The Song of Achilles Read online

  “Briseis,” I say, “if he is dead, I will not be far behind.”

  She presses my hand to her cheek. “Then promise me something else,” she says. “Promise me that whatever happens, you will not leave Troy without me. I know that you cannot—” She breaks off. “I would rather live as your sister than remain here.”

  “That is nothing that you have to bind me to,” I say. “I would not leave you, if you wished to come. It grieved me beyond measure to think of the war ending tomorrow, and never seeing you again.”

  The smile is thick in her throat. “I am glad.” I do not say that I do not think I will ever leave Troy.

  I draw her to me, fill my arms with her. She lays her head upon my chest. For a moment we do not think of Agamemnon and danger and dying Greeks. There is only her small hand on my stomach, and the softness of her cheek as I stroke it. It is strange how well she fits there. How easily I touch my lips to her hair, soft and smelling of lavender. She sighs a little, nestles closer. Almost, I can imagine that this is my life, held in the sweet circle of her arms. I would marry her, and we would have a child.

  Perhaps if I had never known Achilles.

  “I should go,” I say.

  She draws down the blanket, releasing me into the air. She cups my face in her hands. “Be careful tomorrow,” she says. “Best of men. Best of the Myrmidons.” She places her fingers to my lips, stopping my objection. “It is truth,” she says. “Let it stand, for once.” Then she leads me to the side of her tent, helps me slip beneath the canvas. The last thing I feel is her hand, squeezing mine in farewell.

  THAT NIGHT I LIE IN BED beside Achilles. His face is innocent, sleep-smoothed and sweetly boyish. I love to see it. This is his truest self, earnest and guileless, full of mischief but without malice. He is lost in Agamemnon and Odysseus’ wily double meanings, their lies and games of power. They have confounded him, tied him to a stake and baited him. I stroke the soft skin of his forehead. I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  WE WAKE TO SHOUTS AND THUNDER, A STORM THAT has burst from the blue of the sky. There is no rain, only the gray air, crackling and dry, and jagged streaks that strike like the clap of giant hands. We hurry to the tent door to look out. Smoke, acrid and dark, is drifting up the beach towards us, carrying the smell of lightning-detonated earth. The attack has begun, and Zeus is keeping his bargain, punctuating the Trojans’ advance with celestial encouragement. We feel a pounding, deep in the ground—a charge of chariots, perhaps, led by huge Sarpedon.

  Achilles’ hand grips mine, his face stilled. This is the first time in ten years that the Trojans have ever threatened the gate, have ever pushed so far across the plain. If they break through the wall, they will burn the ships—our only way of getting home, the only thing that makes us an army instead of refugees. This is the moment that Achilles and his mother have summoned: the Greeks, routed and desperate, without him. The sudden, incontrovertible proof of his worth. But when will it be enough? When will he intervene?

  “Never,” he says, when I ask him. “Never until Agamemnon begs my forgiveness or Hector himself walks into my camp and threatens what is dear to me. I have sworn I will not.”

  “What if Agamemnon is dead?”

  “Bring me his body, and I will fight.” His face is carved and unmovable, like the statue of a stern god.

  “Do you not fear that the men will hate you?”

  “They should hate Agamemnon. It is his pride that kills them.”

  And yours. But I know the look on his face, the dark recklessness of his eyes. He will not yield. He does not know how. I have lived eighteen years with him, and he has never backed down, never lost. What will happen if he is forced to? I am afraid for him, and for me, and for all of us.

  We dress and eat, and Achilles speaks bravely of the future. He talks of tomorrow, when perhaps we will swim, or scramble up the bare trunks of sticky cypresses, or watch for the hatching of the sea-turtle eggs, even now incubating beneath the sun-warmed sand. But my mind keeps slipping from his words, dragged downwards by the seeping gray of the sky, by the sand chilled and pallid as a corpse, and the distant, dying shrieks of men whom I know. How many more by day’s end?

  I watch him staring over the ocean. It is unnaturally still, as if Thetis is holding her breath. His eyes are dark and dilated by the dim overcast of the morning. The flame of his hair licks against his forehead.

  “Who is that?” he asks, suddenly. Down the beach, a distant figure is being carried on a stretcher to the white tent. Someone important; there is a crowd around him.

  I seize on the excuse for motion, distraction. “I will go see.”

  Outside the remove of our camp, the sounds of battle grow louder: piercing screams of horses impaled on the stakes of the trench, the desperate shouts of the commanders, the clangor of metal on metal.

  Podalerius shoulders past me into the white tent. The air is thick with the smell of herbs and blood, fear and sweat. Nestor looms up at me from my right, his hand clamping around my shoulder, chilling through my tunic. He screeches, “We are lost! The wall is breaking!”

  Behind him Machaon lies panting on a pallet, his leg a spreading pool of blood from the ragged prick of an arrow. Podalerius is bent over him, already working.

  Machaon sees me. “Patroclus,” he says, gasping a little.

  I go to him. “Will you be all right?”

  “Cannot tell yet. I think—” He breaks off, his eyes squeezed shut.

  “Do not talk to him,” Podalerius says, sharply. His hands are covered in his brother’s blood.

  Nestor’s voice rushes onward, listing woe after woe: the wall splintering, and the ships in danger, and so many wounded kings—Diomedes, Agamemnon, Odysseus, strewn about the camp like crumpled tunics.

  Machaon’s eyes open. “Can you not speak to Achilles?” he says, hoarsely. “Please. For all of us.”

  “Yes! Phthia must come to our aid, or we are lost!” Nestor’s fingers dig into my flesh, and my face is damp with the panicked spray of his lips.

  My eyes close. I am remembering Phoinix’s story, the image of the Calydonians kneeling before Cleopatra, covering her hands and feet with their tears. In my imagination she does not look at them, only lends them her hands as if perhaps they were cloths to wipe their streaming eyes. She is watching her husband Meleager for his answer, the set of his mouth that tells her what she must say: “No.”

  I yank myself from the old man’s clinging fingers. I am desperate to escape the sour smell of fear that has settled like ash over everything. I turn from Machaon’s pain-twisted face and the old man’s outstretched hands and flee from the tent.

  As I step outside there is a terrible cracking, like a ship’s hull tearing apart, like a giant tree smashing to earth. The wall. Screams follow, of triumph and terror.

  All around me are men carrying fallen comrades, limping on makeshift crutches, or crawling through the sand, dragging broken limbs behind them. I know them—their torsos full of scars my ointments have packed and sealed. Their flesh that my fingers have cleaned of iron and bronze and blood. Their faces that have joked, thanked, grimaced as I worked over them. Now these men are ruined again, pulpy with blood and split bone. Because of him. Because of me.

  Ahead of me, a young man struggles to stand on an arrow-pierced leg. Eurypylus, prince of Thessaly.

  I do not stop to think. I wind my arm under his shoulder and carry him to his tent. He is half-delirious with pain, but he knows me. “Patroclus,” he manages.

  I kneel before him, his leg in my hands. “Eurypylus,” I say. “Can you speak?”

  “Fucking Paris,” he says. “My leg.” The flesh is swollen and torn. I seize my dagger and begin to work.

  He grits his teeth. “I don’t know who I hate more, the Trojans or Achilles. Sarpedon tore the wall apart with his bare hands. Ajax held them off as long as he could. They’re here now,” he says, panting. “In the camp.”

  My
chest clutches in panic at his words, and I fight the urge to bolt. I try to focus on what is before me: easing the arrow point from his leg, binding the wound.

  “Hurry,” he says, the word slurring. “I have to go back. They’ll burn the ships.”

  “You cannot go out again,” I say. “You have lost too much blood.”

  “No,” he says. But his head slumps backwards; he is on the edge of unconsciousness. He will live, or not, by the will of the gods. I have done all I can. I take a breath and step outside.

  Two ships are on fire, the long fingers of their masts lit by Trojan torches. Pressed against the hulls is a crush of men, screaming, desperate, leaping to the decks to beat at the flames. The only one I can recognize is Ajax, legs widespread on Agamemnon’s prow, a massive shadow outlined against the sky. He ignores the fire, his spear stabbing downwards at the Trojan hands that swarm like feeding fish.

  As I stand there, frozen and staring, I see a sudden hand, reaching above the melee to grip the sharp nose of a ship. And then the arm beneath it, sure and strong and dark, and the head, and the wide-shouldered torso breaks to air like dolphin-back from the boiling men beneath. And now Hector’s whole brown body twists alone before the blankness of sea and sky, hung between air and earth. His face is smoothed, at peace, his eyes lifted—a man in prayer, a man seeking god. He hangs there a moment, the muscles in his arm knotted and flexed, his armor lifting on his shoulders, showing hip bones like the carved cornice of a temple. Then his other hand swings a bright torch towards the ship’s wooden deck.

  It is well thrown, landing amid old, rotting ropes and fallen sail. The flames catch immediately, skittering along the rope, then kindling the wood beneath. Hector smiles. And why should he not? He is winning.

  Ajax screams in frustration—at another ship in flames, at the men that leap in panic from the charring decks, at Hector slithering out of reach, vanishing back into the crowd below. His strength is all that keeps the men from utterly breaking.

  And then a spear point flashes up from beneath, silver as fish-scale in sunlight. It flickers, almost too fast to see, and suddenly Ajax’s thigh blooms bright-red. I have worked long enough in Machaon’s tent to know that it has sliced through muscle. His knees waver a moment, buckling slowly. He falls.

  Chapter Thirty

  ACHILLES WATCHED ME APPROACH, RUNNING SO HARD my breaths carried the taste of blood onto my tongue. I wept, my chest shaking, my throat rubbed raw. He would be hated now. No one would remember his glory, or his honesty, or his beauty; all his gold would be turned to ashes and ruin.

  “What has happened?” he asked. His brow was drawn deep in concern. Did he truly not know?

  “They are dying,” I choked out. “All of them. The Trojans are in the camp; they are burning the ships. Ajax is wounded, there is no one left but you to save them.”

  His face had gone cold as I spoke. “If they are dying, it is Agamemnon’s fault. I told him what would happen if he took my honor.”

  “Last night he offered—”

  He made a noise in his throat. “He offered nothing. Some tripods, some armor. Nothing to make right his insult, or to admit his wrong. I have saved him time and again, his army, his life.” His voice was thick with barely restrained anger. “Odysseus may lick his boots, and Diomedes, and all the rest, but I will not.”

  “He is a disgrace.” I clutched at him, like a child. “I know it, and all the men know it too. You must forget him. It is as you said; he will doom himself. But do not blame them for his fault. Do not let them die, because of his madness. They have loved you, and honored you.”

  “Honored me? Not one of them stood with me against Agamemnon. Not one of them spoke for me.” The bitterness in his tone shocked me. “They stood by and let him insult me. As if he were right! I toiled for them for ten years, and their repayment is to discard me.” His eyes had gone dark and distant. “They have made their choice. I shed no tears for them.”

  From down the beach the crack of a mast falling. The smoke was thicker now. More ships on fire. More men dead. They would be cursing him, damning him to the darkest chains of our underworld.

  “They were foolish, yes, but they are still our people!”

  “The Myrmidons are our people. The rest can save themselves.” He would have walked away, but I held him to me.

  “You are destroying yourself. You will not be loved for this, you will be hated, and cursed. Please, if you—”

  “Patroclus.” The word was sharp, as he had never spoken it. His eyes bore down on me, his voice like the judge’s sentence. “I will not do this. Do not ask again.”

  I stared at him, straight as a spear stabbing the sky. I could not find the words that would reach him. Perhaps there were none. The gray sand, the gray sky, and my mouth, parched and bare. It felt like the end of all things. He would not fight. The men would die, and his honor with it. No mitigation, no mercy. Yet, still, my mind scrabbled in its corners, desperate, hoping to find the thing that might soften him.

  I knelt, and pressed his hands to my face. My cheeks flowed with tears unending, like water over dark rock. “For me then,” I said. “Save them for me. I know what I am asking of you. But I ask it. For me.”

  He looked down at me, and I saw the pull my words had on him, the struggle in his eyes. He swallowed.

  “Anything else,” he said. “Anything. But not this. I cannot.”

  I looked at the stone of his beautiful face, and despaired. “If you love me—”

  “No!” His face was stiff with tension. “I cannot! If I yield, Agamemnon can dishonor me whenever he wishes. The kings will not respect me, nor the men!” He was breathless, as though he had run far. “Do you think I wish them all to die? But I cannot. I cannot! I will not let him take this from me!”

  “Then do something else. Send the Myrmidons at least. Send me in your place. Put me in your armor, and I will lead the Myrmidons. They will think it is you.” The words shocked us both. They seemed to come through me, not from me, as though spoken straight from a god’s mouth. Yet I seized on them, as a drowning man. “Do you see? You will not have to break your oath, yet the Greeks will be saved.”

  He stared at me. “But you cannot fight,” he said.

  “I will not have to! They are so frightened of you, if I show myself, they will run.”

  “No,” he said. “It is too dangerous.”

  “Please.” I gripped him. “It isn’t. I will be all right. I won’t go near them. Automedon will be with me, and the rest of the Myrmidons. If you cannot fight, you cannot. But save them this way. Let me do this. You said you would grant me anything else.”

  “But—”

  I did not let him answer. “Think! Agamemnon will know you defy him still, but the men will love you. There is no fame greater than this—you will prove to them all that your phantom is more powerful than Agamemnon’s whole army.”

  He was listening.

  “It will be your mighty name that saves them, not your spear arm. They will laugh at Agamemnon’s weakness, then. Do you see?”

  I watched his eyes, saw the reluctance giving way, inch by inch. He was imagining it, the Trojans fleeing from his armor, outflanking Agamemnon. The men, falling at his feet in gratitude.

  He held up his hand. “Swear to me,” he said. “Swear to me that if you go, you will not fight them. You will stay with Automedon in the chariot and let the Myrmidons go in front of you.”

  “Yes.” I pressed my hand to his. “Of course. I am not mad. To frighten them, that is all.” I was drenched and giddy. I had found a way through the endless corridors of his pride and fury. I would save the men; I would save him from himself. “You will let me?”

  He hesitated another moment, his green eyes searching mine. Then, slowly, he nodded.

  ACHILLES KNELT, buckling me in, his fingers so swift that I could not follow them, only feel the quick, pulling cinches of tightening belts. Bit by bit, he assembled me: the bronze breastplate and greaves, tight against my skin
, the leather underskirt. As he worked, he instructed me in a voice that was low and quick and constant. I must not fight, I must not leave Automedon, nor the other Myrmidons. I was to stay in the chariot and flee at the first sign of danger; I could chase the Trojans back to Troy but not try to fight them there. And most of all, most of all, I must stay away from the walls of the city and the archers that perched there, ready to pick off Greeks who came too close.

  “It will not be like before,” he said. “When I am there.”

  “I know.” I shifted my shoulders. The armor was stiff and heavy and unyielding. “I feel like Daphne,” I told him, barked up in her new laurel skin. He did not laugh, only handed me two spears, points polished and gleaming. I took them, the blood beginning to rush in my ears. He was speaking again, more advice, but I did not hear it. I was listening to the drumbeat of my own impatient heart. “Hurry,” I remember saying.

  Last, the helmet to cover my dark hair. He turned a polished bronze mirror towards me. I stared at myself in armor I knew as well as my own hands, the crest on the helmet, the silvered sword hanging from the waist, the baldric of hammered gold. All of it unmistakable, and instantly recognizable. Only my eyes felt like my own, larger and darker than his. He kissed me, catching me up in a soft, opened warmth that breathed sweetness into my throat. Then he took my hand and we went outside to the Myrmidons.

  They were lined up, armored and suddenly fearsome, their layers of metal flashing like the bright wings of cicadas. Achilles led me to the chariot already yoked to its three-horse team—don’t leave the chariot, don’t throw your spears—and I understood that he was afraid that I would give myself away if I actually fought. “I will be all right,” I told him. And turned my back, to fit myself into the chariot, to settle my spears and set my feet.

  Behind me, he spoke a moment to the Myrmidons, waving a hand over his shoulder at the smoking decks of ships, the black ash that swarmed upwards to the sky, and the roiling mass of bodies that tussled at their hulls. “Bring him back to me,” he told them. They nodded and clattered their spears on their shields in approval. Automedon stepped in front of me, taking the reins. We all knew why the chariot was necessary. If I ran down the beach, my steps would never be mistaken for his.