Achilles (2 page)

He knows that nothing – not earfuls of prophecy – can prepare a father for the death of his son. It is an offence which nothing can ever make good.

‘And my son, Neoptolemus. Where is he? How did he fight at the end of the war? Is he safe? Tell me, Odysseus. No one here knows anything.'

Odysseus shakes his head. He has come to this borderland to question Tiresias; to learn how, if ever, he will reach his own father and home in Ithaka again. He wants to know. And this is what the dead want too. Every one of them – queens, princesses, kings of men – has asked for news. They have forgotten how hard it is for the living to know things. That the rule is one place at one time. The way they claw at him – it's as if they expect him to have been everywhere at once. The truth is he's as ignorant as they were. As they still are.

‘Noble Achilles, son of Peleus, you see what condition you find me in. Hardships come upon me like walled waters, keeping me from home, from my own father, my son, my wife. My companions fall off one by one, tumble into the sheer-sided pit. Those years we camped on the plain by Troy were nothing in their hardship to what I have endured since that city fell. I have no news of your father Peleus. He must still walk the earth or he'd be here; but in what condition I cannot say. But I do know about Neoptolemus.'

Odysseus stays Achilles. At last he has something to give this terrible, hungry man. It was he, Odysseus, who extracted Neoptolemus from the court at Skiros and carried him over the sea in his beaked ship to the other Achaeans camped on the plain. He heard the boy word-spar with Nestor, saw the old man's eyes gleam like an old, experienced wrestler's when he finds a pupil who can rouse him. Odysseus can tell Achilles how his son was the first to climb out of the hollow horse:

‘He fought on till Priam's palace had no life left in it, not Priam's, not any kin of his. His skill, his courage, his power unextinguishable.

‘All harm came from him. No harm came to him.'

Achilles is proud for his son. He hopes it will be many years before they meet at last down here.

But for himself there is no point in pride. Odysseus, the reputation-seeker, envies Achilles.

‘We honoured you like a god while you were alive. No one could match you. Now that you're dead we still speak of you as one who will never be surpassed. Here too I see you're a king.'

A mistake. A moment ago Achilles had needed Odysseus. Now he lets him go, his face dark with scorn.

‘What's that to me? Don't you know that it's sweeter to be
alive
– in any shape or form – than lord of all these shadows?'

He strides away, leaving Odysseus unblessed.

Quicken

But first, a quickening:

A mortal gets to do what the king of the gods is afraid of.

How
do
you mate with Thetis, the sea-nymph that the gods desire?

‘The main thing,' says Chiron, ‘is not to let go.'

He too would like to pin her under his hooves.

What would it be like?

‘She will do everything she can to throw you – buck, kick, bite,
dissolve,
shrink and grow thorns. You like them lively? This one is flame of life itself. If you want her – and you must, Zeus requires it – you have to hold fast, even to flame.

‘You'll be burnt, and it will be worth it.'

Peleus is a patient man. He can spend three days listening to petitions, hearing each man have his say, judging the merits of each case, without any sign of irritation or weariness. Each man who comes to him feels he's the first: that this beautiful, vigorous king wants to be nowhere else on earth but here, seated and attentive.

He is patient in hunting too. Even as a boy, before he had strength – just the courage that builds it – he was able to wait. He knew that the best meat is the meat of an animal who has died without fear. Fear poisons meat, clogs the fibres. The hunter who puts fear in his prey will end up feeding on it.

So he stalks her.

Thetis the sea-nymph, allocated to him by Zeus who wanted her himself but didn't dare to lay a godly finger on her because of what the son she'd bear him would do to him.

No one has bothered to ask Thetis if this
man
they have chosen for her will do. No one has shown her one good reason why she should let some mortal enter her.

So he stalks her.

She, on her own, is perfectly happy, unpenetrated by man or god. The sea and the air make love to her daily, know each fold and whorl of her, every line of foot and hand, every cleft and dimple. She comes from the sea and is made of it, but separate in her woman's shape she can enjoy it more, dive cleanly into it, ride on it, play. Sometimes she turns herself into a wheel and rolls round and round on herself in the water; then she straightens out to move like an arrow down to the sea bed where she grazes the floor along with the flat-bellied fish. When she comes out she lies slabbed on a rock while the sun licks her dry.

The last thing she wants is some man clambering all over her.

So he stalks her.

She has come to this place for eight days now. A little bay, shaped like a new moon, cradling the sea between the delicate horns of its headlands. The sand on the beach is shockingly white: if a crab moves across, denting the drift with heavy claw, its darkness can be seen from the cliffs above. You don't need eagle eyes to see like an eagle here, everything is so sharpened and magnified. Beyond the beach, some rocks. Vegetation. A cave, sandy-floored, cool, its entrance screened by myrtle.

A good lookout.

Only Thetis does not look out. She sleeps, confident that only birds and animals know this place.

While she sleeps Peleus watches her, the myrtle his screen too. She is lying on her back, left arm stretched up, face turned towards it. Her right knee slightly bent.

What would it take to take her?

He watches her all afternoon. The sun, all stealth, slides in and lays itself along her like a sword. She does not wake and the sun moves on.

Peleus waits and watches; getting to know the shape of her, the edges of bone and the warm furrows. The heft of her as he'll lift her on his cock.

Feet quiet, close as dust, all edges but one softened.

Now!

So little violence required: just enough to clasp her waist with two hands, tip her back into an arch, hold her steady while he scabbards himself fast.

Now!

His right arm scooped under her back, knee wedging thighs apart. She wakes to the man covering her, darkening her like a tent, coming between her and the light.

Her arched back held, she arches more

and bucks.

Her body now one sentient muscle:

A HEART,

AN EEL,

A FISH.

He feels the charge of her bucking like a thunderbolt. It flings him breathless to the ground.

On his back now.

Hold on!

As he falls he reaches out, pulls on whatever substance his fingers find. It burns him and his fingers stick. If he were to pull away his skin would come away too, charred like fish-skin stuck to hot stone.

Has he become fish to meet her?

But she is fire now. Roped flame. A long exhalation of searing heat. Tongue upon tongue of it, each twined on itself, an avid, wildly flickering spiral. Howling with pain he opens his throat and drinks in the flame. He'll be
her
scabbard, her sheath, her cup. No lover entered him so thoroughly.

But she is not yet lover.

He tries to hold on; to cleave to the flame that cores him, to move in closer, tighter.

Not rope but thread now.

A fine fuse.

Close now. Move with it. Let it tune you. Notice how it gets sharper as it gets finer: that should help you stay with it.

Whatever you do, hold on; keep it in view.

But Peleus, cored by this flame, is dissolving. The rest of him is falling away. What is there in him that can follow?

There is nothing of him to hold on with.

Not fire now, but water.

Does she think to elude him? She cools him. Restores him to his edge. Rinses his scalded, crazy flesh so it feels clear again.

But as she streams off him she starts to flee – as water – into the sand.

DON'T LEAVE ME!

He sprawls across the ground, crushing himself into it. He takes up damp sand in fistfuls and plasters it across his chest. She'll not get away. He'll have her,
he'll find her,
whatever form she takes to.

Even a lion's?

Even a lion's.

A lion now, she straddles him; would maul him between her huge paws but he wraps himself round her, legs and arms clasping her trunk as she tries, at this awkward angle, to take his head into the cave of her mouth. She can't reach and his wrap around her tightens. The lion Thetis feels herself squeezed almost beyond bearing. Held now, she wants not so much to escape as to fight. Being squeezed she lets herself go beyond the point where breath is lost – where lion expires – brings herself smaller, tighter, so she is now one lithe tube.

A snake.

So narrow she could slip away if she chose.

She's coiled herself around him and now it is he who is near to expiring for want of breath. For a moment he panics. He is near to losing all the benefit of Chiron's wisdom, about to go against the will of Zeus and Juno, and let go.

Only he can't. She has him so fast in her grip. Now her snake tongue darts into his mouth and its sharpness is so sweet to him he wants to hold it there. Practised on the filament of fire he concentrates the whole of his being on drawing that sweet sting out of her.

So they ride for a while, she fast around his body, covering him with her coils; he fast around the fine pulse of her tongue, intent on extracting its bag of nectar.

He feels it will happen soon. She is gathering herself. The tongue is withdrawn. He is still held fast but the dryness of snakeskin has gone; replaced by flesh which is softer, wetter. More enveloping.

Ten pulsing arms are lapping him and on their undersides are a great many mouths which adhere to him: tiny, searching mouths suckling on him; rubbing his flesh against the bony ridge of their toothless gums. There is no surface of his body that she – this cuttlefish – does not contact and which he in turn does not long to have drawn up and used by her. He is very near to losing himself – and if he does so he'll lose her, though just now he doesn't have the mind to care.

Now she has stopped escaping him. She needs him to find her. She cannot feel beyond the next need which is that the nub, the palate of each tiny mouth, be met by him; pursued right in to the tight star which burns at its centre.

He has no choice. The labyrinth now has no false corridors. He can only travel to the centre.

   Hit.

      Met.

          The stars dissolve.

He is covered in sticky black ink.

Thetis, a woman, under him. He draws himself up for a moment to look on his new wife with tenderness. Then he turns her over, enters her again, and empties himself of all the forms he has ever been.

Neither of them wake until the sun has removed itself from the beach.

*   *   * 

A
CHILLES IS
the seventh.

Six times Thetis has taken a wet new infant up by the heels and dunked it, umbilicus trailing, in the Styx where she'd let it go.

‘Immortality,' she said, ‘I'm burning away their mortal parts in the fire of this river.'

‘You're drowning my sons,' he said.

‘They're living on Olympus,' she said.

‘Not with me they're not,' he said.

The next time they made love he became an eagle (he'd learnt) and in the after-sleep he dreamed of holding his son in his beak and flying him free of scalding waters. When the seventh son comes she begins again on the same rigmarole, but she lingers over it more, holding him by the left ankle as she turns him in the fiery waters, basting him on every side.

The burning baby yells with all the force of unimpeded lungs. Peleus comes running – that sound has hooked into his bowels – and wrenches the child from her grasp. Just a little patch of flesh unburnt: the area held between pincers of thumb and forefinger.

For weeks, using all the skill that Chiron has given him, he tends the poor burnt flesh of his child.

Till Achilles is as mortal as he.

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.