Dark in here, cool and quiet; the cries of women sound fainter now. As his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, he sees a rack of ceremonial robes and, beside it, a chair with the vestments of a priest draped over the back. This must be Priam’s robing room. Standing just inside the door, he listens, feeling the room shrink away from him, just as the women did. Everything’s silent, empty. But then, suddenly, he catches a movement in the far corner. Somebody’s hiding, over there in the shadows, he can just see the outline of a shape. A woman? No, from the glimpse he had, he’s almost sure it was a man. Pushing aside the rack of clothes, he edges forward—and then almost laughs aloud with joy, with relief, because there, straight ahead of him, stands Achilles. It can’t be anybody else: the glittering armour, the flowing hair—and it’s a sign, a sign that he’s been accepted at last. He walks confidently forward, peering into the dark, and sees Achilles coming towards him, sheathed in blood; everything’s red, from his plumed helmet to his sandalled feet. Hair red too, not orange, not carroty, no, red like blood or fire. At the last moment, face to face, he reaches out and his tacky fingers encounter something hard and cold.
Close now, close, almost close enough to kiss. “Father,” he says, as his breath clouds the mirror’s shining bronze. “Father.” And again, less confidently now: “Father?”
3
I’d lost count of the number of times I’d heard that song—if you could call it a song—in the last few days. Groups of men staggering around the camp—drunk, slack-mouthed, fish-eyed—bellowing out the simple, repetitive words until their voices grew hoarse. Discipline had almost completely broken down. All over the camp, the kings were struggling to regain control of their men.
Crossing the arena one morning, I heard Odysseus shout: “If you don’t bloody well get that ship loaded, you won’t be going anywhere!” He’d come out of his hall and was standing on the steps of the veranda, confronting a group of twenty or thirty men. It was a sign of the general mood that, even there, in his own compound, he carried a spear. Most of the singers began to edge away, but then a voice shot out of the crowd. “Aye, an’ what about you, yer conniving bastard? Don’t see you lifting much.”
Thersites, of course. Who else? He hadn’t exactly stepped forward; it was more a case of the others stepping back. Odysseus was on to him immediately, spear raised high above his head. Using the butt end as a cosh, he struck Thersites repeatedly on the arms and shoulders and then, as he lay curled up and groaning on the ground, delivered several more blows to his ribs before finishing him off with a kick in the groin.
Clutching his balls, Thersites thrashed from side to side while the other men crowded round, roaring with laughter. He was well known as a shit-stirrer, a gobshite; if there was any work to be handed out, you’d always find Thersites at the back of the queue. Oh, they might get a vicarious thrill from his challenges to authority, but they’d no love for the man, no respect. So they left him lying there and wandered off, possibly to load the ship but more likely to look for fresh supplies of booze, since the goatskins slung across their shoulders appeared to be empty. A few yards further on they began singing again, though with every repetition the song sounded more and more like a dirge.
The truth? Nobody was going home. Nobody was going anywhere. Only four days ago, they’d been within an hour of departure—some of the kings, including Odysseus, had already gone on board—but then the wind suddenly veered round and started blowing at near-gale force off the sea. You’d have had to be mad to leave the shelter of the bay in that. “Oh, don’t worry,” everybody said. “It’ll soon pass.” But it hadn’t passed. Day after day, hour after hour, the freak wind blew, and so, here they all were, the victorious Greek fighters, penned in—and the captive Trojan women with them, of course.
Meanwhile, Thersites. I bent over him, trying not to recoil from the reek that blasted out of his open mouth. It pained me to think ill of a man who’d just called Odysseus a conniving bastard to his face, but really there wasn’t much to like about Thersites. Still, there he was, injured, and I was on my way to the hospital, so I put my hand under his arm and helped him to his feet. He stood doubled over for a moment, hands on knees, before slowly raising his head. “I know you,” he said. “Briseis, isn’t it?” He wiped his bloody nose on the back of his hand. “Achilles’s whore.”
“Lord Alcimus’s wife.”
“Yeah, but what about that brat you’re carrying? What does Lord Alcimus think about that, then? Tekking on another man’s bastard?”
I turned my back on him, aware all the time as I walked away of Amina trailing along behind me. Did she know the history of my marriage? Well, if she didn’t before, she certainly did now.
A couple of days before he was killed, Achilles had given me to Alcimus, explaining that Alcimus had sworn to take care of the child I was expecting. I knew nothing about this until the morning it happened. Dragged out of Achilles’s bed—a semen-stained sheet wrapped round my shoulders, breadcrumbs in my hair, feeling sick, smelling of sex—I was married to Alcimus. A strange wedding, though perfectly legal, with a priest to say the prayers and bind our hands together with the scarlet thread. And, give credit where it’s due, Alcimus had been as good as his word. Only this morning, he’d insisted I must have a woman to accompany me whenever I left the compound. “It isn’t safe,” he’d said. “You’ve got to take somebody with you.”
This girl, Amina, was the result.
We made a ridiculous little procession, me a respectable married woman, heavily veiled, Amina trotting along a few paces behind. All nonsense, of course. What protected me from the drunken gangs roaming around the camp was not the presence of a teenage girl, but the sword arm of Alcimus, as once, only five months ago, it had been the sword arm of Achilles. The only thing, the only thing, that mattered in this camp was power—and that meant, ultimately, the power to kill.
Normally, I found a walk along the shore pleasant, but not today. The wind had become a hot, moist hand pushing you away from the sea, saying: No, you can’t go there. I say “moist,” but so far there’d been no rain, though an anvil-shaped cloud towered high into the sky above the bay and, at night, you could see flickers of lightning deep inside it. Everything suggested a storm was about to break, and yet it never came. The light, a curious reddish brown, stained every bit of exposed skin bronze, until men’s hands and faces seemed to be made of the same hard, unyielding metal as their swords.
Under the celebrations—the drinking, the feasting, the dancing—I detected a current of uneasiness. This wind was beginning to saw at everybody’s nerves, like a fractious baby that just won’t go to sleep. Even at night, with all the doors shut and barred, there was no escaping it. Gusts insinuated themselves into every crack, lifting rugs, blowing out candles, pursuing you along the passage into your bedroom, even into your sleep. In the middle of the night, you’d find yourself lying awake staring at the ceiling, and all the questions you’d managed to ignore by day gathered round your bed.