by Kate Quinn
As we passed the ditch, the smell of corpses hit us, unburied from the fighting of the last few days.
Achilles leaned over me. “I killed him,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“No?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
We jogged along farther. I could see the battle now; a towering cloud of dust, and birds of ill omen riding the updrafts out over it, waiting for access to the carrion.
“I don't fancy losing you as well,” he said.
I tried to shrug, but the shirt of scales was heavy, and I was not used to it. “I... ”
I could not think what to say. And then I said, almost without volition, “I would rather die out here in battle than live in that camp a slave.”
Achilles looked at me. I had my head turned. “Really?” he said. “Better the slave of a bad master, I’m told, than king of the dead.”
“You don't believe that,” I said.
He kissed me—a dry kiss but a warm one. “I like you,” he said. “Don't die today.”
“But tomorrow?” I asked.
“I don't know how long I have,” he said. “Not long now. But first, I’ll kill Hector.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps he’ll kill me. Perhaps it’s all lies.”
But of course we didn't die. I never even took the horses to a gallop; indeed, as soon as the Trojans saw Achilles, or rather, our chariot, someone called an order, and they slunk away like hyenas driven off carrion by lions.
“Stop,” Achilles said. We were perhaps a long bow shot from the Trojan lines.
He leaned on the rail, drew a breath, and roared.
“Hector!” he called.
The dust moved, and a man screamed. But the fighting seemed to slack.
“Hector!” he roared. Men moved, as if the shouts had physical force, and men fell back from each other; the shield walls separated. The nearer Achaeans grabbed something and pulled at it, and the whole Achaean line shuffled back.
“Hector!” Achilles bellowed.
I could hear the ravens over the battlefield calling to one another, so silent it was. Ravens are loud.
Achilles was louder. He turned to me then, as Ajax and Odysseus, both covered in blood, came toward us. They were dragging a naked corpse. His face had nothing left of the human.
“Drive for me tomorrow?” he asked. “I promise you will be in no danger at all.”
I couldn't swallow, couldn't breathe. The corpse was Patrocles; he had been mutilated.
Achilles looked down at him.
Time stopped.
“Hector!” he dinned into the battle line.
The Trojans just kept shuffling back.
Achilles didn't look at me. He was transfixed by the ruined features of Patrocles.
“Tomorrow,” he said again.
The rain began as soon as the army had held a council; a heavy, soaking rain that flooded the plain, filled the rivers, and drove the men into their tents. To me, it was god-sent, a blessing, because the Achaean camp never had enough fresh water, and with the rain, I could join Skara and the women in washing Patrocles.
Achilles stripped naked and stood in the downpour until he judged himself clean, and then he came among us, a naked man among naked women. Yes, nude, because the dead have many ugly fluids, and the business of death is dirty, and thus men leave it to women. We, who bear the babies, and that is messy; we know that it all washes off skin, but not always out of linen.
But that night I knew that Achilles had truly been trained as a girl is trained because he came to the body and joined us, filling wounds with sweet herbs and sewing them shut—a terrible job. And we wept, all of us, I think.
But Achilles wept more than any. He stopped suddenly and shuddered until finally I told him that if he wanted to help us, he could play his lyre.
He shook his head. His eyes were dull, neither human nor godlike. But he obeyed like a child and went and sat, wrapped in a chlamys, in his great ivory chair, and he began to play. I could not read his thoughts, but it seemed to me that he played the whole of Patrocles’ life, like a tapestry, from glad birth and boyhood, through manhood, to glory, and then to death.
And suddenly he was beside me. “Show me all his wounds,” he said.
I did not want to. I knew what he had glimpsed; I knew what I had seen and reasoned. For although he had the usual wounds that any warrior might bear after a fight—a slash across his knuckles on his sword hand, a cut on his right bicep, a cut behind his left knee that was barely more than a graze—his death wound was in his side, low, just above the war belt, where he should have been covered by his shield. He had fifty other wounds—the Trojans had stabbed and stabbed at his corpse, and I spent more than an hour rebuilding his face where they had cut it, sewing while I wept.
But the wound in his side was deepest, and now Achilles took a stylus and put it into the wound. It clearly showed he’d been killed from behind. He raised his head and howled like an animal.
The story the wounds told was not a pretty one, and if Hector had indeed killed Patrocles, he had done it with other men, and Patrocles’ death wound was under the shield. It looked to me as if he had been killed on the ground. Helpless. And where the corselet didn’t fit. Probably from behind. While he lay on his face in the dust.
“Did he ask mercy, Hector?” Achilles whispered. “Did you taunt him?”
And outside, the gods wept, and the rain fell. Inside, we put balm over the whole body, so that Patrocles appeared whole; pale but intact. Skara stood by his corpse and wept; Achilles stood with her a while and then turned away and followed me to the door. He took one of my hands.
I tore it away as he lifted it to his mouth.
“It is his blood,” Achilles said, licking his lips.
“Worse than blood, my prince,” I said.
“His,” he said and kissed my hand. I went out into the rain, took a rag from the line, and washed while Achilles stood watching me. The rain fell so hard that it came off the tent roof in sheets of water, and I could be truly clean; it was cold but delicious.
I went back and got Achilles. He was standing in the doorway of the tent, backlit by the lamps, his beautiful body covered in Patrocles’ death. I took him by the hand and led him into the rain-swept dark, and I washed him.
“You will do this when I am dead,” he said. “You will sew up my wounds and wash my body.”
“You are not dead yet,” I said and showed him how very alive he could be. And indeed, I needed him as much as he needed me.
Later, we lay in his bed. I slept a little and found him awake, eyes glowing in the darkness.
“Will you drive for me again?” he asked. “Automedon cannot.”
“I’m not sure I’m good enough for battle,” I said.
“I’m quite good enough for both of us. Drive where I tell you; I’ll do the rest,” he said.
“You are not afraid to have a woman drive you?” I asked, stung by his domineering tone.
“Don’t be foolish; women are far tougher than men,” he said.
I probably smiled. I certainly fell asleep again. I awoke when he spoke again.
“I have no armor,” he said, as if we’d had a conversation. “Hector has my armor.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“That armor was my father’s,” he said. “He said it was given to him by the gods when he wed my mother.”
“Your mother is a goddess?” I asked. I knew many who claimed descent from gods, but Achilles was the only mortal I’d ever met who claimed to be god-born in his own generation. And he seemed more god-born than the rest of us.
“Yes,” he said. “I would have thought she would come. She is a raven, a bird of ill omen flying on an ocean wind, and she always comes when... when... ” He paused. “Sometimes she came to Patrocles,” he said.
I think it was the word “wind.”
My body shuddered. My hands closed convulsively.
Achilles sat up. “What is it?” he asked.
“A key?” Achilles asked. He leaped from our bed. “Show me.”
I took him by the hand and led him to my man’s clothes, and there, under the greaves, was a gold key on a leather lace. I handed it to him, and he took it.
He shook his head. “Sometimes I hate my mother,” he said softly.
“I, too, have hated my mother,” I said. “Lately, I have come to see her as wiser than I thought.”
He held the key, his hands shaking. “Do you believe in the immortal gods?” he asked me.
I raised my hands in invocation to the Lady. “Yes,” I said.
“I mean, is your belief absolute? Do you know them? I do,” he said. “It is a curse to see them when they walk, to know them all around me, toying with us as if we were sheep. Agamemnon holds himself both great and free; what a fool he is. Odysseus is wiser and still a fool because, in one snap of her fingers, a goddess can undo all the toil of a man’s life, or a woman’s. And why?” He looked at me. “I hate them. Tomorrow, when I kill Hector, the favorite of Zeus, I will spit on their plans and their fate and their crooked dice. Maybe I will take you on my ship, and we will sail away to Lesvos. And now I see that perhaps my mother was no fool, trying to cheat the gods and making me a girl; and old Chiron, perhaps he was the tool of Zeus to lead me to my doom with a sword.”
“Perhaps,” I said with my hand on his arm, “perhaps we are to take the joys we can, live well, and ignore them when they foul us.”
“That would be a victory of sorts,” he agreed. “Joy in the face of darkness and manipulation? That would be victory, and any who achieved it would be mighty indeed. But why cannot one god of all of them be kind? And not indifferent to us?” He looked at me in the lamplight. “Come,” he said, his voice suddenly harsh. “Come and see what it is to have a goddess as a mother.”
He took me to the room in the back of the tent, the room piled high with loot and chests and trunks of leather and wood. And there was the shining black chest, which seemed in the darkness like a pit of hell, it was so black.
I went and fetched an oil lamp and burned myself on the oil for my trouble.
But I held it high while he moved ten other chests to come at the black one. And then he bent, inserted the key, and I heard the clever lock click. “My mother gave me this chest when she caught me training with Chiron. She said this was the fate I had chosen,” he said.
He flung back the lid.
Inside was armor and a shield.
The armor was like but unlike any of the other armor I had seen. The thorakes was shaped like the chest of a man, right to the muscles on the torso—and it was Achilles’ chest. I had reason to know as my fingers had covered all of it, and so had the rest of me. I knew that body, and there it was.
The greaves were of tinned bronze; the two arm-guards were silvered bronze and polished like mirrors, and the thigh-guards were almost invisible, their polish was so good that they reflected light better than a woman’s mirror. They were gold in the lamplight; so was the breastplate and the helmet, which was plain, unadorned save for the fine work at the edge of the eyes and all along the crest box, and the crest itself was gold—golden feathers or the hair of some mythical creature. Every buckle was gold, every strap vermillion leather.
And the shield was a masterwork, although not like any shield I had ever seen on any warrior; it had two handles on the back, and the face had the most remarkable work, in niello and enamel, better than the very best Aegyptian work I’d ever seen. There were layers and studs of gold and ivory, lapis and jade, silver and bronze, black niello and bright red enamel; all the colors of nature, cunningly wrought in a swirling image of men and women in peace and war. Half of the shield was war, and grim war at that; bodies seemed to bleed red enamel, and they had been despoiled and lay in ivory death under the feet of desperate comrades in armors of gold and bronze; a hero killed another with a mighty overhand blow, the victor frowned, and the loser smiled, and behind them, a line of men led women into slavery, and then women gathered to anoint a corpse, and many poured niello ash on their heads and tore their ivory breasts with their enamel nails. A city was sacked; the silver-gray palace was afire, and an ivory woman threw her golden child into the enamel flames.
And then on the other half of the shield there was a wedding; a long line of women danced, and opposite them men danced; women suckled children at their breasts, and in a corner a couple danced a different dance, and the woman turned to smile on her lover over her shoulder; in the next room, she or her sister gave birth, and then another scene: men sowed grain and then reaped it; a boy led cattle to the fields, and another trained horses; the horse trainer left his work, the horse straining over a fence to follow, but the man was going to the wedding, and he was a friend of the groom, the next figure, fine in a cloak of green, and then the bride.
I choked and fell to my knees.
Because the bride on the shield that came from the locked chest was me. I knew me; I knew me in the mirror, and I knew my face and my eyes.
And Achilles said, “This is how my whole life has been, Briseis.”
The morning was gray, as if the gods were still mourning for Patrocles, or perhaps for the slaughter that was about to ensue.
I missed the council and the formal reconciliation, where Agamemnon, son of Atreus, swore various things, and Odysseus brought out ten talents of gold, ten tripods of bronze, and a number of other prizes to lie useless in Achilles’ tent. Agamemnon apologized and blamed his anger on the gods, and Achilles accepted his apology.
I tacked up the horses with advice from a very pale Automedon; and a mere boy came and helped me get bridles on the two great horses. Then I trotted them up and down the beach while Automedon coached me.
“Just drive where he says, and let him do the fighting,” he told me. “And don’t expose yourself. Look; take this.” He gave me a little buckler, smaller than a warrior’s shield and round. “You can wear it on your left arm; it may save your life if a spear comes your way. Have a sharp knife with you always, to cut the reins if that’s what it comes to. And... Briseis,” he shook his head, “I’m sorry even to say this, my lady, but don’t get captured.”
“I would not,” I said.
“They'll have a special horror for Achilles’ charioteer; worse for a woman. Just put the knife in your own throat, and let them despoil your corpse.”
I showed him the iron knife Achilles had given me, and he smiled. “Good,” he said. “You seem ready to me, Briseis.”
He seemed confident in me, though I suspected he was only trying to bolster my confidence. For indeed, my knees were shaking, and the idea of facing a battle in Achilles’ chariot was layered with the terror of failing in front of him.
And yet I wanted it.
I was standing in the mist; I could really only see forty or fifty paces on the beach, and it seemed worse inland. Automedon had left me, exhausted; the boy was holding the horses. I was trying to breathe.
The woman in black walked up the beach out of the mist. Her veils were off, her head bare, her magnificent face visible to me, and she had a knot of lapis beads around her neck and between her breasts—thousands of lapis beads, a ridiculous display of wealth for a woman past childbearing. She walked up to me, and I saw her feet were bare as well, and her legs wet, as if she’d just come out of the sea, even though her black chiton was dry.
She reached out and touched both horses, and then she touched me, her warm palm flat against my forehead. “He does not die today,” she said. “Nor do you.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Are you the Lady? A goddess?”
“I am a crazy old woman,” she said. “Or perhaps I planned your entire life: your mother’s foolishness, your father’s desire to train you as a boy, all so that you would fit perfectly to my son, and so that you could be my last gift to him, to give him some joy in a li
fe full of dregs and cold fate.” She smiled. “Or maybe all that is true, and I am still a crazy old woman.” She turned with a smile full of bitterness and walked off down the beach into the mist.
Mad as she may have been, her touch cured my terror. Or perhaps it was merely a waft of the sweet, deep sea reaching to steady my senses.
Not fear, not the trembling of my limbs, but the cold terror that robs you of action; that was gone, and indeed it has never returned.
So when Achilles came out of the mist, I was ready. He looked like a god; indeed, his very appearance robbed the cant phrase “like a god” of all meaning.
He was a god.
He walked to the back of the chariot and looked at me. “Automedon,” he said.
“My lord,” I answered. Did he think I was Automedon? Or was he preserving my disguise?
He walked forward and spoke to the horses; Automedon had taught me their names: Balius on the left and Xanthus on the right.
“Well, my loves,” he said. “This time, bring your charioteer back, and don’t leave him to die, as you left my Patrocles.”
The horses tossed their heads, and he laughed.
“Your mother was here,” I said. “She told me you do not die today.”
He shrugged. “Today or another day. Come, my friends,” he said, and he meant all three of us. “Whether I die today or another day, I mean to kill Trojans until the very gods are sickened with the blood.”
He came back and stepped up into the car. “Kiss me,” he said.
So I did.
The sun above, the heavy rain of the night before, and the deep mist over the field only slowly burning off filled the Plain of Troy with mystery. The Trojans, flushed with victory, had again camped on the plain, and, I think, had been flooded by the rain and then threatened when mighty Scamander overflowed his banks in wrath. Regardless, they rose late, having had little sleep while the rain continued. They had moved camp in the night, and their lines were disorganized.
And the plain was full of water; every depression was a pond, and any sand a trap for a chariot, so that my driving skills were challenged from the moment we left our camp. Achilles formed all his chariots on the far left of the Myrmidon phalanx, and we moved along the edge of the shallow flooding that was Scamander over his banks. Now both of Troy’s rivers, Scamander and Meander, wandered back and forth over the plain as rivers do in flat ground, and so we gave Scamander a wide berth, but Achilles was worried about the line becoming lost in the mist.
