by David Malouf
Feeling hollow himself, as if his packed chest and limbs were without substance, he had got to his feet, and reeling a little, stepped outside to observe for himself what was under way.
Out there on the glittering plain, a figure dressed like him and moving as he did, resplendent in his harness, breastplate and greaves and holding aloft his studded shield, was standing alone between the lines. When the Greeks for a second time shouted his name, the figure turned in acknowledgement. His right arm jerked and hoisted aloft the flashing shield.
There was a rush, a great noise of raucous breath and clashing metal. Swords, heads, shoulders everywhere. ‘Patroclus!’ he had shouted, but silently, his cry snuffed out in the far-off spaces of his skull by the clangorous ringing of bronze against hammered bronze, as the helmet with the horsehair crest and nodding plume – his helmet, which every man at Troy, Greek and Trojan, recognised as his and knew him by – at a sudden swing as from nowhere (the gods again, their second thrust!) was struck from his head, and Patroclus, open-mouthed with astonishment, stepped back a pace, then staggered and went crashing.
He had wept for Patroclus. Wept without restraint. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, rocking back and forth in his anguish, pouring fistfuls of dust over his head.
Two days later, looking exactly as he had in life, the ghost of Patroclus had come to where he lay apart from the others, curled up like a child on the open beach on rounded stones that smelled of his mother, dry-damp seagrass. Over the long-drawn-out sobbing of the waves, Patroclus had begged him, in his old voice, tenderly, to cease calling so piteously upon him, to bury his body with all proper ceremony, but quickly, and to let his spirit go at last and make its way among the dead; and from that night on, Patroclus, for all his lying sleepless on his pallet, and watching, and waiting – though he restrains himself from calling – has not come back.
His bones now, the twelve long bones, the burnt-out brainpan, the handful of splintered fragments they had gathered from the ashes of his pyre, are in the wide-mouthed urn in the barrow Achilles has raised to his dear friend’s memory. Where in time his own will join them.
‘Just a little longer, Patroclus,’ he whispers. ‘Can you hear me? Soon, now. Soon.’
But first he had Patroclus’ killer to deal with, in a last encounter out there under the walls of Troy.
The armour Hector wore was the armour he had stripped from the body of Patroclus, Achilles’ own, which Hector wore now to mock him: the helmet with its horsehair crest and plumes, the bronze harness that hung from his shoulders, the greaves with their silver clasps at ankle and knee.
Confronting an enemy so armed, at close quarters, sword to sword at the end of an hour-long pursuit, dodging this way and that to anticipate or avoid the other’s thrusts, searching out, as he knew it from within, the one unprotected place in the corselet – at the gullet, where the collarbone yields to the soft flesh of the neck – was like trying to deceive or outguess his shadow, and aiming, beyond Hector, at himself. And Hector’s death when it came, in his armour, like watching for a second time the dreamlike enactment of his own.
He dodged and feinted, found the place, and grim-faced but secretly smiling eased the heavy weapon in.
Hector, eyes wide with disbelief, dropped his sword, reached out and closed his fist on Achilles’ own. With the hot sweat streaming from his brow, every muscle in his forearm knotted in a last act of defiance, he met Achilles’ gaze.
Achilles grunted, gave the sword another push. The whole weight of his body hung on the thrust.
Weightless himself. All the force of his brute presence gone now into the blade as he urged it in. There was a still, extended moment when they were joined, he and Hector, by three hand-spans of tempered bronze.
On his knees in the dust, Hector gazed up at him, his grip still locked on Achilles’ fist. And despite the death-wound he had received, in a spirit untouched by the old rancour, with an almost brotherly concern, he spoke to Achilles with the last of his breath; as men, both, for whom this moment was sacred; a meeting that from the beginning had been the clear goal of their lives and the final achievement of what they were. Man to man, but impersonally. So that Achilles, leaning close, felt a shiver go through him as he recognised the precise point where Hector’s own breath gave out and what replaced it was the voice of a god.
‘You will not long outlive me, Achilles,’ the voice whispered. Then, ‘The days are few now that you have to walk on the earth. To eat and exchange talk with your companions and enjoy the pleasures of women. Already, away there in your father’s house in Phthia, they are preparing to mourn.’
Achilles, leaning in over his sword to catch the last of Hector’s breath, felt the big body sway a moment, then stagger. Brought down by its own weight, blood gushing from the soft place between neck and clavicle, it detached itself from the blade and rolled slowly back.
Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the borders of an unknown region. For the length of a heartbeat it hesitated, then went on.
How long he passed in that twilit kingdom he would never know. It was another, more obdurate self that found its way back; and stood unmoved, unmoving, as his Myrmidons formed a cordon round Hector’s corpse and stripped it of its armour – harness, corselet, greaves – till all it was left with was the short tunic, now soiled with sweat and torn and drenched with blood, that was Hector’s own. Then he stood watching again as one by one, without passion, but also without pity, they plunged their swords into Hector’s unprotected flesh; with each blow shouting his name, so that all those watching from the walls of Troy would hear it, and Hector too, wherever he might be on his downward path into the underworld, would hear it and look mournfully back.
Achilles watched. Himself like a dead man. Feeling nothing.
When they were done and had stepped away, he roused himself and approached the body. Stood staring down at it. Then, taking a knife from his belt, he fell to one knee, and swiftly, as if he had always known that this was what he would do, slashed one after the other from ankle to heel the tendons of Hector’s feet.
His men looked on. They could not imagine what he was up to.
Unwinding from his waist an oxhide thong, he lifted the feet and lashed them together; then, with the thong wound tight around his wrist, dragged the corpse to his chariot. Passing the thong once, twice, three times round the beechwood axlebar, he made it fast to the car. Jerked the hide to see that it would hold. Then, like a man obeying the needs of some other, darker agency, he leapt onto the platform, dashed the stinging sweat-drops from his eyes, touched the horses lightly with the traces and wheeled out onto the plain, half-turning from time to time to observe how the body, its head and shoulders bouncing over the dry uneven ground, swung in a wide arc behind him.
They were moving slowly as yet. The horses, excited by his presence and the promise of exercise, jerked their heads.
Leaning forward, he whispered to them, dark syllables of horse magic, then loosed the reins.
Behind him the body, its locks already grey with dust, leapt and followed, the hip-bones and the shoulderblades of the massive back dashing hard against sharp-edged flinty stones and ridges as, time after time with gathering speed, the wheels of the light car took to the air, then struck down hard again in a shower of sparks. Faster and faster he drove, up and down under the walls of Troy, his hair loose and flying, gouts of sweat flung from his brow, as Hector’s corpse, raw now from head to foot and caked with dust, bounded and tumbled, and Priam, Hector’s father, and his mother Hecuba, and his wife Andromache with the child Astyanax at her hip, and Hector’s brothers and brothers-in-law and their wives, and all the common people of Troy, who had flocked to every vantage point on the walls, looked on.
Still he felt nothing. Only the tautness of the muscles in his forearm where all the veins were p
uffed and thickened, and in his toes where they gripped the platform of the car. Only the humming of the air, and its scorching touch as it eddied round and past him.
He was waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was committing. That would assuage his grief, and be so convincing to the witnesses of this barbaric spectacle that he too might believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself.
In full sunlight now, face taut and wind-chopped, the skin over his cheekbones stiff with salt, salt on his dry lips when he wets them, Achilles comes to the outskirts of the camp.
All is activity here, the day has begun. From off in the distance a lowing of cattle, a bleating of sheep crowded close in their pens. In the stillness somewhere, the knock of an axe.
But the sun has not yet reached the encampment.
A powdering of frost whitens the base of the pine-trunks that make up the high stockade wall. Small fires are burning, most of them no more now than embers, sending up thin trails of smoke. The guards who crouch beside them, or stride up and down flapping their arms in the morning chill, are wakeful but sleepy-eyed at the end of their watch.
They are men from his home country, clear-spirited and secure in their animal nature, unacquainted with second thoughts. Their sinewy limbs and hard-bitten features, like his own, come from tramping the craggy uplands that in summer, when hawks hang on updraughts over the granite peaks, are ablaze with a compacted heat that invests the whole upper air with its fiery intensity, and in winter become tracts of ice. Their fathers are smallholders who raise wheat in the deep soil of the flatlands and grow small sweet grapes on the ridges above; keep herds of long-horned cattle, and sheep whose milk goes into the curds their women make. On their tongues, as on his, the harsh north-country dialect, full of insults that are also backhanded terms of affection. Its wry jokes and weather-rhymes are the proof in their mouths of a link between them that is older than the oaths of loyalty they swear.
They have the minds of hawks, these men, of foxes and of the wolves that come at night to the snowy folds and are tracked and hunted. They love him. He has long since won their love. It is unconditional.
But when they look at him these days, what they see confounds them. They no longer know what authority they are under. He is their leader, but he breaks daily every rule they have been taught to live by. Their only explanation is that he is mad. That some rough-haired god has darkened his mind and moves now like an opposing stranger in him, occupying the place where reason and rule should be, and sleep, and honour of other men and the gods.
He makes his way past them, and on to where his horses are kept, and the fast light chariot where Patroclus once stood beside him is housed in its shed. He calls up his grooms. Orders them, as he has each morning now for eleven days, to lead out his horses, wheel out his chariot and make all ready for use.
The men obey, but they know what he has in mind and cannot bear to meet his eye.
He watches them work, striding impatiently up and down the yard. On the lookout for some fault he may find with them. Inwardly raging.
But they know how he is these mornings and take care. When the horses come trotting out they are combed and glossy, the spokes and felloes of the chariot wheels have been sponged clean, the rails of the car freshly burnished. They have done their work well. He is punctilious, but so are they. Let him rage as he will and do his looking.
They smile at one another, but show nothing when, after walking twice around the car and stopping half a dozen times to scrutinise their work, he nods and turns to the horses.
These horses were a gift from the gods at his parents’ wedding. Balius and Xanthus, they are called. He whispers a word or two in their ear that the grooms do not catch, and they lift their heads, shake their oiled manes, their dark coats rippling. Though they have a divine spark and are immortal, they are also creatures like any other, and so sensitive in their animal nature, so responsive to every shift of their master’s thought, that they seem endowed with a reason and sympathy that is almost human.
Xanthus, the more nervous, the more impulsive of the two, is Achilles’ favourite. He lays his hand now, very gently, on the satiny hide; senses the lightning quiver of muscle under the almost transparent skin. Leaning close to the leathery soft lip, and feeling warm breath on his cheek, he experiences a rush of tenderness that might be for himself; of awe too at the other life of this magic being; and when he observes the eyes of the grooms upon him with their question – What’s he up to now? – a kind of envy for how free the creature is of a self-consciousness that at times makes us strange to ourselves and darkly divided.
He gives Xanthus a hearty thwack on the rump, then, leaping nimbly into the car, drives slowly to where Hector’s corpse, the feet still lashed together, the arms outflung, lies tumbled in the dirt. No need to get down. He can see from where he stands that all is as it was yesterday, and the day before, and as it has been each day since the beginning. The gods continue to defy him.
Hector lies as if sleeping. His features are those of a young bridegroom newly refreshed, his locks glossy-black as in life, the brow like marble, all the welts and gashes where yesterday bone showed through smoothly sealed and the torn flesh made whole again.
Half-blind with rage, Achilles jumps down from the car, hoists the corpse by its feet to the axlebar, and with a brutal swiftness loops the thong three times round the bar, jerks it firm, then savagely knots it. He is dealing with a sack of bones. As the dogs know, who yelp and howl at having been kept so long from what they would tear at.
‘Later,’ their keeper whispers as, crouched beside them and holding fast to their leads, he watches Achilles at his task. ‘Later, my loves,’ he tells them. ‘When he is finished with it.’
Achilles has remounted the car. A trail of dust billows behind him as he drives out across the plain. Ahead, the barrow with the bones of Patroclus, marking the spot where he had erected the pyre, a hundred feet long, a hundred feet wide, where Patroclus was burned.
Fat sheep and cattle had been slaughtered round the base. He himself had cut gobbets of fat from the carcasses and covered the body with them; laid precious two-handled jars filled with oil and honey against the bier, and cast four splendid horses on the pyre that screamed and shook fire from their coats when their throats were slashed. He had cut the throats as well of two of the nine dogs Patroclus kept, and dragged a dozen highborn Trojan prisoners to the place, all the time raging and weeping. And still it was not enough. Still his grief was not consumed.
All that great pile of offerings is gone now over the plain, as smuts and scattered ashes. Only the barrow remains, and the urn with his dear friend’s bones.
Achilles slows as he approaches it. The horses lift their feet in a ceremonial trot, the wheels of the chariot barely turning.
From the platform of the car, hawk-faced and grim, Achilles looks down. The tears he brings fall inwardly, his cheeks are dry. He glances back over his shoulder to where Hector lies face-down in the dust. All this, he tells himself, is for you, Patroclus.
But it is never enough. That is what he feels. That is what torments him.
With a jerk of the reins he pulls the horses to the left, and with a great shout sets them off at a furious pace to gallop once, twice, three times round the barrow, the body of Hector, as it tumbles behind, raising a dust cloud that swirls and thickens as if at that spot on the plain a storm had gathered and for long minutes raged and twisted while all around it the world remained still.
In the yard a thousand paces off, the grooms stand with shaded eyes, watching. The guards pause in their tasks around the camp.
Higher and higher the column climbs, spreading its branches. Then it stills, hangs, and comes sifting down in shadowy streaks like distant rain.
Achilles is driving back now. Leaden-limbed, covered from head to toe in dust. Grey-headed with it. His face, arms, clothes, hands caked with it. Like a man who has climbed out of his grave.
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He is as fouled with dust as the thing – bloody and unrecognisable – that he trails from his axle-bar.
Tired now, his wrists like water, he drives to where the grooms wait in the yard.
It offends them, though they dare not show it, that he should bring back horses that just minutes ago went out glossy and sprightly on their feet, all ghostly grey and foaming.
He climbs down from the car. Says nothing as he throws the reins to the first man who comes running.
He will sleep now. Too tired even to wash, he goes immediately to his hut, rolls up in his cloak on a pallet in the corner and within seconds is drowned in oblivion.
Swiftness of foot is his special distinction among the Greeks: Achilles the Runner. The quickness of his spirit to haul air into his lungs, to feed their overplus of energy and lightness to his foot soles and heels, to the muscles of his calves, the long tendons of his thighs, is an animal quality he shares with the wolves of his native uplands, bodies elongated, fur laid flat as they run under the wind.
His runner spirit has deserted him. It is the earth-heaviness in him of all his organs, beginning with the heart, that he must throw off if he is to be himself again.
He is waiting for the break. For something to appear that will break the spell that is on him, the self-consuming rage that drives him and wastes his spirit in despair. Something new and unimaginable as yet that will confront him with the need, in meeting it, to leap clear of the clogging grey web that enfolds him.
Meanwhile, day after day, he rages, shames himself, calls silently on a spirit that does not answer, and sleeps.
Laid out on uneven ground along a rocky bluff, Troy is a city of four-square towers topped by untidy storks’ nests, each as tall as a man; of dovecotes, cisterns, yards where black goats are penned, and in a maze of cobbled squares and alleys, houses of whitewashed mud-brick and stone, cube-shaped and with open stairways that at this hour mount to dreams. On the flat roofs under awnings of woven rush, potted shrubs spread their heavy night odours, and cats, of the haughty small-skulled breed that are native to the region, prowl the parapets and yowl like tormented souls in their mating. Tucked in between rocky outcrops there are kitchen gardens, with a fig tree, a pomegranate, a row or two of lettuce or broad beans, a clump of herbs where snails the size of a baby’s fingernail are reborn in their dozens after a storm and hang like raindrops from every stalk.
