Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  It had to be cleaned up, however you looked at it. Achilles knew that, even as Diomedes came up and shook hands with him over the corpse, assuring him of no bad blood. But the blood was there, still trickling from the ruined head – strange to see Thersites lying so quiet and peaceable – and that blood was going nowhere, not until Achilles did.

  ‘It’ll only take a few days,’ said Agamemnon, coming up and clapping him on the shoulder. ‘A couple of weeks at most.’

  Thersites had been no friend to Agamemnon.

  ‘Lesbos?’ Achilles asked quietly.

  ‘Lesbos.’

  And that’s how Achilles came to leave for his cleansing.

  He should have stayed in Lesbos. There was a saying, live in Lesbos – and live! While he was away, one of Priam’s last remaining allies, Memnon, came into the field. He was the son of Eos and Tithonus. Eos, Titaness of the dawn, loved Tithonus so badly she couldn’t bear the thought that one day he’d die. So, as Penelope told it, she begged Zeus that he’d live forever, just like the gods, and stay with her always, always by her side. Zeus agreed but must have forgotten to stem the ageing process while he was arranging the immortality, with the unfortunate result that while Eos stayed as young as the dawn, naturally, and never an hour older, Tithonus shrivelled up into a grasshopper of a man. Shrunken with age in time’s fullness, but still chirping and gibbering away uselessly to himself, he became a burbling idiot, a desiccated wisp, his tunic stained and mouldy with old food, his shrill twittering getting on everybody’s tits, especially Eos’s, and her tits were still in the dawn of womanhood, needing a young man’s handling. So Tithonus had to be locked up in a remote corner of the palace, out of all sight and hearing. And probably smell.

  That much was true – he lost his marbles well before his time and became a pest, with confinement the only answer, short of chucking him off a cliff. The Zeus story was invented, naturally. And a Titaness of the dawn sounds like a fabulous mother for Memnon. Fabulous is the word. A winter’s tale. A myth. But whatever his parentage, Memnon came in at the end with his contingent of black soldiers, for which Priam had paid through the nose.

  He paid for nothing. The mercenaries were useless. On the very same day, Achilles and his Myrmidons came back from Lesbos – just in time to knock hell out of them and crush Priam’s last remaining hope.

  But Achilles died that same day at the Scaean Gate, just as Hector had prophesied. Not that Hector had the gift. Leaders are always coming out with that one – you will fall outside our walls, you will die at our city gates . . . One of those times it has to be true, and this was one of those times.

  After Memnon was routed – with shameful ease – Achilles chased the blackheads back inside the city. But Paris was watching from the main tower over the gate and shot him from a height, from a safe distance, and from inside the walls, a triple chicken. It didn’t take Apollo either to bring Achilles down, though the web shows the god pointing to the famous heel, showing Paris where to aim. An old story, that one. Truth’s simpler than myth. Getting the angle right was next to impossible, and sure enough the arrow fell short. The nick on the heel was a pure fluke, but the nick was enough. The arrow was tipped with poison.

  Stories do the rounds, stories that dress death up nicely and make it meaningful. Penelope liked the one about the heel best of all. Thetis had dipped the infant in the Styx, to make him immortal. But she had forgotten about the point where she’d held him between finger and thumb, the heel. O the almighty gods – as fallible as the rest of us! And that’s where Paris’s arrow struck him, in the only place where he was vulnerable, the exclusively mortal heel. And the arrow was assisted on its way by the iron arm of Apollo.

  It’s a breathless moment – the Scaean Gate swings wide open on its hinges to let the retreating army through, Achilles plunges through the gap like a dolphin after fry, and slinky Paris up there watches and waits. Apollo is at his side, bending the bow, lowering it slowly, the god’s hands on mortal hands, guiding, finding the angle of elevation, assessing the correct trajectory with the cold blue geometry of his eyes, whispering all the time in Paris’s ear, telling him when to let loose . . .

  Fancy an even truer version? It’s simpler than ever. Paris shot Achilles not in the heel, with Apollo’s aid, but in the back, and all by himself. Face him in the field? The little prick never yet saw the whites of enemy eyes. Not when he could fire an arrow instead, the serpent’s weapon, and tip it with venom like the slippery shit he was. Which was exactly what he did. If he’d really aimed for the heel and had hit him there, fuck me, it would have been an amazing shot, given the distance, the angle, the fast-moving target. Only a god could have set it up.

  But what does it matter in the end? Same difference to Achilles. A dead man’s a dead man, and for Achilles the war was over. That was as close as he ever got to Phthia. That was his long homecoming. Dead heroes never stop returning home, lacerating their loved ones with each new day. And his old father didn’t have too many days left. He died of a broken heart.

  At least we got the body out. Achilles had gone well through the gates and died inside Troy. Ajax made the dash with me, and we went in together and battled for the corpse. Sheer fucking hell it was in there, but we got out before they shut the gates and minced us. Achilles was assured of his burning, and his reunion with the ashes of his friend, silly sentimental old bastard – Thersites had been right about that. Still, that’s what he wanted.

  The sea-nymphs rise, robed in foam, following Thetis to the shore. Out of the waves she comes, accompanied by the Muses and her immortal sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, combing the white blown hair of the waves, wafting out of the ocean wastes to bewail her son. The unforgettable crying ascends to the skies, spreading out over the wide waters, and Zeus sends down a great rain of tears.

  We held the usual games for the dead hero. They lasted seventeen days, and the blackheads were thrilled with the breather and kept the ceasefire as we’d done for them when they were burning Hector. There were great prizes up for grabs. I wrestled Ajax for Achilles’ arms and thrashed the bastard. He thought they were his for the taking – and true, he should’ve won, with his height and bulk and all, but it’s easy to outwit an oaf. Use an idiot’s own strength against him and suddenly he’s on your side.

  Another story went round that, unknown to us, Nestor had sent spies into Troy to find out whom they took to be our top soldier now that Achilles was ashes. The spies eavesdropped on a couple of gabbling girls. One said Ajax was top notch because he was the one who’d dragged Achilles outside the gates and got the body to safety. The other said anybody could haul a corpse, even a girl could do it, and Achilles was slender built, whereas Ajax was a mountain. That was the easy bit. Keeping the Trojans at bay had made the rescue possible, and that took more effort and a braver man, she said – and that was down to Odysseus. Nestor went with that view, one with which I fully agreed, and the weapons came to me.

  Well, spies were always in and out of Troy, and girls gossip, but I know I beat Ajax fair and square and left the bastard breathless on the ground. After which, he went AWOL, and subsequently stark raving mad. He slaughtered all our cattle, undoing months of work that had gone into the raids. He even whipped two rams to death, mistaking them for Agamemnon and Menelaus, so bonkers had he gone. In the end, he topped himself, the stupid cunt, so we buried him in a stone coffin, no pyre for him, and he’s there in the web, still sulking in hell – which was all the homecoming he got.

  But all that happened after the sack. In the meantime, we were planning revenge for Achilles. Our hero had been killed, unheroically, and we weren’t going to let Paris get away with it. Nestor called a meeting to discuss the question of how to kill a non-combatant, a fight-funker. A bow-boy. Answer: with another bowman, but an even better one. And who was our best archer? Philoctetes, who was on Tenedos, where he’d settled some time after we’d left him on nearby Lemnos paralysed by a snakebite. He could easily have been demobbed, but t
he poor bugger couldn’t bring himself to go home in that condition – fucked up not by action but by a snake. So he had opted to stay on instead and perfected his art from a sitting position, till he was the best archer in the known world. Even before that, there was probably no one standing who could have beaten him. And now he was the bee’s knees – a crippled killer, but still a killer.

  We sent Diomedes over to Tenedos to being him back, knowing it would be no easy mission. It wasn’t. Diomedes told him his contribution could win the war. He said he didn’t give a flying fuck for the war – after all, it was the war that had fucked him. We’d foreseen that answer and we’d sent Machaon along with Diomedes to work on him, medically. Machaon was hot shit when it came to drugs. He didn’t cure him completely, but the treatment worked wonders, and in a matter of days he was firing his arrows standing up. Back on his feet, he stepped on board with Diomedes, a little gingerly but with an expectant grin cracking his ugly mug. His mission was to kill Paris.

  I planned it all myself. The first stage was to wind down our attacks to a minimum and make it look as if morale was low. Then I asked for volunteers to expose themselves as easy targets and draw the bastard’s fire. Big rewards were on offer. Even so, there were only two volunteers and they never got their rewards. They both bought it on the first day. After that, no more volunteers. So I volunteered myself for the job, bringing up a siege-engine, right up to the walls, but making sure I stood out. I needed men for this job, but they’d fuck-all else to do but shove under cover and just stand there watching me out in the open, apparently giving orders. I’d be a sitting duck, the only target in Troy. They were happy with that. Bastards.

  Sure enough, Paris went for it, thinking he was in for another easy kill. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, up on his killing tower, his balls (if he had any) tucked well out of harm’s way. What the cunt didn’t know was that Philoctetes, hidden inside the siege-engine, was peering out through the slit and lining up his own kill. He saw Paris and slid his bow slowly out, just a fraction. Meanwhile I could see Paris getting me in his sights, the sniping little shit. My bowels trembled. I knew it would be a poisoned arrow, and a flesh wound would be all it would take. Philoctetes had the same set-up, but that would be fuck-all use if Paris got in first, and my man was in no hurry.

  ‘Get a move on!’ I hissed at him between my teeth. ‘I can see the cunt’s knuckles now, white as fucking snow!’

  Still Philoctetes hung fire. ‘I only get the one shot, remember? Wait till he shows more of himself.’

  ‘Wait till he fucking does for me, you mean!’

  Twang!

  I watched Paris’s arrow leave the bow, saw him crane his neck, eager to follow the shot. I had one second. I hit the deck. Philoctetes fired. We heard the scream. The arrow hit the ground just behind me, and the tower above us thickened with figures. The wailing started up.

  He’d taken it in the side and had nearly fallen off the tower, he’d been leaning out so far. Philoctetes had gone for the neck, so it was a long way from his best shot. But then Apollo wasn’t directing it. Maybe he was even diverting it. Neck or side, it didn’t matter. The Hydra’s burning blood was in the bastard’s veins, and nothing would shift it. The cunt was buggered, and he knew it. All of Troy knew it, by the sound of it. He’d only one hope left in the world now – Oenone, the wife he’d deserted for Helen. She could work miracles with herbs, concocting antidotes even for the deadliest toxins. They said her potions could bring dead men back to life. Once she’d revived a man who’d been stone-cold for three days.

  What were his chances? Oenone was still living on Ida with the children he’d left her with. You’d think he’d feel shame even to ask an abandoned partner, but he couldn’t tell shame from self-regard, and the narcissistic little shit was in extremis, and in extreme agony. Next day, before dawn, the cunt was carried on a litter all the way to Oenone. Her frightened kids hung onto her skirts – they’d forgotten who their father was and had no idea that this gasping bastard staring up at them had once sired them on Ida. She looked down at him with stone-cold eyes.

  ‘Get back to your Spartan, you pathetic piece of shit! You heartless little whoremaster! Back you go to her, and let her cunt cure you!’

  They carried him back down the mountainside, and he was dead before they reached the edge of the forest. His last request was to be burned and buried right there and then, on Ida, where he belonged, the little shit-kicker, where if he’d stayed and shagged his sheep, countless lives would have been saved.

  They built the pyre and set fire to it, the wailing flying up with the flames. Oenone heard the howls, saw the sparks, like swarms of bees, red-hot, buzzing over the treetops – and guess what? She relented. Can you believe it? Came running after them down the mountain, too late, screaming that she still loved the bastard in spite of everything that he’d done, the selfishness, the humiliation. After all this time she still cared for him. A last embrace, then, not too late for that? No, never too late. She leapt up onto the pyre in her grief, clasping the burning body in her arms. The sparks went mad and the flames flew up as man and ex-wife mingled, man and wife again, one flesh, feeding the flames. The poor kids had run after her and flew to the pyre screaming for their mother and had to be restrained, orphans as they were now. And that’s how Paris went back to his first wife and came home again to Ida.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  With Paris dead, the fair Helen was free to return, or be returned, to her first husband – or so you would have thought. But her history was never going to be so simple. She’d escaped a seducer, cheated on a spouse, been widowed and was now so eminently available again that her late husband’s brothers, Helenus and Deiphobus, fought for her hand. Priam should have let the pair of them slug it out. Instead, he gave her away to Deiphobus, and a mightily pissed-off Helenus stormed out of Troy and defected – to us! He came over to the Greek side. That’s the effect that whore had on men.

  Agamemnon rubbed his grubby fists, and Helenus was debriefed immediately. The treacherous cunt couldn’t do enough to help us. He squeaked his fucking head off, crap mostly, but he did come out with one interesting idea – he advised us to get into the city under cover and steal the Palladium from the temple of Athene. This, he said, would seriously undermine Trojan morale, or what was left of it, at this stage of the war.

  And who was volunteered for the job? The master of dissembling – old Odysseus. Of course he fucking was. Talent doesn’t always pay. In this case, so goes the tale, I had to be beaten up till I was badly bruised and blackened and bloodied, swollen out of all recognition. Then I exchanged clothes with one of the latriners so that I smelled to hell. And in my rags, reeking of turds, I limped into the city as a beggar.

  That was the easy bit. Getting into the temple and back out again with the Palladium – that was something else. Penelope made it easier for me. In her web, I found a way to Helen – as if – and said I’d protect her when we took the city if only she’d help me now. She played along, spun me the story that she’d always detested Paris and hated Deiphobus even more. She wanted to get back to Menelaus and Sparta. Of course she fucking did. The war could only go one way now.

  ‘Ever considered escape?’ I asked her.

  Old Odysseus – still full of cunning. But she wasn’t fazed.

  ‘Many times,’ she sighed. ‘And tried it often enough. I’ve lost count of the number of times. Only the guards up on the ramparts there could put a figure to it, the times I’ve been caught up there, all roped up and ready to go over the wall.’

  Once, she was nearly hanged, she said, when they hauled her back up again. She had only been feet from the ground.

  ‘Liberation is all I thought of. But I’ll make another attempt tonight and create a diversion for you while you get out on the other side with the Palladium.’

  She was betting heavily on the Greek side now.

  ‘Fickle bitch!’ spat Penelope, warming to her own woven account. ‘Perfidious whore and a half! An
d treacherous to the last thrust of her cunt!’

  On the subject of Helen, Penelope’s language deteriorated. On the web, she was more tasteful and restrained. Theano, Antenor’s wife, can be seen helping me. She was priestess of the temple, and apart from being married to a pro-Greek man, had been worked on by Helen. So there she stands, Theano, arms outstretched, handing me the Palladium.

  Nice idea – and one I’d have tried if I’d thought it could have worked. A sweeter story for sure than the one that’s true.

  One good moonless night I crept into the city with Diomedes. We got in through a drain so stinking wicked it must have been the main sewer running right out of hell. Piss and shit are bad enough on their own, but put them together and you have a sickening concoction. We emptied our insides on that journey, puked our fucking rings up. Even temples require an egress for shit, and holy shit smells the same as any other. But where there’s an egress there’s an ingress, and we made it into the holy of holies, snatched the Palladium and got out fast, back through hell’s large intestine and out under the walls. We were just about dead with the stench by the time we made it back to base, but the Palladium was ours. They’d lost their talisman, their divine trinket. Troy’s hour had come.

  And so had Sinon’s.

  Sinon. A good name for a trickster and a spy. A name for bane and bad luck, vexation, plague. A scourge, a curse. He was the chink through which we finally infiltrated the city.

  I didn’t like the cunt, and I’d put up his name to be sacrificed when we left Troy. You can’t end a major war without a sacrifice. Some poor fucker has always got to pay that price, the one for the good of the many, and even if you don’t believe in gods, or do but don’t put much faith in them, you make out you do, just in case. What have you got to lose?