Achilles (7 page)

She holds the twelve long bones of his body across her arms like wands of peeled wood. They are curiously light now the fire has sucked out their moisture. Light as charcoal and as fragile. It is habit as much as anything that holds them in their shapes. It will not take much to break them into dust. She sets down her load on a clean cloth before returning.

Next she finds the beautiful scapulae. So fine, they are almost transparent. She runs a finger along the delicate shelf of one, clearing it of powdery dust. This could be the beginning of a wing. The column of vertebrae, the spinal cord that threaded this necklace of armour now melted away. The circuit of the pelvis is intact. It makes a strange cincture with its buckle at the pubis. Now she collects the ribs like a precious bundle of kindling. The clavicles – first bones that formed in her womb – her womb now aching as it remembers how it was to carry him. She winnows the grey dust from the small bones that gave form to the spear-wielding hands, the swift and steady feet. She gathers them all and cradles them. They are hardly as heavy as the baby she once held. Much lighter than the armour she collected from heaven to protect him.

But the great helmet of his skull she does not take yet.

It is Machaon, the surgeon, who follows Thetis into the heart of the ash-field, who lifts the skull of Achilles from the dust. He wipes the dust from it and gazes with humble reverence into the dark hollows that housed the eye-pits. He walks over to Thetis. Gently he sets the skull down at the top of her bundle of bones.

Like the jar which Hephaestus gave her she has to hold it in place with her chin to keep it from rolling off.

For a long time she does not move. She stands, bare feet buried in soft ash, as in a field of snow. She looks alone, like a child who must cross a wilderness unescorted. No one who sees her now can remember that she is divine. They all pity her and stand back as she makes her way out of the ash-field with slow, careful steps.

She knows what she must do and knowing is a relief. She sets down all the bones on a spread cloth, laying them out as if she would make another man of them.

But she keeps the skull; tucks it in to the front of her robe as if she were suckling it and takes it with her as she goes to fetch the jar.

It gives her a grim little pleasure to recall that the smith god made it. That this jar of chased gold is undoubtedly the finest funerary urn in existence.

She remembers that her son wanted his bones to be mixed with the bones of Patroclus. Automedon has remembered this too and has been at work exhuming Patroclus' urn. It is an earthenware pot and breaks open easily when struck. The desiccated bones have turned to porous fragments and it is hard to distinguish them from the other fragments – dust and bits of urn – which he carries to Thetis in a bronze bowl. With Thetis he feeds these fragments in through the mouth of the golden urn, then pours in the sediment of clinker.

Now it is Achilles' turn. Thetis handles these bones on her own, knowing how soon they will break up and be indistinguishable from Patroclus'. She feels what each one is and was before she lets it go.

Lastly she removes the skull from her bodice. She cradles it in her hands and then, as Automedon watches in wonder, seems in a moment to unmake it. For as she takes her hands away the skull tumbles into pieces, its separate bones revealed.

There is one bone, shaped like a bird in flight.

Fire

Thetis had cherished a mother's dream for her son: that he, and not Menelaus, would take Helen for his prize.

They were so well-matched.

One mortal parent, one divine.

The most beautiful with the best.

She knew that Achilles had dreamed of Helen: dreams that chilled him with their brilliance, like dreams of a waste of snow. He had woken from those dreams exhausted and told no one, not even Patroclus, about this nightly irritant of beauty. Seeking it again he'd made songs, plucking the strings of his lyre like a cat flexing its claws. He wanted to excise the bright, unwelcome pearl that troubled him.

And Helen? Did she ever think of him?

What she liked best about him was his absence. The fact that he was not there at Sparta with the rest of them – Odysseus, Idomeneus, Elephenor, Menelaus. All pressing in on her. All wanting her. Achilles' indifference sat on her so lightly it was almost like love.

When she dreamed of him his body stood out like a cut jewel against a ground of flame.

Even in the egg she'd felt alone. Cut off. No mother's heartbeat to ride on; no umbilicus to tether her. Just what was needed to build a perfect human form. Yolk and shelter.

Locked in the hot, albumen-filled dark Helen could hear the chirruping of Castor and Polydeuces on the other side: their contentment, their togetherness. She afloat in her separate compartment.

Then there was the moment when there was no longer enough room and she found herself pushing, pressing down with her right heel, her whole being concentrated in that place, till something gave.

The sensation of air on her wet leg.

Castor and Polydeuces still muttering to each other in their velvety white sac.

She was ten when Theseus broke in. Her thin, sunned body – a source of pleasure and strength, the place where she lived – made tiny and bruised under his hands. Bones that had sung their green strength in her, turned delicate and raw as the bones of a bird devoured.

When Theseus broke in she silently slipped out; back into the shell she could summon from that instant. It became a bivouac she could watch from. What she watched that first time was a big man with gleaming eyes and a red, wet mouth at the heart of his beard. He came up to her from behind to seize the proud bones that rose like little hills at each side of her belly. Then his hands grasped lower, tugging her apart like the halves of an apricot. Then not his hand but the blind brute of his penis, cramming itself in wherever it could.

Where had they been, her brilliant brothers, to let this happen?

With each other of course.

When Castor and Polydeuces wrestled together she would hurl herself between them like a small, golden-haired meteor. Not trying to stop their fighting but to prise open a space in their intimacy and put herself in. If the twins were two lobes of a single heart, she wanted to be
its
heart. Heart of their heart.

But they were not there when Theseus broke in – though they swore to protect her ever after (and honed her wrestling skills so she was equal with Sparta's best). They are not there now that Hector lies dead and she walled in with those who desire her and hate her.

She thinks, ‘I am the loneliest person on earth.'

Men lining up for her.

Having ideas about her.

Fingering her in their thoughts while they finger themselves.

They paste her with their thoughts till there is no air left to breathe.

Not one of them has ever seen her.

Only Hector saw her. Saw loneliness rather than beauty. He, like her, taut with the expectations and hopes of others. So at one with Andromache he lacked curiosity about other women – even the loveliest – as women. He spent time with Helen in the months before the war, before the Greeks arrived. It was Hector who taught her Troy's language.

On the day that he was killed she lost her only friend. If they had stripped her and left her on coastal rocks when the sea was high and raging she could not have felt more
exposed.

*   *   * 

S
HE KNOWS
they are waiting for her to grow old.

‘You're like the rest of us – flesh like curd, pouchy skin, teeth gone brown and rotten. See now if you get what you want.'

She wants them to leave her alone.

But the lovely tautness of her flesh never slackens. Her skin continues to exhale light. Maybe the albumen did it. Or having Zeus for a father. The fact is that nothing that happens to her – nothing that has happened to her – shows.

And that is enough to make them hate her. Her beauty is like a smooth wall which resists all impressions. Paint will not stick to it, neither will mud. You cannot hack into it to make your mark. It makes you feel like you don't exist. It makes you imagine all the things you would do to her, all the ways you could hurt her, so she'd eventually notice you and look like you'd touched her.

And they hate her for that too: for the terrible things she leads them to think of.

Theseus,

Menelaus,

Paris.

Each more inventive than the last in his futile attempts to mark her.

*   *   * 

T
HERE ARE
Trojans who speak of the time when they saw her close – maybe at an upstairs window, or shaking a rug at a door; perhaps she even smiled. Others have only seen her far off, high on the battlements in her finery for the monthly showings Paris insisted on. Then they had to curl their fists up into funnels and look through the small apertures they made. Seeing such beauty (or imagining they did for she was a long way off) they cheered and their cheers were in Paris' ears as he fucked her. He needed others to want her to want her.

But no one thinks she is worth the death of Hector. Now when people see her they suck their teeth.

There is no place for her grief at Hector's funeral. She is quiet in her despair amidst the wailing and the clamour, watching from the citadel of herself. She does not hate Achilles for killing him but the dreams of flame increase and the form of Achilles grows smaller within the flames; as if he is vanishing and the whole world becoming fire.

When Paris shoots him she takes no pleasure in it.

*   *   * 

P
ARIS IS
the next to be dead. Philoctetes shoots him through the eye with Heracles' bow, making a mess of that handsome face. She is passed like a tasty bone from son of Priam to son of Priam. Deiphoebus is next in line.

Loneliness draws her, early, while it is still dark, to stroke the flanks of the great wooden horse, parked and abandoned outside Troy's gates. She has guessed its secret. Senses that it is full and waiting to hatch.

She feels an exile's longing to hear her own language spoken again and calls to each of the men crouched inside:

Odysseus, Diomedes, Antielus, Euryplos, Eumelos, Eurydamas, Pheidippos, Leoneus, Meriones, Philoctetes, Meges.

Neoptolemus, Achilles' flame-haired son, newly arrived from Skiros.

Menelaus, her lawful husband.

She whispers to each of them, tenderly, caressingly, with the voice of each man's wife. A life spent watching, listening, has made her flawless in mimicry.

Odysseus, hearing the dark honey of his own Penelope, yearns to reply but suspects a duplicity which is equal to his own. He holds back and silently restrains the others, clamping a hand over Antielus' mouth, putting a dagger's point to his throat.

When he hears her Menelaus knows that he will not be able to kill her as he'd planned. He almost giggles with pleasure as he remembers how she made him feel. His cock thickens and his fear of present danger grows smaller.

Yet the voice he hears is no more her own than the voice of Penelope heard by Odysseus. What each man hears in her now is what each man who looks at her sees: his own desire reflected.

She turns back and remounts the hill to the palace.

She had whispered like this in the egg to her brothers. They had not answered either.

*   *   * 

T
HE HORSE
breaks open, a limb sticks out, then another one, till the whole form of a man slithers to earth. Man after man pouring out; dark, silent worms, crawling from the rotten egg that has harboured them. She sees it as clearly as Cassandra does.

Cassandra's cries rend the palace. Cassandra is sick with her crying; her whole body attempts to extrude what she has seen.

They hold her down; clean up the mess of mucus, vomit and faeces that spurts and dribbles out of her, but her large, shouted words drift away unheard. Helen alone recognises the truth of Cassandra's cries. But she says nothing, her perfect composure the exact opposite of Cassandra's disarray.

The egg is full of vipers. An endless supply of them: if you cut one two will form. They breed and breed.

Dark worms make their way up the hill like big fingers. Fat fingers thrumming on the sand; fingers walking, walking along the floor of her room, across its white walls.

Nearer they come. Nearer.

Her bed.

Her body.

Fat fingers walking. An endless supply. Cut one and two form. They breed and breed and nothing will stop them.

Not even the cries Cassandra hurls from the battlements as she crashes around the palace.

Helen is ten years old and has been building a little walled town out of twigs and mud. At the top of the largest building – she calls it her palace – she has stuck the russet feather of a pheasant. Tiny fragments of shell pave the streets and slivers of bark from plane trees make shingle roofs for the buildings. There is a temple in which she means to place a light if she can make or find one small enough. She wants there to be fire in her town. Water too. With a forefinger she has excavated a small well; she imagines it fed by the same streams as the great river she is digging out to flow at the side of the town. When she has finished scooping out the riverbed she fetches water in a jar and carefully pours some out. But she has not thought to line her riverbed and the water drains quickly away leaving only a muddy trace. She takes the jar again, tipping it by the handles she thinks of as its ears, filling her riverbed again with water. And for a few moments she has the satisfaction of seeing her river full to its banks and she wonders where she will construct a bridge for her townspeople to cross at. Then that water also drains away leaving a deeper paste of mud than before. Well then, it's summer, she thinks. The river has dried up. There is always water in the well if you let your bucket down far enough. She needs to make a bucket and some waterpots. An acorn cup and some small sea shells from her treasure chest.