by David Malouf
‘Priam. Priam.’ Achilles bends down towards the sleeping face. ‘It is time.’
The eyes click open and for a heartbeat there is panic in their gaze. The mouth opens, the cheeks are sucked in. Then the old man remembers where he is, how he got here, how it is that the great Achilles, already dressed and armed, is here beside his bed.
‘There is warm water,’ Achilles tells him.
Two servants, one with a pitcher, the other bearing a bowl and cloth, are standing a little way off, in the half-light under the portico awning. The younger of them yawns and looks quickly to see if Achilles has seen it. The other makes a clicking sound of half-indulgent disapproval.
For some reason this exchange between the two, which has caught Priam’s new-found eye for such irrelevant happenings, has an enlivening effect, brings him back into the world with a renewed sense of how full it is of the odd and engaging, and of things to be dealt with and done. He pushes back the covers and, wincing a little as he swings his legs over the side of the cot, gets slowly to his feet, then stands with his eyes closed, waiting for the pain in his hip joint to ease.
Achilles is impressed again by the man’s long bones, and the remains in him of a commanding strength, as, very elegantly but without fuss, he holds his cupped hands over the basin while Alcimus pours, then vigorously splashes water over his head, all the while making little huffing sounds of pleasurable effort. Then accepts the cloth that is offered him, and stands quietly musing, the cloth in his hand, his brow dripping.
What has struck Priam is the strangeness of the moment.
The wolf’s hour, deep in the Achaean camp.
In the distance, a clacking sound: the masts of the Greek ships, away there in the fog, tapping and creaking where they are drawn up in squadrons along the shore.
These attendant strangers with pitcher, bowl and cloth.
And the killer of his son, dread Achilles, standing wrapped in his cloak and watching, as with the sleep barely out of his eyes he dries his fingers, and the rapidly cooling water he has poured over his head drips and darkens the boards of the portico.
All this has the quality of a dream, where in just this way events and objects seem at once both puzzling and glowingly familiar.
But this is no dream. The cramp in his old bones tells him that, and the bulking presence that watches from just feet away: the animal eyes in the broad-browed skull; the big knuckles of the hand, which even in rest, lightly clasped now on the haft of his sword, retains a terrible potential.
What puzzles him is the desire he feels – curiosity again, that new impulse in him – to know more of what is hidden and contrary in this boldest, most ferocious, most unpredictable of the Greeks. Mightn’t that be useful to him later? As a means to saving them – Hecuba, himself, his people – from what otherwise must surely come?
It is in the light of this otherwise that he stands with his brow dripping, while Achilles, who is also puzzled, looks on.
At their late night supper he had been treated with the utmost courtesy. Achilles himself had gone out to choose a good-sized hog, and when it had been brought in and laid on a board, had himself, in honour of his royal guest, jointed the chine and laid the pieces, sprinkled with salt, on the fire-dogs to be roasted.
At the small table in the empty hut – for the Myrmidons had been quietly dismissed – with Automedon and Alcimus to bring in the dishes and mix the wine, they had soon settled on the terms of a truce.
Nine days for the Trojans to make a journey into the forests of Mount Ida and fell the pine logs for Hector’s pyre. In the city, nine days of ceremonial mourning. On the tenth the burning of Hector’s body. The eleventh for the raising of his burial mound. On the twelfth the war would resume.
But it was the eleven days of peace that Priam had felt shining around them as they dipped their hands into the bowl and quietly talked.
Days of sorrow, but also of holiday from the din and dread of battle. A time for living.
Quietly, as they ate together, he and Achilles had discovered a kind of intimacy; wary at first, though also respectful, and at last quite easy, though Priam had continually to remind himself who it was he was breaking bread with, and what lay out there wrapped in a sheet and waiting to be reclaimed.
He had eaten little, but for form’s sake had taken something from each dish.
Achilles, urged on by Automedon, ate heartily, the fingers of his huge hands running with the juices of the meat, and for a moment, as the tight jaw worked, Priam had seen quite clearly the whole terrible machinery of the man, though all their talk was of peace.
So now, refreshed by sleep and by the water he has splashed over his head, Priam turns and they go down together to the yard.
The wagon is already loaded and waiting, the driver beside it, the two mules quiet in the shafts. The little one, Priam is pleased to see, knows him now, and when he scratches her on the top of the head, rubs her ear against his sleeve. In the bed of the wagon, under a rich mantle, the body of his son.
He walks past it, allowing the practice of long years, a lifetime of rigorous discipline, to hide from these invaders what he feels. He extends his hand to his good Idaeus to be helped up.
Surprised again by how quickly all this has grown pleasant and familiar to him. The driver’s calloused hand clutching his own, the two mules, now that they are ready to set off, beginning to be restive and dancing about on the frosty ground. Even the discomfort of the wooden crossbench, which is so hard on an old man’s bones, is a homecoming.
Achilles and his two squires, walking in a group beside the cart, accompany them to the open gate. Groups of guards, newly risen, move about among their cook-fires, looking puzzled as the cart, with its escort, rumbles by them and comes to a halt before the gate. Achilles, at Priam’s side, rests his hand a moment on the support of the canopy.
‘Call on me, Priam,’ he says lightly, ‘when the walls of Troy are falling around you, and I will come to your aid.’
It is their moment of parting.
Priam pauses, and the cruelty of the answer that comes to his lips surprises him.
‘And if, when I call, you are already among the shades?’
Achilles feels a chill pass through him. It is cold out here.
‘Then alas for you, Priam, I will not come.’ It is, Achilles knows, a joke of the kind the gods delight in, who joke darkly. Smiling in the foreknowledge of what they have already seen, both of them, he lifts his hand, and on a word from the driver the cart jolts on out of the camp.
The sun is already up and has begun to burn off the crisp white groundfrost as they leave the stockade wall behind them. Little birds are twittering in the fog, which crawls so close to the ground that they seem to be setting out across a lake which stretches shoreless in all directions. The carter leans forward over the traces. Calling softly to his mules, he pulls them this way and that as their feet seek out the road.
On either side as they pass, the barrows of the dead. Ghostly figures materialise for a moment among them, then dissolve. Old men and small children are out gathering kindling, which they pile in armfuls onto handcarts or lash to their backs in tottering bundles. The women are scavenging for battle relics – a silver pin, the clasp off a pair of greaves. All this part of the plain has been the scene, at one time or another, of skirmishes or pitched battles in which hundreds of men have fallen and been dragged away.
The women move close to the earth, their hands turning the clods, breaking them up with practised fingers. Too absorbed in their task to care for the cart that looms up out of the fog and rumbles past them.
Later, with the fog-trails thinning and weak sunlight warm on their back, they pass the remains of a village – the charred stumps of an olive grove and a dozen smoke-blackened roofless huts. Half a dozen ragged infants, big-eyed and pot-bellied, come out to stare at them. One, a little girl of three or four, holds out her hand as if begging, but makes no effort to approach.
They go on in silence, slowl
y, till the sun is high above the horizon and they are clear at last of the camp and all its outposts. Then:
‘Here,’ Priam says quietly. ‘Stop here.’
They are nowhere, as far as the carter can see – in a desolate dry stretch of brush and waist-high mallow – but he pulls at the traces, calls to his mules, and they come to a halt.
Priam, refusing help, climbs down, walks round to the bed of the cart and at last lifts the coverlet from the face of his son.
The carter continues to sit. Joggling the traces lightly in his hand, he gazes fixedly ahead.
Off in the distance, the hills towards Troy are just beginning to develop shadows on their sides; their crests are already touched with gold. Behind him he hears the small sounds Priam is making. They are wordless but he understands them well enough. His thoughts go to the long night he spent, he and the boy’s mother, when they brought his eldest son home and they had sat together in the uncertain lamplight on either side of the broken body. Wordless but not silent.
He snuffles, rubs his nose with the back of his wrist and pulls a little at the left-hand trace, so that Beauty turns her head, just enough for him to catch sight of her round eye, its clear glistening white.
Their adventure is nearly over. In no time now, he tells himself, I will be back in my own life. And he thinks, with a burst of joy, of the little girl, his grand-daughter, now fully recovered; how she will come running on her fat little legs to meet him when he rounds the big rock at the bottom of their hill and begins the slow climb to the village. Somewhere along the way he must find something to bring her. Then tomorrow he will go as usual with his cart and his two mules and wait to be hired in the marketplace.
Behind him, Priam falls silent. After a little he comes round to the step of the wagon and without speaking reaches his hand up to be helped.
They go on. Nothing is said. The sun grows warmer. The hot damp smell of earth comes to their nostrils.
After his moment of turmoil Priam has settled. The air is fresh and clear. The cart rolls along at a good pace now, lighter than on the journey out. This is triumph.
It is only a provisional triumph, of course; the gods are not to be trusted when they tilt the balance momentarily in your favour. And what sort of triumph is it to be bringing home the body of a son? But he has done something for which he will be remembered for as long as such stories are told. He has stepped into a space that till now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it. Not as he filled his old role as king, since all he had to do in that case was follow convention, slip his arms into the sleeves of an empty garment and stand still, but as one for whom every gesture had still to be hit upon, every word discovered anew, to say nothing of the conviction needed to carry all to its conclusion. He has done that and is coming home, even in these last days of his life, as a man remade.
Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different. I come as a man of sorrow bringing the body of my son for burial, but I come also as a hero of the deed that till now was never attempted.
He does not think of this as a beginning; or not, anyway, of something large. How could it be? What lies ahead is the interim of the truce, a time for ordinary life to be resumed, one day then the next; no more than that can be counted on. But in his present mood it is enough.
They arrive again at the slope that leads down, through sycamore figs and holm oak, to the fording place with its two channels, one milky, the other leaping clear over sunlit stones; between them the sandbanks with their clumps of flowering bay.
They lurch into the stream, and the driver gets down to urge his mules through the waist-high current, then onto the gravel and humped sand of the island midstream. Back in the cart, he takes them more easily through the second current, which is fast-running but comes barely to their hocks. Then up the gently sloping bank.
The screen of tamarisks stirs and shimmers but they do not stop there, and no god is lounging in the shade. They are coming home. No need this time for a guide or safe-conduct.
But Priam thinks with affection now of that earlier occasion. Of the water, and how it cooled his feet when he sat with his robe bunched in his lap and let them soak. And of the fishlings. And how good the little griddlecakes had tasted, and of the young woman who made them – well-favoured, he had a god’s word for that, even if she did go limping. All this as warm in his memory as some moment recalled from childhood, with a whole life lived between, though in fact it happened just hours ago.
They are almost home now. As they emerge from the treeline that marks the course of the river, Troy, with its walls and battlements – far off, but not so far – is visible on its bluff. Tiny specks, which are swallows, weave in close circles round its towers and in larger circles in the air above it, soaring to the pure blue heavens.
Riding towards it, the earth swarming and singing to the horizon, the wheels of the cart rumbling and the feet of the mules making a regular clopping sound on the road, which has by now become a highway, Priam thinks how those walls, in the days of King Laomedon, his father, had been raised to music struck from the hands of a god, and feels his homecoming now as the coming home to a state of exultant wellbeing in which he too is divinely led as by music.
In his hut Achilles too is visited by a lightness that is both new and a return. Bodily action, the dance of the blood in the play of hand, foot, eye, seems once again the exercise of spirit in him. His heels glow. His sword, when he lifts it, is metal from the depths of the earth made solid flame. In the instant warmth and energy that fills him, the end, which is so close now, seems to have been miraculously suspended.
It has not.
The boy Neoptolemus is no longer in his grandfather’s house in Scyros being spoiled by women. The bronze-haired avenger of his father’s death, already filled with the fierce light of the future, is at sea and sailing fast for Troy.
A child of time, he knows already that the last days of this story belong to him. He cannot wait to burst through the doors and come hurtling into the honeycomb, the maze, the hundred rooms of Priam’s palace, to where the old man standing dazed beside the altar at its centre turns an assenting gaze upon him. The rest is headlong and bloody but unfolds with the effortlessness of trance – that is how the youthful hero sees it, and how he has lived it through long days of training in boyish dreams. But the moment, when it arrives, is not at all like that.
Priam has tripped in flight on the hem of his robe and lies sprawled on the palace floor. He casts a terrified glance behind him as the furious boy descends, flame-headed, enraged, his body a furnace pouring out heat, a round mouth shouting. What the mouth proclaims is instant night.
The youth himself can barely stand, he is already so drunk with slaughter, and a panicky fear assails him that in the excitement of the moment he may fall out of his wrathful dream. ‘Father,’ his soul whispers towards a figure he barely recalls. To be son to the great Achilles is a burden.
All scrag and bones, the old man he has fallen upon, like a dog that has to be put down and refuses to go quietly, half-rises and wrestles in his grip. He wrenches sideways, resisting the blade, and the boy, for all his ready strength and sinew, and the hardness and agility of youth, grunts with the effort and grows breathless. His heart is racing. His palms are slippery with sweat.
Awkwardly aspraddle, he cries out like a child in his frustration – this is ridiculous! – and tugs the head back hard in his locked forearm, his right hand hacking at cartilage. He repeats the cry and hacks and hacks. Warm blood jerks over his fist.
‘Father,’ he whispers again, and to his horror – he feels the short hairs bristle on the back of his neck – the old bundle he is grappling to his chest, out of some other occasion, or some other life or history, turns upon him a ghastly far-off smile; then, with a last spasm and a hollow, hideous rattling of his breath, subsides, and the air is filled with the stench of shit.
Still panting, the boy sits up. Thrusts the old man from him. Glances fearfully about. At least th
ere is no one here to see it. To see the botch he has made of things. Still in a daze, his gorged heart pounding, he pushes slowly to his feet.
The paving all around and under him is slick with blood. He hangs upright, shoulders drooping, hands thick and heavy at the ends of his wrists. The rush of exhilaration that had claimed him has leaked away. In a sudden swift reversal is replaced by crushing disappointment; heartsickness, animal sadness, despondency. Nothing here has gone cleanly or as he wished. All botched! All scramble and boyish hot confusion. His chin sunk on his breast, ‘Pardon me, father,’ he whispers. Hot tears sully his cheeks.
And for him the misery of this moment will last forever; that is the hard fact he must live with. However the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with him now till his last breath.
But time has not yet reached that point. The blood still warm and ticking in his wrist, Priam raises an arm and points towards the walls of his city and to a figure standing small and emphatic against the light.
‘There,’ he tells the driver. ‘Do you see her?’
The carter nods, but is lost in his own concerns.
He must find something in the market for his little one. A pair of earrings perhaps, or a child’s painted cart like his own – she would like that – to wheel up and down the floor of their hut. Something too for the daughter-in-law – more difficult, this – to celebrate his homecoming, and to mark this day and night he has just passed that has been so extraordinary and which he owes to Beauty. He will find something for Beauty as well, and for Shock, who cannot help, poor creature, that he is unremarkable and has no special charm.
Pricked with conscience by the ingratitude of this, he leans forward and scratches Shock’s ear with the traces; then, so that Beauty will not be jealous, tickles her ear as well.
As for all that has happened in these last hours, what a tale he will have to tell! He will tell it often over the years.
