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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.’
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell, I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
‘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.’
He heard the edge in my voice, and looked away. The pain on his face struck me, and I was ashamed. Where was my promise that I would forgive him? I knew what his destiny was, and I had chosen to come to Troy anyway. It was too late for me to object simply because my conscience had begun to chafe.
I learned to sleep through the day, so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable on to the vase of posterity. To release him from it, and make him Achilles again.
A tilting vertigo, as if I were drunk. I could not speak, or think. I had never been angry with him before; I did not know how.
Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. ‘No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.’ ‘But what if he is your friend?’ Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose cave. ‘Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?’ ‘You ask a question that philosophers argue over,’ Chiron had said. ‘He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend, and brother. So which life is more important?’ We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. At twenty-eight, they still
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‘If the camp falls, I will claim you as my husband. It may help some. You must not speak of what you were to him though. It will be a death sentence.’ Her hand has tightened on my arm. ‘Promise me.’ ‘Briseis,’ I say. ‘If he is dead, I will not be far behind.’
With a roar he throws Antilochus from him, knocks down Menelaus. He falls on the body. The knowledge rushes up in him, choking off breath. A scream comes, tearing its way out. And then another, and another. He seizes his hair in his hands and yanks it from his head. Golden strands fall on to the bloody corpse. Patroclus, he says, Patroclus. Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only. Somewhere Odysseus is kneeling, urging food and drink. A fierce red rage comes, and he almost kills him there. But he would have to let go of me. He cannot. He holds me so tightly I can feel the faint beat of
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‘I was sorry to hear of Patroclus’ death. He fought bravely today. Did you hear he killed Sarpedon?’ Achilles’ eyes lift. They are bloodshot and dead. ‘I wish he had let you all die.’
‘It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.’
Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.’
I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbour of his arms. The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.
