Swim. As once Achilles swam—every morning, every night. But the sea’s a wall of brown, churned-up sand. Even the thought of plunging into that makes him feel sick, but he’s got to do it—there’s no choice. There’s never been a choice. So, he wades in; feels ice-cold water slap against his knees, sand slip away between his toes. The next wave slops into his groin, his chest, his mouth and then he’s swimming, his head and tense neck raised above the waves. He tries to put a foot down, but there’s no ground beneath his feet, and so he has to go on through the bubbling foam into the quieter space beyond, though even here the swells are tipped with white and seethe along their crests. A few more yards of shameful doggy paddle, becoming ever more frantic as the waves threaten to carry him away, and then he’s ready to come out. Half walking, half crawling through the shallows, he feels no sense of achievement. The sea swallowed him; the sea’s spewed him back, that’s all.
Achilles, as Pyrrhus has been told over and over again, swam like a seal, as if the sea were his real home. Once, he’d stayed underwater so long that Patroclus ran into the sea to rescue him, only to see him surface a couple of hundred yards further out. That scene’s one of the clearest images he has of his father: a man swimming far out to sea, another waiting anxiously on the shore. Now, for the first time, it occurs to him that the scene makes no sense. What had Patroclus been anxious about? The strongest swimmer in the Greek army, swimming in a calm sea?
There are so many things he doesn’t understand.
Slowly, he puts on his damp tunic, pushes his feet into gritty sandals and turns to look at the camp. One or two lights in the huts now, but he has no desire to go back. He’s better off out here, with the wind scouring his mind clean of the night’s tawdry memories. Not her fault, poor cow. Not her fault at all. If only it wasn’t so cold. If only the wind would stop. And at that very moment, just as the thought forms, there’s a lull.
Silence. Nothing moves, not even a blade of grass. All over the camp, men who’ve slept soundly through the raging of the storm, will be awake, staring at each other. Is this it? Has it stopped? Can we go home? But before they even have the chance to speak, the wind starts picking up again; at first no more than a cat’s-tail twitching of dead leaves and grass, but then with greater and greater force, till it’s sweeping off the sea with every bit as much power and venom as it had before.
These unpredictable lulls, when, for a brief moment, leaving, going home, begins to seem possible, sap morale more than the worst blasts of the storm. And every time it happens, the common-sense view that the wind means nothing, that it’s just, to use Machaon’s contemptuous word, weather, loses ground a little. Because, in the aftermath of one of these lulls, it really does feel as if the gods are playing with them, holding out hope on an open palm only to snatch it away.
Pyrrhus feels his wet hair lift from the nape of his neck, feels his damp tunic being moulded yet more closely to the contours of his body, and trudges on. A hot bath? A bowl of stew? Last night’s leftovers, but stews sometimes taste even better the second day. Or a visit to the stables? See Ebony, help the grooms turn the horses out to pasture. No, none of those things. Not now.
All the time he’s been pretending to think about hot baths and food, his feet have been leading him to where he needs to be. He’s reached the place now. Fingers pinching his nose, breathing loudly through his mouth, he follows the path until he sees what lies stretched out on the dirty sand. He needs this. He needs to confirm what he already knows, that the tongue that said those words—which he will not let himself repeat, no, not even in the buzzing vacancy of his own mind—is rotting now, inside a rotting skull. He stands, stares, takes in every minute detail, notices every change.
Enough. He won’t need to come here again, possibly not for several days, but he will be back. Because this is his proof that he is who he claims to be: the man who killed King Priam. Great Achilles’s son. The hero of Troy.
9
I thought about Priam a great deal over the next few days. Seeing his ring round Andromache’s neck brought everything back. There was nothing I could do to prevent the dishonouring of his body, but at least I could visit his widow, Hecuba, and perhaps make her life more comfortable in some small way. So, one morning, I set off to see her, taking Amina with me. I could have taken one of the other girls, but I thought the walk might give me a chance to talk to her. I was still concerned about her; she seemed unable to accept the reality of her situation. In fact, she was steadily and dangerously defiant. But there was no possibility of speaking to her on our way to the arena. The wind was so strong it made speech impossible. I had to walk head down, muffled in my veil, while Amina trailed obstinately behind.
A group of men was raking the sand on the arena floor. Alcimus’s idea of holding competitive games was proving popular and many of the events were to be held there. I stopped to watch them work, noticing little piles of offerings at the feet of the gods’ statues: fruit, big bunches of purple daisies, as well as other more eccentric gifts: models of shields and spears, a pair of new sandals, a child’s toy horse. Looking around the circle, I saw that some gods—Athena, in particular—were doing better than others and I realized this was a visual guide to what ordinary Greek fighters were thinking. Why are we being kept here on this bloody awful beach? Which god have we offended? Answer—or at least best guess: Athena. And why Athena? Because it was in her temple that Cassandra had been raped, and the rapist, Ajax the Lesser—Little Ajax—had not been punished as he ought to have been, which arguably made Agamemnon and the other kings complicit in his crime. Of course, it wasn’t the rape that bothered them; it was the desecration of the temple. That was a violation Athena might well be inclined to avenge.
Amina was staring at the piles of offerings, her eyes darting from one statue to the next. I wondered what she made of them. They must have been splendid when they were first erected, but they’d fallen into a state of dilapidation over the years: rotten bases, flaking paint. Artemis, the Lady of Animals, goddess of hunting, was in a particularly bad state: her features half erased, barely a trace of paint left on her robes.
Since I was there, I thought I’d visit Hecamede, Nestor’s prize of honour and, after Ritsa, my closest friend in the camp. I found her sweeping the hall, a stack of fresh rushes by the door waiting to be laid, though, as she pointed out after we’d hugged each other, the hall scarcely needed cleaning. There’d been no celebratory feasts in Nestor’s hut; his youngest son, Antilochus, had been killed in the final assault on Troy. Antilochus: the boy who’d loved Achilles. His death had plunged the whole compound into mourning. You felt the stricken atmosphere the moment you stepped over the threshold of the hall—the loss of a young, promising life. Amina lingered by the door; I perched on a bench with my feet raised while Hecamede finished sweeping, then helped her lay the rushes.