Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  Nestor’s two sons, Antilochus and Thrasymedes, eager to please their heroic father, kill two brothers between them, Atymnius and Maris. Atymnius is struck in the side and falls, fatally wounded. Maris charges up for a revenge thrust, but Thrasymedes strikes him on the right shoulder, severing the ligaments. The bone comes out completely, and he falls over his dying brother, cradling him with his one good arm and waiting for death’s black cloud to descend. The pair do not have long to wait and are quickly crushed in the dust.

  Ajax the Runner springs at Cleoboulus, sweeps aside his spear with his huge sword and runs it into the neckbone all the way up to the hilt and out at the throat, the blade coming out steaming. Then he hews off the head and sends it rolling in the dust, the eyes still twisting and twitching in the helmet, as if trying to locate the bleeding trunk to which they belong. Or as if the brain behind those frantic eyes is trying to piece together what has gone amiss that can never now be mended. They stay open but stop seeing.

  Peneleos and Lycon clash with their swords. Lycon hits Peneleos on the helmet, and the blade shatters into fragments. Peneleos slashes at his neck behind the ear. A single string of skin still holds the head attached to the trunk as he falls.

  Idomeneus hurls at Erymas, who is shouting something at the time, and the spear goes straight in at the mouth. The relentless bronze tears all the way through, drives through the bone and tissue just beneath the brain, splitting the brain pan and shattering the teeth. The eyes fill up with blood and scarlet streams spray from the nostrils. The lower part of the skull is a black bloody hole. Erymas falls on his back, both hands pressed blindly to the missing mouth, as if attempting to find it and stem the terrible flood of blood. To spare his efforts, Death comes down and clouds his corpse.

  As wolves pick off lambs, choosing at leisure, so the Greeks pursue the fleeing Trojans back across the ditch, Hector included. He abandons those men who find themselves trapped in the trench when their chariot shafts snap. They are surrounded and butchered where they lie, struck full of spears.

  Many steeds are riderless. They flee, their hooves pounding like the rumbles of a fearsome storm when the earth is drenched on a wild November day, when Zeus hurls down the rain and sends the black clouds hurtling across the hills in scudding gusts. And Patroclus hounds the riders as they make for the city, the thundering hooves sending up the white dust clouds from the plain to meet the flying white clouds in the echoing skies. He cuts off some companies, blocking their retreat and wheeling them round from the city and back again towards the ships, where they run into the soldiers at the rear, waiting to butcher them.

  Patroclus is eager to participate in the butchery. He throws at Pronous and hits him in the heart, ending its business. Then he notices Thestor, who has dropped the reins in his panic. He spears him through the right jawbone, shattering the white teeth. The spear comes out on the other side of the jaw, and Patroclus levers him clean out of the chariot and over the rails, like a fisherman who has hooked a monster of a fish and lands him quivering on deck. So quivers Thestor, open-mouthed and stunned to be hooked so suddenly out of life, out of the element of existence. Patroclus swings his catch high and drops him on his head. He is a doomed man before he hits the ground, but the hammering hooves of his own horses quickly kick the rest of him into the dark.

  Erylaus sees that Patroclus has thrown all his spears and takes a chance, rushing at him with drawn sword, hoping to close and become the hero of the hour. But he is out of hours. The spearless Patroclus is ready for him with a jagged rock. He smashes it straight into his opponent’s face. Few go near Patroclus after that, and he carries on his rampage among the terrified Trojans, a wild wolf slavering, lacerating the lambs.

  But Sarpedon swears at all this shrinking and slaughter and calls back his own fleeing Lycians as he leaps from his chariot to face Patroclus, who jumps down too, determined to kill the Lycian king.

  Zeus, glancing down, knows the fates and is distressed for the hero, who is his own son. He is in two minds. Thought and action are the same to him – he could make either one out of the other and could easily snatch up his darling and set him down unharmed, back on the rich soil of Lycia, far from the battle, safe from war and all its sorrows. But he knows that to do so would be to open the floodgates to all the other gods to do the same, to save their favourites and break their enemies and thereby wreck the dictates of destiny. And the ox-eyed Queen of Heaven, so recently condemned for her own interference, is not slow to remind him of this. So, with a deep sigh, Zeus sends down a shower of bloody raindrops on the earth as a tribute to his beloved son.

  It is doom-hour for Sarpedon.

  First Patroclus kills the king’s squire, Thrasymelus. He hits him deep in the belly and brings him tumbling down out of the chariot, groaning his life out on the thundering ground. Sarpedon hurls back and misses but strikes the horse Pedasus. This causes chaos until Automedon cuts loose the screaming steed and clears the other two. Sarpedon hurls again and misses again. Patroclus grins as he feels the whistling wind of it and takes his time with his own throw.

  It is well aimed. The spear thuds home just below the beating heart.

  Sarpedon falls forward on his face, driving the spear right through and out at the back. He turns over on one side, weakly using his last breath to beg Glaucus to save his corpse. Patroclus leaps down and sets his foot on Sarpedon’s chest.

  ‘Your corpse is dogmeat,’ he gloats.

  He wrenches free the spear, which is followed by the diaphragm, and by the sad soul of Sarpedon, lamenting his lost youth.

  Glaucus gives way to grief only for a moment before turning his grief to anger. He rallies both Lycians and Trojans – Sarpedon has been the bulwark of their city, next to Hector – and both sides now clash over Sarpedon’s corpse, which lies so covered with dust and gore that nobody will be able to identify him. The fighters swarm around him like the big flies buzzing round the milk-pails in the spring when the sun rides with Taurus and the milk splashes over the rim and forms white puddles on the kindly soil. There the flies land at leisure and drink greedily, creatures of instinct. So Myrmidons and Achaeans on one side, Trojans and Lycians on the other, also impelled by instinct, fight over Sarpedon, the one to desecrate the enemy, the other to save his body from the flies. And Sarpedon is the centre of a struggle he knows nothing of. For him the war is over.

  And for Epeigeus, once ruler of Budeion, a fine old town. But he killed a kinsman there, a man of consequence, and, facing the death penalty, went on the run and was taken in by Peleus and silver-footed Thetis. So he went with Achilles to the war in Troy and meets his death there, instead of in Budeion. A man must die somewhere, no matter how hard he seeks to alter the time, the place. He is just bending down to strip a corpse when Hector comes up and smashes him on the head with a huge boulder. It opens his skull, and he sinks to his knees, clutching at his head, his fingers dark with blood. He falls on the corpse he was trying to desecrate.

  Patroclus curses when he sees Achilles’ friend die like this, and he responds by picking up the same boulder and smashing Sthenelaus with it on the side of the neck. Sthenelaus chokes soundlessly for several seconds and falls into the dust. The Trojan line draws back a spear-cast after that.

  Then Glaucus kills Bathycles, stabbing him in the chest with his spear, held in both hands and driven in with great force. With the bronze point now sticking far out of his back between the shoulders, it is clear Bathycles will have to say a fast farewell to all his wealth. He is one of the wealthiest of the Myrmidons, with a lovely house in Hellas he’ll never see again.

  Maddened by his death, Meriones strikes at Laogonus. He strikes mercifully in spite of his anger, driving his spear deep into the man’s neck, just under the jaw and ear, and following it up with a quick stab through the right eye, far into the brain. No lingering death for him.

  Aeneas, equally infuriated, hurls at Meriones and misses. The spear sticks in the earth behind him as he ducks, and it throbs there till Ares
reaches down and stops it with his heavy hand. The two then stand and taunt one another till Patroclus comes up shouting at them to desist.

  ‘Words are for the council, weapons for war. When you want to kill a man, fire! Don’t talk!’

  And he kills the nearest Trojan. Then he leads the assault again with such ferocity that both Trojans and Lycians buckle for the second time and fall back, letting the enemy do what they would with Sarpedon’s already battered corpse. Patroclus rips off the armour, which he sends back to the ships under his name. And he stoops low now, ready to do outrage to the dead hero.

  Only now does Zeus intervene, only after Sarpedon is dead. He orders Apollo to whisk the body far away from the blood and dust and din of the battlefield to save it from desecration and the devouring dogs. Apollo swoops down like lightning. With his own healing hands, the god washes off the clotted gore, bathes Sarpedon in a fast-flowing crystal river, anoints him with ambrosia, clothes him in immortal robes spun of Olympian light and sends the twin brothers Death and Sleep to carry him quick as the invisible wind, sweet and fleet, all the way back to Lycia, to a column and a tomb, and all the honours of the dead, so that his parents can mourn their son and translate their grief into the proper terms, with the sounds of sacred songs pouring balm in their ears, sung by his stricken sisters.

  And so the soldiers’ music and the rites of war spoke nobly for him, deep in the beauty of the web, where art prevails and war is always glorious. No mention there of the unspeakable actions performed by Patroclus on Sarpedon’s corpse. No head hacked off, lacking its ears and nose, no genitals stuffed in the gaping mouth.

  ‘There you go, cunt-head – try your own cock for size! Ask Hector for a fucking blowjob, why don’t you? You’ll be seeing him in hell soon enough!’

  That’s how it was for Sarpedon: just another mother’s son left in pieces on the field, fragmented by war – like his parents’ lives. They never saw their son again and lived with grief, their only companion, to the end of their lives.

  And that was the point at which Patroclus, having committed his atrocities, should have stopped and turned about and ridden back to Achilles to report, as ordered. Instead, steeped in blood and still breathing hatred, he called to Automedon and drove on to his destiny, to meet Hector. He was a fool.

  But he didn’t panic when Hector came at him, snarling and shaking his long hair like a lion. He lined up Hector’s charioteer, Kebriones, who was holding the reins in both hands as he charged down on him at full gallop. Patroclus aimed at the whites of his eyes with a massive lump of rock, jagged and sparkling. Kebriones was so close and coming up so fast he didn’t even have a second to duck or change direction. The piece of rock smashed in his forehead, completely crushing the bones, so that both his eyes dropped from their sockets and struck the dust. Kebriones fell headfirst like a diver and the life left his bones.

  Patroclus jeered.

  ‘What an acrobat! I didn’t know Troy was such a town for tumblers!’

  He rushed up to the body and grabbed it by the feet to drag it away. Hector leapt out of the careering chariot and seized the helmeted head. A tussle began as the two front lines drove into one another like the east wind and the south wind stripping the deep woods in the forest glade, cornel and ash and beech boughs lying broken together in a jumble. So lay the soldiers, friend and enemy together. So lay Kebriones, broken and bloodied in the dust, stripped of his dignity, oblivious now to the lost joys of the charioteer, champion of the throng, and to all the spears and rocks and arrows raining down around him. Little he cared who won the struggle for his corpse. In the end it was taken by the Myrmidons and given to Patroclus, who in the fury of the hour fell into greater savagery still.

  He stabbed and sliced at the torso of the eyeless charioteer until he had exposed the freshly dead heart. Then he plunged one arm in deep, almost up to the elbow, and ripped it out, still twitching, to the surprise of all who witnessed it. The blow to the brain had not yet stilled its beating. He thrust it into his mouth and ripped it to bits, raging like a mad dog. Hector stared, speechless. Even he couldn’t withstand him, he decided, in the terrible ferocity of his rampage. He was unstoppable. But as only the gods are invincible, it had to be Phoebus Apollo in all his terrible strength who came between them and put an end to Patroclus, giving the glory to the enemy. Who or what else could have struck Patroclus so suddenly on the back and knocked the breath from his lungs? What could have happened to the helmet that was so quickly ripped from his head as if by an invisible hand, and went rolling off under the stamping hooves, the helmet of Achilles that had never before been fouled by as much as a speck of dust or a drop of blood? And how else did the spear shatter in his hands, the shield and baldric fall from his shoulders and the corslet come away unclasped, unable to protect him any longer?

  Only Apollo.

  And Patroclus knew it, knew that what happens to all men in the end was happening to him now. His time had come. So he stood there stunned and squandered by his own savagery, godstruck, and vulnerable to the first man to come on him at the breathless end of his killing spree.

  That was young Euphorbus, as it happened. He came up behind him unseen and struck him between the shoulders, as simple as that. It didn’t take the hand of a god after all to wipe him out. Who needs Apollo in the end? You stick a spear in a man, stick it in deep enough and hard enough, damaging flesh and bone, and the man dies.

  Except that Patroclus didn’t die. Not at first. He didn’t even fall. And Euphorbus stood there and shat himself, wondering what the fuck to do next. Supposing the bastard turned around and started fighting. Then he’d be the fucking dead man.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Euphorbus hauled the spear from the wound and ran back to the lines as fast as his little legs could carry him. He was just too terrified to face Patroclus, wounded and weaponless as he was, and without even a scrap of armour, totally exposed.

  But Patroclus had no time to turn and Euphorbus needn’t have worried. Hector himself came up from the front, seeing that Patroclus had been hit, and ran at him, spear in hand.

  ‘Yes! Fucking yes, yes, yes!’

  He drove the spear deep into the belly. That made Patroclus fall all right. And Hector triumphed over him.

  ‘You sad fucker! You’re buggered now all right, you bumboy! You boasted you’d sack our city and rape our women, you cunt! You and your fucking freak! And now see what rotten luck he’s brought you! You should have stayed in fucking Phthia, you fucking loser!’

  Patroclus’s eyes were glazing over already, but a few words bubbled on his lips, indistinct and crimson. ‘Brag away, you bastard, but you didn’t kill me. I was hit from behind by a nobody. And fate came first before him. You came in a poor third. But you’ll be first for the pay-off when Achilles comes after you. Then you’ll see what’s what. Then you’ll see who’s who . . .’

  So Patroclus fell silent and Hector scoffed.

  ‘Do I care? For all that doom-talk? Female fucking chatter! Achilles can come whenever he likes. And when we part, we’ll see which one of us is left standing!’

  He thrust the corpse with his foot, kicking it off the spear. And seeing that he was now speaking to the dead, he stopped speaking and turned his attention to the matter of the armour, the glorious armour of Achilles. Which Patroclus was still wearing. It hadn’t fallen from him after all. Of course it hadn’t. Armour doesn’t simply fall off in the field for no reason. The Apollo story was a myth.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Menelaus saw Patroclus go down and ran up hotfoot to retrieve the body. He had to make his way through the crossfire. Hector was already handing the armour to his soldiers to be taken back to the city. Meanwhile Euphorbus had crept back out of the lines and was skulking around the corpse, claiming his hit to all and fucking sundry.

  ‘Hector finished him off, but the bastard was as good as dead after I’d hit him. Fair and square.’

  ‘Fair and square,’ echoed Menelaus, advancing. ‘And right in the
fucking back!’

  Euphorbus nearly lost his nerve again when he saw Menelaus but tried a bit of bravado.

  ‘What the fuck does it matter how you fall down?’

  Menelaus answered quietly. ‘When the fall is all that there is, it fucking matters.’

  A luminous moment for Menelaus. But Euphorbus snorted and got ready for the throw. He wasn’t into philosophy. Menelaus stopped him.

  ‘Before we do this, can I just say – I’ve killed your brother. Did you know? He got it from behind too. But only because he was running at the time. A skulker, just like you. Brothers in fucking arms!’

  The black news sinks in, drawing forth a loud lament from Euphorbus.

  ‘Alas, if my brother is already in the dark, then I will do what I can to lighten it for him. And what better light in the dark than to see your sad soul descending there, departing your dead bones. Not that this will dry the tears of our sorrowing parents. Nor will it comfort his desolate young wife Phrontis, a new bride left alone on the bridal bed, with lacerated cheeks and empty belly. But if I succeed in sending you down to Hades it will be the better for all, including your own worthless wife.’

  A good speech – if he’d made it.

  What he actually said was, ‘Go and fuck yourself!’

  It was all he had time for before he hurled. But bronze held against bronze – the shield turned the point. Menelaus jeered and sprang at his man.

  ‘No, fuck you, you fucking back-stabber!’

  He drove the spear into the soft throat and right through the tender flesh of the neck. Euphorbus dropped, guttering, to the ground, clutching at the long shaft, and at the blade sticking out behind him. This made Menelaus laugh.

  ‘An awkward arrangement, isn’t it? Here, let me help you.’

  And he wrenched the barbed blade back out again, bringing with it the windpipe and all the soft tissues, and putting an end to life. Euphorbus had lovely soft curls, like the golden Graces, you had to admit. He spent hours braiding them, tying them up with gold clasps and twisting them lovingly, one with silver twine. Menelaus unpicked them equally lovingly, one by one, before starting to strip away the armour. Blood was the only embellishment he left on that lovely head – before he cut it off. A soldier shouldn’t waste time on his hair. It’s a distraction. A good helmet might have helped.