Ransom

by David Malouf

  But Alcimus, reluctant to leave his master alone, hesitates, and before he can make the move, Automedon is back. He is bundling in a second old man, sturdier than the first. Shock-headed and dressed in a garment of coarse homespun, he bears no resemblance at all to the Trojan herald, whom Achilles has seen on at least three previous occasions in the camp.

  ‘It’s true,’ Automedon reports in a whisper, ‘there is a wagon loaded with treasure. In fact, sir,’ and he lowers his voice even further, ‘it’s just an ordinary hay-wain. This fellow is the driver of it. Rather odd, I’d say, and argumentative. He did not want to leave his mules.’

  ‘You are Idaeus, the king’s herald?’ Achilles asks the man. He is puzzled. Not simply by the claim that this rough-looking fellow should be Priam’s herald but by a situation that has already passed beyond anything he has a precedent for. What surprises him is how easy he feels, despite Automedon’s warning.

  The carter, who is rather alarmed in fact at being brought into this business, and by the smoky darkness of the place, and the noise, which is more like what you would expect of a tavern than of a hero’s camp, rubs his nose, a gesture that serves to settle him, and scratches his head. He is playing for time. Now that the question has been put, so directly and with Priam looking on, he does not see how he can answer.

  ‘Well, old fellow,’ Achilles asks again, ‘you are the famous Idaeus?’

  Idaeus?

  He isn’t – of course he isn’t, he’s Somax. A simple workman, who this morning, as on every other morning of his life, just happened to be standing in the marketplace waiting to be hired when two strangers appeared who just happened to be the king’s sons, Trojan princes. One of whom came to a halt, and with a nod in his direction tugged lightly at the other’s sleeve, instantly attracted, as people often were, to the little offside mule, his famous Beauty – all of which, though true enough and relevant, at least to himself, does not even begin to account for the unlikeliness of all this. The words to cover it are there in his head but would get turned about and jumbled if he tried to get them out. And how can he explain, with Priam there to hear it, that this king who is in his care, for all his grave authority, is as innocent of the world as a naked newborn babe, and just as helpless?

  What he does say is: ‘If you please, sir, Idaeus is the name they have given me. Because the king’s helper is always called that. Idaeus. And the king’s … helper, today’ (he had almost forgotten himself and said ‘companion’) ‘happens to be me. The cart and the mules, sir, are mine. The treasure I was guarding …’

  But he does not know what to say of the treasure, or to whom at this point it rightfully belongs.

  Fortunately Priam sees the difficulty he is in and intervenes.

  ‘Achilles, I called this man my herald because I am by ancient custom used to having a herald to drive my chariot, and also, if needed, to speak for me. On this occasion I mean to speak for myself, but this good man has come along to drive the wagon with the treasure I am bringing. He is a carter – no need to dress things up by calling him more. It would be a great courtesy to me if you did not ask too much of him,’ and Priam, turning away from Achilles, addresses the carter. ‘You have done me good service,’ he tells the man. ‘I could not have asked for better. Whatever happens here, I thank you for it, and if all goes well will see you are rewarded. I should be very sorry if any harm came to you on my account. But in that we are in other hands. Both of us.’

  Priam is deeply moved. So is his companion, who rubs his nose, keeps his eyes on the ground, and makes little deprecatory gestures that suggest he has in fact done very little.

  Achilles is intrigued by this by-play between the two old men, who belong to such different worlds – the humility of the one, the awkward shyness of the other – and all the more because it has proceeded as if it were a matter strictly between the two of them and he had no place here. He might have taken offence at this, but for some reason he does not. The unfamiliarity of it, the unlikeliness, takes him out of himself. It amuses him.

  ‘Alcimus,’ he says, ‘take this good fellow out and see that he is fed. Let him have feed as well for his mules.’

  Alcimus steps forward to escort the carter out, and Priam, under the influence of what he has just said, and the quietness with which Achilles has received it, feels emboldened after a moment to go on. ‘Achilles,’ he begins, ‘I appeal to you as a father –’

  He pauses, and Achilles, who is prepared for this, stands ready to hear the old man out. But what Priam says now catches him entirely off guard.

  ‘You are, I know, the father of a son you have not seen for more than half his lifetime. A boy growing up in his grandfather’s house in far-off Scyros. Think what it would mean to you, Achilles, if it was his body that was lying out there, unconsecrated after eleven days and nights in the dust. The body of a son for whom you have a father’s soft affections, to whom you owe sacred duties that nothing, nothing in the world, can cancel. Do you think I ever imagined, when I was a young man as you are now, in the pride and vigour of my youth, that I would in old age come to this? To stand, as I do now, undefended before you, and with no sign about me of my royal dignity, begging you, Achilles – as a father, and as one poor mortal to another – to accept the ransom I bring and give me back the body of my son. Not because these cups and other trifles are a proper equivalent – how could they be? – or for any value you may set upon them. But because it does high honour to both of us to act as our fathers and forefathers have done through all the ages and show that we are men, children of the gods, not ravening beasts. I beg you, ask no more of me. Accept the ransom and let me gather up at last what is left of my son.’ And the old man turns away, unable to go on.

  Achilles frowns, sinks into himself. Priam’s evocation of the boy Neoptolemus has touched a sore spot whose ache he has long suppressed.

  Nine years ago, when he last saw him, Neoptolemus was a mere child, a sturdy seven-year-old, boisterous and proud, with flamy red-gold hair and a saddle of freckles across his nose; an impish small man with the swagger and gruffness of voice, and a brow stern enough for a veteran of forty, that children of that age, in mimicry of their elders, will assume at times with an almost comic effect.

  And now?

  He has tried to picture the grown youth of sixteen, hard-bodied and full of manly resolution, already eager to prove himself, already urging his grandfather, Lycomedes, to let him leave his tutors and the exercise of the palaestra and set sail for Troy, and take his place at last at his father’s side as one of his fearsome Myrmidons. But haunted as he is by old affection, it is the swaggering child who leaps into his mind. All Achilles can see when he looks back across those nine years is the small mimic hero, striding up and down in his grandfather’s hall and posturing with his miniature sword and scowl and little-mannish antic bluster.

  But Priam has recovered.

  ‘Achilles,’ he says, his voice steady now, ‘you know, as I do, what we men are. We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is in our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us – with all of us, every one – and the condition we share. And for that reason, if for no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms. Think, Achilles. Think of your son, Neoptolemus. Would you not do for him what I am doing here for Hector? Would your father, Peleus, not do the same for you? Strip himself of all the ornaments of power, and with no concern any longer for pride or distinction, do what is most human – come as I do, a plain man white-haired and old, and entreat the killer of his son, with whatever small dignity is left him, to remember his own death, and the death of his father, and do as these things are honourably done among us, to take the ransom I bring and give me back my son.’

  In the stillness that follows – for the noise his men are making no longer comes to his ears – Achilles feels immobilised
and outside time.

  This morning, on the beach beyond the line of Achaean ships, he had stood staring out across the gulf and felt that it was not space his mind was being drawn into, but the vast expanse of time, at once immediate in the instant and boundless, without end.

  Now, in the aftermath of Priam’s words, he sees beyond Priam another old man, both closer and further off: his father Peleus, and beyond him another, himself, the old man he will never be. And is struck, in a breath and in all his limbs, by such a coldness as he has never known, even on the deepest winter nights on the Trojan plain. Ice ribs him round with an iron grip. It is the coldness of that distant star that is the body’s isolation in death.

  The moment passes, the thick ice cracks. In his return to the heat and noise of the hut his eyes burn so that he has to cover them with his hand. When he looks up again there is, around everything he sees – the old man Priam who stands before him, the mob at the trestle table – a reddish glow, as if his eyeballs were awash with blood. A fireball comes whistling through the air, a fiery-headed agent of such destructiveness as all these nine years of slaughter have not seen. Priam, in evoking his own death, has let in among them the fearsome instrument of it. Achilles feels the breath of a hot sword in the air. Sees, as through a momentary opening in eternity, the old man Priam go sprawling. Hears the armed Fury, in a burning glance across his shoulder, shout into the dark: ‘There, father! There, Achilles! You are avenged.’

  Achilles sits soul-struck. It is his son, Neoptolemus.

  What he has witnessed, in the illumination of the moment as Priam has called it up, is a time to come, the end of things in the days after his death.

  Priam, impelled by the look of annihilating revelation that has struck the man, falls to his knees at last and clasps Achilles’ hands. Not in supplication now, as he had intended, but out of instant fellow-feeling.

  So the scene is acted after all.

  But Achilles mistakes the gesture for more pleading. With a look of horror he starts back and roughly pushes the old man off.

  ‘No,’ he shouts, ‘no more!’ and his voice is raw with anguish. ‘Don’t speak again. You will have what you came for.’

  He ignores the sob that comes from the old man and rejects the attempt to clasp his knees.

  ‘No more! Please! When Hector’s body has been washed and prepared, we will eat something together and you can rest. Till then, my attendants will see to you.’ And he offers the man, who seems suddenly too weak to get up without assistance, his hand.

  So Achilles, as he has done each morning now for eleven days, goes down to where the body of Hector lies in the dust.

  Automedon, torch in hand, goes with him. A groom follows with a folding stool under his arm and a stake with an iron bracket.

  It is an hour before midnight. A breeze has cleared the sky of cloud, and the stars, some huge and single, others in shoals or clusters, hang so low that Achilles believes he can smell them, the air out here is so fresh and clean after the smokiness of the hut.

  Automedon fixes the torch in its bracket. The groom unfolds the stool, drives its legs into the soft earth, tests it for balance. Achilles nods. Automedon and the groom may leave now. He wants to be alone. But Automedon, who is a worrier, hesitates.

  ‘No,’ Achilles tells him. ‘Go now. I’ll call when I need you.’

  Automedon has no recourse but to obey.

  Achilles, alone at last with his thoughts, draws his cloak about him and sits.

  At his feet the body of his dead enemy. It shines as with the light of another star, a metallic brightness. Except for the wound at the throat where his sword went in, it is unmarked. The wound is as clean as if it had just been made. After eleven days in the sun the body has neither the discolouration nor the smell of corruption.

  Achilles sits and contemplates it: shining brow, lean jaw, the cheeks sunken a little. On the upper lip and chin just the shadow of a beard.

  Each morning, when he rides down to confront it, this is what he finds, this figure of what might be a sleeper, composed and still in the naked perfection of its early manhood, laid out as a challenge to him, from the gods, to inflict upon it – the body of the slayer of his friend – the savage depredations that his pride, his grief, his sense of his own high honour demand, and which the spirit of Patroclus, if love is to prove itself, must witness. And each morning, when he discovers yet again how the gods have defied him, he is maddened anew. Outrageous injury swells his veins.

  And now?

  Leaning forward on the stool, he once again examines his enemy. Frowns. Raises his brow to the clear night sky. Breathes in its freshness.

  Something in him has freed itself and fallen away. A need, an obligation. Everything around him is subtly changed. The body at his feet, in the rightness of its imperturbable calm, his own body, which is tensed as it tips forward, also calm. Some cleansing emotion that flooded through him – when? – when Priam first appeared to him in the figure of his father? – has cleared his heart of the smoky poison that clogged and thickened its every motion so that whatever he turned his gaze on was clouded and dark.

  He regards Hector’s body now, and the cleanlimbed perfection of it, the splendour of the warrior who has won an honourable death, is no longer an affront.

  The affection of the gods for a man whose end it was part of his own accomplished life to accomplish he can now take as an honour intended also to himself. And that, he sees, is how it might have been from the start, and this the first, not the twelfth night.

  What he feels in himself as a perfect order of body, heart, occasion, is the enactment, under the stars, in the very breath of the gods, of the true Achilles, the one he has come all this way to find.

  He sits quietly in the contemplation of this.

  The light of the torch casts a flickering glow a little upwards into the air, creating an effect, in the dark, of a cave whose roof is also the high roof of his skull. At his feet, the body whose quiet he can accept now as a mirror of his own. So long as he sits here, there can be no conflict between them. They are in perfect amity. Their part in the long war is at an end.

  So he sits. Then, with a last look down, rises and calls into the dark to where Automedon, just a little way off, has all this time been waiting and keeping watch.

  Two grooms carry Hector’s body, slung in a clean sheet, into the low-ceilinged laundry hut. Achilles, stooping, watches as they lay their burden on a scrubbed tabletop, then bob their heads and go out at the low door.

  Steam from a cauldron thickens the air, and sharp-smelling woodsmoke. On a bench against the slab wall, an oil crock, a dish with herbs. Beside them, smoothly folded, the linen in which, when it has been sponged and anointed, Hector’s body will be wrapped.

  The women who have been woken and called in to do all this, black-shawled and with heavy large-pored faces, huddle in the shadows. Achilles’ presence makes them uncomfortable. The work they do here is women’s work – common enough, they do it daily, but not for the eyes of men. They are waiting for him to leave before they will begin.

  But Achilles, who has never before been to this hut, and has never till now even considered its existence, is intrigued. Having followed Hector’s body this far, he is curious to see the next stage of its passage into extinction: the business, humble but necessary, of its last commerce with the world in the hands of women.

  And the place itself, now that he has discovered it, compels him in a way he cannot at first account for. There is something here, something about the atmosphere of the place, the damp sweet laundry smell, that he half-recalls and recognises. A room in his father’s palace where he was taken sometimes in the arms of his nurse, whose skin, close up, was large-pored like the skin of these laundry women and whose damp hair he can feel against his cheek. Suddenly he is there again – that smell of dried herbs cut with lye; they have come to fetch a bedsheet for his afternoon nap.

  This is the first world we come into, he thinks now, this world of hot-wat
er pitchers and oil jars and freshly laundered linen or wool. And the last place we pass through before our body is done with it all. Unheroic thoughts.

  Stooped a little, and still closely wrapped in his cloak, he remains standing, awkward and out of place, just inside the door.

  Hector’s body, naked now but with a corner of the sheet drawn lightly over the thighs – a gesture towards modesty on the part of one of the grooms – lies outstretched and waiting, its flesh made rosy by the torchlight, the feet turned out a little. Drawn once again by the deep abstraction of its calm, which his own still feeds on, Achilles is unwilling to break away.

  But the women’s presence is stronger than his own. This is their world. So long as he stands here watching they will not begin. He turns, ducks his head under the low door, and steps out again into the yard.

  Starlight, shadows, the figures of young men, his Myrmidons on duty. The metal of their swords glinting as they move about between the fires. Bodies sinewy, taut, ready for hard use. Out here, for a time yet, he is one of them; the air, with its cool edge, a reminder of how present and warm he is in his envelope of flesh.

  For a time.

  Till he too, like Hector, is in there. Naked as he began. Being turned this way then that in the hands of women.

  First light. A powdering of frost on the ground. In the portico of Achilles’ hut, where they have made a bed for him of rugs spread with a fine linen sheet, Priam is still sleeping, stiff and straight under two woollen blankets drawn close under his chin. Achilles, watching, is touched by the old man’s dignity, even in sleep, and his thoughts fly once again to Phthia and his father Peleus. The chin is lifted just above the selvedge of the blanket, which is purple, bordered with gold. As the breath blows through them, the lips make a puffing sound, then narrow as a new breath is drawn in.