by Pat Barker
Holding her by the arm, he stopped close by me. I whispered, “How close are we to leaving?”
“Not very, nobody’s up yet.” He jerked his head towards Polyxena. “And there’s that…”
Oh, yes, I thought. There’s that.
The hours dragged past, as, very slowly, the Greek camp came to life around us. Everything that needed to be said had been said, everybody was worn out with grief and fear. They wanted it to be over, but at the same time they were ashamed of wanting it, because these were the last few precious minutes of Polyxena’s life.
“He might change his mind,” Hecamede said.
I knew he wouldn’t. Unless of course he’d forgotten what he’d said, which was possible, given how drunk he’d been at the time. Though if he had, there were others to remind him: Odysseus, who’d argued so eloquently for Hector’s little son to be killed. And besides, Agamemnon was genuinely afraid of Achilles, more frightened of him now, probably, than he’d been when he was alive. Alive, you could at least bribe the sod, or try to—but then, I supposed Polyxena’s death could be seen as a bribe. No, he’d go through with it, all right. He’d do whatever it took to keep that turbulent spirit underground.
It was past noon when the men came. They tried to seize Polyxena by the arms and drag her out, but Hecuba stood up and confronted them, staring first into one man’s eyes and then another’s until, whether from fear or shame, they dropped their gaze. In her creased and mud-stained tunic, she was still Hecuba, the queen. And in fact no force was necessary: Polyxena was more than ready to go. Wearing a clean white tunic that had belonged to Cassandra, her hair brushed and braided, she looked if anything younger than her age, but she was calm as she embraced her mother and sisters for the last time. Hecamede and I took our places by her side and slowly, preceded by the guards, shuffled to the door.
As we left the hut, we heard Hecuba howling like a wolf who’d just seen the last of her cubs killed. At the sound, Polyxena tried to turn back, and one of the men caught her roughly by the arm. Stepping in front of him, I said, “There’s no need for that.” And—I must say, to my surprise—he let her go.
It was a long, uphill walk to the promontory. We positioned ourselves a step behind her, ready to support her if she needed it. I couldn’t stop remembering the stocky little girl who’d raced after her big sisters, shouting: “Wait for me!”
A whole army was waiting for her now.
She walked on steadily until she came to the foot of the burial mound where Agamemnon stood with Pyrrhus by his side. Pyrrhus, still very much the favourite because he’d killed Priam, had been awarded the honour of sacrificing her on his father’s grave, though you might be forgiven for wondering how many honours a teenage boy deserves for having hacked one frail old man to death. When she saw the two of them standing there, Polyxena faltered.
Nestor stepped forward, whispered something to Hecamede and handed her a pair of scissors. Then, not meeting my eyes, he gave me a knife. Hecamede, her hands shaking uncontrollably, began trying to cut the girl’s plaits; but the scissors weren’t sharp enough and the blades merely mouthed the thick ropes of hair. So we had to stop and unfasten the braids, a fiddly job in the hot sun with thousands of fighters looking on. At last, her hair, curly from its long confinement, snaked all the way down her back as far as her waist. Somehow, holding thick clumps in our hands, we managed to get it cut off, though by the time we’d finished I was dry-mouthed, and trembling almost as badly as Polyxena herself. I had to keep swallowing to stop myself being sick. I remember black shadows on trampled soil, the searing white heat of the sun on the back of my neck. And then, without warning, Polyxena got up, staggered forward a few steps and began to speak. Instant consternation. Perhaps they thought she was going to curse them—and the curse of a person about to die is always powerful—because she’d got no further than Agamemnon’s name when a guard seized and held her while another forced a strip of black cloth between her teeth and knotted it tightly at the back of her head. Her arms were pulled behind her and bound at the wrists. Shorn and trussed like that, unable to speak, she began to scream deep down in her throat, the sound a bull will sometimes make before the sacrifice.
Directly in front of us, standing in two long rows behind Agamemnon, priests dressed in scarlet and black began chanting hymns to the gods.
Polyxena was dragged forward and forced to her knees in the shadow of the burial mound. Looking green and sick, Pyrrhus stepped forward and began shouting his father’s name: “Achilles! Achilles!” And then, his voice breaking, “Father!” I thought he sounded like a little boy afraid of the dark. Grasping Polyxena by what little remained of her hair, he pulled her head back and raised the knife.
One quick clean cut—I honestly believe she was dead before she hit the ground. Or at least I have to hope she was—though we still had to witness the jerks and spasms of her body after death.
No further ceremony. Everybody, including Agamemnon—perhaps especially Agamemnon—was eager to get away. Though on second thoughts I doubt if Polyxena’s death affected him much. This was a man who’d sacrificed his own daughter to get a fair wind for Troy. I looked at him as he turned and walked away and I saw a man who’d learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, a coward without dignity or honour or respect. I saw him as Achilles saw him, I suppose.
Hecamede and I stood to one side, waiting for the men to disperse, before walking down the hill together. We didn’t talk much. I think we were both holding ourselves in, determined not to feel. At one point, we stopped and looked back at the burning city. A huge ball of black smoke, shot through with jets of red and orange flame, billowed into the sky above the citadel. I was shaking, worse now than I had been when Polyxena died. Why had I watched it? I could have looked away or down at the ground and not seen the actual moment of her death. But I wanted to be able to say I’d been with her to the end. I wanted to bear witness.
At the bottom of the hill, we stopped. We could have gone back to Nestor’s hut, raided his wine stores and spent the rest of the day getting determinedly drunk—I don’t think anybody would have blamed us—but instead, without even needing to consult each other, we returned to the hut where the Trojan women were being kept. The interior now was even hotter and smellier than it had been earlier: that distinctive female smell of nursing mothers and menstruating girls. Hecuba looked dazed. We knelt before her and told her how bravely and quickly and cleanly and easily Polyxena had died. She nodded, twisting her hands around a scrap of cloth in her lap. How much she understood, I don’t know. One of the women was trying to persuade her to drink, but after moistening her lips Hecuba waved the cup away.
After nearly an hour inside the overcrowded hut, I was beginning to feel faint and had to go outside into the arena. Even here the air smelled scorched and tasted of dust. In the distance, the long rows of black ships shimmered in the heat. Out of the haze, I saw a man walking towards me, his shape wavering as he came: Alcimus. He was carrying a huge, glittering shield—not his own—and, in the crook of his other arm, what looked at first like a bundle of rags. As he got closer, I saw it was a dead child. I backed away, thinking I should run into the hut and warn them, because I knew at once this must be Hector’s little son; I didn’t see who else it could be. But, instead, I waited for Alcimus beside the door.
We met over the body of the dead child, man and woman, Greek and Trojan, and he told me what had happened. Brought face to face with Pyrrhus, the boy who was now her master, Andromache had fallen to her knees and begged him not to leave her son’s body to rot under the battlements of Troy, but to let him be buried beside Hector and cradled on his father’s shield. She was asking a great deal—not so much the burial, which would take a couple of men under an hour, but the giving of the shield. This was the shield Achilles had taken from Hector on the day he’d killed him, and it was possibly the most precious thing Pyrrhus had inherited from his father. Hector’s
shield would have had pride of place in Peleus’s hall for generations to come.
Nevertheless, to do Pyrrhus justice, he agreed, though he wouldn’t allow Andromache herself to prepare the child for burial, he needed her to go on board immediately; he was planning to sail as soon as the wind turned.
“So…” Alcimus said. “Here he is. I washed him in the river on the way up, there won’t be time for them to do it.”
Kneeling, he transferred the little body from his arms to the inside of the shield and carried it into the hut.
At first, nobody paid him any attention, he was just another Greek fighter shouldering his way through the crowd, but then somebody caught sight of what he was carrying. The knowledge leapt from tongue to tongue to be followed, immediately, by the first ululation of grief. The sound rose to a crescendo, and then petered out, gradually, as Alcimus laid his burden at Hecuba’s feet.
Nothing could have prepared Hecuba for this. She knew, of course, that her grandson was dead, but knowing was one thing—seeing his body lying on the ground before her, with his little arms and legs broken and a gash in his head deep enough to expose the brain, that was quite another. She fell to her knees beside him and began touching him all over. At one point, she seemed about to pick him up, but she drew back and left him lying where he was, in the hollow of his father’s shield. At times, I don’t think she knew who she was crying for. More than once, she called him “son,” as if she thought it was Hector lying there—Hector, as he’d been at the beginning when she first held him in her arms.
Alcimus whispered, “I’m off to dig the grave. We’re almost ready to sail, he’s only waiting for the wind. I know it’s hard but they’ve got to get a move on.”
Hecamede ran across the arena to fetch a clean linen cloth from Nestor’s hut and together we helped prepare the child for burial. One or two of the women produced small trinkets they’d managed to save—whatever hadn’t been ripped off their necks by the guards—and we put them round the baby’s neck so that at least he was given some faint semblance of a royal burial.
Hecuba was calmer by the end, though the wound in the boy’s scalp distressed her. “I can’t hide this,” she kept saying. Hecamede tweaked a fold of cloth to cover the child’s head, but it made no difference, Hecuba just went on saying, “I can’t hide this, I can’t hide this.” She was scrunching folds of her tunic in her hands and staring vacantly from face to face. “I can’t hide this.”
No, I thought. None of us can.
Abruptly, she sat back on her heels, seeming suddenly to be almost indifferent, saying we’d done everything we could and we had to leave the child now, Hector would take care of him in the next world. There was a collective sigh of relief as she let him go. I hadn’t known till then that I was holding my breath.
Alcimus came back with Automedon, who’d helped him dig the grave, and together they carried the little body away.
Hecuba went on kneeling, rocking backwards and forwards, rubbing her empty hands up and down her thighs. “It doesn’t matter to them,” she said, meaning the dead. “It doesn’t matter to them if they have a big funeral or not. It’s just for the living, all that. The dead don’t care.”
She was quiet after that. We all were, though the mood changed as soon as Alcimus and Automedon returned.
“You’ve got to go now,” Automedon told her, speaking very loudly and clearly, as if he thought she might be deaf or demented. “Odysseus is ready to sail.”
Odysseus had killed her grandson and now she was Odysseus’s slave. I watched as two of the women helped her to her feet. She looked so frail, so thin—like a leaf in winter that storms have stripped all the way down to its shrivelled veins. I honestly thought she mightn’t live long enough to reach the ships. I hoped not, for her sake.
More guards arrived. No gentleness now, no consideration for age and infirmity. The women were herded roughly into the arena and lined up for the march to the ships. I started walking the other way, determined to take one last look at the burial mound, but one of the guards raised his spear and I had to step back.
“Oi!” somebody said. “What do you think you’re doing? That’s Alcimus’s wife.” And, immediately, the spear was lowered.
So I was free to return to the burial mound. There was one thing more I knew I had to do. Polyxena’s corpse lay where it had fallen, her white mantle fluttering round her in the wind that would carry us away from Troy. Bracing myself, I rolled her over onto her back. The deep gash in her throat made her look as if she had two mouths, both silent.
Silence becomes a woman…
Slowly, because the knot at the back of her head was snarled in her hair, I worked the gag loose and took it out of her mouth. Her eyes gazed up at me, unseeing. By the time I’d finished, my teeth were chattering and I had to turn away.
I looked down and saw, far beneath me, men like columns of black ants carrying loads up the gangways onto the ships. The huts would be empty now. I imagined the camp as it would be next winter, how the scouring winds would whistle through the deserted rooms. By next spring, or the spring after that, saplings would have taken root in the gutters, the advance guard of a forest that would one day reclaim its own. And on the beach itself, nothing left, nothing, only here and there a few broken spars bleached bone-white by the sun. And yet Troy’s broken and blackened towers would still stand.
I looked at the burial mound and tried to say goodbye, to Patroclus, who’d always been kind, and to Achilles. I didn’t grieve for Achilles then, and I don’t now, but I do very often think of him. How could I not? He’s the father of my first child. But saying goodbye to him that day was difficult. I remembered how he’d held my chin in his hand, turning my head this way and that, before walking into the centre of the arena, holding up his arms, and saying, “Cheers, lads. She’ll do.” And again, at the end, holding my chin, tilting my head: “He’s a good man. He’ll be kind to you. And he’ll take care of the child.” That voice, always so dominant, drowning out every other voice.
But it’s the girls I remember most. Arianna, holding her hand out to me on the roof of the citadel before she turned and plunged to her death. Or Polyxena, only a few hours ago: “Better to die on Achilles’s burial mound than live and be a slave.” I stood there, in the cold wind, feeling coarse, lumpen and degraded in comparison with their fierce purity. But then I felt my baby kick. I pressed my hand hard against my belly and I was glad I’d chosen life.
Alcimus, beckoning urgently, was climbing the hill towards me. Obviously the ships were ready to sail. I turned for one last look at the mound. Somewhere underneath all the tons of earth the Myrmidons raised as a tribute to their lost leader, Achilles lies with Patroclus, their charred bones jumbled together in a golden urn. Even far out to sea, that mound was still visible, its red earth baking in the sun. And it must be there still, though the grass will be growing green above it.
Alcimus had nearly reached the top of the hill and I still hadn’t managed to find a way to say goodbye. I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, in all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy…? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.
His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave.
Alcimus is here now, I have to go. Alcimus, my husband. A bit of a fool, perhaps, but as Achilles said: a good man. And, anyway, there are worse things than marrying a fool. So I turn my back on the burial mound and let him lead me down to the ships. Once, not so long ago, I tried to w
alk out of Achilles’s story—and failed. Now, my own story can begin.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’d like to thank Clare Alexander for many years of encouragement and sound advice, first as my editor at Viking Penguin and more recently as my agent at Aitken Alexander Associates. Simon Prosser of Hamish Hamilton has been throughout a most enthusiastic and supportive editor and publisher. No author could have a better team, and I know how lucky I am.
A special thank-you also to my copy editor, Sarah Coward, who always manages to be both meticulous and tactful.
Lastly, I would like to thank my daughter, Anna Barker, for being a scarily objective first reader.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pat Barker is the author of Union Street, Blow Your House Down, The Century’s Daughter, The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road), Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, and the Life Class trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, and Noonday). She lives in Durham, England.
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