The Armour of Achilles

by Glyn Iliffe

  She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her husband’s thighs, but he lifted her up and looked into her eyes, his face stern.

  ‘Andromache, you know I love you, but if I don’t lead the fight against these cursed invaders then who will? Unless we drive them back into their galleys, then I promise you they will conquer our holy city before much longer and put it to the torch. And when that day comes, I’ll be killed and you’ll be dragged off to some Greek palace to spend the rest of your life bent over a loom or fetching water from another man’s well. But as long as my shield and spear can keep you free, then I continue fighting.’

  Just then, the child woke and began to cry. Helen watched Andromache pluck him from the cot and comfort him until he was quiet, before passing him into the hands of his father. But the moment he looked up and saw the plume of Hector’s helmet nodding down at him, he burst into tears once more and reached for his mother. Hector quickly unslipped the leather ties from beneath his chin and tossed the helmet on to the bed then, raising Astyanax in his hands, kissed him on his little nose and blew out his cheeks, making him laugh.

  ‘Father Zeus,’ Hector said, looking up at his boy and smiling, ‘make this child grow into a man like his father, to one day become king over all Ilium. Give him strength and courage and grant him victory over his enemies, but above all let him always make his mother happy.’

  He kissed the boy again before giving him back to Andromache and wrapping them both in his arms. ‘Don’t fear for me, my love,’ he said. ‘This war won’t last for ever, but while it does then it’s the business of every man in Ilium to fight. And none more so than myself.’

  Helen turned from the bedroom door and retreated back down the corridor. For there was one man in Troy who had a greater obligation to fight than Hector, and it was Paris. Even if it meant his death, she could not beg Hector to keep him from the war.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD

  That evening the Greeks moved back to the top of the ridge, away from the mangled corpses of the fallen. The ordinary soldiers gathered in sullen groups around large fires, to mourn their dead comrades and rue the absence of Achilles, who most believed would have turned the battle in their favour. While his army grumbled against him, Agamemnon declared a great victory and celebrated it with the sacrifice of a five-year-old bull. Ajax was awarded the choicest cut of meat for his duel against Hector, and even Diomedes, who had also fought with god-like valour, did not dispute that the king of Salamis deserved the honour. But the mood among the other leaders was as melancholy as their men’s, tired as they were by their exertions and disheartened by their failure to rout the Trojans. Despite the King of Men’s triumphant claims, few could deny their enemies had proved they were a match for the Greeks; many were already beginning to believe the tenth year of the war would prove as inconclusive as every other before it.

  After the meal, Nestor called the leaders to council. Few spoke as a thick bank of cloud rolled out of the east and extinguished the heavenly lights above them. Odysseus was particularly quiet, his eyes dark and brooding as he sat beside Eperitus and held his palms out to the hastily made fire. Eperitus looked at the handful of gaps left by the captains who had fallen, Tlepolemos chief among them, and understood his friend’s mood. A chance to finish the war had come and gone, and Odysseus must have been wondering if he would ever see his home and family again. He must also have been pondering the words of Athena, as Eperitus was himself.

  Agamemnon prayed to Zeus for victory and, after they had poured libations into the dust at their feet, Nestor took the staff from the king of Mycenae’s hand and turned to face the circle of men. He began by suggesting they call for a two-day truce to gather and burn the dead, and after receiving the firm agreement of the council added that they should also use the time to finish the camp’s defences – building the wall that had been suggested long ago but never started, fitting gates and deepening the ditch. The King of Men objected immediately, calling the proposal defeatist and holding his hand out for the staff. Nestor ignored him and, turning back to the council, began extolling the courage of the Trojans and Hector in particular. The Greeks needed a last line of defence if the gods continued to favour the Trojans, he argued, for they could no longer count on Achilles to help them. This angered Agamemnon, but the rest of the council supported Nestor and agreed that the wall should be built.

  Eperitus was woken the next morning by the feel of rain on his face. His limbs were stiff and heavy and he was tempted to throw the blanket over his head and fall back into sleep, but instead he raised himself on one elbow and looked to the east, where a faint greyness was creeping over the distant mountains. All around him were the humped shapes of his comrades, some fully covered by their blankets, others continuing to snore despite the light drizzle that was falling from the stony heavens. Odysseus was close by, silent and still, only the faint movement of his shoulders indicating he was still breathing.

  Quietly and stiffly, Eperitus stood and rolled up his blanket. Then, shaking out his balled-up cloak, which had acted as his pillow, he threw it around his shoulders and went over to the nearest picket fire. Polites and Omeros were there, staring down the slope at the thousands of dark, formless shapes that were just becoming visible in the pre-dawn light. Both men looked up at him as he joined them, their faces pale and their eyes starkly white in the gloom.

  ‘The rain woke me,’ he explained as he sat down, but Polites raised his fingers to his lips and nodded down the hill.

  Eperitus could see anxiety in his face, something he had never known in the giant warrior before, and realized it was more than the stress that followed a hard day’s fighting. He peered down the slope, his keen eyesight struggling against the darkness and the shroud of thin, clinging rain. For a while all he could see were the shapes of the dead, blurred and indistinct and devoid of the individuality that life had once given them. And then he saw it, another shape moving over the heaped corpses, its cloak catching in the light wind that blew out of the north. For a moment Eperitus thought someone was despoiling the dead – a common feature of battlefields in darkness – but then he noticed that the tall figure seemed to be gliding slowly, not pausing or stooping to rob the broken bodies at its feet. Suddenly Eperitus understood who the figure was and a chill of recognition shuddered through him.

  ‘He’s been there most of the night,’ Omeros commented, his eyes fixed on the slope below. ‘He was there when Polites and I came on watch, and the men we replaced said they had first noticed him at dusk. No one has dared go down to challenge him. We think he’s a god – or a ghost.’

  ‘It’s Hermes, collecting the souls of the dead,’ Eperitus said, recalling his own experience of the god many years before.

  Omeros simply nodded and pulled his knees to his chest, resting his chin on them and looking with dejection at the figure in the semi-darkness. Somehow he had survived his first battle, but the young singer of songs also knew one small twist of fate could have meant his own ghost being caught up beneath Hermes’s cloak and ushered down to the Underworld. The thought of it put fear in his eyes as he watched the god moving over the bodies of the slain, but Eperitus could see that it was a controlled fear. His own long experience of war had shown him more than enough men who had lost all discipline in the face of terror and succumbed to dumb panic. Omeros, he was pleased to note, was not one of them.

  As they watched, the darkness slowly became suffused by a grey half-light. Scattered voices began to break the silence of the sleeping army behind them, causing the figure on the slopes to turn and stare at the picket fires on the ridge, as if noticing them for the first time. Then it began to laugh, a deep, mocking sound that seemed to rise up from the ground beneath their feet, filling their heads with despair and loathing as if a finger of doom had been laid upon the whole army. Eperitus pressed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, only opening them again when he felt the heaviness suddenly lift from his heart. Hermes had
gone, like smoke in a breeze, but in the nascent light of the new day he saw that another shape was picking its way towards them over the bodies of the dead. But this was no god: it was Idaeus, the ageing Trojan herald, who raised a ram’s horn to his lips and sent a long, clear note into the air above the battlefield.

  He was taken to Agamemnon, where a two-day halt to hostilities was arranged so that both sides could retrieve their dead. After he had gone, Nestor advised that each king or leader should divide his men in half, sending the less hardy back to the camp to build the walls with as much speed as possible, while the more resilient were to remain on the ridge and begin the painful process of gathering the fallen. After the sun had cleared the eastern mountains, though unseen behind the belly of grey clouds that filled the sky from horizon to horizon, the men ate a cold breakfast and then the army was split into two. As half marched back to build the walls, carts and chariots passed them in the opposite direction, sent to collect the bodies and take them back for burning.

  The different contingents of the Greek army moved to the parts of the slope where they had fought the day before, looking for their comrades among heaped corpses. The rain fell more heavily now, rattling on helmets and breastplates and soaking into woollen clothing so that every man was soon cold to the bone. It turned the powdery dust of the battlefield to mud, making men slip and struggle as they lifted armoured bodies on to their shoulders and carried them to the waiting carts. Ironically, the rain was not heavy enough to wash away the dust and blood that made many of the dead unrecognizable, so men were detailed to carry pails of water and wash the filth of battle from their faces. Others had lost heads or were too disfigured to identify, and only their armour or clothing distinguished them as Greek or Trojan. Occasionally there would be a shout of despair or a stifled cry as men came across their friends, but Agamemnon had forbidden displays of grief before the Trojans and so the warriors shed their tears in silence.

  Similar orders must have been given to the Trojans, so that the only sound that persisted through that long day was the hiss of the rain and the trickle of the small brown rivulets that had formed on the hillside and ran down to join the Scamander. The men of both sides – murderous enemies only a day before – now mingled cautiously as they searched the same heaps of bodies for their comrades. Occasionally a Greek might give a surly nod to a Trojan, or vice versa, and sometimes one side would separate their enemy’s dead from their own and then call across to indicate the pile. Otherwise there was little communication between them: they were still rivals in a deadly contest, and the previous day’s fighting had left feelings of hatred and revenge on both sides.

  Eperitus spent as much time scanning the faces of the Trojans as he did the pale, lifeless faces of the dead. After years of loathing the men of Troy, he found it hard to believe their blood ran in his own veins or that he could have anything at all in common with them; and yet, as he watched them gather their dead, he could not help but admire the strength they had shown in battle. Before yesterday, they had only ventured beyond their own walls to fight limited skirmishes – small clashes to foil Greek plans and in which they had been aided by information from the traitor Palamedes. But now they had attempted to break the deadlock – perhaps because they had been blinded by the loss of Palamedes and could no longer anticipate the next Greek attack – and had proved themselves a formidable enemy, worthy of respect. As he looked at them he found himself thinking of Astynome and how she had asked him to go with her to Troy, even to become a Trojan. Had he made the right choice? he wondered, and the moment the thought entered his head he was appalled that he should think such a thing. Had not the Pythoness warned him against betraying his friends for the sake of love, all those years ago? Was this the challenge in his heart Athena had spoken of? He stared around at the faces of the dead, gazing up into the rain with soulless eyes; too many of them were Greeks, killed in a war that the Trojans had caused. Picking up the body of one of the most recent batch of Ithacan reinforcements, a lad whose name he had heard but could not remember, he threw it across his shoulder and trudged angrily up the slope towards a half-filled cart.

  ‘Eperitus!’ called a voice.

  He dropped the body into the cart and turned to see the barrel-like figure of Peisandros jumping down from the back of a newly arrived wagon.

  ‘Eperitus,’ he repeated, seizing the Ithacan’s hand and pulling him into a hug. ‘I’m glad to see you survived the fighting. They say it was a hard day.’

  ‘See for yourself,’ Eperitus replied, sweeping an arm towards the corpse-strewn battlefield, where more than half the bodies still remained where they had fallen. ‘We could have done with the help of the Myrmidons. Is that why you’re here? Has Achilles decided to rejoin the fighting?’

  Peisandros shook his head despondently. ‘You know how proud he is, Eperitus; it’ll take a lot of grovelling from Agamemnon before he takes up his spear and shield and fights for the Greeks again. No, I came here to see if things are as bad as they’re saying back at the camp – and from the corpses I passed on the way and those that are left, I’d say it was worse. What about Odysseus and the others?’

  ‘I’m well,’ said the king, appearing beside the cart with a body over his shoulder. He laid it down on top of the others and paused to brush a tumble of hair from its face, then embraced the Myrmidon spearman warmly. ‘And the others, too – Eurylochus, Polites, Arceisius and Antiphus all came through safely. But why’s Achilles still hanging back, Peisandros? Can’t he see he’s missing all the glory, and that we need him?’

  Peisandros rubbed his chin and looked down the slope.

  ‘He knows you need him. In fact, it’s his fault the Greeks are being slaughtered in the first place.’

  ‘How can it be Achilles’s fault?’ asked Eperitus.

  ‘You forget his mother is chief of the Nereids. He asked her to speak to Zeus for him, so the father of the gods would give the upper hand to the Trojans. He wants Agamemnon to be humiliated and the Greeks made to see they’re helpless without him.’

  ‘But that’s ludicrous,’ Odysseus protested. ‘He’s fought at our sides the whole campaign; why would he turn against us for the sake of Agamemnon’s arrogance?’

  ‘Do you think we haven’t asked ourselves the same question?’ Peisandros retorted. ‘It has to be this war. We’ve had ten years of fighting and the savagery gets to us all in the end, even Achilles. Perhaps him most of all. After all, he’s lived every day here knowing he will never leave Ilium alive, and that can’t be easy for any man. That and his rigid pride; I’m only surprised something like this hasn’t happened before. Anyway, now I’m here I’ll help you with the bodies. We’ve a lot of work to do if we’re to clear the field by sundown.’

  They moved back down the slope, Peisandros looking with sad eyes at the terrible slaughter all around him, and resumed the work of retrieving their dead countrymen. Above them, cart after cart squealed away with their bloody burdens, the teams of oxen plodding slowly through the thick mud and sheet rain. That the heavens could contain so much water seemed impossible to those that toiled beneath it – especially in the middle of a Trojan spring – but as Peisandros commented, at least it kept the flies off the bodies. Then Odysseus spotted Omeros, sitting among the dead with his head in his hands. Beside him was Elpenor, another of the recent arrivals from Ithaca, whose young face had gained years in a single day; a skin of wine was clutched between his knees and his glassy eyes were staring emptily across the Scamander towards Troy. Together they had carried the bodies one by one to the carts, but now it seemed the task had defeated their will to carry on. Odysseus took pity on them.

  ‘Omeros,’ he called, ‘give us a song, lad.’

  Omeros lifted his head and stared vaguely at his king.

  ‘A song, my lord? Here?’

  ‘Yes, here. If men can sing about battlefields, why can’t they sing on battlefields? Give us something to take our minds off . . . off our work.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’r />
  Omeros dragged himself to his feet and looked down into the valley of the dead. His cheeks were flushed with tears and for a moment Eperitus thought he might just sit back down and bury his face in his hands once more. But he remained standing and, after accepting a swallow of wine from the skin Elpenor held up to him, he cleared his throat and raised his chin a touch.

  At first, his voice was a soft, quiet sound, almost drowned by the patter of the rain. A few of the men looked up and saw a small, pale-faced lad standing on the slopes above them, before ignoring him and returning to their grim work. Eperitus looked at Odysseus and was about to speak, but the king placed a finger to his lips. As he did so Omeros’s voice rose a little and the words became more distinguishable. But where Eperitus had expected a dirge, he was surprised to recognize a popular song about the seven heroes who had fought to conquer Thebes during the dark days of the Greek civil wars. It told of their deaths before the walls of the city, of their heroism, courage and sacrifice for one another, and as the young bard’s voice found itself and began to rise above the sound of the rain, Eperitus felt his throat thicken and tears come to his eyes. The men on the slopes stopped working and looked up, standing and listening as the song’s words spread their net about them, pulling them in deeper and deeper as the young bard grew in confidence, forgetting the rain and the oppressive darkness and singing as if he would never have the chance to sing again.