by Pat Barker
The day Patroclus arrived, Achilles heard a commotion and, hoping it might be his mother back for one of her infrequent visits, burst into the hall, only to skid to a halt when he saw his father talking to a stranger. Close by stood a big, ungainly boy with a bruised face and a broken nose, though the injuries weren’t recent because the bruises had a yellow centre and a purple rim. Another “friend”?
The two boys stared at each other, Patroclus peering round Achilles’s father’s side. What Achilles felt at that moment was not the familiar awkwardness of meeting yet another “friend,” but something infinitely more disturbing: a long, cool shiver of recognition. But he’d been hurt too much and too often to make friends easily, so when the other boy, prompted by his father, held out his hand, Achilles just shrugged and turned away.
As soon as it became known that Patroclus had killed somebody, had actually done what they were all being trained to do, the other boys were queueing up to take him on. He became the one to beat. And so he was always fighting, like a chained bear that can’t escape the baiting, but must go on and on, whimpering and licking its wounds at night, dragged out to face the dogs again by day. By the time Achilles finally plucked up the courage to approach Patroclus, he was well on the way to becoming the violent little thug everybody believed he was.
How did they come together? He can’t remember—but then he remembers almost nothing about the two years after his mother left. He knows they fought, played, quarrelled, laughed, trapped rabbits, picked blackberries, came home with purple stains round their mouths, inspected the scabs on each other’s knees, fell into bed and slept—as naked and sexless as two beans in a pod. Patroclus had saved his life, long before they got anywhere near a battlefield. But then, Achilles did the same for him, fighting beside him whenever one of the other boys attacked, until they stopped attacking and recognized a natural leader. By the time Achilles was seventeen, he and Patroclus were more than ready for war, ready to take on the whole world.
Comrades-in-arms: commendably virile.
The truth: Patroclus had taken his mother’s place.
He’ll be back at the hut now, waiting for him. For some reason, Patroclus has always hated these nocturnal visits of his to the sea. Perhaps he’s afraid that one night Achilles might walk straight into it, as his mother did, when breathing the thick air had become intolerable.
Well, worried or not, Patroclus is going to have to wait. He’s not ready to go back yet, not ready to face the empty bed. Which needn’t be empty—god knows, he’s got plenty of girls. But that’s not the problem. The problem is, he doesn’t want the other girls, he wants that girl—and he can’t have her. And so he turns the pain of loss over and over in his mind, trying to grind it smooth, like the pebbles he’s standing on, every one of them smooth. The fact is, he misses her. He shouldn’t, but he does. And why? Because, one night, she came into his bed with the smell of sea-rot in her hair? Because her skin tastes of salt? Well, if that’s all it takes, he can have the whole bloody lot of them thrown into the sea—they’ll all come back smelling of salt.
She’s his prize, that’s all, his prize of honour, no more, no less. It’s nothing to do with the actual girl. And the pain he feels is merely the humiliation of having his prize stolen from him—yes, stolen—by a man who’s his inferior in every way that matters. The cities besieged and sacked, the fighters killed, the whole unrelenting bloody grind of war…And he takes her, just like that. That’s what hurts—not the girl—the insult, the blow to his pride. Well, that’s it. He’s out of it now. Let them try to take Troy without him—they’ll soon come crawling for help when they find out they can’t. He tries to squeeze pleasure out of the thought, but it doesn’t work. Perhaps he should have followed his original instinct and gone home? Patroclus was in favour of it, and Patroclus, though it pains him to admit it, is almost always right.
There are no answers, or none to be found on this mist-shrouded beach. His mother won’t come tonight. And so he wraps his cloak round him and sets off back to the hut where he knows Patroclus will be waiting.
As he walks between the cradled ships, his mind fills with small tasks, lists of things he has to do. If the next spring tide’s as high as the last, they perhaps ought to think about moving some of the storage huts further inland. They were built eight, nine years ago after that first dreadful winter under canvas. The wood’s pearly-grey now from long exposure to wind and rain and no doubt if you looked underneath you’d find plenty of rotten planks. A rebuilding programme, then? Give the men something to do and at the same time demonstrate his commitment to seeing it through—whatever “it” turns out to be. Yes, keep them busy, he thinks—practical, earth-bound, a fighter again, nothing wishy-washy, nothing liminal, about him—as he slips like a shadow along the sides of his spectral ships.
17
But I cried that night.
* * *
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So what did he do that was so terrible? Nothing much, I suppose, nothing I hadn’t been expecting. But then, when I thought it was over and I was at last free to go, he took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted my face up to his. For one insane moment I actually thought he was going to kiss me—but then, inserting a finger between my teeth to prise my jaws apart, he worked up a big gob of phlegm—leisurely, taking his time about it—and spat it into my open mouth.
“There,” he said. “Now you can go.”
Floundering around an unknown compound in the dark, I stumbled eventually on the women’s huts. I was all the time frantically trying to scrub my mouth out with the hem of my tunic and the effort made me retch so badly I threw up on the sand. I was still wiping my mouth when a door opened and Ritsa’s face peered out. I fell into her arms. For a long time I couldn’t speak. She rocked me, murmuring reassurances—the sort of things you say to children who’ve had a bad dream—and some of the other women gathered round and stroked my back. I couldn’t tell them what had happened, but perhaps I didn’t need to, perhaps they already knew, or guessed. Most of them would have slept with Agamemnon at one time or another, before his obsession with Chryseis had relieved them of the duty. Ritsa was very kind, but even with all her soothing it was a long time before I was calm enough to sleep.
I woke in the early hours and lay staring into the half-darkness, petrified. I knew that as soon as Agamemnon got tired of me—and that wouldn’t take long, he’d already told me I was a poor substitute for Chryseis—he’d hand me over to his men for common use. Though next morning, when I mentioned my fears to Ritsa, she said, “No, he won’t do that, he can’t, you’re Achilles’s prize.” I just shook my head. I thought that was precisely why he would do it: the ultimate insult to a man who’d dared to challenge his authority. No, I reckoned a few more nights of inventive humiliation and I’d be crawling under the huts to find a place to sleep.
None of that happened; after the first night, he never wanted me again—or not for a long time. But still every evening I was required to pour wine for his guests. Why, you may ask, would he want me to do that, when he so obviously couldn’t bear the sight of me? I was useful, I suppose; I served a particular purpose. Men carve meaning into women’s faces; messages addressed to other men. In Achilles’s compound, the message had been: Look at her. My prize awarded by the army, proof that I am what I’ve always claimed to be: the greatest of the Greeks. Here, in Agamemnon’s compound, it was: Look at her, Achilles’s prize. I took her away from him just as I can take your prize away from you. I can take everything you have.
So I smiled and poured, poured and smiled, until my cheeks ached. And then, after they’d all gone, I would creep back to the women’s hut, pull a blanket over my head and try to sleep. The hut was crowded with sleeping bodies, fuggy with the smell of sweat. I’d found a place near the wall, where a gap between two planks let in a breeze from off the sea. Some nights, I lay with my mouth pressed against that narrow crack sucki
ng in cold salt air.
We slept on pallet beds lined up between the looms. The beds were stored under the huts by day and dragged out in the early evening when it became too dark to go on working. Above us were the squares of cloth we’d been weaving, rich reds and greens and blues, though even the brightest colours looked dark in the rush lights that were dotted here and there across the floor. Women’s faces, clustering round the lights, shone like the pale wings of moths. Even in bright sunlight, the women looked pallid, and many of them had hacking coughs caused by breathing in minute particles of wool. Some days the air was so full of tiny floating threads of cloth it looked like soup. In my husband’s palace, the weaving rooms had opened directly on to the inner courtyard, so there was always fresh air and the sight of people passing. These huts were completely enclosed; we worked long hours and it was rare for us to go outside. As we worked, we sang songs we’d known from childhood, the songs our mothers had taught us. But by late afternoon we were exhausted and the singing died away. Then a quick meal, bread and cheese, a cup of wine so diluted it was barely pink, and, if we were lucky, a brief glimpse of the outside world, before darkness fell.
And so it went on. Usually, I got back to my hut late, sometimes very late. I’d tell Ritsa any little scrap of information I’d managed to glean from the conversation at dinner, then strip off my finery and lie down on the hard bed. One by one, the lamps would be extinguished, though even in the semi-darkness you could sense the presence of the looms. Gradually, as our eyes became accustomed to the gloom, we could make out the elaborate patterns we’d been spinning all day. So we spent the nights curled up like spiders at the centre of our webs. Only we weren’t the spiders; we were the flies.
* * *
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Sometimes, before dinner, I would seize a moment to walk down to the beach and catch a glimpse of the sea, though I was no sooner there than I had to run back and get dressed to serve wine. On one of these brief excursions, I saw Achilles running in full armour along the shore, his bare feet flashing in and out of the shallow waves. He hadn’t seen me. After a while, he stopped and bent over, his hands resting against his knees as he struggled to catch his breath. Then he looked up and saw me. He didn’t speak, didn’t wave, didn’t acknowledge me in any way, just turned and started running back the way he’d come, a small figure dwarfed by the vast expanse of sea and sky.
* * *
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The first few evenings after his quarrel with Achilles, Agamemnon was jubilant. The plague was clearly over; there’d been no new cases since the return of Chryseis to her father, though the ritual of prayers and sacrifices to Apollo at sunrise and sunset was still meticulously observed. Even more gratifying, Agamemnon’s army had advanced several hundred yards across the muddy plain, so that treacherous little shit had already been proved wrong—of course they could take Troy without him, could and would. All the way through dinner on those nights Agamemnon kept jumping to his feet proposing toasts until by the end of the meal he could barely stand.
Later, in his living quarters, surrounded by the few men he almost trusted, the talk became more scurrilous. What on earth was Achilles finding to do with himself? Sulking in his hut, of course, eating his heart out because he couldn’t fight—and whose fault was that? Getting drunk, stuffing his face till he had to throw up to make room for more—and then falling into bed with Patroclus and lying there till noon. A few more weeks of that, and they’d both be as flabby as eunuchs. His guests laughed, sycophantically, though they must have known that none of it was true. Every one of them, at some time or another, must have seen Achilles running in full armour round the bay, or heard Patroclus marshalling the Myrmidons for yet another gruelling session at the training grounds; and yet nobody contradicted him. The only real friend Achilles had left was Ajax, and Ajax stayed away.
But then, gradually, evening by evening, the mood began to darken. The ground they’d won in days of hard and bitter fighting was soon lost again and the casualty figures were beginning to creep up. Oh, there were still toasts and songs, but there weren’t quite so many jokes about Achilles. One evening, Agamemnon pointed out that Achilles’s armour had been a gift from the gods to his father, Peleus, on the occasion of his marriage to Thetis. “Divine armour,” Agamemnon said. “Which does rather raise the question: is it the armour or is it the man?”
“Well,” said Odysseus, smoothly, “I suppose you could always challenge him to a bare-knuckle fight. You’d soon find out…”
There was a slightly shocked silence after he’d finished speaking. The mere fact that he’d dared, however subtly, to challenge Agamemnon revealed how drastically the atmosphere had changed.
I was beginning to dread the nightly drinking parties; I sensed that my presence—walking round the table, pouring wine into their cups—had begun to evoke a different response. I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’s humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it—in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. And because of that quarrel, because of me, many souls of young, brave Greek fighters had gone down to Hades—martyred youth and manhood overthrown. Or was it the gods who’d done that? I don’t know, I get confused. I only know when they weren’t blaming the gods, they were blaming me.
I was aware of glances following me around the room, and they were not, as they’d once been, discreetly admiring. I remembered an incident I’d once witnessed when I was a girl in Troy. A man had stepped forward and greeted Helen with every sign of respect, chatting, smiling and then bowing as he took his leave. Only I happened to turn round as we walked past and I saw him spit on her shadow.
I could feel the same hostility, the same contempt, beginning to gather around me. I was Helen now.
18
When I was a young girl—too old for dolls, not yet ripe for marriage—I was sent to stay with my married sister in Troy. My mother was dead, I hated the young concubine who’d taken her place and my father had become exasperated by the sound of quarrelling issuing from the women’s quarters. It seemed better for everybody if I went away.
My sister, Ianthe, and I had never been close. By the time I was born, she was already preparing for her marriage to Leander, one of King Priam’s sons. The marriage was not happy. Leander had soon tired of her and taken a concubine by whom he now had three sons, so my sister was not much called upon to perform her marital duties. She’d become a plain, dumpy little woman, her disgruntled expression making her seem much older than her years. How such a woman could have become Helen’s friend was a mystery—and yet they were, genuinely, friends. They used to gossip for hours over a dish or two of wine. Both of them, I think, very lonely women.
Ianthe used to take me with her on these visits and I sat and listened, though I never took much part in the conversation. But then, one day, my sister was called away to attend to some domestic crisis and I was left alone with Helen. For a time she talked—rather shyly, as normally confident people sometimes are shy with children—and then she suggested a walk. I was twelve, the prison walls had already started to close in. Girls approaching marriageable age didn’t go out except—closely veiled and chaperoned—to visit female relatives. And yet Helen seemed to think a walk to the battlements was nothing out of the ordinary. She was lighthearted, suddenly, pinning on her white veil and taking me by the hand as if we were setting out on a great adventure. We walked straight through the marketplace, accompanied only by a single maid. I must’ve looked surprised, I suppose, because she said, “Well, why not?” There was no point in her worrying what people might think. The Trojan women—“the ladies,” as she always called them—couldn’t think any worse of her than they did already, and as for the men…We-ell, she had a pretty good idea what they were thinking—the same thing they’d been thinking since she was
ten years old. Oh, yes, I got that story too. Poor Helen, raped on a riverbank when she was only ten. Of course I believed her. It was quite a shock to me, later, to discover nobody else did.
* * *
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From the ramparts you could look down on the battlefield, the once-fertile plain so churned up with horses’ hooves and chariot wheels it had become a wasteland in which nothing grew. Two or three carrion crows circled low above our heads. I remember thinking their wing feathers looked exactly like outstretched fingers. Helen walked right up to the parapet. I had no choice but to follow, though I was careful not to look down. Instead, I gazed up at the sky, and then, cautiously, further down to where sunlight glittered on a calm sea.
Immediately below us, all was violence and confusion. I heard a horse scream, I heard the cries of wounded men, but I was determined not to look. I noticed how Helen’s breathing quickened as she leant over the parapet; she seemed desperate—no, not desperate, avid—to see as much as she could. I didn’t know then—and can’t imagine now—what she was thinking. To hear her talk, she felt nothing but guilt and misery at being the cause of all this carnage, but was that really all she felt? Did she never look down and think: this is about me?
