‘Priam. Priam.’ Achilles bends down towards the sleeping face. ‘It is time.’
The eyes click open and for a heartbeat there is panic in their gaze. The mouth opens, the cheeks are sucked in. Then the old man remembers where he is, how he got here, how it is that the great Achilles, already dressed and armed, is here beside his bed.
‘There is warm water,’ Achilles tells him.
Two servants, one with a pitcher, the other bearing a bowl and cloth, are standing a little way off, in the half-light under the portico awning. The younger of them yawns and looks quickly to see if Achilles has seen it. The other makes a clicking sound of half-indulgent disapproval.
For some reason this exchange between the two, which has caught Priam’s new-found eye for such irrelevant happenings, has an enlivening effect, brings him back into the world with a renewed sense of how full it is of the odd and engaging, and of things to be dealt with and done. He pushes back the covers and, wincing a little as he swings his legs over the side of the cot, gets slowly to his feet, then stands with his eyes closed, waiting for the pain in his hip joint to ease.
Achilles is impressed again by the man’s long bones, and the remains in him of a commanding strength, as, very elegantly but without fuss, he holds his cupped hands over the basin while Alcimus pours, then vigorously splashes water over his head, all the while making little huffing sounds of pleasurable effort. Then accepts the cloth that is offered him, and stands quietly musing, the cloth in his hand, his brow dripping.
What has struck Priam is the strangeness of the moment.
The wolf’s hour, deep in the Achaean camp.
In the distance, a clacking sound: the masts of the Greek ships, away there in the fog, tapping and creaking where they are drawn up in squadrons along the shore.
These attendant strangers with pitcher, bowl and cloth.
And the killer of his son, dread Achilles, standing wrapped in his cloak and watching, as with the sleep barely out of his eyes he dries his fingers, and the rapidly cooling water he has poured over his head drips and darkens the boards of the portico.
All this has the quality of a dream, where in just this way events and objects seem at once both puzzling and glowingly familiar.
But this is no dream. The cramp in his old bones tells him that, and the bulking presence that watches from just feet away: the animal eyes in the broad-browed skull; the big knuckles of the hand, which even in rest, lightly clasped now on the haft of his sword, retains a terrible potential.
What puzzles him is the desire he feels — curiosity again, that new impulse in him — to know more of what is hidden and contrary in this boldest, most ferocious, most unpredictable of the Greeks. Mightn’t that be useful to him later? As a means to saving them — Hecuba, himself, his people — from what otherwise must surely come?
It is in the light of this otherwise that he stands with his brow dripping, while Achilles, who is also puzzled, looks on.
At their late night supper he had been treated with the utmost courtesy. Achilles himself had gone out to choose a good-sized hog, and when it had been brought in and laid on a board, had himself, in honour of his royal guest, jointed the chine and laid the pieces, sprinkled with salt, on the fire-dogs to be roasted.
At the small table in the empty hut — for the Myrmidons had been quietly dismissed — with Automedon and Alcimus to bring in the dishes and mix the wine, they had soon settled on the terms of a truce.
Nine days for the Trojans to make a journey into the forests of Mount Ida and fell the pine logs for Hector’s pyre. In the city, nine days of ceremonial mourning. On the tenth the burning of Hector’s body. The eleventh for the raising of his burial mound. On the twelfth the war would resume.
But it was the eleven days of peace that Priam had felt shining around them as they dipped their hands into the bowl and quietly talked.
Days of sorrow, but also of holiday from the din and dread of battle. A time for living.
Quietly, as they ate together, he and Achilles had discovered a kind of intimacy; wary at first, though also respectful, and at last quite easy, though Priam had continually to remind himself who it was he was breaking bread with, and what lay out there wrapped in a sheet and waiting to be reclaimed.
He had eaten little, but for form’s sake had taken something from each dish.
Achilles, urged on by Automedon, ate heartily, the fingers of his huge hands running with the juices of the meat, and for a moment, as the tight jaw worked, Priam had seen quite clearly the whole terrible machinery of the man, though all their talk was of peace.
So now, refreshed by sleep and by the water he has splashed over his head, Priam turns and they go down together to the yard.
The wagon is already loaded and waiting, the driver beside it, the two mules quiet in the shafts. The little one, Priam is pleased to see, knows him now, and when he scratches her on the top of the head, rubs her ear against his sleeve. In the bed of the wagon, under a rich mantle, the body of his son.
He walks past it, allowing the practice of long years, a lifetime of rigorous discipline, to hide from these invaders what he feels. He extends his hand to his good Idaeus to be helped up.
Surprised again by how quickly all this has grown pleasant and familiar to him. The driver’s calloused hand clutching his own, the two mules, now that they are ready to set off, beginning to be restive and dancing about on the frosty ground. Even the discomfort of the wooden crossbench, which is so hard on an old man’s bones, is a homecoming.
Achilles and his two squires, walking in a group beside the cart, accompany them to the open gate. Groups of guards, newly risen, move about among their cook-fires, looking puzzled as the cart, with its escort, rumbles by them and comes to a halt before the gate. Achilles, at Priam’s side, rests his hand a moment on the support of the canopy.
‘Call on me, Priam,’ he says lightly, ‘when the walls of Troy are falling around you, and I will come to your aid.’
It is their moment of parting.
Priam pauses, and the cruelty of the answer that comes to his lips surprises him.
‘And if, when I call, you are already among the shades?’
Achilles feels a chill pass through him. It is cold out here.
‘Then alas for you, Priam, I will not come.’ It is, Achilles knows, a joke of the kind the gods delight in, who joke darkly. Smiling in the foreknowledge of what they have already seen, both of them, he lifts his hand, and on a word from the driver the cart jolts on out of the camp.
V
The sun is already up and has begun to burn off the crisp white groundfrost as they leave the stockade wall behind them. Little birds are twittering in the fog, which crawls so close to the ground that they seem to be setting out across a lake which stretches shoreless in all directions. The carter leans forward over the traces. Calling softly to his mules, he pulls them this way and that as their feet seek out the road.
On either side as they pass, the barrows of the dead. Ghostly figures materialise for a moment among them, then dissolve. Old men and small children are out gathering kindling, which they pile in armfuls onto handcarts or lash to their backs in tottering bundles. The women are scavenging for battle relics — a silver pin, the clasp off a pair of greaves. All this part of the plain has been the scene, at one time or another, of skirmishes or pitched battles in which hundreds of men have fallen and been dragged away.