The Firebrand

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Ah, my sons! My Hector! My firstborn and my last-born in a single hour! Ah, most fateful of all battles! It has begun,” Hecuba wailed, and crumpled senseless. Kassandra ran to kneel by her, suddenly terrified that the shock had killed her mother too.

  “No, Troilus is alive,” said Aeneas, lifting the old woman gently. “You must be strong, Mother; he will need your good care if you are not to lose him too.” He turned Troilus over to a healer-priest, who restored him to consciousness with a sip of wine, then examined his wounds. Women were handing wine around; Aeneas took one of the cups and gulped it.

  “I think tomorrow I will take careful aim at Akhilles from the walls and try to get him off the field before we even venture out.”

  “He can’t be killed that way,” Deiphobos said. “That armor of his is God-forged; arrows bounce off it like twigs!”

  “Not God-forged,” said Penthesilea, “forged of solid iron. Have you any idea what it must weigh? Even my women’s metal-tipped Skythian arrows cannot penetrate it.”

  Paris said in disgust, “There’s an old tale that Akhilles is protected by spells so that no wound inflicted by a mortal can bring him down.”

  “Let me but get a weapon into his flesh,” said Aeneas; “I’ll guarantee to kill him. But we must go up and break the news to Priam; the worst news of all this year.”

  Kassandra said between her teeth, “We should have expected this. Hector killed Patroklos; Akhilles was ready for him the moment he put foot outside the wall. This was not war but murder.” And silently she wondered if there was that much difference.

  “We must go to Akhilles at once,” Aeneas said, “perhaps even before we tell our father, and ask a truce to bury and mourn our brother.”

  “Do you really think they will give it?” asked Paris sarcastically. “You think too well of them.”

  “They must grant it,” said Aeneas. “We gave a truce for Patroklos’ funeral games.”

  “If it comes to that,” said Andromache, “I will go myself and kneel to Akhilles and beg back the body of my husband.”

  “They will return it,” said Aeneas. “Akhilles is always talking of honor.”

  “Only his own, I notice,” Kassandra said.

  “Well, then, his own honor will prompt him to do the honorable thing,” Aeneas said. “They know me; let me go, then, with a delegation of Hector’s own guard to bring home his body.”

  “We must tell Father first,” said Troilus, rising from the healer’s ministrations, very pale, his head wrapped in bandages. “If you wish it, I will tell him; I am to blame; I let him fall into Akhilles’ hands.”

  Hecuba embraced him fiercely. “No blame to you, my love. I rejoice that you did not follow him into death.” She added, “But yes, go to Priam; nothing could comfort him for the loss of our firstborn but the knowledge of the son we still have to bless us. . . .”

  “I will go and tell him,” Paris said. “But first gather all my brothers; all of us who live still shall stand before him and be ready to comfort him.”

  “And I,” said Kassandra, “I will go to the Maiden’s Temple and tell Polyxena; she and Hector were close in age, and they loved each other well.”

  They had begun to set out on their various errands, when Andromache went to the wall and let out a high, wild shriek.

  “Ah, the fiend, the monster! What is he doing now?”

  “Who?” Kassandra asked, but she already knew; fiend, monster could be only one person. She rushed to the wall.

  The sun was high. It was not yet noon; it had only seemed that they had watched the great battle for half of a day. There was a great cloud of dust on the plain before Troy; it cleared a little and she could see the chariot of Akhilles, with Akhilles himself standing upright, driving his matched horses. And in the dust at the tail of the chariot, a figure whose armor clearly revealed its identity.

  “Hector! But what is he doing?” she demanded.

  It was all too clear what he was doing; he was dragging Hector’s corpse in the dust behind his chariot, as he raced fiercely in circles around the plain. The Trojans watched, frozen in horror.

  “Why,” said Kassandra, “he is mad, then. I thought . . .” She had thought they called him mad rhetorically; but surely a man who could thus abuse the corpse of a fallen enemy—even an enemy who had slain his dearest friend—must be mad in truth.

  Why, he is not fit to be let out without a keeper, she thought with a shudder.

  Aeneas said, “Why, this goes beyond even revenge; the man is inhuman.”

  “Demented with grief, perhaps,” said Kassandra. “He loved Patroklos beyond reason, and when his friend died, he lost the last of all ties to sanity.”

  “Still, this must be stopped,” Aeneas said. “We must send to the Akhaians—Odysseus, at least, is a reasonable man—and get back Hector’s body before this comes to his father’s ears.”

  “So,” said Andromache, with clenched fists, “I am to stand here and watch this and not go mad myself with grief; but Priam, a man and a King, must be shielded from the very word, let alone the sight . . .” She flung back her head and screamed, “I will go down myself, if I must, and I will persuade that man with a horsewhip that he cannot do this thing before all of Hector’s kin!”

  “No,” Paris said, embracing her gently. “No, Andromache, he would not listen to you. I tell you, he is mad.”

  “Is he? Or is he feigning madness so that we will offer him a greater ransom for Hector’s body?” Andromache asked. Kassandra had not thought of that.

  At last Troilus, taking with him two or three of Priam’s other sons, went up to tell the King that Hector was dead, while Paris and Aeneas armed themselves and drove forth in a chariot with Priam’s favorite herald. They tried in vain to make Akhilles hear them, but he simply went on whipping up his horses into a frenzy and refused to listen to a word the herald said.

  After a time they stopped and conferred and went on to the main Akhaian camp to speak with Agamemnon and the other captains. Eventually, looking discouraged, they returned to Troy.

  Andromache rushed at them. “What did they say?” she demanded, though it was obvious they had had no success; down on the plain, Akhilles’ chariot was still dragging the body around in circles. It seemed he meant to go on at least till sunset, perhaps longer.

  Aeneas said, “They will do nothing to stop Akhilles; they said he is their leader, and he must do as he will with his own captives and prisoners. He killed Hector and the body is his, to ransom or not as he chooses.”

  “But that’s monstrous,” Andromache said. “You hesitated not at all to grant them a truce for mourning Patroklos! How can they do this?”

  “They didn’t want to,” said Paris. “Agamemnon could not look me in the eye. He knows they are violating all the rules of warfare—rules which they themselves made and we agreed to honor. But they know they have no chance of triumphing without Akhilles; they angered him once, and they will not risk making him angry again.”

  The sun had slanted down considerably, and the plain of Troy was now partly in the long shadow of the walls. Paris said, “There is nothing for it but this, then: we must go out and fight for his body.” He called his arms-bearer and started putting on his armor.

  “Summon the Amazons; their charge and their arrows can cover us. They are fierce fighters, fiercer than any man,” Aeneas said. “I will vow my best horse to the War-God if He grants us that we win Hector’s body.”

  “I’ll vow more than that if He grants me Akhilles,” said Paris. “Hector and I were not always close, but he was my elder brother, and I loved him; and even if I had not, kinship’s dues would forbid me to stand by and see his corpse dishonored. Even Akhilles can have no quarrel with the dead.”

  Kassandra said,“I remember how Hector said he and Patroklos would have much to talk about in the Afterworld.”

  “Aye,” said Aeneas somberly. “If Akhilles paused to think, he would know that Hector and his friend would feast side by side as comra
des in the halls of the Afterlife.”

  “I trust it is no God’s will I meet Akhilles as a comrade on the other side of death,” said Paris grimly. “Or I swear, unless I learn something there that I have not been given to know in this life, I shall disrupt the peace of that world itself when I meet Akhilles there.”

  “Oh, hush,” said Aeneas. “None of us know what we shall think or do past that gate; but in this world, we all have been properly taught that enmity ends at death, and what Akhilles now does is an outrage and an atrocity—as well as being plain bad manners. He should show respect for a fallen foe; you know that, I know it, the other Akhaians know it. And I give you my word, if Akhilles does not know it, I shall be happy to give him a lesson, here and now. Are the soldiers armed and ready?”

  “Yes,” called Paris. “Open the gates.”

  Priam came slowly through the ranks and went to the wall where the women stood. He himself was as white as death, Kassandra thought, and he had been weeping.

  “If you rescue the body of my son for honorable burial,” he said, as Aeneas passed him on his way down to the gate, “it needs no saying that you may ask whatever reward you will.”

  Aeneas knelt for a moment before him and kissed the old man’s hand.

  “Father, Hector was my brother-in-law and my brother-in-arms; I want no reward to do for him what I know well he would be the first to do for me.”

  “Then the blessings of every God I know how to call be upon you,” said Priam, and as Aeneas rose, embraced him quickly and kissed his cheek. Then he let him go, and the men went down to the gate.

  As Troilus would have joined them, Hecuba cried out, “No! Not you too!” and caught at his tunic; but Troilus pulled away, and Priam motioned to the Queen to let him go.

  Hecuba collapsed weeping. “Cruel old man! Unnatural father! We have lost one son today; will you lose another?”

  “He is no child,” Priam said. “He wishes to go; I will not forbid him. I would not make him go if he wished any excuse to stay; but you should be proud of him.”

  “Proud!” she raged, looking down on the chariots as they raced out through the gates. “There is more than one madman here!”

  8

  KASSANDRA HAD SEEN the Amazons fight many times before; she wished that she were riding forth with them. Yet if she had thought the morning’s fighting fierce, that was nothing to the ferocity of this battle for Hector’s body.

  Time after time the Trojan soldiers made what seemed like a suicidal dash at Akhilles’ chariot, trying to overturn or crash it and cut free the body; but the joined forces of Hector’s soldiers and the Amazons could not come near him. It seemed that the War-God Himself rode with Akhilles, and more than a dozen of the soldiers and seven of the Amazon warriors died in these charges before Agamemnon’s charioteers, led by Diomedes and the strongest of the Spartan archers, came and drove them off a final time.

  When it was almost too dark to see, at last the Trojans retired; and when Troilus fell to an arrow shot by Akhilles himself, Aeneas finally yielded and called off the attack, carrying Troilus inside the walls.

  “He didn’t want to live,” Hecuba wept over his body. “He blamed himself—I heard him—that his brother died. . . .”

  In the flaming sunset, the cloud of dust behind Akhilles’ chariot was undiminished. “It looks as if he means to keep that up all night,” said Paris. “There is nothing else we can do.”

  “I can probably see better in the dark than his horses,” said Aeneas. “We might try again by moonlight. . . .”

  “There is no reason to do that,” said Penthesilea. “You have one brother now to bury and to mourn; tomorrow will be time to think again about Hector.”

  Hecuba, kneeling before Troilus’ corpse, raised her face, swollen with tears, looking suddenly twenty years older.

  “If I must, I will go to Akhilles and beg him, for the love of his own mother, to let me bury my son,” she said. “Surely he has a mother and pays honor to her.”

  “Do you truly think anything human gave birth to that monster?” wept Andromache. “Surely he was hatched from a serpent’s egg!”

  “As a keeper of serpents, I resent that on their behalf,” Kassandra said.“No serpent was ever wantonly cruel; they kill only for food or to defend their young, and no serpent ever made war against another, whatever God they may serve.”

  “Let us leave it for tonight,” Andromache said; “perhaps a new day may bring him reason.” She turned from the wall, deliberately looking away from the sight of Akhilles’ chariot and the cloud of dust where Hector’s body was hidden. She raised Hecuba gently by the arm and, Kassandra noted, took a good deal of the older woman’s weight. Together the two went up the steep street toward the palace.

  Kassandra bent over the lifeless body of Troilus. She remembered when he had been born, what a sweet red round-faced baby he had been, squalling and thrusting out his little fists. How her mother had prayed for another son, and how happy she had been when he had arrived. But then she had always been happy with every son born in the palace, even those born to the concubines; the Queen was always the first to have every baby in her arms, however humble the mother.

  Well, she had promised to tell Polyxena; she went slowly up the steep streets of the city toward the Maiden’s Temple. The winds at that height dragging against her cloak and hair, she reached the outer court, where the statue of the Maiden stood.

  She had now spent so many years as a priestess that she had almost ceased to trouble herself about the nature of Gods or Goddesses, whether They were truly from some place beyond humanity, or whether They were from some soul of humankind seeking to worship the greater virtues and the divine within. Yet now, looking at the serene face of the Maiden, she wondered again: could anything, human or divine, be brought unmothered to birth, and was not that very concept a blasphemy against all that was divine? She herself had brought no child to birth; yet within her the unfed passion for motherhood had brought Honey into her arms, and she knew she would protect her with her very life, as any other mother would do.

  With her own mother she now shared a passionate grief. She had been guilty of underestimating Akhilles; she should have known that his madness made him ever more dangerous, as even a house dog may turn vicious and untrustworthy.

  Yet if she had offered warning, she would not have been listened to.

  One of the attendants of the shrine recognized her and came to ask deferentially how she could serve the daughter of Priam.

  “I would speak with my sister Polyxena,” she said, and the servant went at once to fetch her.

  Before very long, she heard a step and Polyxena came into the room, at the sight of Kassandra’s face crying out, “You bear evil news, Sister! Is it our mother, our father—”

  “No; they live still,” Kassandra said, “though I know not what this news will do to them in the end.” Polyxena, now a tall woman in her late twenties, still had the soft face of a child. She came and embraced Kassandra, weeping.

  “What do you mean? Tell me.”

  “Hector . . .” Kassandra said, and felt herself almost at the edge of tears.

  “The worst,” she said. “Not only Hector, but Troilus.” Her throat closed and she could hardly speak. “Both dead in a single hour, at Akhilles’ hands; and that madman drags Hector’s corpse behind his chariot and will not hear of giving up his body for burial. . . .”

  Polyxena burst into sobs, and the sisters clung to each other, united as they had not been since they were little children.

  “I will come at once,” Polyxena said. “Mother will need me; let me but fetch my cloak.” She hurried away, and Kassandra reflected sorrowfully that this was true; she could not comfort her mother. Even Andromache was closer to Hecuba than she was. All her life it had been so: that of all their children Hector was closest to their parents’ hearts, and Kassandra the least loved. Was it only that she had always been so different from the others?

  It broke her heart that even
in this dreadful moment she could not turn to her mother. Because she could always retain her composure and because she was not beside herself with grief, it would never have occurred to anyone that she herself was in need of consolation. Her bottomless, tearless sadness seemed to her mother, she knew, cold and inhuman, quite unlike the aspect of a woman at all.

  Polyxena returned, in the pale cloak of a priestess, with something tied in a cloth at her waist. Her eyes were red, but she had stopped crying; however, Kassandra knew she would weep again at the sight of their mother’s tears.

  I wish that I could; Hector is worthy of all the tears we all might shed for him. And she wondered, despairing, What is wrong with me, that for all my grief I cannot weep for my dearest brothers?

  Yet in her heart a small rational voice said, Hector was a fool; he knew Akhilles was a madman who did not abide by any civilized rules for warfare, and nevertheless for something he called honor he rushed to his death. This honor was dearer to him than life, or Andromache or his son, or the thought of the grief his parents would feel. And for all the horror of it, she could not feel any additional disgust or dismay at what Akhilles had done to his corpse. Hector was dead, and that was bad enough. What could make it worse?

  And we are all going to die anyhow; and few of us as quickly or mercifully. Why do we not rejoice that he is spared further suffering?

  Polyxena handed Kassandra the cloth, and she felt something hard within it.

  “What jewels I have,” she said. “Father may need them to ransom Hector’s body. Akhilles is just as greedy for gold as for what he calls glory; perhaps this will help.”

  “He is welcome to mine too,” said Kassandra, “though I have few: only my rings and my pearls from Colchis.”

  Together they went down the hill toward the palace. It was growing late; the low sun was hidden behind a heavy bank of cloud, and the brisk wind held a smell of rain. On the plain, there was no sign of Akhilles’ chariot; he had given up his gruesome revenge, at least for the night.