English class was devoted to Readathon because the school wanted the kids to read as many books as possible for Leukemia, and that night was the end of the time period for the Readathon. Kira was in Nory’s English class and she was a passionate reader. Every spare second, Kira was there nonstop, reading, reading, whistling through book after book. Her father had pledged twenty pounds per book, she said, and she wasn’t like Shelly Quettner or Bernice from last year where when they tell you something you never know what’s true and what isn’t. Shelly Quettner brought in a book about simultaneous human combustion that had a picture of a bloody piece of leg where a man had blown up for no reason, and she expected everyone to believe that it had happened, and everybody did, for a while, until they began thinking about how simple it would be to fake it. But when Kira said something had happened, it had happened. Nothing bothered her while she read, she just read like a hot butterknife, totally emerged in the page, because she wanted to have read more books for Readathon than anyone else in fifth year, and she had a good chance of doing it, too. She never talked about what she read, she just read. Nory couldn’t read that fast and when she read one book like The Wreck of the Zanzibar in a day she had a staring wobbling sensation as if she’d been playing too long with the screensavers on the computer.
The English class read their Readathon books pretty well for a while, although there had to be some chatting. Absolutely no chatting was a little bit hard to ask. Then the teacher went out of the room, and the chatting turned to a muttering and a chittering and a smattering and a fluttering in every direction, because when the teacher goes out, let the rumpus begin. The two main chitter-chatterers for most of the time were Paul and Ovaltine, who was called that because his first name was Oliver, and he liked Ovaltine — or maybe he was just a good sport and said he liked Ovaltine, since basically everyone liked Ovaltine and you wouldn’t normally make a big thing out of liking it and, for instance, stand up on a chair and say, ‘Hi, everybody, I like Ovaltine!’—and his last name was Dean, and his face was oval, and maybe another reason that Nory couldn’t remember, but that covered most of it. Paul and Ovaltine were friends but they couldn’t stop talking and arguing, on and on and on and on. As soon as the teacher was gone they started fighting, and they actually drew on each other’s cheeks.
Then the teacher came back in and everybody dove headfirst back to the Readathon. And then the bell rang and it was time for the next lesson, which was Classics. But unfortunately Classics was totally devoted to Readathon, too, so no chance for Nory to ask her questions about Achilles.
33. Unexplained Mysteries
Her questions were: The only place that Achilles wasn’t immortal was in the back of his ankle, in what’s known as his heel, because his mother did less than a perfect and less than a gentle job of dipping him. So, Nory felt, the only place he absolutely has to wear armour was around his ankles. He could fight in whatever strange underwear they had back in ancient times except for two huge gold and silver dust-ruffles around his ankles. Nory knew a little about ancient underwear because of the movie, Ji Gong, about the crazy monk. In it a rich, rich, rich man got naked in clothes that he would have worn very long ago. If you were rich in China your underclothes would be little shorts and a huge apron over your chest that tied in the back.
It would not matter how many times Achilles was stabbed in the neck or the heart — those parts were totally immortal. He would never have to fight back with Hector, he could just stand there with his hands at his sides and let Hector stab and jab the day away. But then you would miss the good part later, when they fight so fast and were so good at swordfighting that the crashing together of the swords made sparks, and the light of the sparks could be seen for miles in the night sky. But probably that wasn’t true. It was probably two stumbling men, swamped with blood, shouting bad words at each other and fighting in the mud until one slumped down. Nory hated when people said that oh yes, so-and-so ‘bit the dust,’ because what it meant was that the person lost his balance and fell at a point of being so faintingly weak and near dying that he couldn’t even put his hands out to stop himself when he fell, and so his teeth hit and dug a little way into the mud or dust or dirt, which was sad and a little disgusting to think about. But say a young child had been crouching in a doorway watching, a frightened young thing. She would have seen the fight, and then seen everyone else stab each other and die off, and when she was older her child would ask her, ‘Mommy, tell a story of a bad thing that happened to you as a child,’ just the way Nory herself always used to ask her mother and father that same question, so many times. ‘Tell me a bad thing that happened to you as a child.’ Nory asked it, year after year, and her mother and father told their stories of getting stitches in their thumb or getting hit by a car while running after a paper airplane or being kicked under the sinks in the school bathroom or mocked for long hair or falling one floor down and getting a concussion and then having to stay awake all night hearing Winnie the Pooh so they wouldn’t doze into a coma (this last bad thing happened to Nory’s mother when she was four), until her parents ran dry of bad things and had to start all over again with one of the early ones.
The girl who saw Hector get stabbed to death would say to her young child that she saw Hector and Achilles fight and Hector die, and the child would say, ‘What did they look like fighting?’ The mother wouldn’t want to say what it really looked like when a sword puncture-wounded deep into someone’s body, since it was a plain basic gruesome thing like the sight of the butterfly’s little head when she made the mistake with the lid, and she would think around for something else, and would have an instinct to say ah, that she saw the swords sparkling each time they smashed together, something nice like that, because maybe there was a poem already in Latin or some African-American language that people spoke in those days, or ancient Chinese, about swords sparkling. When you’re asked to say how you saw something you almost have to give up the idea of doing it exactly, since whatever bad thing happened had a happy ending because here you are, an everlasting grownup, happily holding a child.
‘But all right,’ Nory thought, ‘let’s say that the story is obviously made up in certain aspects, the way that legends so very often are.’ Myths were totally made up from scrap, according to Mr. Pears, but legends were a combination of made up and true-to-life. Even still, just to have it be a working legend, you need to know the kind of way that Achilles was immortal, and the story doesn’t provide you with that. Say Hector tried to stab him in the chest. There were three possibilities of what could happen. The sword could just not be able to go into Achilles at all, even an eighty-sixth of an inch, because his skin would be incredibly durable and unable to be cut in a good, sensible immortal way. Or the sword could go in just as deep as it would be in a normal human and hurt him very badly, so badly that he would have to be in the hospital, since you can be severely badly injured and be under intensive care in the hospital and still not die. Or the sword would swish completely through the chest as if it was the chest of a realistic ghost and Achilles would only feel a little sense of tickling inside, like when you swallow a very cold, pure, sour glass of cran-blackberry juice and feel it pouring down your ribcage in a waterfall.