A Song of War: a novel of Troy

by Kate Quinn

  Stung, the horse seemed to explode, and their chariot swerved out into the Field of Ares and away from the gate, and again we were passing. I slowed because I wanted Hector in front, and Achilles threw.

  The range was long. But the angle was such that I could watch his spear from his hand at my side to the flank of the off-side horse in our enemy’s team, and the horse screamed. And ran.

  He ran along the wall. The spear shaft clipped the wall as Hector’s team made the turn at the south side for the third time, and the spear flew free, bouncing along the track and then over the edge and into the lower fields.

  An arrow struck the rail by my left hand.

  Another flashed over my horses.

  And then I was running back out into the fields while Hector’s team stayed in close. But their off-side horse was mortally wounded; I could see it in the blood coming from his nostrils, and I knew we had them. I swung wide and let my tired team trot; it took coaxing for Hector’s team to get around the tree. An archer on the wall tried a long shot at us out in the barley field and missed, well short. I raised my left fist and jeered, although it hurt my nose.

  And then I cracked my whip, and we went for the kill. Their off-side was lagging; he was not going to make the gate, and as I watched, Hector cut his traces, and the chariot slewed, straightened, and went down the bluff while I came along the gully.

  I looked back. Achilles had a line of blood along the crest of his nose; Hector’s spear had been that close to reaping his life, and I hadn’t known.

  The charioteer put on a burst of speed with just one horse; he came down the cliff as if there was nothing to fear, and his horse, game to the last, ran all the way down, and they didn't crash. So they gained ten horse lengths on us, and I had to catch them.

  With two horses to their one, it required only patience.

  Hector tried another throw at the turn, but I actually hauled my reins, and we slowed, and his spear skittered in the dirt. Then we were flying; Bailus and Xanthus ran like god-horses, and their coats gleamed like metal, and Hector’s charioteer swerved, unable to plough a straight furrow with his one-horse team, and they slowed.

  We shot past.

  Achilles’ third spear killed the second horse.

  Hector leaped to the ground. He picked up his own fighting spear from his car while his charioteer ran.

  “Take me close,’ Achilles said. He pulled his heavy ash spear from its socket, and I made a wide turn, raising dust so that the watching Achaean army disappeared for a moment.

  “Just there,” Achilles said. He pointed. Now Hector was standing alone near the olive tree. I aimed my horses a little to his left and cracked the whip once more.

  Achilles left the car at full gallop. I watched him; I had the whole plain of Troy in which to turn, and I did at speed, and he, mighty runner, paced the chariot.

  Hector threw his heavy spear as Achilles tore toward him.

  Achilles had his own spear high over his head, the point low over his shield, the back point high over his shoulder, and the tip of his spear twitched, and Hector’s spear glanced away, parried in the air.

  Achilles slammed into Hector at full career, and they went shield to shield and shoulder to shoulder, but Achilles was moving like a thunderbolt, and he knocked Hector flat. By then, I had my team in hand, and we were slowing, slowing...

  Achilles rolled over his shield and came to his feet, twisted, and threw his spear back along the line of his charge, an incredible feat. I wondered how often he’d practiced it.

  Hector was on one knee, his shield out of position, trapped by his wounded leg. Achilles’ spear took him where the shoulder meets the neck—went in and came out the back in a fearful gout of blood, and Hector fell back.

  I stopped the chariot. Then I took the reins off my waist and leaped to the ground. I could see the archer on the wall. I ran for Achilles.

  He drew his sword and walked forward to Hector.

  Hector spoke. Even with a spear in his neck, he said something, and Achilles stopped.

  The archer drew.

  I got another step closer to Achilles and reached out with my broken buckler.

  Achilles saw me, saw the buckler, read my intention, and ducked.

  The arrow passed between us.

  Achilles spat.

  “Your heart is of iron,” Hector said. “Do you care nothing for the anger of the gods?”

  Achilles put his hand on the spear shaft. “Nothing. I will take my death whenever it comes. But yours is now.”

  He pulled his spear out, and the spearhead, cutting as it left the neck, opened Hector’s veins. Then his eyes blanked, his hands beat against the earth, and I heard Andromache above the gate scream in the anguish of despair.

  I can tell you how the next twenty days passed. But I will not, at least in any detail.

  First, because the darkness after battle is deeper than any man had told me. Battle takes you to the gods, but also to Tartarus. For days, I was too tired to move. I had wounds; my face swelled, my head pounded, and all I wanted was wine and peace.

  It was worse for Achilles.

  Achilles was not a man or a god, but very like a beast. I left his tent and lived in another; I would not make love to a man who behaved like a carrion eater, dragging a corpse behind his chariot, refusing to wash. I could recognize that his illness was like my own but deeper, but I had troubles of my own and goals of my own. Odysseus sought me to bring Achilles to his senses; Odysseus, who for all his wiles saw women only as soft creatures, Eros-mad, to pleasure men and take the darkness from their eyes, and I was not happy.

  I reminded him of our bargain.

  He glared at me across a campfire. “Half the camp knows that you rode as Achilles’ charioteer,” he said. He said it as an accusation.

  I laughed. “They may say whatever they like, the dogs. I want a ship and any twenty women I choose; ten gold cups and ten bronze cauldrons and ten iron tripods. Show me the ship, bring me the rest, and I will go to Achilles. Again.”

  “He calls for you,” Odysseus said. It was clear to me that of the two of us, Odysseus could not tell who was more alien; me or Achilles.

  I shrugged.

  The next day, with twenty women in my little camp, with ten heavy cups of gold, ten cauldrons, and then tripods with which to buy myself power, I walked slowly across the sand. Phoenix saluted me; Idomeneus came and kissed my hand. He had blood under his nails. He was death-mad, and yet I liked him better than most of the Achaeans. He and Leitus.

  Patrocles lay before Achilles’ tent. Our embalming was nearly perfect; there was only a faint, sweet odor on him.

  Skara was there, and she embraced me. “He misses you,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked.

  She looked down.

  “In a few days, I’m leaving,” I said. “Will you come with me?”

  Skara smiled. “Any other woman, I would tell her she was full of shit,” she said. “With you? Yes. I will come.”

  “Good,” I said. “Take me to Achilles.”

  But on the ground, just past Achilles, was Hector.

  Instead of being a thing of horror, Hector’s body was almost perfect except for the red gash of his death wound.

  “You embalmed him,” I said.

  Skara shrugged. “I did a little work. I find him hard to hate dead,” she said.

  I went into the tent to find Achilles. My hands shook. I knew it would be bad.

  He was sitting facing the door, his lyre in his hands, silent. He was covered in dirt and blood, and he stank. He had not washed since the fighting. Twenty days or more before.

  He looked up. Our eyes met with the same intensity they always did.

  “You,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  He looked away. “I am not done,” he said. He had the face of a beaten boxer, perhaps just from weeping. “I am not done with all of the things I should not do. Come back tomorrow after I burn Patrocles.”

  “
I will come and weep for Patrocles,” I said. “He was a great man.”

  “Yes,” Achilles said.

  The next day, I spent part of the morning with Skara, working on Hector. My women helped; all women know how to minister to the dead, and we walked, gathered herbs, and won praise from old Nestor. He was on his way to his tent to fetch a prize; the men were having funeral games. He looked at our work with frank interest, and he nodded to me.

  “This is dignity,” he said to me. “This is excellence. I honor you, Briseis.”

  “Skara did the nasty bits,” I said. In fact, she’d left us little to do.

  But as the sun set, we carried Patrocles to his pyre atop a tall mound, built for the purpose by Idomeneus and Leitus, and each of the Achaean war chiefs rose and gave a speech. Each was more noisome than the one before; Agamemnon’s speech made my gorge rise.

  Achilles simply murdered ten Trojan boys, all captives, all sons of great men. One by one, he slit their throats and threw their bodies on the logs of the pyre the way a cook throws the guts of a fish on the midden heap. He cut off a hank of his hair and threw it on the pyre. Then he took a great bowl of golden wine and used it to wash the altar.

  He took a torch lit from the sun with a lens of crystal and put it to the pyre, and the flames caught; at first, just a crackle to betray that the fire still lived, but soon enough it rose with a sound like a storm, and the winds came as if summoned.

  And Achilles watched and wept.

  I stood and watched him. After a while, when all the Achaeans were gone, I sat holding my knees. He didn’t even know that I was there. But along toward morning, he walked to his tent. The pyre was burning down; there was not a hint left in its shape of a man or of any boys.

  I followed him.

  He went to Hector’s body. I went in behind him.

  By the Lady, Achilles smelled bad.

  “You cannot throw Hector on the fire,” I said.

  He turned so fast I thought I might be in danger.

  “You know me so well,” he said.

  “Wash,” I said. “Wash off the blood.”

  “Yes,” he said dully.

  But instead, I washed him; no worse, in truth, than washing Patrocles or Hector.

  “You will do this when I am dead,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I will be gone.”

  He looked at me, then nodded.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  I put him to bed like a child and left him, the murderer of children, to sleep.

  The next day, Odysseus brought me all my treasure to the camp of the Myrmidons, who treated me with respect verging on worship. And that evening, I led my women to the shore to wash, and I wept a little for Patrocles and even for Achilles. I knew then, far too late, that I loved him. But I was leaving anyway.

  But when I rose from the saltwater, the old woman in black was there. She came toward me, and I confess that I almost turned away; her words held no comfort, and she challenged my whole idea of the world.

  But she caught my hand. “Please,” she said. “Please go to him. He needs you.”

  I am not him. I cannot harden my heart. I nodded to Skara and walked up the beach to his tent, his palace.

  There he was, seated in his ivory chair.

  He was clean, at least.

  I gathered food. His slaves were terrified; I bullied them. But I put a dinner together, and I made him eat and drink.

  Finally, he looked at me. “I thought you had left,” he said.

  “Soon,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “But not tonight?” he asked.

  “Soon,” I said. “But first, we must talk.”

  I poured wine, a wonderful golden wine that could have come from the gods. Then I sat beside him.

  “Listen, Achilles,” I said. “You have put your seed in me, and I will have your child.”

  Then he started; his head moved, as it never did in combat. His mouth fell open.

  “I am leaving because this camp is a terrible place, and I will not live here or birth your child here.”

  He smiled then, one of those rare human smiles that lit his face and calmed the madness in his eyes. “What will you call this child?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “If a boy, after my father, Brises,” I said. “Achilles is too much name for any boy to bear.”

  He smiled his bitter smile. “And if a girl?”

  “If a girl, perhaps for my mother’s mother, Sappho,” I said. “It is an old name with us.”

  “Sappho,” he said. “I like that.”

  Later, he played. He played a long lament, and then he played a number of simple tunes and then played one and began to spin off variations. I laughed, and he laughed, and then we heard the sound of horses. It was night outside; he reached for his sword belt, and I went to the door of the great tent.

  Outside was an old man: tall, hale, with a gray beard and piercing eyes, red even in torchlight from weeping. I knew him immediately. He had stood by Hecuba on the walls of Troy.

  He was Priam.

  Priam passed me as if I didn't exist and threw his arms around Achilles’ legs and looked up into his face.

  “Pity me, Achilles,” he said. “Remember your own father, and pity me. When this war began, I had fifty sons, nineteen by Hecuba alone.” His voice caught. “Now I have almost none. And who must I blame? I could blame you, killer of men. You have been like a disease, killing to the right and left, and no propitiation of the gods will stop you.” He took a deep breath and then said, “But I know that the only blame is mine. I killed them. Greed and ambition and hubris. I have killed them all, and now I have nothing.”

  He paused and lost his voice.

  Achilles looked at him and said nothing.

  “Come, Achilles!” he shouted. “Slay me, if you like. But outside on a chariot is a ransom as great as I would have paid for Hector alive. All I ask is his corpse, even if it is strips of meat; something for me to take and bury. Pity me because you, too, have a father, and you know how he would feel to hear you are dead.”

  Achilles stood as if struck dumb, looking down at the father of his adversary.

  Then he stepped away from the old man.

  “Pity Peleus, my father,” he said slowly. “You had fifty sons, and Zeus poured you an urn of misery; you began this war, but you must repay your hubris ten or a hundred times. But Peleus, my father, he had a glorious life and the favor of gods and a goddess as a wife; but he had only one son, and that son’s fate is to die young and far from home. And each fate was set on by gods. Ask, then, who has no pity? Who is to blame?”

  Priam turned his head away.

  “Count no man happy until he is dead,” Achilles said. “The gods are our enemies.”

  Priam recoiled.

  “Take your son,” Achilles said. “I wish I could have liked him. And you, admit that you sent him to die, hoping that he would lure me close enough to be shot with arrows.”

  Priam hung his head. Very quietly, after too long a wait, he said, “Yes. I admit it.”

  “And I admit that I murdered your children,” Achilles said. “There is nothing to judge between us; we are trapped in the same net. But I tell you, Priam, we must stop pretending we are not responsible. We are.”

  Priam shook his head. I understood every word, but Priam did not; he was too terrified, and too much, I think, a king.

  “You give me his body?” he asked finally.

  Achilles shrugged. “Of course,” he snapped.

  Then he paused and walked to Priam. “I am sorry, Priam. Things change. People change. Even I change. Soon I will be dead. Count yourself lucky that you came just as I learned something that surprised me.” Then Achilles looked at me.

  And I met his eye.

  Automedon, still favoring his arm, and a stable boy and I went to Priam’s chariot, and we took from it treasures and laid them on the rug at Achilles’ feet. Then we took Hector’s body, neatly wrapped in linen by Skara, and we placed i
t on the floor of the chariot and strapped it.

  Achilles looked at the treasures. “I do not want them,” he said and sighed. “I never do. Why do people give me these things?”

  I nodded. “I’ll have them, then,” I said. “And I’ll see to it they are used wisely.”

  Achilles smiled. “Of course you will,” he said.

  Priam emerged. The morning star was up.

  “I want to see my son,” he said.

  Achilles took his shoulder. “In the morning,” he said. “First, have a meal with me; sleep here, well guarded. If you leave now, and Agamemnon sees you, he will take you, as much to spite me as you. And what then? The whole farce might come to an end.” He laughed without mirth, and I could see that Priam thought he was mad.

  Nonetheless, a servant slaughtered a young sheep, and slaves cooked it, and they sat and ate, and Skara and I served Priam, king of Troy. And after they had eaten and Priam drank, then Achilles played.

  And then Priam wept.

  We woke before the dawn. I had my head on Achilles’ chest, and when I looked at him, his eyes were open.

  “You must leave soon,” he said. “Before I try to keep you.”

  I smiled because, for a few hours, I had had him again, as he was. As he should have been.

  And then I rose and dressed myself in the priestess garb of the Lady, as I had not dressed since Mythimna. I went out and woke Priam and led him to his chariot, which Automedon had yoked and harnessed, and Skara pulled back the winding sheet so that Priam could gaze on his dead son.

  And then he drove away; the Myrmidons had their own gate, and Achilles saw to it that the old man left us safely.

  But he came back to an empty tent. For I kissed Automedon, who was my friend then, and still is; I exchanged bows with Phoenix. I had an odd thought as I gave orders to gather my women that I had fought like a man and survived. I thought of the Amazon Penthesilea; once, I had wanted to be her. Watching my women laugh and raise their children over the bulwarks of the penteconter. I knew I was no Amazon. I would be a mother and perhaps a queen, but war seemed to me a foolish game except perhaps when played by Achilles and Hector.

  I climbed aboard the penteconter that Odysseus had provided. There were fifty slaves to row, most of them Thracian and Trojan war captives. They were mine as well.