The armour had been intended for ceremonial purposes, not for fighting use, and many times Achilles had imagined himself wearing it as he entered Troy in triumph. But Patroclus had taken the less ornate armour that he wore for battle out onto the plain with him, and Hector had stripped it from his bleeding body, so now his mother’s gift must be put to grimmer work.
Achilles was arrayed in that armour when he stepped out of his lodge and crossed the strand to where Agamemnon and his warlords sat in council under an awning raised against the rain. All of them had been desolated by the death of Patroclus and by the failure of his tremendous effort to crush the Trojans against the city walls. Some of them were still recovering from their wounds and few had slept. Now, in this unremitting rain, none of them had much heart to return to the field. So they looked up at the approaching figure of Achilles with both awe and trepidation in their eyes. Agamemnon, who was still in pain from the spear-thrust in his arm, could scarcely look at him at all.
‘Son of Atreus,’ Achilles began, ‘it seems to me that no one has profited from our quarrel but Hector and his Trojans, and it’s time we brought it to an end. Summon the host to arms once more and let me find out whether any of the enemy dare stand against my spear.’
The awning flapped in the wind, spilling the rainwater that had gathered there. The air felt damp against their faces and, beyond the ships, the morning was no more than a rainy grey blur of sky and sea. Somewhere a horse whinnied and they could hear the noise of hammers against metal where the smiths and carpenters were repairing the broken axles and linch-pins of the chariots.
Agamemnon rose slowly to his feet. His arm was still strapped in a sling, and he glanced only briefly at Achilles before speaking, but his voice was loud enough for all to hear. ‘I know that some among you have blamed me for this quarrel, but I think that on the day when I stripped Achilles of his prize, Zeus and Fate and blind Fury must have darkened my mind. And when such gods decide to act what can a mortal man do to prevent them? But I now understand that my judgement was blinded by the gods and am willing to make amends.’ He turned briefly towards Achilles, though his gaze remained slightly askance. ‘You shall have everything that was promised when Lord Odysseus came to your lodge. My servants will bring it from the ships immediately and lay it before you.’
He was about to turn and give the order when Achilles said, ‘That can wait a while. We have more urgent matters on our hands. The Trojans are making ready to fight even as we stand here talking. We should go out to meet them.’
Agamemnon groaned and sagged back on to his seat. Grey-faced, he looked up at Odysseus who stood beside him, carrying his weight on a spear-shaft to relieve the pressure on his wound.
‘It’s good to have you back among us, Achilles,’ Odysseus said, ‘but the men are still weary from yesterday’s battle and they haven’t eaten yet. There’ll be time enough to fight. So why don’t you let Lord Agamemnon have his gifts brought before you and we can celebrate your reconciliation with a feast?’
Stiffly Achilles said, ‘I cannot think of eating while my friend lies dead and the bodies of our comrades are still out there on the plain. Let the men fight first and eat later. That is my way, and they will follow me.’
But when his urgings failed to move the other leaders, Achilles retired to his lodge while the others feasted on the boar that Agamemnon offered to Zeus. The morning was far advanced before the horses were yoked to the chariots, and Achilles at last raised his battle-cry and led the Argive host in the charge across the plain.
There had been times during the course of the war when the balance of power between the two forces seemed so poised that the bards watching the battle claimed that Zeus had forbidden the gods to lend their weight to either side. On that day, however, the violence unleashed itself across the battlefield with such savagery that it was clear the gods themselves must have come to war. They were present in the loud rolling of the thunderclouds. They were present in the driving rain with which both men and horses contended. They were present in the cries with which men urged each other to greater effort, and in the prayers they stammered out when they caught sight of death approaching in the eyes across from them.
But Achilles gave no thought to the gods. He was far beyond thought, in the pure realm of unreflecting action where his only concern was with the work of slaughter as he fought his way through the Trojan ranks in search of Hector. Twenty men fell to his spear in the first onslaught, the last of them, clasping him by the knees, trying to offer a fortune in ransom even as Achilles lifted his spear and smashed it in the man’s face. At one point in the fight he was confronted by Aeneas who stood up against him as few men had dared to do and cast his spear. It struck the great shield but failed to penetrate it, and Aeneas was about to join the number of those whom Achilles had killed when a surge in the line pushed him away. Achilles turned and saw a young Trojan warrior, barely out of boyhood, staring at him through the rain.
It was King Priam’s youngest son, Polydorus, a bastard half-brother to Hector, who had come into the field against his father’s wishes. Turning swiftly on his heel, the youth began to run, but Achilles’ spear was swifter. It caught him in the small of the back and sent him headlong in the mud.
From his own position twenty yards away, Hector saw the boy die. Throwing aside all caution, he pushed his way through the throng till he confronted Achilles. In the same moment, a volley of thunder rolled about the sky and the rain thickened, driving down with torrential force. Hector hurled his spear but it flew wide. And then neither warrior could see the other so fierce and dense was the storm against their faces.
Achilles raised his voice in a terrifying shout, urging his Myrmidons to drive the Trojans back to the city. They responded at once with a push of their spears and saw the enemy fall back before them, making for the ford in the Scamander by which they could cross the river and get back to Troy. But the ford was narrow and many men were trying to cross it all at once, and such was their terror of Achilles that men began to jump into the deeper waters of the swollen river where they were swept away amid a wreckage of chariots and swimming horses.
When he saw what was happening, Achilles ordered the Myrmidons to outflank the fleeing enemy, and they moved quickly enough to trap a large body of men in an ox-bow bend of the river. They were mostly Carians -- warriors who went into battle jingling with gold ornaments like girls -- and they had no choice now but to trust their jewelled limbs to the deep, muscular currents of the river or face the swords of the Myrmidons.
Achilles led the assault against them. The world had wanted him to be a killer and he was going about his work swiftly and cleanly, without thought or feeling and with a butcher’s practised skill. Blood splashed all around him. His arms and legs and face were streaked with it. Things that had once been men became soft bags of air and blood and excrement that burst before him and expired. The noises of their dying blurred with the racing of the river through his mind. He was deep inside a trance of killing, slashing and thrusting and pulling out his blade with no more hatred or disgust than if he had become his own golden suit of armour hacking his way through the ranks of death towards immortality.
As he cut his way through to the river bank a warrior struggled up out of the mud at his feet. Achilles recognized the face of Priam’s son Lycaon who had escaped his sword once before on the battlefield. This time there would be no escape. When he raised his sword, Lycaon grovelled beneath him begging to be spared. ‘None of us is spared,’ Achilles answered. ‘Patroclus wasn’t spared. Nor will I be spared when my time comes. This world is turned into a killing-field. So be brave, friend, and take this brotherly touch from one mortal to another.’ As Lycaon stared up at him, he brought his blade down through the Trojan’s neck into the collarbone. Then he kicked the body back into the river and watched the brown current carry it away.
So the slaughter went on. He might have been wearing a mantle of invincibility, so easily did he pass among the spears and swords
without taking a wound. Yet the dead and dying lay piled around him, and soon the only men left to kill were struggling to save themselves from drowning far out among the river’s rocks. As though each life was an obstacle to be removed before he could come through to Hector, Achilles plunged into the river after them and was surprised how fierce the current’s grip about his thighs. But he strode on through the bloodied water and had already killed three more men before he sensed that the accelerating flow of the Scamander might sweep him off his feet.
Several miles away, high among the chasms of the Idaean Mountains, a dam formed by trees that had fallen in the storm had given way under the pressure building behind it. That water was flashing down the mountain now and racing between the banks with such strenuous force that it drove boulders and drowned animals and smashed boughs along with it.
Hearing the river roar, Achilles glanced upstream and saw a turbulent white wall of water hurtling towards him. He turned and was striding to get back to the bank when his wrist was gripped by a hand that reached up from below the surface. As he struggled to break free, he could make out the man’s bearded features staring up at him. The arm which had grabbed him was sinewy and muscular, and holding on so tightly that its white fingers might have locked there and seized. Then the flood crashed into both of them, the drowning man was swept away, and the armoured body of Achilles was dragged under into a world of vigorous brown shadows, each of which seemed possessed by the desire to hold him down till his lungs had consumed the last available gasp of daylight air.
Then, for a time he was with his mother in the watery realm of the Nereids, breathing water, thinking water, dreaming water, as the river sought to swallow him by being swallowed. And when Thetis asked him why he was weeping so, he told her how the death of Patroclus had made futile his own quest for glory, and that the death of his friend could be redeemed only by the death of Hector. ‘But once Hector is dead,’ his mother was saying, ‘you too must die,’ and Achilles was answering that nothing could come closer to his wishes when he broke through to a harsh dazzle of consciousness again, and was coughing up brown river water. He looked up and saw Phoenix gazing anxiously down at him. Instantly two thoughts blazed across his mind: he was still alive; and so was Hector.
From the walls of Troy, King Priam had seen his army routed. He had seen how many of his warriors fell before the first onslaught of Achilles and the Myrmidons. He had seen how the whole battalion of Carians was trapped and slaughtered in the ox-bow bend of the Scamander, and his old heart was shaken by the sight of the brown torrents of flood-water sweeping men away among a violent trash of trees and stones and broken chariots. He had given the order that the gates be opened so that those who escaped from the fury of Achilles could flee within the safety of the walls, and they had crowded in like sheep driven to a pen, not stopping to care for those carrying wounds. But when Hector remained outside the gate, ushering the stragglers in, Priam guessed that the noblest of his sons must be debating whether he too should withdraw from the field, or stay to confront the man who had struck such terror into the hearts of the Trojan host.
There had been many times over the years when Priam had woken in the night wondering whether he had been out of his mind to waste the treasure of his kingdom and risk the lives of his sons in this brutal war. But now, for the first time, he was contemplating the possibility of utter defeat. And with Achilles back in the field, only Hector could rally the Trojan forces to their city’s defence. His life must not be thrown away.
Priam turned to Deiphobus, who stood at his side bleeding from a gash in his arm, and ordered him to bring the Queen to the wall. Then he looked back down over the crenellated parapet to where Hector stood in his chariot at the foot of the ramp that led up to the Scaean Gate. The storm had blown over at last, though the birds flying above the watchtower were still buffeted by the wind. Further out across the plain, by the flooded banks of the Scamander, kites and vultures swooped among the dead. Elsewhere the Argive army were taking advantage of this lull in the fighting to regroup, dress their wounds and carry the injured away. Finding it incomprehensible that a day which had begun with such elated hope should have shifted so swiftly to disaster, Priam called down for Hector to come back inside the walls.
‘The day is not yet done,’ Hector answered. ‘They must come against us soon.’
‘I know it,’ Priam answered, ‘but I can afford to lose no more sons -- least of all yourself on whom all our hopes depend.’
Without answering him, Hector looked back across the plain. He tilted his chin as though sniffing at the wind that ruffled his helmet’s tall plume, and though outwardly he seemed poised, his thoughts were in turmoil. There had been a critical moment earlier that day, when his line was shaken by the onslaught of Achilles, and his captains had counselled him to lead the army in an orderly retreat back across the plain so that they could take shelter behind the city walls and give thought to the changed situation. But Hector’s blood had been on fire after the successes of the previous day. He had decided to stand and fight the Myrmidons, and the ruinous consequences of that decision were evident to all.
His proud spirit balked now at the thought of skulking back behind the walls to meet the recriminations of those who had paid the cost of his folly in lost husbands, brothers, sons and friends. Better to mount a stand here at the Scaean Gate, making a defiant show of Achilles’ own suit of armour, in the certain knowledge that the son of Peleus was still out there and must soon come looking to avenge his friend Patroclus.
Above his head, he could hear his father calling to him still, but Hector did not turn. One of his pair of greys snorted and its harness jingled. He saw how blue reaches of sky had begun to appear and the light was glancing across the plain with the freshly rinsed glare that often follows a storm. Over by the mountains, Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, shimmered her veil among rags of cloud. Hector wondered if his little son Astyanax had seen her. How good it was, he thought, simply to be alive.
Then he heard the anguished voice of his mother the Queen calling down to him, begging him to come back inside the wall. ‘Think of your wife and your son,’ she was crying. ‘And must I who gave you life watch it taken away by that fiend Achilles? Come inside, I beg you. Come back inside and let us close the gate.’
For a moment Hector dithered, thinking of his wife working at her loom to steady her nerves, and longing again for the peace they had once known together. Surely the Argives were as weary with blood as the Trojans were? Both sides had taken terrible losses, yet Troy still stood impregnable on its windy ridge and could not be starved into submission. Who could possibly want more long years of bloody stalemate? So if he stripped himself of this armour and went to meet Achilles unarmed, offering to return Helen to Menelaus along with half the treasure of Troy, might the offer not be accepted now? Wouldn’t any man in his right mind gladly grab at such a settlement and leave in peace?
But Achilles was no longer in his right mind, and the Argives would not leave, not with the son of Peleus back at their head, insatiable for slaughter. And Achilles would desist from fighting only when either he or Hector was dead. These were the brutal facts of the case, and when Hector glanced up out of his brief trance of hope, he saw a stir among the Argive lines, and the chariot of Achilles advancing towards him across the plain.
He heard an anxious moan rise from the walls behind him as the Myrmidons moved in behind their lord.
‘Hector,’ Deiphobus called down, ‘we must close the gate.’
Hector nodded. His horses stirred fretfully at their yoke-pole. He heard another urgent voice shout that he should come inside -- the voice of Paris with whom all this bitter quarrel had begun -- and still he did not turn. Then there was a loud commotion at his back, a shouting of orders, a voice countermanding them from the parapet, and a brief time of argument. But with a creaking of timber against its huge bronze hinges, the great Scaean Gate began to close.
Now he was alone between the city and the
plain, and Achilles was advancing alone to meet him.
Hector was thinking how strange it was that a man’s fate should be written from the hour of his birth and yet no man could know what his fate might be until the deathless gods unfolded it before him. As for himself, he had revered the gods, honoured his parents, loved his wife and son, served his city and fought its enemies with skill and courage. And yet all of that might be obliterated in the coming minutes.
He saw Achilles brandishing his spear. And then a shaft of sunlight shone through the drenched air of the plain, dazzling off Achilles’ helm and shield with so fierce a lustre that the figure at the reins of the chariot careering towards him might have been more than a mortal man.
Hector’s heart began to shake like an awning in the wind.
Too late he saw that he was not ready to die. Yet the gate was shut and barred behind him, and while he shouted for it to open he would be struck down like his brother Polydorus in the back. His mother was still wailing from the wall. Now he must either fight or run.
Hector whipped his horses and urged them away from the oncoming chariot, past the ancient fig tree by the gate, and out onto the wagon track at the foot of the city wall. A great jeering shout went up from the Myrmidons, but louder still he heard the clatter of Achilles’ chariot wheels among the ruts and stones close behind him. He could smell the steam rising from those horses as he drove his own team past the hot springs and the ancient stone troughs where the women used to chatter over their washing in the days of peace, and then on round the steep curve of the city wall, as if these were merely games in which he and Achilles contended, and one of them might emerge laughing as winner from the chase.
Three times they circled the walls and the whole world circled round them -- the dark sheen of the Hellespont, the palisaded coast of the bay where the Argives had beached their ships, the distant shadowy island of Tenedos, the banks of the Scamander still strewn with corpses, and the cloud-wrapped crags of the Idaean Mountains from where the gods gazed down. The whole landscape of Hector’s birth and youth and manhood was spinning around him as the chariot jumped and lurched across uneven ground. His horses sweated and strained before him as if in flight from the terror in his heart. When they passed the Scaean Gate and approached the troughs once more, he glanced back to see Achilles gaining on him, and in that moment his right wheel struck against a stone.
The War At Troy Page 37