I flushed. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“You answer a different question than the one I asked.”
“I’m sorry, Master Chiron.” I did not want to anger him. He will send me back.
“There is no need to be sorry. Simply answer.”
I stammered a little. “Yes. I would like to learn. It seems useful, does it not?”
“It is very useful,” Chiron agreed. He turned to Achilles, who had been following the conversation.
“And you, Pelides? Do you also think medicine is useful?”
“Of course,” Achilles said. “Please do not call me Pelides. Here I am—I am just Achilles.”
Something passed through Chiron’s dark eyes. A flicker that was almost amusement.
“Very well. Do you see anything you wish to know of?”
“Those.” Achilles was pointing to the musical instruments, the lyres and flutes and seven-stringed kithara. “Do you play?”
Chiron’s gaze was steady. “I do.”
“So do I,” said Achilles. “I have heard that you taught Heracles and Jason, thick-fingered though they were. Is it true?”
“It is.”
I felt a momentary unreality: he knew Heracles and Jason. Had known them as children.
“I would like you to teach me.”
Chiron’s stern face softened. “That is why you have been sent here. So that I may teach you what I know.”
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON LIGHT, Chiron guided us through the ridges near the cave. He showed us where the mountain lions had their dens, and where the river was, slow and sun-warm, for us to swim.
“You may bathe, if you like.” He was looking at me. I had forgotten how grimy I was, sweat-stained and dusty from the road. I ran a hand through my hair and felt the grit.
“I will too,” Achilles said. He pulled off his tunic and, a moment after, I followed. The water was cool in the depths, but not unpleasantly so. From the bank Chiron taught still: “Those are loaches, do you see? And perch. That is a vimba, you will not find it farther south. You may know it by the upturned mouth and silver belly.”
His words mingled with the sound of the river over its rocks, soothing any strangeness there might have been between Achilles and me. There was something in Chiron’s face, firm and calm and imbued with authority, that made us children again, with no world beyond this moment’s play and this night’s dinner. With him near us, it was hard to remember what might have happened on the day by the beach. Even our bodies felt smaller beside the centaur’s bulk. How had we thought we were grown?
We emerged from the water sweet and clean, shaking our hair in the last of the sun. I knelt by the bank and used stones to scrub the dirt and sweat from my tunic. I would have to be naked until it dried, but so far did Chiron’s influence stretch that I thought nothing of it.
We followed Chiron back to the cave, our wrung-dry tunics draped over our shoulders. He stopped occasionally, to point out the trails of hare and corncrakes and deer. He told us we would hunt for them, in days to come, and learn to track. We listened, questioning him eagerly. At Peleus’ palace there had been only the dour lyre-master for a teacher, or Peleus himself, half-drowsing as he spoke. We knew nothing of forestry or the other skills Chiron had spoken of. My mind went back to the implements on the cave’s wall, the herbs and tools of healing. Surgery was the word he had used.
It was almost full dark when we reached the cave again. Chiron gave us easy tasks, gathering wood and kindling the fire in the clearing at the cave’s mouth. After it caught, we lingered by the flames, grateful for their steady warmth in the cooling air. Our bodies were pleasantly tired, heavy from our exertions, and our legs and feet tangled comfortably as we sat. We talked about where we’d go tomorrow, but lazily, our words fat and slow with contentment. Dinner was more stew, and a thin type of bread that Chiron cooked on bronze sheets over the fire. For dessert, berries with mountain-gathered honey.
As the fire dwindled, my eyes closed in half-dreaming. I was warm, and the ground beneath me was soft with moss and fallen leaves. I could not believe that only this morning I had woken in Peleus’ palace. This small clearing, the gleaming walls of the cave within, were more vivid than the pale white palace had ever been.
Chiron’s voice, when it came, startled me. “I will tell you that your mother has sent a message, Achilles.”
I felt the muscles of Achilles’ arm tense against me. I felt my own throat tighten.
“Oh? What did she say?” His words were careful, neutral.
“She said that should the exiled son of Menoitius follow you, I was to bar him from your presence.”
I sat up, all drowsiness gone.
Achilles’ voice swung carelessly in the dark. “Did she say why?”
“She did not.”
I closed my eyes. At least I would not be humiliated before Chiron, the tale of the day at the beach told. But it was bare comfort.
Chiron continued, “I assume you knew of her feelings on the matter. I do not like to be deceived.”
My face flushed, and I was glad of the darkness. The centaur’s voice sounded harder than it had before.
I cleared my throat, rusty and suddenly dry. “I’m sorry,” I heard myself say. “It is not Achilles’ fault. I came on my own. He did not know that I would. I did not think—” I stopped myself. “I hoped she would not notice.”
“That was foolish of you.” Chiron’s face was deep in shadow.
“Chiron—” Achilles began, bravely.
The centaur held up a hand. “As it happens, the message came this morning, before either of you arrived. So despite your foolishness, I was not deceived.”
“You knew?” This was Achilles. I would never have spoken so boldly. “Then you have decided? You will disregard her message?”
Chiron’s voice held a warning of displeasure. “She is a goddess, Achilles, and your mother besides. Do you think so little of her wishes?”
“I honor her, Chiron. But she is wrong in this.” His hands were balled so tightly I could see the tendons, even in the low light.
“And why is she wrong, Pelides?”
I watched him through the darkness, my stomach clenching. I did not know what he might say.
“She feels that—” He faltered a moment, and I almost did not breathe. “That he is a mortal and not a fit companion.”
“Do you think he is?” Chiron asked. His voice gave no hint of the answer.
“Yes.”
My cheeks warmed. Achilles, his jaw jutting, had thrown the word back with no hesitation.
“I see.” The centaur turned to me. “And you, Patroclus? You are worthy?”
I swallowed. “I do not know if I am worthy. But I wish to stay.” I paused, swallowed again. “Please.”
There was silence. Then Chiron said, “When I brought you both here, I had not decided yet what I would do. Thetis sees many faults, some that are and some that are not.”
His voice was unreadable again. Hope and despair flared and died in me by turns.
“She is also young and has the prejudices of her kind. I am older and flatter myself that I can read a man more clearly. I have no objection to Patroclus as your companion.”
My body felt hollow in its relief, as if a storm had gone through.
“She will not be pleased, but I have weathered the anger of gods before.” He paused. “And now it is late, and time for you to sleep.”
“Thank you, Master Chiron.” Achilles’ voice, earnest and vigorous. We stood, but I hesitated.
“I just want—” My fingers twitched towards Chiron. Achilles understood and disappeared into the cave.
I turned to face the centaur. “I will leave, if there will be trouble.”
There was a long silence, and I almost thought he had not heard me. At last, he said: “Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”
Then he bade me good night, and I turned to join Achilles in the cave.
Chapter Nine
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THE NEXT MORNING I WOKE TO THE SOFT SOUNDS OF Chiron getting breakfast ready. The pallet was thick beneath me; I had slept well, and deeply. I stretched, startling a little when my limbs bumped against Achilles, still asleep beside me. I watched him a moment, rosy cheeks and steady breaths. Something tugged at me, just beneath my skin, but then Chiron lifted a hand in greeting from across the cave, and I lifted one shyly in return, and it was forgotten.
That day, after we ate, we joined Chiron for his chores. It was easy, pleasurable work: collecting berries, catching fish for dinner, setting quail snares. The beginning of our studies, if it is possible to call them that. For Chiron liked to teach, not in set lessons, but in opportunities. When the goats that wandered the ridges took ill, we learned how to mix purgatives for their bad stomachs, and when they were well again, how to make a poultice that repelled their ticks. When I fell down a ravine, fracturing my arm and tearing open my knee, we learned how to set splints, clean wounds, and what herbs to give against infection.
On a hunting trip, after we had accidentally flushed a corncrake from its nest, he taught us how to move silently and how to read the scuffles of tracks. And when we had found the animal, the best way to aim a bow or sling so that death was quick.
If we were thirsty and had no waterskin, he would teach us about the plants whose roots carried beads of moisture. When a mountain-ash fell, we learned carpentry, splitting off the bark, sanding and shaping the wood that was left. I made an axe handle, and Achilles the shaft of a spear; Chiron said that soon we would learn to forge the blades for such things.
Every evening and every morning we helped with meals, churning the thick goat’s milk for yogurt and cheese, gutting fish. It was work we had never been allowed to do before, as princes, and we fell upon it eagerly. Following Chiron’s instructions, we watched in amazement as butter formed before our eyes, at the way pheasant eggs sizzled and solidified on fire-warmed rocks.
After a month, over breakfast, Chiron asked us what else we wished to learn. “Those.” I pointed to the instruments on the wall. For surgery, he had said. He took them down for us, one by one.
“Careful. The blade is very sharp. It is for when there is rot in the flesh that must be cut. Press the skin around the wound, and you will hear a crackle.”
Then he had us trace the bones in our own bodies, running a hand over the ridging vertebrae of each other’s backs. He pointed with his fingers, teaching the places beneath the skin where the organs lodged.
“A wound in any of them will eventually be fatal. But death is quickest here.” His finger tapped the slight concavity of Achilles’ temple. A chill went through me to see it touched, that place where Achilles’ life was so slenderly protected. I was glad when we spoke of other things.
At night we lay on the soft grass in front of the cave, and Chiron showed us the constellations, telling their stories— Andromeda, cowering before the sea monster’s jaws, and Perseus poised to rescue her; the immortal horse Pegasus, aloft on his wings, born from the severed neck of Medusa. He told us too of Heracles, his labors, and the madness that took him. In its grip he had not recognized his wife and children, and had killed them for enemies.
Achilles asked, “How could he not recognize his wife?”
“That is the nature of madness,” Chiron said. His voice sounded deeper than usual. He had known this man, I remembered. Had known the wife.
“But why did the madness come?”
“The gods wished to punish him,” Chiron answered.
Achilles shook his head, impatiently. “But this was a greater punishment for her. It was not fair of them.”
“There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”
“Perhaps,” Achilles admitted.
I listened and did not speak. Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.
“Come,” said Chiron. “Have I told you the legend of Aesclepius, and how he came to know the secrets of healing?”
He had, but we wanted to hear it again, the story of how the hero, son of Apollo, had spared a snake’s life. The snake had licked his ears clean in gratitude, so that he might hear her whisper the secrets of herbs to him.
“But you were the one who really taught him healing,” Achilles said.
“I was.”
“You do not mind that the snake gets all the credit?”
Chiron’s teeth showed through his dark beard. A smile. “No, Achilles, I do not mind.”
Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. My mother’s lyre. He had brought it with him.
“I wish I had known,” I said the first day, when he had showed it to me. “I almost did not come, because I did not want to leave it.”
He smiled. “Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”
The sun sank below Pelion’s ridges, and we were happy.
TIME PASSED QUICKLY on Mount Pelion, days slipping by in idyll. The mountain air was cold now in the mornings when we woke, and warmed only reluctantly in the thin sunlight that filtered through the dying leaves. Chiron gave us furs to wear, and hung animal skins from the cave’s entrance to keep the warmth in. During the days we collected wood for winter fires, or salted meat for preserving. The animals had not yet gone to their dens, but they would soon, Chiron said. In the mornings, we marveled at the frost-etched leaves. We knew of snow from bards and stories; we had never seen it.
One morning, I woke to find Chiron gone. This was not unusual. He often rose before we did, to milk the goats or pick fruits for breakfast. I left the cave so that Achilles might sleep, and sat to wait for Chiron in the clearing. The ashes of last night’s fire were white and cold. I stirred them idly with a stick, listening to the woods around me. A quail muttered in the underbrush, and a mourning dove called. I heard the rustle of groundcover, from the wind or an animal’s careless weight. In a moment I would get more wood and rekindle the fire.
The strangeness began as a prickling of my skin. First the quail went silent, then the dove. The leaves stilled, and the breeze died, and no animals moved in the brush. There was a quality to the silence like a held breath. Like the rabbit beneath the hawk’s shadow. I could feel my pulse striking my skin.
Sometimes, I reminded myself, Chiron did small magics, tricks of divinity, like warming water or calming animals.
“Chiron?” I called. My voice wavered, thinly. “Chiron?”
“It is not Chiron.”
I turned. Thetis stood at the edge of the clearing, her bone-white skin and black hair bright as slashes of lightning. The dress she wore clung close to her body and shimmered like fish-scale. My breath died in my throat.
“You were not to be here,” she said. The scrape of jagged rocks against a ship’s hull.
She stepped forward, and the grass seemed to wilt beneath her feet. She was a sea-nymph, and the things of earth did not love her.
“I’m sorry,” I managed, my voice a dried leaf, rattling in my throat.
“I warned you,” she said. The black of her eyes seemed to seep into me, fill my throat to choking. I could not have cried out if I’d dared to.
A noise behind me, and then Chiron’s voice, loud in the quiet. “Greetings, Thetis.”
Warmth surged back into my skin, and breath returned. I almost ran to him. But her gaze held me there, unwavering. I did not doubt she could reach me if she wished.
“You are frightening the boy,” Chiron said.
“He does not belong here,” she said. Her lips were red as newly spilled blood.
Chiron’s hand landed firmly on my shoulder. “Patroclus,” he said. “You will return to the cave now. I will speak with you later.”
I stood, unsteadily, and obeyed.
“You have lived too long with mortals, Centaur,” I
heard her say before the animal skins closed behind me. I sagged against the cave’s wall; my throat tasted brackish and raw.
“Achilles,” I said.
His eyes opened, and he was beside me before I could speak again.
“Are you all right?”
“Your mother is here,” I said.
I saw the tightening of muscle beneath his skin. “She did not hurt you?”
I shook my head. I did not add that I thought she wanted to. That she might have, if Chiron had not come.
“I must go,” he said. The skins whispered against each other as they parted for him, then slipped shut again.
I could not hear what was said in the clearing. Their voices were low, or perhaps they had gone to speak elsewhere. I waited, tracing spirals in the packed earth floor. I did not worry, any longer, for myself. Chiron meant to keep me, and he was older than she was, full grown when the gods still rocked in their cradles, when she had been only an egg in the womb of the sea. But there was something else, less easy to name. A loss, or lessening, that I feared her presence might bring.
It was almost midday when they returned. My gaze went to Achilles’ face first, searching his eyes, the set of his mouth. I saw nothing but perhaps a touch of tiredness. He threw himself onto the pallet beside me. “I’m hungry,” he said.
“As well you should be,” Chiron said. “It is much past lunch.” He was already preparing food for us, maneuvering in the cave’s space easily despite his bulk.
Achilles turned to me. “It is all right,” he said. “She just wanted to speak to me. To see me.”
“She will come to speak with him again,” Chiron said. And as if he knew what I thought, he added, “As is proper. She is his mother.”
She is a goddess first, I thought.
Yet as we ate, my fears eased. I had half-worried she might have told Chiron of the day by the beach, but he was no different towards either of us, and Achilles was the same as he always was. I went to bed, if not at peace, at least reassured.
She came more often after that day, as Chiron had said she would. I learned to listen for it—a silence that dropped like a curtain— and knew to stay close to Chiron then, and the cave. The intrusion was not much, and I told myself I did not begrudge her. But I was always glad when she was gone again.
The Song of Achilles Page 7
