The Silence of the Girls

by Pat Barker

  At dinner, the moment everybody was seated, Myron himself got up and barred the doors, an extraordinary thing to do in that heat, but nobody protested. I think everybody could see he was out of control. I carried round the wine as usual, though I asked Iphis to serve at Myron’s end of the table. After pouring each cup, I straightened up and looked across at him. His eyes were darting from side to side: he obviously thought he hadn’t got the door closed fast enough: the rats had got in, they were running around. Were they? I thought I could hear something, but that might’ve been my own feet rustling through the rushes as I walked up and down. Myron peered into the shadows, now and then seeming to focus on one particular spot. I thought: He can see them, though when I turned to follow the direction of his gaze there was nothing there.

  Ten minutes into the meal, Myron, by this time streaming with sweat, began clawing at his throat and armpits. The other men teased him. “Got fleas, Myron?” This was a joke—everybody had fleas, the whole camp was crawling with them—but Myron was in no mood for jokes. He got to his feet and started for the door. Thinking he’d taken offence, one of the men shouted after him: “Oh, sit down, Myron, for fuck’s sake, have a drink!”

  I don’t think Myron heard. He was tearing at his throat and armpits, he even put a hand up his tunic and started clawing at his groin. One or two of the men began to look uneasy; clearly something was wrong. “You all right?” somebody asked.

  Myron slumped against the wall. “Look at the cheeky little sods,” he kept saying. “Look at them.”

  Men at the far ends of the tables had fallen silent and were leaning forward to see what was happening.

  “Look at them, look!”

  Some men spun round, perhaps expecting to see Trojan fighters bursting through the doors. I knew he meant the rats, but there were no rats.

  By now, Achilles was on his feet. Myron let go of the wall and set off in lumbering pursuit of something only he could see, though he’d taken no more than half a dozen steps when he fell headlong on the floor—not buckling at the knees, no graceful slide—crashing like a felled tree.

  A moment’s silence. Then Patroclus was kneeling beside him, turning him over onto his back, shouting at everybody to get back. “Give him some air.”

  The crowd parted to let Achilles through. He too knelt and pressed his fingers into the fleshy jowls round Myron’s jaw. “Feel that,” he said, in a whisper, to Patroclus.

  Patroclus put his hand on Myron’s neck and nodded. “Hard.”

  Achilles reached down the front of Myron’s tunic to feel his armpits, then looked at Patroclus and, almost imperceptibly, shook his head. “Better get him across to the hut.”

  It took four men to lift Myron and another to support his head. As they staggered past me, I noticed a smell, like the water in a vase when lilies have been left to rot. Achilles went to the door and watched the little procession move across the yard. Meanwhile, Patroclus was walking up and down the tables, reassuring the men, telling them that, yes, Myron was ill, but he was in the best place, he’d be well looked after…Nothing to worry about, they all knew Myron, strong as an ox, take a lot more than this to keep him down, be on his feet again in no time, giving everybody hell.

  Patroclus even took a jug from one of the girls and started filling the men’s cups, urging them to drink to Myron’s health. Every eye in the room followed him and gradually the talk and laughter started up again.

  12

  Early the following morning, I took Myron a pain-killing draught that had been mixed by Achilles himself. I’d watched him grinding the herbs and crushing roots for it the night before. One of the legends that grew up around Achilles was that he had remarkable powers of healing. Whether he actually had such powers or not, I don’t know. The draught certainly didn’t cure Myron, though it did, to be fair, relieve the pain.

  I found Myron in the hospital hut propped up on pillows, tousle-haired and sweaty, still pawing at his neck, armpits and groin. His skin was hot to the touch and the swellings had begun to stink. When, gritting my teeth, I made myself feel his neck, he grasped my wrist and tried to pull me down onto the bed, which was when I knew his mind was gone. He kept staring into the shadows and muttering about rats, though there weren’t any to be seen. Mixed in with his delirium, there were occasional moments of clarity. In one of them, I asked him how he felt.

  “I’m not ill,” he said, pettishly. “It’s just the bloody rats, I’ve let it get to me.”

  “There weren’t so many this morning.”

  That was just intended to soothe him. I realized only after I said it that it was true. He brightened slightly and finished off the dark, bitter-smelling draught. I made to leave, promising to bring him another cup. It did seem to be doing him some good, though I suspected that was mainly because he knew it came from Achilles. At the door, I turned to look back. He seemed considerably more comfortable, even sliding down the bed and pulling up the sheets to cover the black mat of hair on his chest.

  A few hours later, I took another dose across to him and was shocked to see the deterioration. He’d thrown off the sheets and was lying half on the bed, half on the floor, his tunic rucked up round his waist. I could see the swellings in his groin bulging out of the fuzz of black hair like horrible, overripe figs. He’d vomited all over his chest and neck, a ropey mixture of mucus and bile. No solids, I noticed, but then he hadn’t eaten anything that day and not much the day before. One hand was at his groin, the other at his neck—and his skin when I touched it was so hot I involuntarily snatched my hand back. He muttered something. I supposed it was about the rats, but then I caught the word “fire.” “On fire” he seemed to be saying, but his throat was so clogged he couldn’t get the words out. I offered him the cup, but he was obviously incapable of grasping it, so I bent over him and dribbled some of the dark brown liquid into his mouth. Almost at once, he vomited. I tried him on water and that came back too, though at least he’d been able to rinse his mouth and moisten his lips; he was burning up.

  Even in his weakened state, he struggled to pull himself up when Achilles entered the room, sitting to attention, almost, and stretching his neck as if to distance himself from the sweating, stinking lump his body had become. “Sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No need,” Achilles said. “The rats have gone.”

  After a few minutes Achilles left, no doubt going down to the sea to swim before dinner. The door banged shut behind him, releasing a puff of cleaner air, but I’d no sooner felt it on my skin than it was gone. Still I lingered, managing to get a little more of the draught into Myron, whose eyes were starting to close. Shortly afterwards, he fell into a deep sleep and I was able to leave the hospital hut and go back across to the main hall, where the captains were starting to gather. I fetched a jug from the sideboard and was about to start my rounds, beginning, as always, with Achilles, when Patroclus took the jug from me and told me to go into the living quarters and get some rest.

  That night, when I went to see Myron again, I really thought he was getting better—he seemed a lot brighter and was talking coherently again—but by the next morning he was worse, much worse, tossing and turning on sweat-soaked sheets, muttering constantly, though nothing he said made any sense. I called some of the other women and we bathed him, one girl turning aside to gag as the stench became too much for her.

  Achilles, still in full armour, came in as soon as he got back from the fighting. He paused inside the doorway, obviously shocked. There were white crusts on Myron’s lips like the fungus you sometimes see on fallen trees, and the corners of his mouth cracked when he tried to speak. Patroclus came in a few minutes later and looked across the bed at Achilles, who shook his head.

  “I’ll stay with him,” Patroclus said.

  “No, you won’t,” Achilles said. “You need something to eat.”

  “So do you. Go on, bugger off, I’
ll stay.”

  But Achilles sat down on the end of the bed and placed the palms of his hands on the soles of Myron’s feet. It seemed to me a strange gesture of tenderness towards a man who had so little to recommend him, but obviously Achilles saw a different side to him. They were comrades, after all.

  “Get some water, will you?” Achilles asked.

  This seemed to be addressed to me so I went and fetched a jug of clean water from the vat near the door. Achilles took it from me and tried to force some into Myron’s mouth. Myron was muttering, “Rats, rats…” and then again, as he seemed momentarily to recognize Achilles, “Sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  But Myron was past caring whose fault it was. The end had come so quickly I think it took us all by surprise. We waited for the next breath. When it didn’t come, Achilles felt for the pulse in Myron’s neck, moving his fingers a little from side to side…“No, it’s over.” He closed Myron’s eyelids, stood breathing deeply for a moment and then turned to Patroclus. “The sooner he’s cremated, the better—burn everything belonging to him.”

  “Bit late for that.”

  “I know—but what else can we do?”

  * * *

  ——————

  By long tradition, the laying-out of the dead is women’s work—as much so in Greece as it was in Troy. Men carried Myron’s body to the laundry hut and hoisted it onto a slab, but then they withdrew, leaving women to do the rest.

  Because Myron had been Achilles’s kinsman, I knew I had to be there. So I filled a bucket of water from a vat in the corner of the room, sprinkled a mixture of herbs—rosemary, sage, oregano and thyme—across the surface and set to work. Three of the women who worked in the laundry also filled buckets and carried them over to the slab, their bare feet slap-slapping on the wooden floor. The laundresses were heavy women, for the most part, slow-moving, with broad, shapeless feet, their faces pale, moist, open-pored, the skin on their fingertips permanently pleated from long immersion in water. I’d seen them standing in the troughs outside the laundry hut, their skirts bundled up round their waists, knee-deep in piss, treading garments hour after hour. Dried blood doesn’t easily wash out and piss is one of the very few things that will shift it. As a result, the women’s legs always stank; I could smell them, though I suspect they’d long since ceased to smell each other.

  These women had no love for Myron, who’d always driven them hard and made use of them sexually too, but there was a job to be done. We stripped the sweat-stained clothes from his body, one woman exclaiming in disgust at the burst swellings in his groin. “The poor sod,” she said, taking a step back.

  But another woman muttered, “Serves the bugger right.”

  I was wringing out a cloth, about to start washing the body, when the door opened and Achilles walked in, closely followed by Patroclus. Achilles’s chief aides, Alcimus and Automedon, crowded into the narrow space behind them. The women stayed where they were, so we ended up with Achilles and his men on one side of the slab and a row of silent, splay-footed women on the other.

  I stepped forward and faced Achilles over the corpse. “We won’t be long,” I said. I couldn’t for the life of me think what he was doing here.

  He nodded, but showed no sign of leaving. Patroclus cleared his throat. “We brought some clothes to dress him in.” He pushed them towards me over the damp marble. “Oh, and coins for his eyes.”

  Achilles was looking straight at me. Nobody moved or spoke. I think at that point he saw us, however briefly, as we really were. Not just women, not just slaves: but Trojans. The enemy. It satisfied something savage and unappeased in me that he should see us like that. That he should see me like that. At last, after a final, penetrating stare, he turned and strode out of the room, leaving the others to follow.

  I knew what he was thinking: that Myron would be safe in our hands. If fear of earthly punishment didn’t make us treat his body with respect, then obedience to the gods surely would. Women are, after all, renowned for their devotion to the gods.

  We waited till the door had closed behind them. Then one of the women picked up Myron’s poor limp penis between her thumb and forefinger and waggled it at the rest of us. The women hooted with laughter—and immediately clapped their hands over their mouths to silence themselves. But nothing could contain that laughter which rose in pitch and volume till it turned to whoops of hysteria that must have been clearly audible outside the hut. The woman waggling Myron’s penis was shrieking as she gasped for breath. They must have heard us as they walked away, Achilles must have heard, but not one of them turned back and demanded to know what was going on. And so we were left alone with the dead.

  13

  As Achilles’s kinsman, Myron was given a dignified funeral. His rotten carcass, oiled and perfumed and dressed in my father’s tunic, was carried to the pyre with all the proper sacrifices, hymns, ceremonies, rituals and prayers. Before the kindling was lit, a priest poured libations to the gods. But when the fighters began to disperse, the talk was all of other men who’d fallen sick—five of them on the day Myron died.

  Soon, the arrows of Apollo were striking thick and fast. The hospital hut filled with men tossing and turning in sweaty sheets. The few brave enough to visit their friends carried lemons stuck with twigs of rosemary and bay, but nothing could keep the noxious fumes out of your lungs. This was not the coughing plague so some of those who fell ill did survive, but many didn’t. By the end of the first week, men were dying in such numbers that funerals could no longer be dignified rituals honouring the dead. Instead, bodies were transported under cover of darkness to a deserted part of the beach to be disposed of as swiftly and secretly as possible. Corpse fires were visible from Troy and nobody wanted the Trojans to know how many Greeks were dying, so often five or six bodies would be thrown onto a single pyre. The result, next morning, was a heap of charred and all too recognizable remains. Sometimes, the men following a dead comrade to his grave would sing loudly and clatter their swords on their shields, pretending they were on their way to a feast. In some of the worst incidents, rival groups of mourners fought each other to secure a place on the pyre for their dead friend.

  At dinner, the singing and the table-banging still went on, but there were gaps on the benches that no amount of strong wine could make the men forget. Achilles himself went up and down the tables, joking and laughing, always with a cup of wine in his hand, though he did little more than moisten his lips. And I went on doing what I’d always done: smiled and poured, poured and smiled, till I wanted to vomit. I thought I detected a subtle change in the atmosphere, in the way the men looked at the women who were serving them. It was Iphis who worked it out. “It’s because we’re not dying,” she said. That wasn’t strictly true; several of the common women had died, crawling under the huts and dying alongside the dogs, but she was right in one respect: we weren’t dying in anything like the same numbers as the Greek fighters. And the few deaths that did take place among the women went almost unremarked. After all, who’s going to notice a few dead mice among so many squealing rats?

  What did I feel during this time? Well, I was too exhausted from the nursing to feel anything very much. But that’s evading the question. Yes. Yes, there were times when I watched a young man die and remembered my prayers for vengeance. Did I regret those prayers? No. My country was at war, my family had been killed—and remember, this wasn’t a war that we’d chosen. So no, I didn’t regret them; though, at the same time, I did grieve for the waste of so many young lives. But I never felt responsible for their deaths. Yes, I’d prayed for vengeance, but I wasn’t vain enough to believe my prayers had carried any weight with the god. Apollo had been insulted and he was exacting a terrible revenge, as he was known to do.

  On the ninth day, Achilles and Patroclus returned from a particularly distressing cremation, their hair and clothes reeking of woodsmoke and burnt fat. Achilles
yelled for more wine, stronger wine, and I ran to fetch it. When I came back, Patroclus was slumped in his chair, his hands slack between his knees. Once I’d filled both their cups I started to relax a bit, but then Achilles leapt to his feet and began pacing up and down. “Why doesn’t he call an assembly? What’s he doing?”

  Patroclus shrugged. “Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s enough of a crisis.”

  “So what else has to happen? Or perhaps his men aren’t dying?”

  “They are, the hospital’s full, I asked.”

  “We might just as well pack up and go home.” Achilles threw himself into his chair, then immediately jumped up again. “Well, if he won’t call an assembly, I will.”

  Patroclus swished wine round the sides of his cup, raised it to his mouth and drank.

  Achilles looked down at him. “What? What?”

  “He hasn’t called one.”

  “No—and we all know why not. He doesn’t want to be told he’s got to give the girl back.”

  “Perhaps he can’t see the connection.”

  “Then he’s the only one who can’t. You insult Apollo’s priest, you insult Apollo.”

  “He’s going to need a lot of convincing.”

  “Well, I’m sure we can find a seer to tell him what everybody else knows already.”

  Decision taken. With some men, that might have been the end of it, but not Achilles; he ranted and raved, fists pumping, spit flying, working himself up into a state of near-insanity. Agamemnon was a total fucking disgrace, a king who cared nothing for his men, greedy, rapacious, cowardly, and as for clinging on to the girl…A cunt-sniffing dog would have shown more sense. Sometimes you see a toddler, purple with rage, screaming till he gasps for breath—and you know only a slap will shock him out of it. Achilles’s rages were like that. But who was going to slap Achilles?