Thrown from his feet, Hector clutched at the rail while the spokes splintered, his team reared and shied, and the chariot skidded to a halt with its broken axle dragging through the dust.
Hector staggered out of the wreckage, reaching for his weapons. Blood flowed from his mouth where he had bitten his tongue at the shock. He looked up to see Achilles dismount from his chariot, holding his long spear. The sun was bright at his back. Hector wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and stood, panting, as he tightened his grip on the strap of his shield and balanced his own spear in his hand.
Achilles came to a halt a few yards away. Almost nothing of his face was visible inside the bronze hollow of his helmet -- only the grey eyes that were fixed on his quarry with an implacable stare.
Hector raised his voice. ‘Let there be an end to it then, son of Peleus. But swear with me that the victor will treat the body of the vanquished with respect.’
There came not the least flicker of response.
Hector was about to speak again but, with the sharpened senses of a man fearful for his life, he saw the muscles flexing in Achilles’ spear-arm. Ready for the throw when it came, he crouched down so that the spear flew over his bent back and lodged in the earth with its shaft quivering from the force of the strike.
‘May the gods grant me better fortune!’ Hector said and moved round to get the sunlight from his eyes, balancing his spear in his grip. Achilles moved with him, waiting for the throw. When it came, the spear struck the shield with a clang of bronze on gold, but the shield had been forged from so many layers of metal and hide that though the spear-point stuck, it lacked the power to break through.
Unbalanced by the weight of the shaft, Achilles threw his shield aside. Hector reached to draw his sword. In the same moment he realized that his circling movement had brought Achilles back within reach of the spear he had thrown. Hector leapt across the ground between them, but his assault was not quick enough to prevent Achilles from grabbing for the spear-shaft. In a single deft movement Achilles twisted the spear upwards and shoved its point deep into what he knew to be the one weak place in the armour that Hector wore. Then, with a twist of his wrists, he wrenched it out again, and saw Hector sag to the ground with a runnel of bright blood bubbling from a gash in his neck.
Hector fell first to his knees, hung there a moment as though in prayer, and then slumped forward onto his chest. With a flick of his foot Achilles kicked him over onto his back to look down on the dying face. The eyes were losing focus and blood was spurting from his neck, yet Hector managed to gasp out a last plea that Achilles allow his body to be ransomed.
But the voice that came back at him was merciless.
‘You would have hung the head of Patroclus from the walls of Troy if his friends hadn’t fought over him, so ask no favours of me, Hector. It’s my pleasure that you should die knowing that your father will never look on your face again.’
The words were lost in the rush of blood in Hector’s ears, and his mind was already merging with the blood-red dusk that was closing down round him. Moments later, with no more than a hoarse sigh from the torn passage of his throat, the life passed out of him.
Achilles lifted his head and shouted at the sky.
High on the watchtower, King Priam looked down, tugging at his hair, as he watched the Myrmidons stabbing at Hector’s limbs with their spears. Beside him, Hecuba was keening out her grief, and all along the wall the citizens of Troy looked on in shock as the Myrmidons stripped Hector’s body of its armour.
Thrusting his men aside, Achilles picked up the purple baldric that had once belonged to Ajax, knotted it round Hector’s ankles and dragged his mutilated body across the rough ground towards his chariot, where he fastened the baldric to the rail. Then he leapt into the chariot, urged his horses to a gallop and dragged the body of Hector round the walls of Troy with his head jolting among the stones and his long hair trailing through the dust.
When he returned to the Argive camp that night, Achilles untied the battered corpse from the rail of his chariot and threw it down by the bier where the body of Patroclus lay. But he felt less like a hunter returned with his kill than an awkward boy seeking to make clumsy reparation for some unrightable wrong he had done.
Achilles collapsed weeping over the body of his friend.
After a time Phoenix approached him, putting a gentle arm across his shoulder, and bidding him come to the bath that had been prepared for him, and to eat with Agamemnon and the other Argive lords. But Achilles pushed him away, and got up to sit alone by the dark shore staring at the sea.
The sea was a darkness lapping at darkness, and there was scarcely a star to be seen in the dark sky. Grief was what Achilles had become -- a grief so immense that it was like a black chasm into which he had thrown Hector s body and the bodies of countless other men, yet its darkness would never be filled even if he were to exterminate the whole Trojan host. Grief was all there was, and nothing now would ever change.
The body of Patroclus was burned the next day. Each of the Myrmidons cut a lock from his hair and placed it on the body, and from his own head Achilles cut off the lock that his father Peleus had asked him to leave uncut till he came back home to Thessaly where he would offer it in grateful sacrifice to the gods. Now he placed that lock in the palm of his dead friend, and the men mourning round him knew that Achilles no longer had any intention of returning from Troy.
Then a torch was put to the immense pile of wood. The tinder caught but there was no wind that morning and the unseasoned wood was still wet from the rain. Though a few flames flickered and guttered for a time, the fire refused to take.
Achilles stared in despair at the immense holocaust he had made for Patroclus whose motionless body still hovered between the world of light and the world of shades. Again men tried to light the pyre, and once more it yielded no more than a few listless wisps of smoke.
Weeping with frustration, Achilles asked everyone but his Myrmidons to leave. Then he sat by the pyre, praying for guidance to far-sighted Apollo. After a time he went into the lodge he had shared with Patroclus, and brought out the two-handled golden drinking cup. Filling it with wine, he turned first to the north where he poured a libation to Boreas, the god of the north wind. Then he turned to the west and poured a libation to Zephyrus. And having asked both those Thracian gods to lend the strength of their winds to the fire, he waited throughout the heat of the day for his prayer to be answered.
Towards evening, a breeze got up, blowing in across the bay towards the pyre. Again a torch was lit and put to fresh tinder, and this time the flames thrived. They licked along the oil that had been poured onto the wood until, with a hoarse suck of air, it combusted. The flesh of the sacrificed animals began to smoulder, fat sizzled and dripped. Soon the air around the pyre wobbled in the heat as the blaze twisted higher and a reddening pillar of black smoke billowed in the breeze off the sea, blowing hot sparks through the dusk across the plain to Troy.
When the fire had died and the ashes cooled, they collected the charred bones of Patroclus and sealed them in a golden urn. Achilles took the urn into his lodge and placed it where it would wait until the day when his own ashes were mixed with the remains of his friend. Then the Argives raised a revetment of stones around the site of the pyre and built a high mound of earth above it as a monument to the name of Patroclus.
Achilles declared that he would give rich prizes for the funeral games to be held in honour of his friend, but he watched only listlessly as the contenders raced before him on foot and in chariots, and wrestled and boxed together, and drew their bows and threw their spears. Nor could he find any solace now in the company of Briseis, who had been returned to him by Agamemnon, for she reminded him too painfully of the times they had spent together with Patroclus, and Achilles believed himself no longer capable of love. So he gave the girl her freedom and sent her, weeping, back to her people. By night he slept alone in the hugely empty lodge, and morning after morning, in
an increasingly futile ritual of vengeance, he dragged Hector’s still unburied body around the mound of Patroclus only to find that the god of his grief remained unassuaged.
There came a night when he dreamed that he saw the ghost of Patroclus gazing tenderly down at the broken corpse of Hector as if in mourning for him, and when Achilles reached out to clasp his friend in a last embrace, he found that it was Hectors broken body that he was clutching to his breast.
He woke, crying out in the night.
During the next day he decided to visit the sanctuary of Apollo at Thymbra where he might beseech the god to show mercy on the shade of Patroclus. Though he barely spoke to Laocoon, a son of Antenor who now served as priest in that temple, Achilles must have found some consolation in the tranquil silence of the place for he returned again a second time.
On his third visit he saw a young Trojan woman, perhaps fifteen years old, standing beside the priest. She wore the garb of a priestess, and as he made his offering she stared at him with an expression both of modesty and trepidation in her eyes.
When the offering was made, Laocoon spoke uncertainly in the silence of the temple. ‘This is Polyxena, a servant of the god. She wishes to speak with you.’
Achilles stood uncertainly. He had come here for the solitude and wished to speak with no one but the god, and after what had been done about the banks of the Scamander and before the walls of Troy, he could not see how he could talk easily with a young woman who might be the daughter or sister of one of the many men he had killed.
Her voice was shaking as she said, ‘You are Achilles, son of Peleus?’
He nodded and glanced away from the accusation of her eyes.
Seeming to draw strength from his dismay, Polyxena said, ‘It was you who slew my brother Hector.’
Though the words passed through him like a spear, he stood motionless. It was she who started a little as his grey eyes flashed fiercely back at her. ‘You are King Priam’s daughter?’ And when she nodded, he said hoarsely ‘If you have come to curse me, you should know that my life is already cursed. Nothing you could say can add to my woes.’
He was some ten or eleven years older than she was, and his name alone had terrified her heart since she had been a little girl, yet she found herself looking at a strangely unanticipated figure now. The glare of ferocity was gone from his face and much of the light gone with it. His blond hair was already greying a little here and there, and his whole presence seemed shadowed by an almost famished aura of hopelessness such as she had never encountered before. Polyxena had come to the temple trembling that day, hoping at best that she might touch this man’s mind with some scruple of shame. But her dread was diminishing now. And perhaps it was the abiding presence of the god in this holy precinct, or perhaps it was some deficiency of loyalty in her own soul, but she was amazed to discover a kind of pity in its place.
‘You are grieving for the friend you loved,’ she said.
Again he could only nod, for the tide of that grief was building inside him again and might overwhelm him at a single word.
‘As I am grieving for the brother I loved,’ she dared to say.
He could not bear to look at her now. He wanted to turn away, to stride across that cool marble floor, to go out onto the plain and cover his hair with dust as he had done when he first heard that Patroclus was dead. But he could not move.
Nor could his eyes flee forever from the reach of hers.
When he looked up he found himself thinking that this must surely be King Priam’s youngest daughter, that she could have been no more than an infant when this war began. How many such girls had grown up knowing only war? Then he remembered Iphigeneia, the girl who had come to Aulis thinking that he was to be her bridegroom only to find that she was marrying death. And Deidameia also came into his mind, holding their infant son at her breast, and he remembered the feast of the shepherds on Skyros when he had dressed as a girl in service to the goddess and had sensed in the ecstasy of the dance the dark, strangely familiar wonder of a woman’s condition. How would it have been if he had been born a woman then? If instead of becoming a killer he had been fated like them to wait in the knowledge that some day some brash foreigner smelling of sweat and blood might burst through the door with rape on his mind?
Either way it seemed that there lay at the end of everything only the inescapable fact of grief.
Polyxena said, ‘You are not as I thought to find you.’
In the stillness of the temple, he said, ‘I am not as I thought to find myself.’
‘Yet Divine Apollo knows who you are.’ Her voice took on greater confidence. ‘It is in his name that I have a thing to ask.’
‘Then ask it of the god, not of me. I no longer know who I am.’
‘But you know your grief. You know your loss.’
Again he had to fight to prevent both overwhelming him.
‘My father also knows such grief,’ she said. ‘He too knows such loss. You grieve for a friend. He grieves for a son. And you are enemies, I know. But in the place of grief you and he are one and the same.’
With a lurch of the heart, he knew then what she was going to ask of him.
The thing was done in secret. Without the knowledge of his master Agamemnon, the herald Talthybius consulted with King Priam’s herald Idaeus at the Thymbraean temple under the sign of Hermes, herald of the immortal gods, and the arrangements were duly made. Yet the mission might still have proved impossible if both armies had not been glad of this lull in the fighting, and if the ships of Achilles had not been drawn up on the beach far to the west of the line, where only Myrmidons were posted at the watchtowers. As it was, on a moonless night a wagon might pass unseen across the plain.
Achilles had just finished eating with his friends Phoenix and Automedon when the arrival of Idaeus was announced. ‘Let the herald enter,’ Achilles said, but when he looked up at the door, two men came in and Idaeus was not the first. The other was a slightly stooped figure who stood with his face lowered in the gloom and with the thick folds of his cloak covering his head. He turned to Idaeus who took the cloak from his shoulders. White hair glinted in the light of the oil-lamps, and when the stranger turned, Achilles and his friends started with amazement for they were looking into the careworn features of King Priam.
The old king stood uncertainly for a moment fingering the grizzled curls of his beard. Automedon was the first to move, but knowing that his friend was reaching for a sword, Achilles restrained him with a gesture. Priam lifted his hands so that they could see he was weaponless.
‘May we speak alone?’ he said and nodded for Idaeus to leave. A moment later Achilles gestured for his friends to follow, and the young warrior and the old king were left staring at one another uneasily across the dirt floor of the lodge.
Achilles said, ‘This is not as I expected.’ But he was thinking that the mutilated corpse of this man’s son still lay at the back of the compound outside the lodge like a dog thrown on a midden.
‘Nor I,’ Priam answered, ‘but when a god commands a mortal must obey, and I value my life as nothing since you killed my son. In any case, I wanted to be quite sure that you would keep to the agreement.’
Achilles stiffened. ‘I am a man of my word. I vowed before Athena to kill your son and I killed him. I told your daughter that I would return his body and it would have been done. I am not some Trojan whose honour might fairly be questioned.’
For an instant the hatred of the old man for the young warrior who had slain his son gleamed between them like the blade of a knife. Achilles sensed that if it had been within the old man’s power, Priam might have tried to kill him in that moment. And he knew too that he would have caught the frail hand holding the blade and bent it back into the old man’s heart. But the moment passed and they simply stared at one another in the bewildered awareness that, whatever their own desires, the gods had larger claims on them.
King Priam sighed and shook his head. When he held up his hands in a ges
ture of remorse, Achilles saw that they were trembling. Then the old king crossed the floor towards him and fell to his knees like a supplicant.
‘Forgive an old man his frailty,’ he said. ‘Think of your own father, Lord Achilles. He and I must almost be of an age. He too faces only the wretched prospect of the decline towards death. Yet he has a consolation that I lack. He has a son who will support him in his weakness.’
‘You too have sons. The traitor Paris still lives. No doubt there are others.’
‘But the best of them -- the only one on whom I could rely -- is gone.’
Achilles stood stiffly above him. ‘Hector was killed in fair fight. His death is not on my conscience. The Daughters of the Night do not visit me on his account.’
Priam lowered his face. A moment later he astounded Achilles by reaching out to take his hand between both of his own and pressing it to his lips. When Achilles pulled his hand away, Priam looked up with an expression of abject desolation in his eyes. ‘I have done what no man has done before me. I have kissed the hand that killed my son. Now be you merciful, son of Peleus, and give his body back to me.’
Achilles realized that he too was trembling.
‘Stand up,’ he said, ‘I pray you.’
The thought of his own father had already made his heart heavy. Now he could scarcely breathe for the turbulence and confusion there. Helping Priam to his feet, he said, ‘You were brave to risk coming here. And you have suffered greatly. Come, sit down with me. You must be weary. Eat something if you will. Let you and I talk together for a while.’
The War At Troy Page 38