His Girlhood

The world is never large enough to hide in.

Thetis has always known the war would come; that any son of hers would be moth to its flames. What she can do she does. She trains him in the arts of being a girl and takes him – her lovely daughter Pyrrha – to the court of King Lycomedes at Skiros …

  where she tips him

                         into the shoal of girls.

… watched by Deidamia, King Lycomedes’ daughter.

When Deidamia catches a fish, she keeps it in a bowl for a while, watches it curvet and turn, imagines she is training it as her father trains his horses. Then she’ll tip the fish back into the water it came from, follow it with her eyes … till with one quick turn the fish dissolves the trail and she can no longer tell it from all the rest.

This fish – the one that Thetis slides into the shoal – goes on being different. Deidamia, half-concealed by a pillar, observes the strange new girl:

Auburn hair in tight coils down to the collar bone; long limbs; a straight and supple back. This Pyrrha does not smile as the other girls would have done. She appears not to mind whether anyone likes her.

Deidamia wants this fish for herself.

Achilles knows perfectly well that the girl is watching him. Not just this one; all of them. It is new, this sensation of being stared at from all sides. It’s like standing in the sun at midday, feeling the heat cooking you. Only in sunlight you can strut or box the air, make little eddies in the heat. These twenty-five pairs of girls’ eyes on him make him less free to move. He wishes he were busy at something – whittling some wood to a spear point would be good – but his mother took his knife from him when she dressed him in this thin girl’s tunic. He fiddles with the bracelets on his arm; turns them, draws them up to the wrist and lets them fall back towards his elbow. The gentle clash of metal.

With these eyes still on him he burns. Senses his power.

These are the bodies Achilles knows:

1. Thetis’. Made of the sea. Cool hands that refresh him; wash pain away; wash away blood and dirt from his limbs. Her silent gowns are greens and blues and silver grey. This body is there whenever he seeks it but he does not caress it or know its contours – just the feel of it rinsing heat away.

 

2. Chiron’s body. Wide horse back to straddle, vault and sometimes arc yourself across. Man’s waist, chest and shoulders rising firm, sure as a prow. So many textures and smells in one body: close nap of horse hair, darker along the spine and set at a different angle; the sticky, resinous feel of this pelt if you run your hand against the grain; the silky, hairless flesh near the genitals – a place of comfort and burrowing. A hoof, knocking his cheek in reproof when he tries, exploring, to prise out the pouched, retracted member. The smells of man sweat and horse sweat; the mat of springy blonde curls on chest and beard that he’d tugged as a baby, still tugs sometimes now. This body taught him itself and nearly all else. The hoof that drew shapes in the dust showed him how stars moved.

 

3. His father’s body: less intimately known than Chiron’s but also loved and familiar. A stillness in Peleus like rock. Watching him sometimes you’d wonder if he’d ever move again. Then when he does move it is swift as a snake’s tongue. A body smoother than Chiron’s – you can trace where the flesh puckers and coarsens into scar. Each wound a story. When he was small Achilles would choose a scar and poke it with his finger, demanding a tale which ended here; testing to see if the story was the same as the last time. In his mind he cast a net over Peleus’ body. Where the lines joined there were scars. He learned how to spin a story from link to link, from scar to scar. These, the stories of his father’s body, were his first.

He also knows the body of his cousin Patroclus.

But the nearest he has got to a girl’s body is his own, togged up like this.

Deidamia plays host. She goes up to Pyrrha and takes both hands as if to tug her into the circle of a game.

‘Come. I’ll show you my favourite place.’

She leads Pyrrha out of the palace, past her father’s stables to where there is open plain. Then she drops Pyrrha’s hand and runs and Achilles – though he has to hold himself back so as not to overtake her – does not have to go as slowly as Thetis had told him to. They run to where the plain stops and woodland begins. Deidamia knows a path and leads her new friend through a maze of trees till the soft ground changes to rock. As the trees thin out you hear water. High slabbed boulders jut over a river in spate. Deidamia scrambles up the highest boulder and waves down to Pyrrha who follows.

‘Look how the water pounces on that rock. And there, where it sucks itself into a tunnel.’

Achilles breaks off a segment of pine cone and aims it at the funnel of water; they take it in turns to drop things in – a leaf, a twig, a berry – see how the water catches them.

‘Let’s swim,’ says Deidamia.

Achilles, suddenly bashful, hangs back while the princess races ahead to a clearing where the sun burns hot through the trees and smooth rocks frame a deep, hardly-moving pool. Where the river takes a breath.

As soon as she gets there she drags her shift off. The gesture is nothing like the one he’s learnt girls use. He has never seen a naked girl before – the little puffs of breasts, the rounded stomach. It looks so soft compared with his. Like him she has some new silky hairs below her belly but no penis juts out of them. He feels for his prick through the cloth of his girl’s tunic. Pats it to reassure himself; does something else entirely.

Deidamia is now bobbing around in the water.

‘Jump in Pyrrha. Can’t you swim?’

Feeling stupid, trying to hold his tunic down across his thighs, Achilles slithers down between the cleft of two rocks; joins her in the heavenly cool water. Deidamia embraces him – or rather Pyrrha – with cold, fresh-watery kisses. She dives down and sees – in spite of his efforts – what he’s been attempting to hide. She comes up laughing and kisses him again. They find the inside of each other’s lips – smooth and hot and very unlike the water they bob in and keep swallowing as they struggle to keep afloat. Only when they have pulled themselves out of the water does Achilles take off his dress and spread it out across a wide flat rock to dry.

Later that day, when they have arrived back at the court, Deidamia announces to her friends that Pyrrha will be sharing her bed. Does Lycomedes know of these arrangements? He says nothing.

They often go out to the bathing pool. The other girls respect their friendship. At court Pyrrha is thought quiet and modest. A better musician than any of them, but she will not sing; a tireless dancer; good at all their games.

For Achilles these days of girlhood complete the education Chiron began. Refine it; soften his burning impatience. He learns to listen, dawdle, play. Delighting in Deidamia he becomes adept as Pyrrha. He borrows Deidamia’s dresses, wanting to feel how her body feels – not just to his hands but to herself – when her soft silks drift over it. He uses her sweetest oils on his skin and hair, lets her plait flowers into his curls.

But there are times when girlhood chafes and his underused limbs ache to be stretched. Then he slips off; takes another path into the woods to a cave he’s found, removes his girl clothes and bracelets, binds his hands with strips of cloth and starts to box. He jabs the air, mapping its emptiness into a thousand precise locations. Forward – over a little – now yield to the right. Cover. Cover. Now punch and get out.

He hears Chiron’s commentary in his mind, urging him on. He makes a bag of a piece of hide, fills it with stones and suspends it from a tree. He uses this to test his hands and feet against.

He longs to be met. To find an opponent who will answer each move with countermove; who will weigh him up and see him. Daily as he trains he dreams of this opponent. Builds him in thought.

He finds a tall pine to climb from where he can look out over the island and across the sea. The number of ships is growing. In a hollowed-out tree nearby some bees have built a nest. He speaks to them, observes how they organise themselves. Steals their honey for Deidamia.

From his pine tree lookout he sees the ship with the rust-coloured sails. It is still a long way off but he senses it is aiming at him. He feels the circle tightening.

The air in the court alters when the three men arrive. Odysseus: stocky, legs a bit too short for his body. A sense of compressed power. Ajax like a god. Huge. Well-made – looks like he could eat you and three oxen for breakfast. Then Nestor: older than the other two, more contained, his face shadowed with thought. But built like a warrior too.

The men have licence to search the court. Achilles doesn’t need Lycomedes to warn him they have come for him. He must now be only Pyrrha. But these men carry the smell of action. While Deidamia dresses his hair, he smoulders.

The search is over. Nestor and his companions have been through every corner of the palace, questioned every groom, stable-hand, man and boyservant in the place, examined their form and features – and particularly their hands – to see if any might be Peleus’ famous son: the boy who kills lions with his hands; who can outrun a deer.

But no one has seen him.

And no one could be him.

Of course they have other business. Nestor invites Lycomedes to contribute some ships to their expedition. Lycomedes feasts the ambassadors with lamb and wine and honey.

The ambassadors in turn have gifts for the court: jars containing the best Achaean wine and promise of much more if a navy is sent.

‘We also have pretty gifts for the ladies,’ says Odysseus, and word goes out that the women and girls of the court are to gather. Odysseus fetches in a small chest and begins to unpack:

bracelets,

necklaces,

rings,

lengths of fine fabric,

delicate sandals,

a little knife,

mirrors of polished bronze and among them, a shield;

embroidered girdles. A spear.

He lays them out around him.

‘There’s something for everyone,’ he says. ‘Don’t hold back. Each one of you, choose something.’

Gradually they all move forward. Some at first are shy as does but soon all are engrossed, picking over the gifts, handling them, passing them between one another, trying things on. Deidamia has led her friend Pyrrha into the circle and Pyrrha too experiments with cloth and bracelets.

EEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIAAAAAEEEEEEAAAAGGGGHHH!!!!!

Outside: the aching ring of metal on metal and the unmistakeable sound of a man’s breath fleeing his body for ever.

Achilles is there, the shield already on one arm, the little knife in the same hand, the spear – ready to fall wherever it is needed – balanced in the other.

‘There you are,’ says Odysseus (who has forfeited the life of one of his men to this end).

‘I didn’t think you could resist a fight. Come with us. There’ll be a better one in Troy.’