by Pat Barker
Abruptly, I was furious. “Now come on,” I said, seizing her thin arms and dragging her to her feet.
She was staring at me. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t move or speak, but then realized she was looking not at me but at something behind me. At the same moment, a hand grabbed the back of my neck. I felt a jolt run through my body; the baby inside me kicked. The other guards were coming up behind him. I twisted round, wanting them to see who I was, knowing the Myrmidons wouldn’t hurt me. But when I looked from face to face there were no smiles, no hint of recognition. These were the young fighters from Skyros, Pyrrhus’s men—and I knew I had no influence with them. Pulling our arms roughly behind us, they forced us ahead of them down the steep path to the camp.
19
We were led away from the grave and marched through the stable yard. By now, the sun was climbing steeply above the horizon, throwing a harsh light on the faces of the grooms who turned to watch us pass. Through the stable yard and on to Pyrrhus’s hall, where there were more guards, Myrmidons this time, who recognized me as Lord Alcimus’s wife.
“We should fetch Alcimus,” one of them said.
“No,” said the guard holding me. “Lord Pyrrhus was quite clear. They’re to go straight to him.”
And so, they pushed us up the steps onto the veranda, where they hammered on the door—and went on hammering for some considerable time before Pyrrhus himself came to answer it. He’d draped the purple-and-silver coverlet from his bed loosely round his shoulders but was otherwise naked. He peered from face to face, bleary-eyed from sleep, foul-tempered and bewildered by the sudden intrusion. “What’s this?”
“We found them burying Priam.”
Pyrrhus stepped aside and the guards pushed us ahead of them into the hall.
“Women?” Pyrrhus said, staring at us incredulously. “Are you sure?”
“We all saw them, sir—and heard them. They were saying the prayers for the dead.”
Many of the Myrmidon fighters had followed us into the hall. One of them coughed and pointed to me. “That’s Lord Alcimus’s wife.”
“Is it?”
Pyrrhus had no reason to know I was married to Alcimus. Even if he’d noticed me on one of his rare visits to Alcimus’s hut, he’d probably have assumed I was just another slave girl.
“She was there?”
The young men looked at each other, uneasy now, but then the one holding me nodded.
“Well, I suppose you’d better find Alcimus, then.” Pyrrhus, obviously feeling he had to seize control, jabbed his finger at one of the guards. “You—stay here. Rest of you, get back there—DIG THE BUGGER UP!”
I saw Amina flinch, but when Pyrrhus looked directly at her she met his eyes defiantly. I stared at my feet, dreading the moment when Alcimus would appear.
“I’ll get dressed,” Pyrrhus said. “Keep an eye on them.”
He strode out of the room. Feeling suddenly faint, I looked longingly at the bench by the table. I knew there was no point appealing to the Myrmidon fighters; they had no power to set against Pyrrhus. They just gawped at me in astonishment. God knows how long it would take to find Alcimus; he could be anywhere in the camp, feasting, drinking…Or in some other woman’s bed. So, I simply stared around the hall, which, as always in the aftermath of the previous night’s feasting, looked desolate and slightly mad. Smells of rancid fat, resin from the walls, smoking oil lamps—the rushes, though freshly laid the day before, were too tired to sweeten the air. Feeling dizzy, I started to edge towards the bench, but at that moment Pyrrhus came back into the room, his face knotted in anger. “Why?” he said.
Amina stared straight at him. “I buried my king. I don’t have to explain that.”
Immediately—no pause for thought—he hit her. The sound of the slap echoed round the room.
“You knew I said the body wasn’t to be buried?”
“Yes, I knew. Only you can’t do that—you can’t just overrule the laws of god. Nobody can—I don’t care how powerful they are.”
I thought he was going to hit her again, but there were footsteps on the veranda and that distracted him. Alcimus came into the room, dishevelled, tunic blotched with wine. He bowed to Pyrrhus, though his gaze was fixed solely on me. “What on earth possessed you?”
His voice was low, urgent, not much above a whisper, but Amina heard it.
“She didn’t do anything.”
Pyrrhus said: “The guards caught them at it. Both of them.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t burying him—she was just trying to stop me.”
This was both true and untrue. I closed my eyes, wanting to shut them all out, and saw Priam’s skeletal hand reach out to me from the ground. I had helped bury him, not in obedience to the gods, but as a simple act of respect for an old man who’d been kind to me when I was a child in desperate need of kindness. For a moment, I was tempted to accept Amina’s offer of a way out, but then I said—heard myself say—“That’s not true. I did help her bury him.”
Amina spun round. “You did not!”
At that moment, I glimpsed the full extent of her pride. There she stood, chalk-white, Pyrrhus’s fingermarks red on her cheek, glittering with pride. She wasn’t trying to save me; she wanted them to believe she’d acted alone. Perhaps by now she’d managed to convince herself.
Silently, I held out my hands to Pyrrhus. They were covered in dirt; every fingernail was black.
Pyrrhus turned to Alcimus. “I can’t overlook this. I don’t care whose wife she is.”
“I didn’t know,” Alcimus said.
“She didn’t help,” Amina insisted. “She was just trying to drag me back to the hut.”
Alcimus ignored her. “I’ll deal with my wife.”
“No, you won’t,” Pyrrhus said. “They were in it together. You’ve only got to look at her hands!”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know—lock them up, I suppose.” Pyrrhus was shaking his head like a bewildered bullock. “There’s got to be somebody else behind it—can’t be just women.”
Amina cut in. “I keep telling you—there was nobody else.”
Suddenly, I realized she actually wanted to die. And that she very probably would die—and me with her.
Alcimus said, “Well, there’s the laundry hut—that’s got a lock. And there’s the armour storage hut. I don’t think you should put them in together.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him; he was betraying me—and Achilles. That was the real surprise.
“All right,” Pyrrhus said. “We can decide what to do with them later.” He nodded to the guards, who stepped forward to escort Amina from the hall. One of them grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and shoved her along.
“Hoy—no need for that,” Alcimus said.
A hand closed round my arm. Amina and the guards had almost reached the door, when there was a noise outside and the guards who’d been sent to uncover the body—no “digging up” would have been required; it was the shallowest of shallow graves—burst into the room. One of them, a skinny youth with blank eyes and odd, dislocated movements, was pushed to the front. I recognized him. When not required to guard corpses, he worked in the stables and was generally the butt of the other men’s jokes, a sort of village idiot, though he could quieten a nervous horse better than anybody.
“Go on,” the other guards said, pushing him to the front. “Go on, show him.”
The poor lad, dimly aware that he’d been chosen to take the hit, stood at the centre of the group and stared desperately from face to face, but Pyrrhus was surprisingly patient with him. Of course, he’d know this boy from the long hours he spent at the stable yard, doing—or so it was said—quite menial jobs, wiping sweaty horses down, cleaning tack, even mucking out the stalls…Work that men of his rank simply didn’t do. Now, he leant
in and asked, gently, “What’s that you’ve got?”
Reluctantly, the boy opened his hand, and there, catching the light, was a man’s thumb ring—the one I’d last seen hanging from a chain round Andromache’s neck. Alcimus and the guards had no idea whose ring this was—or why it mattered. Instinctively, I turned away, hiding my face—I don’t quite know why—almost as if I felt my own recognition of the ring would somehow transfer itself to them.
But Pyrrhus had recognized it. “I gave this to Andromache.”
“And I stole it,” Amina said, quickly. “She was having a bath and she took it off and…and I stole it. She was devastated, searched everywhere—she more or less had us ripping the floorboards up…”
She was gabbling. Closing my eyes, I willed her to stop.
“Why?” Alcimus asked.
“Why did I steal it? To pay the ferryman.”
Normally, when you’re laying out a corpse, you finish by putting coins on the eyes. They keep the lids closed, but the devout believe they’re also used to pay the ferryman who rows the departed spirit across the River Styx to Hades, the land of the dead. Amina had no coins, no jewellery, nothing of any value at all; none of the women did. Except Andromache, who had Priam’s ring. Was Amina telling the truth? When Andromache had taken a bath in my hut, she hadn’t taken the ring off, but that didn’t mean she never did. It was possible Amina had seized an opportunity to steal it. Just about.
The silence dragged on. Pyrrhus was looking around the room and I could sense he was beginning to see us all differently. Alcimus, me, Amina, Andromache…It must have been starting to feel like a conspiracy to him. Abruptly, without taking his eyes off us, he yelled: “Andromache!”
She appeared so promptly she must have been listening at the door. As she walked towards him, I noticed her mouth was pinched with fear.
Pyrrhus held out the ring. “Did you give her this?”
Andromache looked from his face to his hand and back to his face and said nothing at all—a rabbit mesmerized by a stoat.
“I stole it!” Amina shouted.
Pyrrhus spun round and hit her again. This time, she put her hand to her nose and brought it away covered in blood.
Turning back to Andromache, Pyrrhus said: “We-ell—did you?”
“I don’t know what happened. I had it in the morning, and in the evening, it was gone. Sorry.” She was sobbing. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Andromache was looking at Pyrrhus as she spoke, but I felt the words were meant for Amina.
Amina said, “She didn’t give me the ring. I stole it.” Blood still dripping from her nose, she stared straight at Pyrrhus. “Neither of them helped. I did it—and I don’t regret it for a minute.”
She turned away from him then and, of her own accord, walked to the door, while the guards followed along behind her, transformed into what looked more like a royal escort. There was silence after the door had closed after her.
Alcimus picked up one of the oil lamps and handed it to me. “Make sure she keeps that.” The guard, a Myrmidon, nodded.
“All right.” Pyrrhus was speaking to Alcimus. “We’ll talk later. And you”—jabbing his finger at Andromache—“GET OUT!”
20
Outside the storage hut, the guard stopped and began unlocking the door. Three locks, an indication of the value of the armour kept inside. When he’d finished, he stood aside and politely indicated to me that I should go in. I recognized him as one of the men who’d touched my belly as I’d served wine in the hall, a sign of loyalty to the bloodline of Achilles. Well, gestures like that weren’t going to help me now. And it was Achilles’s son who’d sent me here.
I stepped over the threshold. The guard closed the door behind me and fastened the locks. They didn’t really need locks to keep me in. Where would I go? The lamp cast a circle of pallid light around the hut and I caught the gleam of polished bronze. At first, I squatted down next to the lamp and gazed at the thin line of light under the door. My hands were trembling; I put them up my sleeves to warm them, but I couldn’t stop them shaking. All around me was the cold, heavy smell of metal and oiled cloth that seemed to settle onto my stomach and lie there like a stone. I think, at that moment, I understood how fragile my position really was. As Alcimus’s wife, I’d started to feel secure in my new status, but standing there in a storage hut with a locked door behind me, I knew I’d never been more than an inch away from slavery.
My whole life, years, weeks, days, hours, had led me to this moment in this place. And one day in particular: the day my own city, Lyrnessus, fell. I’d gone up onto the roof of the citadel to watch the battle raging far below. I’d watched Achilles kill my youngest brother with a spear thrust to his throat. Before pulling the spear out, he’d turned and stared up at the citadel. I knew I had the sun behind me, I knew he couldn’t see me—or only as a dark smudge looking down—and yet I felt he was looking straight at me. Gradually, in twos and threes, the other women had drifted up from the floor below and together we’d waited for the end. As the Greek fighters had pounded up the stairs, Arianna, my cousin on my mother’s side, had grasped my arm, saying without words: Come. And then she’d climbed onto the parapet and, at the exact moment the fighters burst in, she’d leapt to her death, her white robes fluttering round her as she fell—like a singed moth. It had seemed to be a long time before she hit the ground, though it could only have been seconds. Her cry had faded into a stricken silence in which, slowly, stepping in front of the other women, I turned to face the men who’d come in.
Arianna said: Come…
But I chose to stay—and everything else, everything that had happened between then and now, had followed on from that choice. From my first hours in the camp, I’d been wary, alert, single-mindedly focused on survival—right up to the moment when I saw Priam’s hand lying dishonoured on the filthy sand. Did I regret helping to bury him? Yes. Yes!
And, no.
It seemed to me, crouched by the door of the storage hut, that I’d merely blundered into it. I had gone out to try to stop Amina, I had tried to persuade her to come away, to leave the task unfinished, but then I’d seen Priam’s hand and suddenly there I was scrabbling like a dog in the sand. I’d said the prayers, I’d drunk the wine, forced the stale bread down my throat…I’d buried Priam—and less than twenty-four hours after I’d heard Pyrrhus say the penalty for doing so was death. I’d thrown away all the gains I’d made in the past dreadful year. I really thought it possible that Pyrrhus would kill me, or have me killed. Amina would go on lying to save me—or to save her concept of herself as the only person brave enough to defy Pyrrhus and obey the gods. But I didn’t think they’d believe her. Why would they? When I’d shown Pyrrhus the dirt under my fingernails.
I closed my eyes, and gradually—this was a slow process—I felt a presence growing in the darkness behind me. “Presence” is the wrong word, but I don’t know what the right word is. Opening my eyes, I forced myself to lift the lantern high above my head—and cried out with shock. Because there, lined up along the far wall, stood Priam, Hector, Patroclus, Achilles. The cry died on my lips—because of course they weren’t there. Of course not. What I was seeing were suits of armour, not stacked in corners, as I’d thought they would be, but fastened to the walls, each piece in its proper place, so that together they formed the shapes of men. Men, instantly recognizable. Here was Priam’s armour, which Hecuba had begged him not to put on. Blood all over it—you never wipe off an enemy’s blood. Beside it, Hector’s armour, his famous plumed helmet glittering in the light—but no shield with it. Andromache had begged Pyrrhus to let her baby son be buried inside his father’s shield—and he’d agreed, though he’d regretted his generosity later. I could imagine how furious he would be, every time he looked at the empty space. Finally, Achilles’s armour. The shield was missing from this too, but only because Pyrrhus kept it close by him in the hall
, polishing it obsessively, as Achilles himself had done.
Raising the lantern higher, I looked up at the helmet. Whenever I moved my hand, light and dark chased each other across the metal, creating—or revealing—movement behind the eyeholes in the mask. I heard two people breathing where only one had breathed before. No words spoken; none needed. I don’t know whether this meeting—and it did feel like a meeting—lasted minutes or hours, but it changed me. On the day Polyxena died, I’d stood by Achilles’s burial mound and told myself that Achilles’s story had ended at his grave, and that my own story was about to begin. The truth? Achilles’s story never ends: wherever men fight and die, you’ll find Achilles. And as for me—my story and his were inextricably linked.
A sound of somebody outside the door. It opened and a widening arc of daylight cut a slice out of the dark. The light hit me like cold water, bringing me out of my trance. Alcimus said, “Briseis!” and as I walked towards him, he stood aside to let me out. All the way across the yard, I felt him rigid with fury at my back. Evidently the moment of reckoning was upon me, and that was confirmed when I entered the living quarters and found Automedon waiting there.
Alcimus sat down at the table. “All right. Let’s start at the beginning.” He pointed to a chair and I sat down. The light was dim, so he lit a candle and set it down beside me, close enough for me to feel the warmth on my skin. Automedon slipped into the chair at the head of the table—and I remember thinking that was odd because Alcimus always sat there. So far, Automedon hadn’t even glanced at me. I resented his presence, while at the same time knowing I had no right to resent anything. But I felt I couldn’t have a proper conversation with Alcimus with him sitting there. I wondered—for the first time, which is stupid, I know—if Achilles had hesitated over which he should give me to—and how long it had taken him to decide. I knew what he thought of them; he’d never made any secret of it. Alcimus was a decent man, kind-hearted, a good fighter, but young for his age and a bit of a fool. Automedon—you could trust him with your life, totally honest, no sense of humour, a self-righteous, intolerant prig. But both brave, both loyal—both completely devoted to him.
