Alcimus cleared his throat. “There’s something I should say before we start. I told Pyrrhus you’re expecting Achilles’s child.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much.”
“It won’t necessarily help you,” Automedon said—and I felt he enjoyed saying it. “I think he’s quite attached to the idea of being great Achilles’s only son. Difficult to know how he’ll react.”
“No doubt it’ll become clear.”
I saw them exchange glances. Perhaps I wasn’t reacting in the way they’d been expecting either.
“Right,” said Alcimus. “Let’s start at the beginning. Where were you when the men found you?”
“By the grave.”
“Standing up?”
“No, kneeling. I—”
“And you had soil on your hands?”
I nodded. He seized my wrists and pulled them closer to the candle. There was soil under my fingernails and a dusting of grit on the palms of my hands. Alcimus glanced at Automedon and the atmosphere in the room subtly changed. I felt a ripple of cold air across my skin, though the room was airless and thick with the smell of candle-wax.
Automedon leant forward. “What about the first time? Were you there then?”
“No.”
“She’d not said anything?”
I hesitated and caught a glint in his eyes. This was an interrogation. I looked to Alcimus for some warmth, some acknowledgement of the relationship between us, but I got nothing back. If we’d been alone, I’d have tried to be honest with him about the confusion in my mind, the unintended switch from trying to stop Amina to helping her. I’d have told him about meeting Priam on the battlements and how kind he’d been. But there they were, the two of them, and I didn’t think Automedon had ever been confused in his life.
He was still waiting for me to speak.
“Only that she was horrified Priam hadn’t been buried.”
“Did she tell you what she was going to do?”
“No.”
Alcimus said, “So, when you found out he’d been buried, what did you think had happened?”
“I didn’t know.”
He was leaning in closer. The table was between us, only it didn’t feel like that; he seemed to be breathing into my face. And he looked different: older, leaner, more focused. The infatuated boy—and I did think he’d been infatuated with me once—was gone, and in his place was somebody altogether more formidable. This was the man who’d taken part in the final assault on Troy and done nameless things inside its walls. No longer “young for his age”; no longer “a bit of a fool.” I felt I was seeing him for the first time.
After a pause, I said, “Well, you were saying it must be Helenus or Calchas, so I suppose I thought it was one of them.”
Automedon thumped the table. “No, you didn’t! You knew who it was.”
“Look, she just said Priam deserved a proper burial. It’s only what any Trojan would have said.”
“Any Trojan fighter.”
“Do you think women have no views? No loyalties?”
“A woman’s loyalty is to her husband.”
Alcimus got up and fetched a jug of wine from the sideboard. He poured two cups and then, after a fractional hesitation, a third for me.
“Right,” he said. “Last night. Did you know what she was going to do?”
“I had absolutely no idea.”
Not an outright lie, but not exactly the truth either. They sat in silence, staring at me. United. At that moment, I felt I’d lost my husband, while at the same time suspecting I’d never really had one. I wanted to ask what they thought Pyrrhus was going to do, but I didn’t dare; I was too afraid of the answer.
Automedon: “So when did you find out?”
“One of the girls knocked on the door. Don’t ask me which one, I don’t know all their names. Some of them still can’t speak.” Careful. Don’t let the anger show.
“Well, evidently this one could. What did she say?”
“That Amina wasn’t in the hut. That she’d gone.”
“So, what did you think had happened?”
“I thought she’d run away. I certainly didn’t think she was burying Priam.”
Automedon was shaking his head.
“We’d just been to the gardens. There’s shelter there, plenty of food. I thought she might have gone there—”
“But you didn’t go looking for her there, did you? You went to where you knew the body was.”
There was no denying that. And looking back, the idea that Amina might have run away had never been more than a passing thought. Amina would never have run away from anything.
Alcimus: “What did you find when you got there?”
“She’d almost finished. I just wanted it to be over, I wanted her back inside the hut. Safe.”
“So, you helped her bury Priam?” Alcimus barked a laugh. “My god, woman.”
It was too late now for anything but the truth. “Look, I was trying to save Amina. But you know what? You’re absolutely right, I buried Priam. Because I respected him. Because it was shameful to leave him lying there. You both met him—when he came to see Achilles, you met him. You know what happened that night. Achilles made him welcome, he gave him food, he gave him a bed, he treated him with respect—he even gave him his own knife to eat with. Do you think he’d want this?”
They glanced at each other. I could see them reading the truth in each other’s faces, but neither of them was going to admit it.
“You know,” I said. “Both of you—you know Achilles would have wanted Priam buried.”
Alcimus said, heavily, “Your first duty is to me.” He took a deep breath. “Just as mine is to you.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help myself. “No, Alcimus, we both know your first duty is to this.” I pulled the loose fabric of my tunic tight across my belly.
“Shouldn’t that be your first duty as well?”
I felt ashamed in front of him then: his single-minded commitment to a child that wasn’t his contrasted so sharply with my own doubts, my own ambivalence.
Automedon had been silent throughout all this, doodling with a spillage of wine on the table, turning it into a spider, giving it legs. “I think we can find a way round this,” he said, at last. “The girl says she acted on her own. Well, good, let her say it. All Briseis needs to do is keep saying she was trying to stop her. I think she might get away with it. Possibly.”
She. This was Automedon at his smoothest, his chilliest. “Aren’t you forgetting the guards?” I said. “They know I was covering the body—they saw me.”
“You can leave the guards to us,” Automedon said. “If we tell them they saw you trying to drag the girl away, that’s what they’ll say. As long as the girl doesn’t change her story…”
“She won’t,” I said. No, Amina would be where she’d always wanted to be: in a circle of blazing torches, every eye focused on her, and her alone. Perhaps I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t. “What’s going to happen to her?”