Achilles (8 page)

She is thinking now of who will live in her town. She goes to the place in the wall where there is a gap and, making her first two fingers into legs, walks up the street to the palace. Then the first two fingers of her other hand walk up the street – or rather they run, in a hurry to join the first person at the palace with its feather flag flying. There's going to be a party.

When the man comes in – she has not invited him into the hut where she plays – he asks her about her game. It is not a game, she explains, but a town and this is the river that runs near it and it is summer so it has run dry. And this is the palace where visitors are arriving.

‘Like me,' he says. ‘Like me coming here to visit you in your palace.'

And with his great fat fingers he makes his way up the town street. When he gets to the palace door Helen is afraid he will push his way in. His fingers are too big and clumsy for the delicate frame she has made.

But he stops in front of the door.

This time Theseus stops.

From her high room in the palace Helen watches the men streaming up the hill. She feels each footfall as a print on her flesh.

The fat fingers keep walking till they come upon her and fasten. They push, tease, slide their way in where they should not go till her body feels like a cooking pot coming to boil; gobbets of meat rising and hurtling in different directions. Hot, muddled, excited, angry. The smell of meat's juices. The fingers stick to her so closely it's as if she has grown them; as if it's her own secret will doing this painful, confusing, exciting thing. If she, this slender ten-year-old child, could use her wrestling skills to throw him off and kill him she would do it, but he has her pinned down. She tries to cry out to her brothers but the fingers clamp down on her mouth. As he pushes in tighter and breaks her she knows that the smell on his fingers is partly her own.

*   *   * 

T
HE MASSACRE
begins in silence.

To each home in Troy, a Greek soldier. He enters by stealth like a burglar, jemmying open the locks; or he slides himself in through a window like a cat. He stands before a door, still, gathering the poise and purpose of a diver on the edge of a high dive. Then he kicks the door down with a sudden release of force. He eases himself, belly down, across a roof until he finds a weak point to dismantle – make a hole large enough for his body to drop through.

Throughout the city the throats of sleepers are cut.

Then the dogs start up their rumpus.

Mothers who run out into the street with their babies are met by dark-clothed soldiers with knives and clubs and ropes. Some attempt to hide their babies – in chests, in the jars where bread is stored, up chimneys. One tells her child to hide in the well she'd often forbidden him to climb down. There is a little shelf a short clamber down the well-shaft where he's crouched many times, hiding from friends. He stays there, shivering, listening to the dogs and the screams, seeing the bright gleam of the moon reflected in the water below him. After many hours the silver of moonlight is replaced by the gold of flame.

It is ten years since these Greek men have seen the families they left. Mothers and fathers have died in that time. Wives given birth to other men's children. Now they show what this has been like; the harm that's been done to them. Listen to the little sigh a child's body makes when you pierce it. See the mother's expression as you rape her with your hand, your penis, your spear, in the presence of her dead or dying child.

The palace is like another city; so many dwellings and quarters, linked by passages instead of streets, halls instead of market places. And while soldiers whose names we'll never know give vent to their injured lust and imagination to murder, loot, rape and torch the citizens of Troy whose names are also forgotten, the Greek commanders – the celebrated warriors – do much the same amongst the palace's royal inhabitants. There are only so many parts you can slice or hack from a man or a woman; only so many holes and crevices you can fuck.

Of all the destroyers who move through the palace that day it is Neoptolemus who excels; who is the most unremitting. He makes his way through the rooms, eliminating life, thinking to emulate the father he's never met, whose armour he now wears. He wants someone to say, ‘It's as if Achilles were living and moving again.' But not one person does.

Helen hears the cries of Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, Polyxena, the shrieks of the baby Astyanax, as if they were her own. The cries she has never been able to utter from that perfect, unfailingly beautiful mouth. And just as those cries are her cries, so the sheer, screaming, terrified chaos of the palace is hers also, as she sits composedly in her high room, waiting.

Flames from the town have already begun to lick the sides of the palace when Menelaus and his rout stumble, almost by accident, into the small room. They find her sitting, perfectly still, like a good little maid who has finished her job of hulling the strawberries and is now lost in reverie, bowl in lap, enjoying the sweetness of sun on her cheek. The others, drunk with the killing they've already accomplished, see only another object to destroy. It looks to Menelaus as if his own men will go for her.

‘Leave us,' he says, barring their way with his spear.

The men brake themselves with difficulty.

Nothing in her appearance suggests the years that have gone by. Her skin is so soft you would imagine a breath might bruise it, let alone all those things her body has done and had done to it.

For a moment Menelaus is humbled by the wondrous thing that she is. Then a kind of glee begins to drift up through him in little bubbles; more and more of them, till he is fizzing with it.

‘Mine,' he thinks. ‘She's mine.'

He takes down one of the tapestries from the wall and wraps her in it to protect her from the flames.

In the well it grows hot. The flames that are romping through the city, eating it up, suck out the air from the well-shaft till there is none left to breathe.

And Neoptolemus – they call him Pyrrhus because of his hair – wipes his sword clean when he sees there is no one left to kill.

Vulnerary

When Chiron who made the ash spear gave it to Peleus on his wedding day he saw beyond Peleus to the son. And to the son's son and what he would do with it. He saw the blade gleam in the flames of the burning city.

Yet as he passed it to Peleus it was balanced so easily across his outstretched palms you might have thought it as light as a piece of cloth and not of a weight to make men stagger.

The tree which made it was always meaning to become a spear. He wonders now if there is a moment in the destiny of a tree when its future is open. When it is simply a quantity of wood – a material which may be used in a variety of ways to give shelter or fodder, adorn or destroy? Is he responsible for the outcome of what he made – did his seeing contribute to its destiny? For he never saw it as other than it became.

The tree began like any other – as a tiny, germinated sprout from a handful of green keys. Chiron had seen that the way above the shoot to the sky was unobstructed. He'd watched it grow and lopped back rival growth, keeping the vertical pathway clear so the tree was drawn up, as through a funnel, exceptionally tall and straight. The slender, central trunk divided into branches like burnished grey antlers, each nubbed with a sentient black bud, like a little hoof.

It had grown like a mast, pointing to heaven. But he knew it would not make a mast.

He sensed the ghost of the spear in the small sapling; saw the terrible bronze tip Hephaestus would make for it. It poked out through the leaves at the top of the tree, glinting in the sun.

It cut into the sky.

For twenty-two years he watched the ash tree grow and helped it on. When he saw it was ready he took an axe (whose handle he'd made from an ancestor of the tree) and felled it. He peeled the wood, seasoned it, planed it till it was perfectly smooth and taper. Tested the weight and balance. When Hephaestus delivered the spear-head, he fitted it; stepped back when Athene pushed in, insisting it was her job to finish it.

She blew a mist of breath on the shaft and buffed it with the edge of her shawl till it shone like polished bone.

*   *   * 

T
O SAY
that Chiron suffers is like saying that earth receives rain or that olive trees accept the winds which pummel and mould them till each is shaped like no other. Some people find a strip of seaweed which they hang at their window frame to catch the mood of the weather. By its puckerings and sweats they discover what they fail to read in the tissues of their flesh. The soft mouth of Chiron's wound catches every shift of wind: whether the air carries dryness, moisture, balm or ice. It catches each breath of animal pain and shares it.

This wound, received from Heracles, would have killed any creature able to die. The arrow went in to his breast, just under the left foreleg, pressing in between ribs to lodge its tip in the smooth muscle of his large horse heart. Where it continues to bleed: a steady, agonising leak of blood which cannot kill him (the god-heart he carries in his man-trunk ensures this) and cannot ever be healed. It feels as if the arrow is still embedded. When he moves, walking or galloping, he has the sensation of it dangling from his chest, its shaft a little bit longer than the distance between chest and ground so it drags and catches, causing the point to stir in his heart and release more gusts of pain.

He has found no antidote to the poison the arrow was dipped in. Searching and intimate, it crawls and flashes around his body at all times.

The wound has become his laboratory.

In May the air on Pelion is sweet with the scent of apple blossom. Pelion's apples are the best in the world (no human there would choose a gold one). It is also the home of sweet and bitter herbs: demulcents, hepatics, astringents, analgesics, diuretics, emetics, expectorants, vulneraries, tonics and deadly poisons.

He has proved the effects of them all on his body. All the grated rhizomes, pappy stalks, crushed leaves and macerated seeds that he prepares he applies to his own wound. He feels how they affect the living tissue; how some contain enzymes which change its nature, eating it away, while others momentarily soothe and are balm to its rawness. But there are others yet that aggravate, making him wish he could tear off the caustic layer with his nails. There are times he could tear the heart from his horse's breast.

Years of experiment and practice made him a great and wise healer. But it is suffering – his own – which makes him the best. Because he can bear to suffer (though he cannot bear it, that is the trouble) he can judge exactly the extent of another's need and when it has been assuaged.

He knows who to treat, when to treat, and when to stop.

He knows that the smallest quantities are often the most effective.

He has taught (but only Asclepius has ever understood this) that the weapon which wounded you may sometimes be used to heal you.

The pain of others, far away on the plains of Troy, or the agony of a creature mangled in a trap: these nudge the phantom arrow tip and make his heart bleed.

He needed no visitor to tell him the war had begun. It was as if a herd of terrified cattle had crashed down off the edge of a precipice to land with all their hooves embedded in his breast.

AAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!

The hooves continue their lacerations for ten years. Sometimes it's a steady grinding; at other times a sharp and detailed agony makes him vomit and want to rear. If his body were less solidly planted, his nervous system less disciplined, he would dance wild with it, skittering crazy in the longing to cast it off.

But when Apollo's arrow pierces Achilles it is not pain he feels. For once there is no pain.

Instead, a sense of stopping. A silence, as if all the waterfalls that spout and gush down Pelion's sides have ceased, their waters pooled somewhere else, somewhere still. As if life and colour have been sucked from the world. As if his own heart has suddenly emptied.

*   *   * 

I
T IS
the curse of immortality to see those you care for die. (Even Zeus knows it, all those variously beloved mortal children – he cannot deify them all – snuffed out after a little breathing space.) Your children should be your immortality. Your pupils too. Chiron has seen too many of each grow up and die. Not all had the chance to grow old.

Which is worse? To watch the ardent child you've trained and nurtured grow dim-eyed, dried-out and faltering, while you, his father and teacher, remain unchanged – not young exactly, but unimpaired.

Or to see that child cut off before age has begun to eat his powers?

Either way, it feels wrong.

He climbs up onto a lip of rock that overhangs his high cave. From here he can see the Bay of Iolkos below him. Its wide, generous curve. Jason set out from here in the beautiful, fifty-oared ship – oars cut from the trees of this mountain. Two other foster sons – Peleus and Heracles – were part of that unparallelled crew. And Orpheus, who had the nerve to compete with the Sirens. He can remember the sound of the oars, dipping and lifting, dipping and lifting. The sound of the water as it streamed from the oars; the sight of the sun silvering the streaming water. Young men's voices singing in time with their raised oars. Youth, hope, confidence in vigour. All things sparkled: the sea, the oiled bodies, the eyes of the crew. And the faraway fleece which beckoned them with its scintillating impossibility.

So many have set out with high hearts.

He watched the Myrmidon fleet set sail for the muster at Aulis. Achilles, fresh home from Skiros to lead it.

When Thetis first brought him – wanting to see this famous foster-father with her own eyes before entrusting her son – the boy made Chiron think of a young fox: russet hair, quick, watchful eyes. The child Achilles liked to sleep curled up around the centaur's belly, cramming himself into the softness below the horse ribs. At these times Chiron felt himself a mother to the boy.