The Choice
Deidamia’s slender boy-lover has grown into a man, his large body moulded by action.
On action.
On action.
For nine years he has followed the flame, not pausing to remember his mother’s words.
He leads his Myrmidons – the ant-men – into battle, their shields scrumming to make flexible, impenetrable walls. He makes raids – alone or with Patroclus. Cattle, massing like storm to thunder down the slope as you close in.
Then reaction.
Agamemnon pulls rank (the only way he pulls anything) and takes Briseis – the girl who was Achilles’ prize.
And Achilles remembers that he can choose. He lays off his men and folds his arms.
The fifty beached orange ships frame a village of soldiers at ease. The Myrmidons – those strong maquis fighters – are at play. They throw dice, wrestle, fish, tell stories. Patroclus and Achilles dance. The sight of this little village with its smoke and easy laughter offends Agamemnon more than he can say. He feels his army sinking deeper with each day that passes. He feels that they, not Troy, are under siege.
The Trojans feel so safe they come down to the beach and kill Greeks there. And Thetis purrs, satisfied that Zeus is avenging her son.
Agamemnon thinks of everything he can to win Achilles back. He will give him the woman now (swearing he hasn’t touched her) along with seven more. And any one of his surviving daughters for a wife when they get home. Plus the usual bronze, gold, tripods etc.
Do they really think he is greedy?
The only child of Agamemnon he’d marry is the dead one – the one they offered, then killed. He is ready to sail home. To a long and nameless future.
It’s not as if the wounded pride of a son of Atreus was ever his affair.
But Patroclus is tender-hearted. It hurts him to see the wounds of his fellows. He begs Achilles: ‘Let me go into battle, dressed in your armour.’
And Achilles lets him.
This armour fits three men and no one else:
Achilles, for whom it was made; Patroclus (who nevertheless cannot lift the great ash spear that goes with it) and … who else? What did you say? WHO?
To a Trojan it’s a fearful sight: Achilles’ armour moving again. Though without the great ash spear.
But Hector – he is the third – is not afraid. He is only disappointed when he comes to peel the armour from Patroclus’ body that the smashed flesh inside is not Achilles.
* * *
HECTOR.
Before there was the name there was the shadow.
The shadow Achilles felt first at Skiros. It teased his own body on to growth. Cell by cell, calling him.
Body for body, each grew.
So that Achilles’ armour, stripped from Patroclus, now fits Hector perfectly.
And Achilles no longer has a choice.
Ajax and Menelaus have rescued the poor, heavy, mangled body (they thought it would break as they heaved Patroclus by the armpits while Hector hung on to a foot). Achilles washes the dear flesh. He tells Patroclus he will not sleep till Hector is dead. Nor will he eat.
Achilles of the loud war cry lets out his war cry …
and the Achaeans regroup. Each man of them merry and agile for war.
The Trojans shit themselves.
* * *
BUT NOT even he can go naked into battle and count on winning. Thetis, heavy-hearted, makes him wait; goes to Olympus to order new armour. When he straps it on he feels himself lifted on wings; when the sun strikes it men are blinded.
The metal is stamped with the future he won’t see.
On this day he finds twelve Trojans for Patroclus’ funeral pyre. He picks them off easily, before the sun has cleared the mist. His Myrmidons rope them together and drag them off alive. They’ll keep.
He moves on towards the river. No Trojan has a chance. He on his own has the strength of one army; the Myrmidons – all their unused power unleashed – are another.
Up to his thighs in the River Scamander.
The River Scamander choking with blood and corpses. A thick, stinking soup; so full of bodies of men and horse, bits of limbs and pikes, mashed hide of shields, it can hardly move.
Scamander longs for the sea. So near he could smell it if it weren’t for this stinking freight. If he could only flow to join it, this vile cargo would disperse. Then he could breathe again. But now he is so weighed down, so clogged. Like a dying man he cannot raise his head to meet the longed-for water near his mouth.
But Scamander will not die. He rouses himself from his deepest fundament, draws up his strength … and heaves.
And heaves again. A terrible, dry retching as he throws the bits that choke him out onto his banks.
Sodden mangled corpses:
men,
horses,
tackle …
and again he can breathe and flow. Now he will drown the man who has hacked so many sons of Troy into his waters.
When the river roars at him Achilles jumps in, ready to take him on. Scamander clasps him, grabs him by the throat, and rises in a tower over his head.
Like a slab of rock over his head.
Like his funeral pile heaped over his head.
Water, the stuff of his mother, is now so heavy.
She never said this would happen: that he would die like a boy whose boat’s turned over, his dead flesh waterlogged, teased apart by fish, buried at last in silt.
And Hector alive.
Summoning all his strength he rears, like Atlas rising to slide the heavens from his back. Moving through water he sees a tree – an elm – its trunk leaning out over the river. He grabs it with one arm and hauls himself up till he has wrapped his legs around. But the weight of Achilles and his heavenly armour is more than the roots of this tree can bear. They try to grip the earth they’re dug in, send out new fingers to fasten into the bank. The tree doesn’t want to drown either. It clings to the bank but the bank cannot hold on to itself and breaks away, clod by fat clod, ripping the sinews of root and fibre that bound it. It falls away like cake, a new island carried by the rushing river, Achilles still straddling the tree.
Achilles hurls himself towards the open wound of the bank and the River Scamander gathers itself up into a wall. So high it blots out the sun.
This wall of water comes after Achilles.
ZEUS HELP ME!
The cry hits target. Though Achilles is not his son – because Achilles is not his son – Zeus loves him. He sends his brother Poseidon and his grey-eyed brainchild Athene to clasp the man’s hands and bear him up. They assure him he will kill Hector. Nothing can take this from him.
But Scamander won’t let up. His wall of water’s poised to crash down even on the gods. Zeus and Athene call on Hephaestus: ask him for fire.
Hephaestus lobs fire down and, for a moment that all who survived will remember for ever, a river of molten flame pours through the sky. As it meets land it roars into a blaze, romping over the heaped bodies that Achilles killed that morning, eating them whole.
Hungry still, it makes for the river; breathes on the water which shrinks, scalded, from its banks.
Scamander – a hot, narrow vein in a bed of baking mud – surrenders.
* * *
THE TROJAN soldiers – what’s left of them – are scuttling back behind the walls. How small they look in flight; men who even yesterday shone with power as they poured across the beach. The women watching from the ramparts see the small wounded dots hauling their way up the hill. Husband, brother, child. Something in the configuration of each moving mark is unmistakeable to eyes made sharp by love. Hephaestus’ flames have eaten the dead. But the wounded are brought home on stretchers of shields or dragged, slumped across their companions’ shoulders. The dust on the paths is rosy with blood. Men tumble through the gate. Men without arms, men with barely half a face, a hole where the nose was. One unstraps his helmet and, as he tugs it off, the skull flaps back and his brains slide down his neck.
QUICK!
CLOSE THE GATE. ACHILLES IS COMING.
Those who have only heard of Achilles would like to linger for a glimpse, but the men who press in push them back. They bundle their companions through. If only to die inside Troy’s walls.
Priam orders them to close the great Scaean Gate before Achilles can reach it.
QUICK!
GET IN!
The huge leaves of the gate are pushed together, the enormous bolts heaved into place. For a moment they breathe in relief. But they know the end has begun.
Then someone says that Hector is still out there. The two of them. Out there.
They needn’t have bothered to run. Achilles has no interest in any other Trojan now. He has just seen Hector from the plain – high on a boulder near the ramparts, in full view, surveying the land below.
As if spears, boulders and axes could not be hurled.
As if he were watching the sky for signs of weather.
Achilles reaches the wall and sees Hector outside the gates, an easy spear’s flight away. They look at each other and, just for a moment, time stops, eyes blazing into eyes as each takes in the form and splendour of the other and thinks It’s him. Then Achilles raises the great ash spear and Hector begins to run and the race, which both always knew would one day begin, begins.
Hector’s feet are sure. They know these tracks, where they’ll find scree, where the ground is firm. As he runs he remembers each part of his life: the bushes and rocks of his boyhood hideouts, the promontory he lay on one full night to learn the stars; the routes of his hunting, his cattle herding, the waterfall he led Andromache to when he wooed her. The stream of Astyanax’s first bathing. The shallow rock pools where the women did the laundry before the war. He remembers, his life spread out before him like a giant sheet in the sun, the way ahead narrowing to a tunnel which he runs down.
The rhythm of their steps goes on for ever.
It makes no difference that Achilles does not know the terrain so well. He is strong as a stag. Inexhaustible. Hector can gain no ground. Three times they circle the city. Now Hector scans the walls for armed comrades who might occupy Achilles while he scales the battlements and escapes; but Achilles never lets him get close to the walls.
The Myrmidons press in. Stationed at various points in the circuit they follow Achilles as they can, keeping Hector running, blocking off his escapes. But if one of them raises a spear or a boulder Achilles glares him to a halt. No one will take this kill from him.
Athene is back with him – lucid and swift and not at all out of breath. She tells him again that Hector is his and promises to make him stop. Then, looking like Deiphoebus, she catches up with Hector who takes heart, happy that his dear brother has risked his life to join him. Ready now, he stops in his tracks, and turns.
Again Achilles’ eyes meet Hector’s. The Myrmidons stand back.
Hector promises an honourable deal: the winner will treat the other’s body with respect and allow his people to fetch it for decent burial.
Achilles looks at the man who killed Patroclus and feels the hatred spread through his body, slowly, luxuriously, like cream. A sumptuous hatred that leaves no part of him unfilled.
‘No Hector. We meet as animals. What’s left of you will go to the dogs.’
He lifts the great ash spear that even Patroclus could not hold. And throws.
Hector ducks. The spear pierces the ground. Immediately, unseen by Hector, Athene tweaks it out and hands it back to Achilles.
Now it is Hector’s throw. Achilles’ miss has cheered him. He casts his own great spear which lands, dead centre, in Achilles’ Olympic shield.
But no god tweaks it out and he has no other spear.
Deiphoebus is nowhere to be seen.
Now he knows he has come to his death. He draws his huge sword and wields it with both hands.
Achilles takes his sword too. After the day’s slaughter the divine blade still flashes like a sun. There is all the time he could ever want. He looks Hector over, scanning the armour that fits him so well, searching for a place to insert his blade. Like a lover taking in every inch of his beloved as they lie in the hot sun. All the time he could want, no rush, no fear of missing.
There is one point where the armour does not close over Hector. The tender diamond hollow between the clavicles is naked. Achilles fits his sword’s tip here.
Slowly, evenly, the pressure mounting, he pushes.