Priam spoke. “Remember your father, who is old and defenseless like me. Even now he must be surrounded by troubles since you are not by him to keep them off. And yet, when he hears that you still live, his heart lights with joy. Such happiness will never fill my heart again. I had fifty sons, the noblest in Troy; most are dead, struck down in the violence of war. One remained who guarded the city and her people, the dearest and best of them all, Hector. You killed him while he fought in defense of his country. I have come with gifts beyond number. Honor the gods and remember your father, taking pity on me, who am even more pitiful than he is, for I have kissed the hand that killed my children. Return Hector’s body to me.”
Achilles bent down to Priam. “As you knelt here, you looked like my father. Perhaps you seem so alike because the grief you feel now is the same that Peleus will feel when I am gone. I have imagined that same expression on his face over and over, and it has torn at my heart.” Tears stained both Achilles’ and Priam’s faces.
Achilles reached out and raised Priam from the floor. “How could you dare to come alone to my shelter when I have killed so many of your brave sons? Your courage and your grief surpass any that the human heart has known, and yet you endure. Seeing your suffering as if it were my own father’s pain, I understand that the pain I feel at having lost my dearest companion, Patroklos, is not unique to me, but the agony that we all feel when someone who is a part of our selves—our children, our closest loves—is taken from us. No matter how we long for them, nothing that we do can bring them back. In some way, I thought if I could make Hector suffer enough, Patroklos would conquer death. Sit here upon a chair. Let us put aside our lamentation. Do we gain anything by grieving? The gods spin lives full of unhappiness for us, unfortunate mortals.”
Priam shook his gray head. “Do not make me sit in a chair while Hector lies on the ground. Take the ransom and give him back to me so that I may look at him.”
The old anger flashed in Achilles’ eyes and Briseis drew back in concern for Priam.
“Do not speak of this again,” said Achilles. “I have already pledged to return him. Zeus commands it, and I know you did not come without a god to guide you. Some immortal brought you past the guards and all the dangers of the Greek camp.”
Achilles turned away, and she saw him will himself back to courtesy. He called to his men to bring wine to Priam while he waited and to prepare a meal as the rules of hospitality required.
She stepped forward, wondering if he had noticed her waiting in the shadows. He nodded as if to affirm he welcomed her presence and said softly, “We must prepare Hector’s body.” She went outside with him and asked some of the women to help her.
While Achilles’ grooms helped the old servant who had driven the wagon stake Priam’s mules and chariot horses and give them fodder, Achilles and his men unloaded the wagon.
Briseis and two other women went down to the shore where Achilles had left the body. As they knelt with basins of scented water and linen cloths, the women murmured at the purity of the corpse. There was little to do, but they washed him. As they finished, Achilles came with a finely woven tunic and a great robe that he had chosen from the treasures to serve as a shroud for Hector.
Achilles himself lifted the body to carry it to the wagon. Briseis saw him shudder as he straightened up with the body in his arms. His eyes burned with that terrifying fire. Then, as if the dire necessity of anger had loosened its grip, he seemed to breathe more freely. When he laid the body in the wagon, he called out Patroklos’s name.
“Do not be angry that I gave back Hector to his beloved father.” Patroklos would be pleased at this compassion, not angered, thought Briseis.
They returned to the shelter. “I have released Hector’s body,” Achilles said. “When the dawn comes, you may take him back to Troy. Now we must remember to eat.”
Achilles himself brought Priam a plate of roasted lamb, rich with cumin and garlic. He raised his two-handled cup and Priam lifted a fine silver bowl to his lips, and they drank deeply. As Achilles tore off a piece of bread and scooped up the juicy lamb, a look of surprise crossed his face. It was, thought Briseis, as though he had rediscovered some long lost pleasure. The hard edges of his face softened. She had not been able to reach Achilles. The words of his own goddess mother had made no difference. The grief of a father, this old man who wept and kissed his hand, had restored Achilles’ humanity.
Later, when they had filled themselves with food and drink, Priam asked Achilles to make beds for his servant and him so that he could sleep before he returned to Troy.
“I will make you beds in my anteroom. If some messenger from Agamemnon comes, he will not see you there and bring word of your presence to the king. Lord Agamemnon would require three times this ransom to release you back to your family, and I cannot permit such an insult. You were forced to perform this duty because I forgot myself for a time. It is enough that you had the courage to face me.” Achilles gave the orders to make up the beds.
“Before you take your rest, tell me how many days you will need for Hector’s funeral rites. I will hold off the Greek attack for as long as you require to conduct them as is proper for the son of the king.”
Priam asked for eleven days. Briseis wondered at Achilles’ ability to promise a truce for the whole army, but then she realized no Greek king would ever argue with Achilles again. His word could stand for all of them.
After Achilles had shown Priam and his servant to their beds, he came back into the room, and he and Briseis stood in the flickering firelight together. The others had left them alone. Achilles looked at her and she knew that he truly saw her for the first time since Agamemnon took her away.
“So much has come between us,” he said. She nodded. “I am not the same person whom you loved. My wrath claimed too high a price from everyone. Too many lives gone—was our love also destroyed while I stubbornly stayed in my rage? Then in my grief I lost all other feeling. You have borne these weeks alone. I used to understand your feelings as if they were mine, but now I hardly know my own. I feel like a visitor in a strange land.”
He reached for her and they embraced. A balm for their spirits. He knew what she had endured—that was enough. So much had come between them, and yet in his arms she was willing to let those hurts recede. Loving kindness toward each other made more sense in the face of all they had suffered. They were both different people now. They could not return, but they could love in this new territory.
Her face rested against his chest. She slid her hand across the muscles of his back and down into the hollow at his hip. Her breath caught with desire. Some things remained the same. She turned her face up and tasted his kisses.
He drew her toward their bed. She pulled his tunic over his head, standing on tiptoe to reach high enough, and then she kissed the powerful shoulder and along the bone until she ran her tongue within the hollow of his throat and down the modeled perfection of his chest. He groaned and fumbled with her skirt and tunic, letting her clothes fall to the floor.
He knelt before her, running his hands and kisses slowly up her legs until the intensity of her sensations made her legs buckle underneath her. They gave themselves to the embrace of pure sensation.
When at last they lay content to hold each other in stillness, Briseis felt melancholy return to both of them. Their lovemaking had only temporarily pushed aside the distance between her and Achilles. Sorrow rose in her for her life before captivity. Their love could offer a soothing balm, but not a cure.
He looked apologetically at her. She kissed away a tear that started to run down his cheek. At least, she thought, he was able once again to sense what she felt; he wanted happiness with her, even if it was only possible for brief moments. Perhaps the time had come to tell him she was pregnant. They could share this joy for the time allowed.
But he spoke first. “I may feel the fullness of life at this moment, but I am no longer truly part of it. My fate has been too firmly fixed, too clearly marked in
the minds of men and gods for me to do more than taste a meal I will never finish. But you—you are fully alive. Your losses do not diminish what each day offers you. You must find a fresh wellspring for yourself. I cannot help you.”
She did not say anything. From time to time since the death of Patroklos, his words had sounded like prophecies, but dire ones, that gave her no guidance out of the darkness. Suddenly he had given voice to the inarticulate longing of her heart. She knew in that moment where her wellspring lay, where it had always been. Lyrnessos. Her city. Mount Ida’s forests. She had shrunk from his beloved Phthia. She did not feel like she was meant to sail across the sea to his father’s home. Reluctantly, she kept silent. She knew his joy at the thought of a child would be too much for her; she would never be able to refuse to go to Phthia. She felt the presence of another measure of distance between them.
When they awoke just before dawn, Priam and his servant were gone. Briseis saw Achilles’ relief that he did not have to face the heartbroken father and the responsibility of getting him safely out of the camp when others might be awake. She did not wonder how the old men had escaped. She remembered the young man whose divine light had brought them to Achilles’ door.
She and Achilles shared an early breakfast outside by the kitchen fire that they themselves had stirred back to life. The day promised to be warm and sunny. Achilles was restless.
“I was thinking we could go walking on Mount Ida, but we can’t. I agreed to an eleven-day truce. Having given my word, I can’t risk a confrontation by wandering through the countryside while the Trojans believe they have no reason to fear the presence of any Greeks.”
Instead they walked to the shore. When they stood before Patroklos’s barrow, he looked around, unused to having no means to take out his bitterness now that Hector’s body had been redeemed. She laid a hand on his arm and he covered hers with his own for a moment, but then he pulled away and knelt by the raised earth, laying his forehead against the dirt. He could not let anyone help him with this pain.
She walked to the water’s edge, slipping off her sandals and lifting her skirt so that the cool water could wash over her feet. She smelled the salty tang of the sea air, felt the back and forth tug of the waves as they surrounded her feet and then flowed back into the main body of water.
She considered what might happen if she returned to the ashes of Lyrnessos. Had enough people survived on the surrounding estates that life went on, if in meager form? Maira had spoken hopefully of her sister’s survival. Certainly no one had sent the hill estates word to come into the city—Mynes’s precipitous launch into battle had assured that, at least. Getting there in safety, especially for a pregnant woman, posed many risks. She might arrive and find the survivors had abandoned the ruins.
She picked up two stones and tossed one across the water. It skipped twice and then plunged below. That plunge to the bottom of the sea felt like her fate if she went to Phthia. She knew too much of palace life. As a captive—once Achilles died she would be no one’s wife in Phthia—she could not hold off threats to her child. Many would wish to seize the old king’s throne as soon as death claimed him, if not before. Let the threat of Achilles’ return vanish and the vultures would descend. What chance did her child have to grow up in safety within those intrigues?
If anyone remained in Lyrnessos, they would welcome her. She held an assured position as ruler and healing priestess. She could give that status to her child. If any of her people had started to rebuild, she had a duty to them. She flung the second stone far out, letting it arc through the air. Better to be queen of the ashes than slave in a foreign court.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Wellspring of Life
Briseis heard Achilles’ footsteps on the beach behind her. Would he realize what she had been contemplating? His words the night before had seemed to give her a kind of blessing, but she didn’t want him to know her thoughts. She smiled as he approached.
He took her hand. “We can’t go for a long walk about the countryside, but we can climb onto the ridge. From there I can look across the sea and imagine that I can see Phthia. From here, hateful Troy always fills my sight.”
She nodded and leaned down to put her sandals on. They walked toward the lower slope. She wasn’t sure whether he knew that she had buried Eurome there or not. His grief had been so all-consuming, she didn’t think he had attended to her actions, but he stopped by the small mound she had made for Eurome’s ashes. His respectful posture eased some of her pain left from that lonely burial.
“It is a custom among my people,” he said, “to offer a lock of hair to honor our dead heroes. Patroklos took one of mine with him to the Underworld.”
He took his knife from his belt and cut a lock of his hair. He looked at her with a question and when she nodded, he clipped one of her curls. He handed her the intertwined locks. She tugged off the wool thread she had used to tie back her hair and wrapped it around the top portion so that the two locks stayed together. Then she placed them on Eurome’s burial where they fluttered in the breeze like a small flame.
They continued climbing to the top of the ridge. She remembered their lovemaking in the grassy nest. They looked at each other with understanding but without speaking of it. The somberness of greeting their dead still held them when they reached the place and sat on Achilles’ outspread cloak.
“It would be easier,” Achilles said, “if we knew that when we died, we would be rejoined with those who died before us. Some say we wander mindless through the dark, nothing more than gibbering shadows, others imply that we hold some remembrance of our former selves and can recognize our fellow dead. What does your goddess teach?”
Briseis looked at him in surprise. “I never considered it that way—but among my people we provide a pleasant place for the spirits of our dead to return to so that they will linger among the living and give us protection, so it must be that they remember who they were when they lived. I haven’t ever considered what death would truly be like. Strange, I suppose, since death has been everywhere around me and we have faced your over-looming fate together.”
“You shouldn’t think about dying. You will live for a long time and grow into a gentle old age—that has to be true.”
She smiled at him. “I hope so. I wish you would grow old beside me. Why does your fate have to hold you here in its grip? So far your fate is only a prediction that has not yet happened. Can’t we escape this war together and live?”
He shrugged. “I cannot leave Troy now that I have caused Patroklos’s death. I can no longer choose life away from this war—if I ever could have. My fate is the way it must be. The gods—my own mother—have announced it clearly. If I tried to fight it, fate would catch me even more cruelly. You have heard the songs the bards sing about men who try to outrun their fate when they do not like what the oracles tell them. Better to face my death with honor and win immortal remembrance and glory as recompense.” He smiled at her. “Perhaps death is like sleep and I will be able to dream about you—then I will choose to dream about the night we spent here and last night.”
She had never confessed her vivid dreams of lovemaking to him. When she should have told him, she could not bring herself to mention so intimate and private a subject from her previous life.
Now she told him about the dreams and vision he had appeared in during her girlhood and marriage—her Telipinu, whom she only later realized was him. This revelation first startled and then delighted him. Her descriptions of the dreams broke their solemn mood and inspired new lovemaking, this time slow and tender as they both felt the presence of a new, shared history and dimension in their love. They had, Briseis thought sadly, little future together, so they added more past.
Briseis’s conversation on the ridge with Achilles about the nearness and unavoidability of his death helped her decide to talk to Maira about returning to Lyrnessos.
For now, she and Achilles had regained some portion of their love, but that would be taken away so
on, and then she would be alone. Even now, she sensed Achilles had passed some boundary between mortals and gods and no longer balanced his human and divine sides in equilibrium. Even in their most intimate moments, he lived as a god.
Nonetheless, their old love filled her with gratitude. Without Achilles’ healing, she would not have recovered from Lyrnessos’s destruction, the loss of her family, the humiliation of Mynes’s violence. She would not have become a warrior. He had been the best of healers. Her delight and joy in all that life had to offer had been restored because she understood it was an essential part of her, a strength to listen to.
Now she must live on her own. She had to turn away from his death before it consumed her. Lyrnessos called to her, but was it a foolish madness that she must forget? She needed to try the idea out with someone she trusted. Her sister was Maira’s reason to return, and Maira had both good sense and courage. Briseis brought it up when she was able to slip into Agamemnon’s camp and visit her friend.
Maira brightened at the idea. “I want to find my sister, but I don’t see how we can do this. You’re worried about getting safely over the mountain range, but before that how can we escape the Greek camp?”
Briseis told her about the route up on the ridge that Achilles had shown her on their secret night walks. At night she and Maira could escape without anyone noticing.
“If you can escape this camp, why not go to Troy where your father may still be alive?”
“Because Troy will fall and I do not wish to participate in its death. Could you bear to live through another city’s sacking? How long would we be free if we went there? My father is honor bound to stay and fight until Troy is no more. If he survives, where else would he go but back to the lands he holds in Lyrnessos? If fate means for us to meet again, this is the surest way to accomplish that in safety.”
Hand of Fire Page 33
