We stare. Achilles’ mouth opens, closes.
Odysseus says, “Agamemnon offers you a great honor, Prince of Phthia.”
Achilles stutters, a rare clumsiness. “Yes, and I thank him.” His eyes go to Odysseus, and I know that he is thinking: What of Deidameia? Achilles is already married, as Odysseus well knows.
But the king of Ithaca nods, slight so that Agamemnon will not see. We are to pretend that the princess of Scyros does not exist.
“I am honored that you would think of me,” Achilles says, hesitating still. His eyes flicker to me, in a question.
Odysseus sees, as he sees everything. “Sadly, you will only have a night together before she must leave again. Though of course, much may happen in a night.” He smiles. No one else does.
“It will be good, I believe, a wedding,” Agamemnon’s words come slowly. “Good for our families, good for the men.” He does not meet our gaze.
Achilles is watching for my answer; he will say no if I wish it. Jealousy pricks, but faintly. It will only be a night, I think. It will win him status and sway, and make peace with Agamemnon. It will mean nothing. I nod, slight, as Odysseus had.
Achilles offers his hand. “I accept, Agamemnon. I will be proud to name you father-in-law.”
Agamemnon takes the younger man’s hand. I watch his eyes as he does—they are cold and almost sad. Later, I will remember this.
He clears his throat, a third time. “Iphigenia,” he says, “is a good girl.”
“I am sure she is,” Achilles says. “I will be honored to have her as my wife.”
Agamemnon nods, a dismissal, and we turn to go. Iphigenia. A tripping name, the sound of goat hooves on rock, quick, lively, lovely.
A FEW DAYS LATER, she arrived with a guard of stern Mycenaeans —older men, the ones not fit for war. As her chariot rattled over the stony road to our camp, soldiers came out to stare. It had been long now, since many of them had seen a woman. They feasted on the curve of her neck, a flash of ankle, her hands prettily smoothing the skirt of her bridal gown. Her brown eyes were lit with excitement; she was coming to marry the best of the Greeks.
The wedding would take place in our makeshift marketplace, the square wooden platform with a raised altar behind it. The chariot drew closer, past the thronging, gathered men. Agamemnon stood on the dais, flanked by Odysseus and Diomedes; Calchas too was near. Achilles waited, as grooms do, at the dais’s side.
Iphigenia stepped delicately out of her chariot and onto the raised wood floor. She was very young, not yet fourteen, caught between priestess poise and childlike eagerness. She threw her arms around her father’s neck, laced her hands through his hair. She whispered something to him and laughed. I could not see his face, but his hands on her slender shoulders seemed to tighten.
Odysseus and Diomedes moved forward all smiles and bows, offering their greetings. Her responses were gracious, but impatient. Her eyes were already searching for the husband she had been promised. She found him easily, her gaze catching on his golden hair. She smiled at what she saw.
At her look, Achilles stepped forward to meet her, standing now just at the platform’s edge. He could have touched her then, and I saw him start to, reach towards her tapered fingers, fine as sea-smoothed shells.
Then the girl stumbled. I remember Achilles frowning. I remember him shift, to catch her.
But she wasn’t falling. She was being dragged backwards, to the altar behind her. No one had seen Diomedes move, but his hand was on her now, huge against her slender collarbone, bearing her down to the stone surface. She was too shocked to struggle, to know even what was happening. Agamemnon yanked something from his belt. It flashed in the sun as he swung it.
The knife’s edge fell onto her throat, and blood spurted over the altar, spilled down her dress. She choked, tried to speak, could not. Her body thrashed and writhed, but the hands of the king pinned her down. At last her struggles grew weaker, her kicking less; at last she lay still.
Blood slicked Agamemnon’s hands. He spoke into the silence: “The goddess is appeased.”
Who knows what might have happened then? The air was close with the iron-salt smell of her death. Human sacrifice was an abomination, driven from our lands long ago. And his own daughter. We were horrified and angry, and there was violence in us.
Then, before we could move: something on our cheeks. We paused, unsure, and it came again. Soft and cool and smelling of the sea. A murmur went through the men. Wind. The wind has come. Jaws unclenched, and muscles loosened. The goddess is appeased.
Achilles seemed frozen, fixed to his spot beside the dais. I took his arm and pulled him through the crowd towards our tent. His eyes were wild, and his face was spattered with her blood. I wet a cloth and tried to clean it away, but he caught my hand. “I could have stopped them,” he said. The skin of his face was very pale; his voice was hoarse. “I was close enough. I could have saved her.”
I shook my head. “You could not have known.”
He buried his face in his hands and did not speak. I held him and whispered all the bits of broken comfort I could find.
AFTER HE HAD WASHED his stained hands and changed his bloodied clothes, Agamemnon called us all back to the marketplace. Artemis, he said, had been displeased with the bloodshed this huge army intended. She demanded payment for it, in advance, in kind. Cows were not enough. A virgin priestess was required, human blood for human blood; the leader’s eldest daughter would be best.
Iphigenia had known, he said, had agreed to do it. Most men had not been close enough to see the startled panic in her eyes. Gratefully, they believed their general’s lie.
They burned her that night on cypress wood, the tree of our darkest gods. Agamemnon broached a hundred casks of wine for celebration; we were leaving for Troy on the morning’s tide. Inside our tent Achilles fell into exhausted sleep, his head in my lap. I stroked his forehead, watching the trembles of his dreaming face. In the corner lay his bloodied groom’s tunic. Looking at it, at him, my chest felt hot and tight. It was the first death he had ever witnessed. I eased his head off my lap and stood.
Outside, men sang and shouted, drunk and getting drunker. On the beach the pyre burned high, fed by the breeze. I strode past campfires, past lurching soldiers. I knew where I was going.
There were guards outside his tent, but they were slumping, half-asleep. “Who are you?” one asked, starting up. I stepped past him and threw open the tent’s door.
Odysseus turned. He had been standing at a small table, his finger to a map. There was a half-finished dinner plate beside it.
“Welcome, Patroclus. It’s all right, I know him,” he added to the guard stuttering apologies behind me. He waited until the man was gone. “I thought you might come.”
I made a noise of contempt. “You would say that whatever you thought.”
He half-smiled. “Sit, if you like. I’m just finishing my dinner.”
“You let them murder her.” I spat the words at him.
He drew a chair to the table. “What makes you think I could have stopped them?”
“You would have, if it had been your daughter.” I felt like my eyes were throwing off sparks. I wanted him burnt.
“I don’t have a daughter.” He tore a piece of bread, sopped it into gravy. Ate.
“Your wife then. What if it had been your wife?”
He looked up at me. “What do you wish me to say? That I would not have done it?”
“Yes.”
“I would not have. But perhaps that is why Agamemnon is king of Mycenae, and I rule only Ithaca.”
Too easily his answers came to him. His patience enraged me.
“Her death is on your head.”
A wry twist of his mouth. “You give me too much credit. I am a counselor only, Patroclus. Not a general.”
“You lied to us.”
“About the wedding? Yes. It was the only way Clytemnestra would let the girl come.” The mother, back in Argos. Questions rose in me,
but I knew this trick of his. I would not let him divert me from my anger. My finger stabbed the air.
“You dishonored him.” Achilles had not thought of this yet— he was too grieved with the girl’s death. But I had. They had tainted him with their deceit.
Odysseus waved a hand. “The men have already forgotten he was part of it. They forgot it when the girl’s blood spilled.”
“It is convenient for you to think so.”
He poured himself a cup of wine, drank. “You are angry, and not without reason. But why come to me? I did not hold the knife, or the girl.”
“There was blood,” I snarled. “All over him, his face. In his mouth. Do you know what it did to him?”
“He grieves that he did not prevent it.”
“Of course,” I snapped. “He could barely speak.”
Odysseus shrugged. “He has a tender heart. An admirable quality, surely. If it helps his conscience, tell him I placed Diomedes where he was on purpose. So Achilles would see too late.”
I hated him so much I could not speak.
He leaned forward in his chair. “May I give you some advice? If you are truly his friend, you will help him leave this soft heart behind. He’s going to Troy to kill men, not rescue them.” His dark eyes held me like swift-running current. “He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”
The words drove breath from me, left me stuttering. “He is not—”
“But he is. The best the gods have ever made. And it is time he knew it, and you did too. If you hear nothing else I say, hear that. I do not say it in malice.”
I was no match for him and his words that lodged like quills and would not be shaken loose.
“You are wrong,” I said. He did not answer me, only watched me turn and flee from him in silence.
Chapter Nineteen
WE LEFT THE NEXT DAY, EARLY, WITH THE REST OF the fleet. From the stern of our ship, Aulis’s beach looked strangely bare. Only the gouges of the latrines and the ash-white ruins of the girl’s pyre were left to mark our passage. I had woken him this morning with Odysseus’ news—that he could not have seen Diomedes in time. He heard me out dully, his eyes bruised despite how long he had slept. Then he said, “She is dead, all the same.”
Now he paced the deck behind me. I tried to point things out to him—the dolphins that ran beside us, the rain-swelled clouds on the horizon—but he was listless and only half-listening. Later I caught him standing alone, practicing drill-steps and sword-swings and frowning to himself.
Each night we put in at a different port; our boats were not built for long journeys, for day after day of submersion. The only men we saw were our own Phthians, and Diomedes’ Argives. The fleet split so that each island would not be forced to give landfall to the entire army. I was sure it was no coincidence that the king of Argos was paired with us. Do they think we will run away? I did my best to ignore him, and he seemed content to leave us in peace.
The islands looked all the same to me—high cliffs bleached white, pebbled beaches that scratched the underside of our ships with their chalky fingernails. They were frequently scrubby, brush struggling up beside olives and cypresses. Achilles barely noticed any of it. He bent over his armor, polishing it till it shone bright as flame.
On the seventh day we came to Lemnos, just across from the Hellespont’s narrow mouth. It was lower than most of our islands, full of swamps and stagnant ponds choking with water lilies. We found a pool some distance from the camp and sat by it. Bugs shivered on its surface, and bulbous eyes peered from amidst the weeds. We were only two days from Troy.
“What was it like when you killed that boy?”
I looked up. His face was in shadow, the hair falling around his eyes.
“Like?” I asked.
He nodded, staring at the water, as if to read its depths.
“What did it look like?”
“It’s hard to describe.” He had taken me by surprise. I closed my eyes to conjure it. “The blood came quickly, I remember that. And I couldn’t believe how much there was. His head was split, and his brains showed a little.” I fought down the nausea that gripped me, even now. “I remember the sound his head made against the rock.”
“Did he twitch? Like animals do?”
“I did not stay long enough to watch.”
He was silent a moment. “My father told me once to think of them like animals. The men I kill.”
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. He did not look up from his vigil over the water’s surface.
“I do not think I can do it,” he said. Simply, as was his way.
Odysseus’ words pressed in on me, weighed down my tongue. Good, I wanted to say. But what did I know? I did not have to win my immortality with war. I held my peace.
“I cannot stop seeing it,” he said softly. “Her death.” I could not either; the gaudy spray of blood, the shock and pain in her eyes.
“It will not always be like that,” I heard myself say. “She was a girl and innocent. These will be men that you fight, warriors who will kill you if you do not strike first.”
He turned to look at me, his gaze intent.
“But you will not fight, even if they strike at you. You hate it.” If it had been any other man, the words would have been an insult.
“Because I don’t have the skill,” I said.
“I don’t think that is the only reason,” he said.
His eyes were green and brown as forest, and even in the dim light I could see the gold.
“Perhaps not,” I said, at last.
“But you will forgive me?”
I reached for his hand and took it. “I have no need to forgive you. You cannot offend me.” They were rash words, but I said them with all the conviction of my heart.
He looked down a moment at where our hands sat joined. Then his hand ripped itself from mine and blurred past me so swiftly I could not follow it. He stood, something limp and long as a piece of wet rope dangling from his fingers. My eyes stared at it, uncomprehending.
“Hydros,” Achilles said. Water-snake. It was dun gray, and its flat head hung brokenly to the side. Its body still trembled a little, dying.
Weakness sluiced through me. Chiron had made us memorize their homes and colors. Brown-gray, by water. Quick to anger. Deadly bite.
“I did not even see it,” I managed. He threw the thing aside, to lie blunt-nosed and brown among the weeds. He had broken its neck.
“You did not have to,” he said. “I saw it.”
HE WAS EASIER AFTER THAT, no longer pacing the deck and staring. But I knew that Iphigenia still weighed on him. On both of us. He took to carrying one of his spears with him always. He would toss it into the air and catch it, over and over again.
Slowly, the fleet straggled back together. Some had gone the long way around, south by the island of Lesbos. Others, taking the most direct route, already waited near Sigeum, northwest of Troy. Still others had come as we did, along the Thracian coast. United again, we massed by Tenedos, the island just off of Troy’s wide beach. Shouting from ship to ship, we passed word of Agamemnon’s plan: the kings would take the front line, their men fanned out behind them. Maneuvering into place was chaos; there were three collisions, and everyone chipped oars on someone else’s hull.
At last we were set, with Diomedes on our left and Meriones on our right. The drums began to beat and the line of ships thrust forward, stroke by stroke. Agamemnon had given the order to go slowly, to hold the line and keep pace as one. But our kings were green still at following another man’s orders, and each wanted the honor of being first to Troy. Sweat streamed from the faces of the rowers as their leaders lashed them on.
We stood at the prow with Phoinix and Automedon, watching the shore draw closer. Idly, Achilles tossed and caught his spear. The oarsmen had begun to set their strokes by it, the steady, repetitive slap of wood against his palm.
Closer, we
started to see distinction on the shore: tall trees and mountains resolving out of the blurring green-brown land. We had edged ahead of Diomedes and were a whole ship length in front of Meriones.
“There are men on the beach,” Achilles said. He squinted. “With weapons.”
Before I could respond, a horn blew from somewhere in the fleet, and others answered it. The alarm. On the wind came the faint echo of shouts. We had thought we would surprise the Trojans, but they knew we were coming. They were waiting for us.
All along the line, rowers jammed their oars into the water to slow our approach. The men on the beach were undoubtedly soldiers, all dressed in the dark crimson of the house of Priam. A chariot flew along their ranks, churning up sand. The man in it wore a horsehair helmet, and even from a distance we could see the strong lines of his body. He was large, yes, but not as large as Ajax or Menelaus. His power came from his carriage, his perfectly squared shoulders, the straight line of his back arrowing up to heaven. This was no slouchy prince of wine halls and debauchery, as Easterners were said to be. This was a man who moved like the gods were watching; every gesture he made was upright and correct. There was no one else it could be but Hector.
He leapt from the chariot, shouting to his men. We saw spears hoisted and arrows nocked. We were still too far away for their bows, but the tide was dragging us in despite our oars, and the anchors were not catching. Shouts came down the line, in confusion. Agamemnon had no orders; hold position; do not make landfall.
“We are almost in range of their arrows,” Achilles commented. He did not seem alarmed by it, though around us there was panic and the sound of feet pounding the deck.
I stared at the shore coming closer. Hector was gone now, back up the beach to a different part of his army. But there was another man before us, a captain, in leather armor and a full helmet that covered all but his beard. He pulled back the string of his bow as the line of ships drew closer. It was not as big a weapon as Philoctetes’, but it was not far off. He sighted along the shaft and prepared to kill his first Greek.
The Song of Achilles Page 17
