‘Chryseis,’ said the priest’s daughter. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Briseis,’ said the blue-eyed woman.
*
Chryseis huddled up against Briseis’ back, as the sky began to lighten. She had not slept. She had never been in such close proximity to so many women; her mother’s untimely death meant she had grown up in an often-empty house. She had always longed for a sister, almost as much as she had wished for her mother. She had spent the night thinking of Briseis’ family, their bodies lying unburied while their souls must be wandering the banks of the River Lethe, with nothing for the ferryman, no way to cross and enter the Underworld, until someone took pity on them and threw a few grains of dust over them. How long would they wait?
But Briseis was as good as her word. She did not weep or wail. She merely spread her cloak on the ground beneath her. She patted it: there was room for Chryseis here too. The girl curled up beside her and felt the warmth radiate from the woman’s body. Her golden hair smelled of grassy herbs and something Chryseis could not name. An animal smell, comforting.
The talkative woman from the night before – Chryseis never did find out her name – had been given meal and water by the Greeks. She made a warm, flavourless broth for the women, which Chryseis ate, nonetheless. By the time the flaps of the tent were flung open and two men ordered them all outside, it was a relief, because the waiting was over.
The women were placed in a line by the guards, in an order which was meaningful to them but not to the women. Every now and then they would stand for a moment, arguing about whether someone should be to the left or the right of her neighbour. The older women were furthest away from Chryseis, and she wondered if they were ordering them by years. But that did not look quite right: Briseis remained right next to her, though there were two other girls who were visibly closer to her age. After more pulling and shoving, she found herself at the end of the line. She understood some of what the men said, but the guttural speed made it difficult to follow.
She focused instead on the camp, which extended on both sides and in front of her all the way to the sea, and the tall ships which had sailed to Troy all those years earlier. The tents were clustered together, dirty and weather-beaten, with hungry-looking cattle in small pens here and there. She turned to look behind her and saw the fortifications on the north edge of the camp, sharpened wooden stakes pointing at the city, at her city, like arrows. One of the men grabbed her arm and jerked her back to face the same way as the others. She did not cry out, and felt sure that Briseis was impressed with her self-control. If a woman who had lost so much could remain calm, Chryseis could too.
They stood in the line, waiting, as the sun broke through the early-morning cloud and caught them in its pitiless glare. Chryseis looked along the row of women and saw fear behind their eyes. Some were not even troubling to hide it: they wept openly, clawing at their skin and tugging out their hair. Chryseis almost wished she could do the same: wail for her absent father and for the loss of her poor shepherd boy. But she would not let these men, these enemies of Troy, see her afraid. She was her father’s daughter and no Greek would see her cry.
Finally, a herald raised his horn to his lips and sounded a call. The men did not appear all at once, but gradually, from every direction, they began to gather in front of Chryseis. The soldiers came in gangs with others who shared the same clothing, the same weaponry, the same home. Chryseis tried to remember the list of Greeks that her father had prayed to Apollo to curse: Boeotians, Myrmidons, Argives, Aetolians. They looked battle-weary, she thought, like the men of Troy. So many flaming scars across faces and arms. So many more limping from injuries she could not see.
She stared over the taunting faces of the Greek soldiers as they massed in front of the women. She looked up at their ships. Would she be bundled onto one of them and carried away to Greece? The idea seemed both absurd and inevitable. She knew she could not afford to think about the possibility of being taken from Troy and never seeing her home or anyone she knew again. She focused on the ship, and what it would be like to sail across the ocean. She had never been on water, had no memory of even touching the sea. Had her father brought her down to the shore when she was an infant? The idea of her father in his priestly robes standing over a child as she played in the shallows was preposterous. As he had told her many times, Chryseis had been born to disappoint him, and she had never let him down.
She heard a murmur rush across the crowd of men. The last of them were arriving now, the leaders of each tribe, she supposed. These men seemed taller than their soldiers; thick-necked and thick-armed. Perhaps they just carried themselves more confidently, she thought. And their clothes were fresher, not covered in so many patches and repairs. It must be one of these men who had killed Briseis’ family: the story she had told described a great warrior, a man of prodigious speed and cruelty. It could not have been an ordinary soldier. She scanned the crowd to see if she could guess which one. But as she looked, she remembered that every one of these leaders had killed a man she knew over the past nine years: a cousin, an uncle, the father of a friend. It came into her mind in a rush, that there was no sense wishing to be given to one man or another, when they were all equally bad. She would wish for Briseis instead, she thought. Wish that she would avoid the man who had taken everyone from her.
But if the gods were nearby, they were not minded to listen to Chryseis. The herald spoke more slowly than the other Greeks, shouting to make himself heard by those at the back of the crowd. The booty would now be awarded to the commanders who had excelled in the recent raids, he explained. The men cheered.
‘First to the king of Mycenae,’ cried the herald. ‘To Agamemnon.’
His words were lost in a sea of shouts, not all of which, Chryseis thought, were approving. A heavy-set man, his greying hair in a sharp widow’s peak, was standing directly in front of Chryseis. This was the most powerful of all the Greeks, she knew. The king of kings, and brother of Menelaus, whose wife was now ensconced in the citadel of Troy with her lover, Paris. Agamemnon was the one who had assembled the Greeks for their campaign against Troy. He quieted the roar from his Argive soldiers with a small wave of his hand, and stepped forward.
‘To Agamemnon,’ repeated the herald, ‘the Greeks award the first choice of the slaves.’
Agamemnon barely looked at the line of women in front of him.
‘I’ll take that one,’ he said, jerking his head at Chryseis. A man’s hand grabbed Chryseis from behind and thrust her at the Argive king. Men laughed as she stumbled but she managed to stay upright. She felt a jolt of pain in her foot, and she was grateful, because it distracted her briefly from looking at the fat old man who had just made her his own.
‘Come,’ said Agamemnon. ‘No, wait.’ He turned to the herald. ‘Allot all the women and then we shall take them to our quarters. I want to see what the others pick first.’ His men roared again. Chryseis stepped back into her place.
‘Second,’ cried the herald, ‘to the greatest warrior among us, Achilles.’
The noise was deafening. This was the man whom these soldiers loved the most. Chryseis watched Agamemnon’s expression as he too realized that the shouts for him had been cursory. His old man’s face – Agamemnon was older than Chryseis’ father, and she tried not to feel sick – was consumed with jealousy. Chryseis allowed her eyes to flicker to where the noise was loudest. That must be Achilles, scourge of the Trojans, stepping out of a line of black-clad warriors. Golden-haired and golden-skinned, like a god. The Trojans said he was the son of a goddess, a sea nymph, and now she could see why. He was beautiful, even with his mouth set in a cruel line. He did not bother to silence his cheering soldiers. He simply opened his mouth, knowing they would fall quiet of their own accord.
‘I’ll have the one next to her,’ he said. He turned to the man who stood beside him, slightly shorter, slightly less muscular, a darker reflection of himself. The man nodded. ‘The yellow-haired one,’ Achilles confirmed. His men
cheered again, and Briseis made the smallest sound. No one but Chryseis – her ears level with the woman’s lips – could have heard her. But she knew at once that the gods had shunned her prayers for her new friend. It was this man, Achilles, who had killed Briseis’ family as she watched. And now she belonged to him, and there was nothing either of them could do. Still, Chryseis would not cry. And nor would Briseis, although the two women were taut, like bowstrings. They would not snap.
The distribution of the rest of the women, and of a towering pile of gold and silver objects which had also been looted from their homes, took a long time. But Chryseis heard little of what was said. She pushed her fingers against the back of Briseis’ hand, and the two of them stood together in the blistering sun, metamorphosing from people into property. When it was all over, the guards shouted at her, taking pleasure in making her jump.
‘If you have anything in the tent, now’s the time to fetch it,’ one of them said. She was about to say she had nothing to collect when Briseis took her hand and nodded to the guards. The two of them walked back to the tent where they had spent the night.
‘I don’t have anything,’ Chryseis said.
‘You do. Here.’ Briseis dug into the cloak on which the two women had slept and produced a small leather bag. ‘Take these. You must put them in his wine when he asks you to pour it out for him.’ Chryseis looked at the bag dumbly. ‘Are you listening?’ Briseis said, reaching out and shaking her friend’s arm. ‘Put a pinch of them in his wine. He drinks it sweetened with so much honey, he won’t taste them. It’s important.’
‘What will happen?’ Chryseis whispered. ‘Will it poison him?’
Briseis shook her head. ‘It will leave him . . .’ She paused. ‘Leave him uninterested in you. Or unable. He may become angry when it happens. He might hit you. But he will still be incapable, do you understand?’ Chryseis nodded. Briseis knew her darkest fears before she knew them herself. A strand of hair fell in front of her face and Briseis reached out, unthinking, and tucked it behind her ear.
‘If he becomes very angry, you should ask him if he has a daughter,’ Briseis continued. ‘He becomes melancholy when he thinks about his daughter. It will make him less likely to hurt you.’
‘Thank you,’ Chryseis said. ‘But what will you do? Don’t you need these for yourself?’
Briseis shrugged. ‘I will manage,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to worry about me.’
‘Will I see you again?’ Chryseis asked.
‘Of course. The camp is not as large as all that. The men will be away fighting many times, we will find each other then. In the mornings. By the water. Will you remember?’
Chryseis nodded again. She would never forget anything Briseis said to her.
*
Briseis walked five paces behind the man who had killed her family. She watched his smooth calves – impossibly unmarked after all these years of fighting – bulge as his feet touched the ground. He was tall, broad across the shoulders, narrow across the hips. His biceps were thick like the haunches of a bull. But he stepped so lightly that the leather of his boots did not even creak as he moved. The man who walked beside him was not quite so tall, or so broad, or so muscular. His hair was darker, a mousy brown, and his skin was covered in the small tattoos of war: the crimson lines of long-healed wounds. He had to extend his stride a little beyond its natural length to keep in step with Achilles. Briseis watched his hips twitch as he tried to maintain the pace. It was this man who looked back, every few steps, to check that she was behind them. He could not have thought she would run away: the Myrmidons – Achilles’ men – surrounded her. Yet still he turned to look at her, and then back to Achilles.
‘Pompous old fool,’ Achilles was saying. ‘His desperation disgusts me, I can smell it on him.’
‘Of course he’s desperate,’ the smaller man said. His tone was soothing, as though he were calming an anxious horse. ‘He knows what they all know: that you are the greatest of the Greeks. It sickens him, the envy. It bites at him from within.’
Achilles nodded. ‘How many more lives must I take?’ he asked, and suddenly he was plaintive, like a child. ‘Before they give me my due?’
‘The men give you your due,’ his friend replied. But he spoke slowly, his tone that of consolation rather than contradiction. ‘It is not surprising that Agamemnon will not acknowledge your superiority. What would that leave him with?’
‘His own shallow pride,’ Achilles snapped. ‘Which is everything he deserves. He is not the son of a goddess, he has nothing in his ancestry but cursed blood and good luck. Instead of which he walks around, puffed up with his misplaced sense of self-worth, taking first pick of the treasure won by my sword and mine alone.’ His friend said nothing, but Briseis still felt the tension spring up between them. ‘Not alone,’ Achilles corrected himself.
‘The majority of booty was won by your sword,’ his friend murmured.
‘By my Myrmidons, under my command,’ Achilles agreed.
Briseis had watched him scythe through her city, his sword swinging down from the back of his horse, culling anyone who could not move out of his way. Her elderly father, her strong husband, her young brothers, her demented mother, cut down one after another, with no pause to consider their worthiness as his opponents, their fitness to fight. He slaughtered the Lyrnessans as easily as drawing breath. His men had been needed for one thing and one thing only: gathering up the treasure, the women, the children that this one-man killing spree had won for them. Achilles was trying to console this man about his lesser martial prowess, Briseis realized, at the same time as his friend was trying to calm him down. How curious, she thought. Two warriors determined to be so kind to one another.
‘He picked the wrong girl,’ the smaller man smiled.
Achilles looked across at him. ‘Of course he did,’ he said. ‘He picked the one on the end. Once the guards had placed her there, he was always going to. As soon as other men had judged her the most beautiful, he followed them. He is a follower of men, in all things. Even women.’
‘I can’t imagine how they ordered the women like that,’ the second man replied. ‘A blind man can see she is the most beautiful woman we have ever captured. Helen herself could not be more perfect.’
Achilles smiled, his face transforming into a sweetness which Briseis knew to be false. ‘You can’t imagine?’ he asked.
The man stopped dead, but Achilles did not, and his friend had to run a few steps to catch him up again.
‘You bribed them!’ he said.
Achilles laughed. ‘Of course I bribed them. You said she was the one you wanted, and I wanted you to have her. I would rather have picked her first, as was my right. But I knew you would prefer me not to argue with Agamemnon about that again. So I rigged his choice in your favour. I knew he wouldn’t realize, because the other one was younger. But you liked this one better.’ The man said nothing. ‘You’re not angry, are you?’ Achilles said, and again Briseis heard the child behind the man.
‘Of course not,’ said his friend, patting the warrior’s arm. ‘I’m surprised. I didn’t think you had such a mind for subterfuge.’
‘It was Nestor’s idea,’ Achilles replied. ‘The wily old man will do anything to keep the peace, you know. Even if it means cheating his king of the first pick.’
‘Agamemnon chose first,’ the second man said. ‘He’ll never be able to say he didn’t.’
‘Imagine his face when he looks at that girl by torchlight tonight, and sees she is scarcely more than a child,’ Achilles said. ‘You should send your girl to collect water as close to his quarters as possible every day, so he can see what he missed out on.’
‘I will,’ the man said. ‘I’ll take her there myself, so I can see his expression and report it back to you in every detail.’
‘That alone would make the bribe cheap,’ Achilles said. And, saying nothing, her eyes on the ground in front of her, Briseis kept walking behind them.
*
&nbs
p; Chryseis was sitting on a low stool outside the tent of the Argive commander, gulping in the clean, salt-washed air. Agamemnon’s tent reeked, like a filthy stable. The man seemed unable to discern the thick staleness which caught in her throat. And none of his advisers seemed willing to say anything. They laughed at him behind his back, Chryseis had seen. The short, stocky one with the cunning eyes – Odysseus – and the young one like a stout tree – Diomedes – pulled faces at one another when Agamemnon’s back was turned. They found his personal quarters as disgusting as she did.
But at least Chryseis had the herbs which Briseis had given her. She had followed the older woman’s instructions and dropped a few small leaves in Agamemnon’s wine as soon as the sun began to dip over the sea. Every night, the commander had lurched at her, grabbed whatever of her he could reach, but he had fallen into a deathlike unconsciousness before he could do more than pull ineffectually at her clothing. Chryseis wondered if she was giving him too high a dose. She was not especially worried about poisoning him, though she sensed that she would be in trouble if Agamemnon was found dead with small flecks of foam around his lips. But she looked into the small leather bag every day, trying to calculate when the herbs would run out. Could Briseis supply her with more, or direct her to the plants she needed to find? Or, as seemed more likely, had she brought the mixture with her from Lyrnessus? Chryseis felt a twisting in her stomach at the thought that the bag she was holding contained all there would ever be.
Sitting behind the tents, it took her a moment to notice the flurry of activity at the front of the Argive camp, the sound of men and hooves hastening across damp ground. She heard shouts and muffled whispers and more shouts, and eventually Agamemnon’s voice, demanding to know who was asking for an audience with him.
Chryseis preferred to stay out of sight of the soldiers, keeping herself to the places where other captured women and camp-followers congregated: near the cooking pots and the stream where they washed their clothes. But curiosity overwhelmed her, and she crept round the edge of the tent, holding herself close beside it, in the hope that she wouldn’t be noticed.
A Thousand Ships Page 7
