The Song of Troy Read online

  ‘Achilles, Achilles,’ he whispered in a voice that was his and yet not his, mournful and chill, ‘how can you sleep while I still lie unburied, unable to cross the River? Free me! Let me loose from my clay! How can you sleep while I am unburied?’

  I reached my arms out to him to plead for his understanding, trying to tell him why I had let him fight in my place, babbling explanations one after another. I took him into my arms and my fingers closed on nothing; he shrank and dribbled away in the darkness until the last chirrup of his bat voice faded, until the last lingering thread of his luminescence faded into nothing. Nothing! Nothing!

  I screamed. And woke still screaming, to find a dozen of my Myrmidons pinning me down. Shaking them off impatiently, I stumbled back between the ships, men stirring and asking each other what was that awful noise?, the grey light of dawn showing me the way.

  A night wind had blown the shroud onto the ground; the Myrmidons who formed his guard of honour had not dared approach close enough to retrieve it. So when I staggered into the square I saw Patrokles himself. Sleeping. Dreaming. So peaceful, so benign. A facsimile. I had just seen the real Patrokles, and knew from his lips that he would never forgive me. That heart which had given so generously from the days of our shared adolescence was as cold and hard as marble. Why then was the facsimile’s face so tender, so gentle? Could such a face belong to the shade haunting my sleep? Did men truly change so much in death?

  My foot touched something chilly; I shivered uncontrollably as I looked down on Hektor sprawled just as I had left him the evening before, his legs twisted up as if they were broken, his mouth and his eyes wide open, his emptied white flesh showing the pink mouths of a dozen wounds, the one at his neck gaping like a gill.

  I turned away as Myrmidons came from all directions, wakened by the sound of their leader screaming like one demented. They were led by Automedon.

  ‘Achilles, it’s time to bury him.’

  ‘More than time.’

  We carried Patrokles across the waters of Skamander on a raft, and then walked garbed for war with his corpse on his shield shoulder high in our midst. I stood behind the shield with his head in the palm of my right hand as his chief mourner, the whole army dotting the cliffs and the beach for two leagues around to witness the Myrmidons put him in his tomb.

  We bore Patrokles into the corbelled cavern and laid him tenderly on the ivory death car, clad in the armour he had worn to his death, his body covered in locks of our hair, his spears and all his personal belongings on gold tripods about the painted walls. I glanced towards the roof, wondering how long it would be before I too lay there. Not long, so the oracles said.

  The priest fitted the mask of gold over his face and tied the strings under his head, arranged his gold gauntleted hands on his thighs, their fingers meeting over the sword. The words were chanted, the libations poured out on the ground. Then one by one the twelve Trojan youths were held over a huge golden cup standing on a tripod at the foot of the death car, and their throats were cut. We sealed up the entrance to the tomb and marched back to the camp, to the assembly ground in front of Agamemnon’s house, where funeral games were always held. I brought out the prizes and went through the misery of presenting them to the winners, then, while the rest feasted, I returned to my own house alone.

  Hektor lay now in the dust outside my door, removed there after we had taken Patrokles from his bier; the memory of that wraith out of my dreams had urged me to inter him with Patrokles like a mongrel dog at the foot of a hero, but I couldn’t do it. I broke my vow to my oldest and dearest friend – my lover! – to keep Hektor with me instead; Patrokles had the price of the ferry ride: twelve noble Trojan youths. Enough and more than enough.

  I clapped my hands; the serving women came running. ‘Heat water, bring the anointing oils, send for the chief embalmer. I want Prince Hektor prepared for burial.’

  I carried him to a small storehouse nearby and laid him on a stone slab the right height for the women to minister to him. But I straightened his limbs, I put my hand on his face to close his eyes. They opened again very slowly, sightless. An awful thing, to watch Hektor’s vacant husk. To think of my own.

  Brise was sitting waiting for me, hunched in a chair. She glanced at me, but didn’t speak for some time. Then she said in a neutral voice, ‘I have water ready for your bath, and there’s food and wine afterwards. I must light the lamps, it’s dusk.’

  Oh, if only water had the power to wash away the stains on a spirit! My body was clean again. But my spirit was not.

  Brise sat on the couch opposite me while I toyed with the food, quenched my thirst. I felt as if I had been running like a madman for years.

  Then she used the word too. Madman. She said, ‘Achilles, why are you behaving like a madman? The world isn’t going to cease because Patrokles is dead. There are others still living who love you as much as he did. Automedon. The Myrmidons. I.’

  ‘Go away,’ I said wearily.

  ‘When I’m finished. Heal yourself, Achilles, in the only way possible. Stop pandering to Patrokles and give Hektor back to his father. I’m not jealous, I never have been. That you and Patrokles were lovers didn’t affect me or my place in your life. But he was jealous, and that warped him. You believe he thought you betrayed your ideals. But to Patrokles the real betrayal was your love of me. That’s where it started. After that, nothing you did would have been right as far as he was concerned. I’m not condemning him – I’m just speaking the truth. He loved you and he felt you betrayed his love by loving me. And if you could do that, you couldn’t be the person he thought you were. It was necessary that he find flaws. He had to feed his own sense of injury.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I do. But it isn’t Patrokles I want to talk about. I want to talk about Hektor. How can you do this to a man who faced you so bravely and died so well? Give him back to his father! It isn’t the real Patrokles who haunts you, it’s the Patrokles you’ve conjured up to drive yourself mad. Forget Patrokles. He was no true friend to you at the last.’

  I struck her. Her head snapped back and she fell from the couch to the floor. Horrified, I scooped her up, laid her down to find that she was moving and groaning. I stumbled to a chair, put my head in my hands. Even Brise was a victim of this madness, and madness it was. But how to heal it? How to banish my mother?

  Something wrapped itself about my legs, plucked feebly at the hem of my kilt. I lifted my head in terror to see what new visitation had come to plague me and stared confounded at the white head and twisted countenance of an old, old man. Priam. It could be no one else. Priam. As I took my elbows from my knees he seized my hands and began to kiss them, his tears falling on the same skin Hektor’s blood had.

  ‘Give him back to me! Give him back! Don’t feed him to your dogs! Don’t leave him alone and unhallowed! Don’t deny him proper mourning! Give him back to me!’

  I looked across at Brise, who was sitting upright, her eyes filled with unshed tears.

  ‘Come, sire, sit down,’ I said, lifting him and putting him into my chair. ‘A king shouldn’t have to beg. Sit down.’

  Automedon stood in the doorway.

  ‘How did he get here?’ I asked, going to him.

  ‘In a mule cart driven by an idiot boy. I mean that literally. A poor creature full of mindless mumbles. The army is still feasting, the guard on the causeway is Myrmidon. The old man said he had business with you. The cart was empty and neither of them was armed, so the guard let them in.’

  ‘Fetch fire, Automedon. Don’t breathe a word to anyone of his presence here. Pass that onto the guard, and thank it for me.’

  While I waited for the fire – it was cold – I drew up a chair close to his and took his gnarled hands in mine, chafing them. So chilled.

  ‘It took courage to come here, sire.’

  ‘No, none.’ His rheumy dark eyes looked into mine. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘I ruled a happy and prosperous kingdom
. But then I went wrong. The wrong was in me. In me… You Greeks were sent to punish me for my pride. For my blindness.’ His lip trembled, the moistness in his eyes made them glitter. ‘No, it took not one scrap of courage to come here. Hektor was the final price.’

  ‘The final price,’ I said, unable not to say it, ‘will be the fall of Troy.’

  ‘The fall of my dynasty, perhaps, but not the fall of the city. Troy is greater than that, even now.’

  ‘Troy the city will fall.’

  ‘Well, on that we beg to differ, but I hope not on the reason for my coming. Prince Achilles, grant me the body of my son. I will pay a fitting ransom.’

  ‘I require no ransom, King Priam. Take him home,’ I said.

  He fell on his knees a second time to kiss my hands; my flesh crawled. Nodding to Brise, I disengaged myself. ‘Sit down, sire, and break bread with me while I have Hektor readied. Brise, look after our guest.’

  As I spoke to Automedon outside I thought of something. ‘Ajax’s baldric – it belonged to Hektor, whereas the armour didn’t. Find it, Automedon, and put it in the cart with him.’

  When I returned it was to find Priam recovered, chattering happily to Brise in one of the bewildering mood changes characteristic of the very old, asking her how she liked life with me when she had been born into the House of Dardanos.

  ‘I’m content, sire,’ she was saying. ‘Achilles is a good man, and not ignoble.’ She leaned forwards. ‘Sire, why does he think he must die soon?’

  ‘Their fates are linked, his and Hektor’s,’ said the ancient King. ‘It has been seen in the oracles.’

  When they saw me they abandoned the subject, of course. We dined then and I discovered I was famished, but I forced myself to a pace equal to Priam’s, and drank sparingly of the wine.

  Afterwards I conducted him to his mule cart, in which lay the sheeted body of Hektor. Priam didn’t look beneath the covering, but climbed up beside the idiot boy and drove off sitting as erect and proud as if he rode in a car of solid gold.

  Brise waited for me with her hair unbound, a loose robe folded about her. I went through to our bed as she lingered to blow out the lamps.

  ‘Too tired even to shed your clothes?’

  She unclasped my collar and belt, removed the kilt and let all of them lie on the floor where they landed. Exhausted, I put my arms above my head and lay flat on my back as she lifted herself up beside me, leaning over me and fitting her knotted fists into my armpits. I smiled at her, suddenly as light and happy as a small child.

  ‘I haven’t the strength even to pull your hair,’ I said.

  ‘Then lie still and go to sleep. I’m here.’

  ‘I’m too tired to sleep.’

  ‘Then rest. I’m here.’

  ‘Brise, promise me that you’ll not leave me until the end?’

  ‘The end?’

  Gone her laughter; her face hung over me, her eyes dimmed because only one lamp still burned, and it at the farthest reaches of the room. With an enormous effort I lifted my arms and took her head between my hands, holding her frail skull the way I had held Hektor’s, bringing her face closer.

  ‘I heard what you asked Priam, and I heard his answer. You know what I mean, Brise.’

  ‘I refuse to believe it!’ she cried.

  ‘Some things are required of a man on the day of his birth, and these things are told to him. My father would not, but my mother did. Coming to Troy meant I would die here, and now that Hektor’s dead, Troy must fall. My death is the purchase price.’

  ‘Achilles, don’t leave me!’

  ‘I’d give my all to stay, but it can’t be.’

  She was quiet for a long while, her eyes dwelling on the tiny flame sputtering in the lamp’s shell, her breathing rhythmic and unhurried. Then she said, ‘You had ordered Hektor prepared for burial before you saw me this evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have told me? Then some things would never have been said.’

  ‘Maybe it was necessary that they be said, Brise. I struck you. A man must never strike woman or child, anyone weaker than he. When men cast out the Old Religion, that was a part of the bargain by which the Gods gave men the right to rule.’

  She smiled. ‘You struck not at me but at your daimon, and, in striking, you drove it out. The rest of your life belongs to you, not to Patrokles, and for that, I rejoice.’

  My exhaustion left me; I lifted myself on one elbow to look at her. The tiny lamp would have been kind to any woman, but because she had no fault it gave her the aura of a goddess, it burnished her pale skin to faint gold and enriched the shimmering fire of her hair, touched her eyes with liquid amber. I put my fingers hesitantly to her cheek and traced a line down to her mouth where it was swollen from the impact of my hand. Her throat was hollow in shadow, her breasts drove me to distraction, her small feet were the terminus of my world.

  And because at last I admitted the depth of my need for her, I found things in her beyond my dreams. If I had tried in the past consciously to please her, I no longer thought of her at all except as an extension of my own being. I found I wept; her hair was wet under my face, her hands relaxed and fluttered to mine and locked there in aching comfort, her hands in mine above our heads on the shared pillow.

  Thus Hektor dwelled once more in the palace of his forefathers, but this time unknowing. Through Odysseus we learned that Priam had passed over his remaining senior sons to choose the very young man, Troilos, as the new Heir. Not even, so some Trojans were saying, arrived at the Age of Consent – a term we didn’t know or use, but (said Odysseus) which apparently formed the Trojan concept of maturity.

  The decision had met with great opposition; Troilos himself begged the King to give the Heirdom to Aineas. This provoked Priam into a diatribe against the Dardanian that ended when Aineas stalked from the Throne Room. Deiphobos too was angry; so was the young son-priest, Helenos, who reminded Priam of the oracle which said that Troilos would save the city only if he lived to reach the Age of Consent. Priam maintained that Troilos had already reached the Age of Consent, and that confirmed the phrase’s ambiguity in Odysseus’s mind. Helenos kept begging the King to change his mind, but the King would not. Troilos was anointed the Heir. And we on the beach began to sharpen our swords.

  It took the Trojans twelve days in all to mourn Hektor. During that time Penthesileia of the Amazons arrived with ten thousand mounted women warriors. Another reason to sharpen our swords.

  Curiosity oiled our whetstones, for these unique creatures lived lives completely dedicated to Artemis the Maid and an Asian Ares. They dwelled in the fastnesses of Skythia at the foot of the crystal mountains which spear the roof of the world, riding their huge horses through the forests, hunting and marauding in the name of the Maid. They existed under the thumb of the Earth Goddess in her first triple entity – Maid, Mother, Crone – and ruled their men as women had in our part of the world before the New Religion replaced the Old. For men had discovered one vital fact: that a man’s seed was as necessary for procreation as was the woman who grew the fruit. Until that discovery was made, a man was deemed an expensive luxury.

  The Amazon succession lay entirely in the female line; their men were chattels who didn’t even go to war. The first fifteen years of a woman’s life after she attained her menses were dedicated exclusively to the Maiden Goddess. Then she retired from the army and took a husband, bore children. Only the Queen did not marry, though she stepped down from the throne at about the same time as other women left the service of Artemis the Maid; instead of taking a husband, the Queen went to the Axe as a sacrifice for the people.

  What we didn’t already know about the Amazons, Odysseus told us; he seemed to have spies everywhere, even at the foot of the crystal mountains in Skythia. Though, of course, what consumed us most was the fact that Amazons rode horses. Other peoples did not, even in far Egypt. Horses were too difficult to sit upon. Their hide was slippery, a blanket wouldn’t stay in place; the sole
part of them of use to men was the mouth, into which a bit could be inserted attached to a head harness and reins. Therefore the world used horses to pull chariots. They couldn’t even be used to pull carts, for a yoke strangled them. How then could the Amazons ride their beasts into battle?

  While the Trojans mourned Hektor we rested, wondering if we would ever see them outside their walls again. Odysseus remained confident that they would come out, but the rest of us were not so sure.

  On the thirteenth day I put on the suit of armour Odysseus had given me, to discover that it felt much lighter. We crossed the causeways in the dimness of dawn, endless threads of men trudging across the dew-wet plain, a few chariots in their lead. Agamemnon had decided to make his stand along a front about half a league from the Trojan wall adjacent to the Skaian Gate.

  They were waiting for us, not as many as before, but still more numerous than we were. The Skaian Gate was closed already.

  The Amazon horde was positioned in the centre of the Trojan van; as I waited for our wings to come into formation I sat on the side rail of my chariot and looked them over. They were mounted on big, shaggy beasts of some breed I didn’t know – ugly aquiline heads, shorn manes and tails, hairy hooves. In colour the horses were uniformly bay or brown, save for one white beauty in the middle. That would be Queen Penthesileia. What I could see was how they stayed aboard – clever! Each warrior fitted her hips and buttocks inside a kind of leather frame strapped beneath the horse’s belly so that it remained firmly in place.

  They wore bronze helmets but otherwise were clad in hardened leather, and covered themselves from waists to feet in tubes of leather bound about from ankles to knees with thongs. On their feet were soft short boots. The weapon of choice was obviously the bow and arrow, though a few were girt with swords.

  At which moment the horns and drums of battle sounded. I stood upright again, Old Pelion in my hand, the iron shield riding my left shoulder comfortably. Agamemnon had concentrated all his chariots in the van opposite the Amazons, pitifully few.