so beautiful tumbling and trundling and trailing in the dust, furrowing all the plain, with the long black hair flowing out behind, tangled and whitened and torn. And the clouds of hot dust rose thickly behind the chariot in a lengthening white train, like the train that follows the plough in the drought when the farmer paces fast behind the oxen over the dry clods, lashing and laughing and anxious to sow.
That’s how Hector’s head tumbled in the dust.
Hecuba saw it all from the walls and tore her face and hair, while old Priam had to be held back from rushing out of the city gates to entreat Achilles to cease his savagery. The king sank to his knees among his servants and grovelled on the ground.
‘Leave me alone, all of you! He has a father too, Achilles, even Achilles has a father, old Peleus. Perhaps he’ll remember him and relent, for the sake of all grieving fathers, whose sons are soldiers. He’s killed nearly all my sons, and I’d give them all to have Hector back, dead as he is, to have his body to hold. Oh, if only he’d died in my arms! Or if he’d died in infancy, and I’d never known him grown up in all his strength and beauty. How happy I would be now!’
Hecuba led the mourning, wailing that her days were done. And Andromache heard the sounds of lamentation from the upper room where she sat at her loom. She was working on a lovely purple tapestry, a floral design, and she had just asked the maids to prepare a hot bath for her husband, when the sounds of shrieking and sobbing tore the air. She dropped the shuttle, flew from the chamber and saw the crowds gathered up on the walls. Her heart began to hammer, she felt she was choking, and found she couldn’t breathe. Her mouth went so dry that her tongue clove to her palate and she lost the power of speech. Lifting her skirts and clutching her breast, she ran up to the battlements, pushed through the throng of people to look out across the plain – and saw it, her husband’s body being dragged in triumph and disgrace, backwards and forwards in front of the city. She screamed and reeled back unconscious into the arms of her women. And when she came to she wept bitterly.
THIRTY-FOUR
When he got back to the ships, Achilles flung Hector’s body down in the dust beside the corpse of his comrade on its bier. The Myrmidons, exhausted and battle-scarred, ate and drank eagerly, but Achilles extended his vow, and swore he wouldn’t even wash himself until Patroclus was laid on the pyre. Then his friends went to their tents, leaving their leader to lie down on the beach beneath the stars by the sounding sea, and, as the waves washed up at his feet, his senses gradually lost their hold on the scent and sound and spume of breakers, sleep wrapped its dark blanket round him, and the sorrow slid from his heart.
As he slept, he dreamed of Patroclus, who came and took his hand, regretting that they would never sit down together to laugh and chatter, telling each other their innermost thoughts – as they’d done ever since Patroclus’s father had first brought him to Peleus after he’d accidentally killed a playmate in a quarrel over a child’s game of knucklebones. And Achilles asked now, all these years of special friendship later – though he was asking the strengthless dead in the dead of sleep – that their two ashes be buried together in one urn, just as one heart had contained the two men and one soul the two spirits. For they had loved one another with a love that could never be surpassed, not by the love of women.
So Achilles murmured as he struggled in the troubled web of dreams. ‘Let me get through the gates of Hades, past this army of souls fending me off, the shades of the unhappy incapable dead, and let me reach you and stay with you. Don’t let them separate us, friend, don’t let my bones be buried apart from yours. Death will unite us eternally. Oh, when I think of it all now, the hopes we had in our hearts, the plans we laid, in spite of time, the dreams we dreamed when we were young . . .’
And he reached out, stretching from his bed on the beach, to take Patroclus in his arms again. But the dream-shadow couldn’t be clasped, and it vanished away like smoke, like sandmarks under water, leaving him with a faint wail.
Dawn’s pink fingertips gripped the skyline now, and her rosy hands quietly stroked the sea-lanes of the east. The wood-gathering began. Agamemnon had sent out many men and mules to the spurs of Ida to cut and bring back timber for the pyre. The Myrmidons made a procession, chariots in front, infantry in the rear, to accompany Patroclus to the place on the shore that Achilles had chosen for him. Here they would build the barrow that would eventually contain both himself and the friend of his heart.
Achilles had long vowed to give his long yellow hair to Spercheus, the river of his homeland on his return to Phthia, but now he cut it off, staring bitterly across the wine-dark sea and saying that his father’s wish had not been granted and never would – he’d never come home, would never see his own country again, and so he’d give his long hair not to Spercheus but to Patroclus to take with him to the House of the Dead. For Spercheus had been deaf to his father’s prayers. So he laid the long lovely locks, shorn from his bent head, into his friend’s dead hands, and he wept. Then the company went off to the ships. But the dead man’s closest comrades stayed behind to do what now had to be done.
They built the pyre a hundred feet long and wide, and in the centre they placed Patroclus. The pale corpse, wrapped in the flame-coloured shroud, prefigured the fire that would consume it. Slaughtered sheep and cattle were heaped on the fire, together with jars of oil and honey. Achilles slew four fine horses and cut the throats of two of the nine dogs that Patroclus used to feed with scraps and crumbs from his own hand. These animals too he hurled into the flames.
Then – and this was the hardest thing – the twelve Trojan youths Achilles had taken were cruelly butchered and, while still seeing and alive, were pitched into the roaring flames to augment their last agonies.
The Myrmidons asked about Hector.
‘No,’ said Achilles, ‘the flames are too quick for him. He’ll be flung to the dogs. They’ll chew his bones, and the vultures will gouge out his eyes.’
That was still his intended revenge, and his anger burned brighter at the thought of Hector’s corpse rotting slowly under the sky. Except that Penelope would not have it that way. Not that she cared for Hector – she hated him – but she was uneasy about Achilles’ ugliness of soul that reflected so badly on the Greeks. So she told a different version of the story of the unburied body.
And so Aphrodite kept the dogs from Hector and poured oil of roses on him, while over the corpse Phoebus Apollo drew a cloud as protection from the scorching sun and a glittering veil to keep away the wriggling worms. An exquisite arrangement. Art is long, existence short, as they say, though dogs and decomposition are facts of life, and death’s door is always ajar.
Achilles now prayed to the winds. Iris delivered his message and veered off, setting a speedy course for Olympus. The pyre burned slowly at first, until the north wind and the rushing west wind came roaring over the sea, answering Achilles’ call, and the sea surged and sang in response as the two winds tossed and whirled the flames together. So all night long in the howling winds Achilles paced heavily round and round the pyre like a man of lead, pouring out wine on the earth as he went, drenching it blood-red from a golden bowl for the burning bones of his friend. The tears fell from him.
Night and silence, broken only by the crackling flames. The Plough rusts slowly against the sky, turning in the field of stars. Dawn glimmers, the sea wrinkles, the pyre dwindles, and the flames drop down to embers and ash. And so Achilles drops, unconscious, exhausted, on the sand.
When he woke he gave his orders.
‘Collect the bones carefully. It will be easy to identify Patroclus, because his bones will be at the centre. I want them placed in this golden urn and sealed with a double fold of fat, two good layers to protect them until the time my own bones come to join them, which will not be long now. Then the seal can be broken to let me be with my friend again.’
So they quenched the pyre with wine. The ashes fell. They gathered the white bones, weeping over them, and placed them in the golden urn, covered with a linen cloth, and put this in Achilles’ tent. Next they marked out the circle for the mound, laid the foundations where the fire had been and heaped up the earth for the barrow.
No need for an imposing tomb yet, Achilles said. A simple one would suffice, until his own time came. Then, finally, those of the Myrmidons who’d be left after Achilles had gone would place the two together and build the barrow broad and huge and high.
And so it was done. But still Achilles wouldn’t let them turn and go, not until they’d held games in honour of the dead. And all this was done too, except that Achilles would not race his own horses. They were the horses that Poseidon gave to Peleus, and Peleus to Achilles, and that could never be bested. Clearly unfair then, and unsporting, to enter them for the games. It is not every day you race horses that were the gift of a sea-god. And it is not every day you see horses in mourning. Yes, still they wept, those fabulous horses, wept on the web of devotion for their lost glorious charioteer, their tears trickling slowly down their long drooping manes, as only the tears of mythical horses do.
THIRTY-FIVE
Achilles threw himself to the wolves of sorrow. The many images of his friendship with Patroclus crowded round him like stars, peering through the windows of his eyes, open or shut, staring at him with white cold faces, like the white face of his friend before it flaked and vanished in the flames. He lay on his back and on his front and on his side, unable to find sleep. At last he’d rise and wander aimlessly along the beach, watching the dawn as it painted the salt-waste – pink at first, glimmering and glowing like a rose in the slow summer, then liquid gold as the sun came up.
But yet another dawn and sunrise brought him no hope; Aurora and Apollo were false to him. He could view the world only through the dim flickering of the torches he’d lit for the dead, the sombre flames of the funeral pyre on which he’d burned those precious bones, and not in the light of a false dawn or a garish day.
So he’d return from wandering the shore, yoke up his horses and drag Hector’s body round and round Patroclus’s tomb. Afterwards, he would fling it aside in the filth so that the desecration could continue.
The Olympians grew uneasy. Although, unknown to Achilles, the golden aegis of Apollo hung over the body as it lay in the dirt, although it fended off the dogs and maggots, even so the gods disapproved of this prolonged and pitiless savagery. They wanted to send Hermes, the slayer of Argus, to steal the corpse away and so end Achilles’ shameful acts of anger, which disfigured his reputation as a hero. But three of the gods wouldn’t hear of it: Poseidon, Pallas Athene and Hera – all powerful players on Olympus.
Behind the cold grey eyes of Athene especially there burned still a hot hate for Troy because of Paris’s crime. Not the crime of wife-stealing in particular – there was nothing unusual there – but the greater sin of slighting the goddess when he had chosen Aphrodite for her beauty and had been awarded in return the madness of his heart’s desire, the madness that had caused so much suffering and destroyed so many young lives.
After eleven days, however, Phoebus Apollo stood up on Olympus and spoke his piece. Achilles had lost all honour. All men must mourn for those they have loved and lost, but within reason. They must also learn to let their dead go and not allow the heart to be eaten up by anger. The human heart is made for suffering and endurance; bitterness does not become it. Achilles had lost his humanity as well as his honour. In desecrating senseless flesh, not in the heat of battle but in the deliberate vein of avenging anger, he had murdered compassion and made ugliness his objective. He was flouting the gods.
So Zeus sent Iris to Thetis, ordering her to go to her son and bring him to his senses again. Thetis obeyed, telling him that the gods now frowned on him and that he should return Hector to his family and accept the ransom for the dead. Achilles agreed. In truth, his revenge-thirst had been slaked at last, and he could drink no more from that cold and bittersweet cup.
Then Zeus sent Iris to Priam’s palace, which was a scene of terrible grief, with daughters and daughters-in-law sorrowing for the newly dead, and Priam himself prostrate on the ground, his old bones all muffled up in his cloak and the white dust piled over his already white head. The old king seemed cut in stone, an abject figure, his face and shoulders defiled by the dung and dirt he’d gathered from the ash-pit and the midden where he’d grovelled, scooping up and throwing over himself the leavings of the table and of bodies, human and animal. Now he sat inert in his filth.
Picture it – a king sitting among excrement and cinders, and bright-coloured Iris appearing like a rainbow to deliver the Olympian order: Priam should go now to the Greek camp unprotected, with only one old man to drive the gift-laden mules, and he should ask the grief-weary Achilles to accept the ransom for his son.
The stricken king, still sitting among the ashes and slops, informed his wife of his intention. Hecuba was horrified.
‘What, go to that inhuman brute? He’ll tear your head off and slaughter you without a shred of sentiment. He butchered my son, and he’ll smash you like a fly. He’s a monster, not a man, and if I could only fasten my remaining teeth on his wolf’s heart I’d eat it raw and gnaw the flesh from his bones.’
‘Enough, woman!’ roared Priam. ‘Cease squawking at me like some bird of doom! Nothing but songs of death. I’ve had enough of death! But if he kills me, I’ll be glad to go. I can’t live another day like this – and my son unburied. So you can give over your wailing. I’m going.’
He collected together the best of the remaining treasures, sparing nothing, including twelve robes and cloaks, many sheets and mantles and tunics, ten talents of gold, two tripods, four cauldrons and a magnificent gold cup which the Thracians had presented him with once on embassy. It meant nothing to him in his loss, not now that the thing closest to him had been ripped from his heart. And, exactly as he had been ordered, he set out with just the one old man to drive the mules. Hecuba screamed at the guards not to let him out of the city, but they had to obey their king.
At the gates, the sight of the mourners drove him mad.
‘About your business, you dismal lilters, you useless weepers, you lugubrious louts! Have you no sorrows of your own, no griefs in your homes that you have to hang about here mourning on my behalf, dinning my ears with your whimpering and snivelling, and drowning me in your rain of tears? I don’t need it.’
He laid about them with his staff, and they scattered and ran from the crazed old king. After that, he turned on his remaining sons, Helenus, Agathon, Pammon, Antiphonus, Deiphobus, Hippothous, Dius, Polites – and Paris. And he cursed them one and all.
‘You – look at you! I had the fi
nest sons once, and not one of them is left alive. I’ve lost all. You’re not my sons. The war has cropped the flower of my family, and see what I’m left with! Only the sons of shame remain to me, the wasters and revellers, the heroes of the dance and the drinking tables. You earn your laurels with the ladies and the soft-livers – when you’re not otherwise busy fleecing your own people of their sheep, you scum! Oh yes, I know you all. Can’t one of you at least yoke up these mules and set me on my way to bring back your brother’s body if I can? That’s if the Greek dogs have left anything of him to bury.’
They were not all idlers. Their main fault was not to have been killed. They had survived their illustrious brother, and now his shadow would always be over them and his shade haunt them. But they felt ashamed after this outburst from their demented father, and they did as he asked. Hecuba had abandoned her attempts to prevent him and she begged him to pray to Zeus for a good omen.
The skies stayed empty after sunset.
But Penelope felt a fellowship with the woman of sorrows, and she wove into the web the dark rider of the air, the great eagle with wings outspread. He was one of those dusky hunters, the colour of a grape as it ripens and takes on the succulent dust of a vintage bloom. And though no such eagle appeared, or any eagle for that matter, to lift the old king’s hopes on his splendid wings, Penelope’s bird was an accurate enough image of the old man’s emotion, spanning the huge extent of the hope that must have filled his heart, wing-tip to wing-tip, soaring to the gods.
Penelope's Web Page 28