“Come on.” I tried to force a little energy into my voice. “Let’s get going.”
Wrapping my veil tightly round my face, I set off. There was a taint in the air that I hoped she hadn’t noticed, though she seemed alert to everything. Sliding down slopes of loose sand, we came out into a clearing, and there it—he—was. No way of telling whether this place had been deliberately chosen or if Priam’s body had been simply abandoned where Pyrrhus’s mad ride had come to an end. But, whether by accident or design, he’d been left propped up against a slight incline so that he seemed to be half rising to greet us. Somehow that made everything worse. Nothing much left of his face: his eyes and the tip of his nose were gone. Crows always go for the eyes first, because it’s easy and they need to work fast. Many a hungry crow has lingered a second too long and ended up in a fox’s jaws.
There was no way round the body: we had to walk past. Close to, the stench became a physical barrier that you had to push against. I breathed through my mouth, keeping my eyes down so I’d see as little as possible. What I hadn’t expected was the buzzing of flies, thousands of them, covering the body like a fuzz of black bristles. As my shadow fell across them, they rose up, only to settle again the moment I was past. The noise filled my head till I thought it was going to split open. Sometimes, even now, so many years later, I’ll be sitting outside enjoying the warmth of a summer evening, and I’ll become aware of the buzzing of bees fumbling the flowers, of countless other insects seething in the green shade—and it’s unbearable. “Where are you going?” people ask. And I say—convincingly casual, because I’ve had a lot of practice—oh, believe me, a lot—“It’s too hot out here, don’t you think? Why don’t we go inside?”
That day, there was no escape. I tried to focus on trivial things—what we were having for dinner, whether the women would remember to have a hot bath ready for Alcimus’s return, though I’d no idea when he was coming home, or if he’d come home at all. I thought about anything and everything except what was lying there in front of me—the pitiful ruin of a great king.
Amina was some way behind. I turned, meaning to chivvy her along, and found I couldn’t speak. Sickened by the stench, she’d raised her veil to cover her nose and was staring at the body. That mane of silver hair, laced with blood—not much else was recognizable—but still enough for her to say: “Priam?”
I nodded and beckoned her on, but she stood rooted to the spot, staring, staring, her eyes so wide they seemed to have swallowed the rest of her face. And then she turned aside and retched, her whole body convulsed by the effort. A few moments later, she was dabbing her mouth delicately on the edge of her veil.
“Are you all right?”
No reply. Well, fair enough, stupid question. Using the edge of her sandal, she was scraping up enough soil to cover the vomit. Taking her time. Fastidious as a cat. When, finally, she turned to face me, I was startled. I don’t know what I’d expected. Revulsion? Yes. Shock? Yes. Even full-blown hysteria, perhaps; anything but this cool, calm, calculating stare. It made me nervous. “Come on, let’s get you home.”
“Home?”
Too late to choose another word, and anyway, whether she liked it or not, the women’s hut was her home now. I walked on, hoping she’d follow, but she didn’t, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I found her still staring—not at Priam, now, but at the small mound of earth she’d raised to cover her sick. She looked up. “The soil’s very loose. Be easy to dig.”
At first, I didn’t understand. Then: “No. No!”
“We can’t just leave him like this.”
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“Yes, there is. We can bury him.” Then, like a child repeating a lesson she’d learnt by rote: “If a dead person isn’t given a proper burial, they’re condemned to wander the earth. They can’t enter the world of the dead where they belong.”
“Do you honestly believe that? Priam’s being punished because Pyrrhus won’t let anybody bury him? Doesn’t say much for the mercy of the gods, does it?” Every word of that was false. Nothing in my life up to that point had inclined me to believe in the mercy of the gods. “The point is, Pyrrhus doesn’t want him buried and what Pyrrhus says goes.”
“There’s a higher power than Pyrrhus.”
“Yes,” I said, deliberately misunderstanding. “Agamemnon. Do you think he cares whether Priam’s buried or not?”
“I care.”
“You’re a girl, Amina. You can’t fight the kings.”
“I don’t want to fight anybody. And anyway, I wouldn’t be—I’d just be doing what women have always done.”
She was right, of course. Preparing the dead for burial is women’s work, every bit as much as childbirth and the care of the newborn. We are the gatekeepers. In normal times, the women of Priam’s household would have prepared his body for burial, but things were different now, and she seemed to have no grasp of how fundamentally her life had changed.
“Look, Amina, if you’re going to survive, you’ve got to start living in the real world. Troy’s gone. In this compound, whatever Pyrrhus wants, Pyrrhus gets.” What I really wanted to say was: You’re a slave. Learn to think like a slave. But I couldn’t do it. She was so young, so brave. And I was a coward, I suppose; I just let it go, hoping the reality of her situation would sink in without me having to hammer it home. “Let’s get you back to the hut. Have something to eat.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. I set off, striding out as fast as I could, though on this sheltered ground behind the dunes, grasses and weeds grew almost waist high; it was a struggle to get through them. Ahead of us was the cinder path that connected the stables with the grazing pastures on the headland. A groom was coming towards us, leading a black stallion. Disturbed by the high wind, the horse was tossing his head and sidestepping so often the man walking on the other side of him was barely visible. Ebony. I recognized him because he was one half of Pyrrhus’s chariot team. I stopped on the edge of the path and raised my veil, aware of Amina standing tall and straight-backed beside me. At first, I was so absorbed in watching Ebony’s constant pirouetting that I didn’t see who the “groom” was; but then I caught a glimpse of wind-blown red hair, jarring against the horse’s sleek black neck. Pyrrhus.
What on earth was he doing, bringing his own horse back from pasture, when he had a dozen or so grooms to do the job for him? But then I remembered that when Pyrrhus first arrived in the camp, ten days after Achilles’s death, Alcimus had more than once remarked on how many hours he spent in the stables. “Brilliant with horses,” he’d said, in a tone that implied Pyrrhus was rather less brilliant with men. “Strange lad.” This was the closest he’d ever come to voicing the doubts I knew he had. Sometimes I wondered if any of those initial doubts remained, despite Pyrrhus having done so well at Troy. A short war, but a good one—that seemed to be the general verdict. (“Doing well at Troy” and “a good war” are phrases that blister my tongue.)
So, there we stood, both of us discreetly veiled, waiting for horse and man to pass by. Perhaps Ebony could smell death or perhaps he just didn’t like the huge black birds still circling overhead, their sharp, angular shadows slicing the ground beneath his feet. Dragging on the lead rope, he reared, then bucked three or four times in quick succession, letting out a string of explosive farts. Pyrrhus did well to hold him. He had a real fight on his hands, but he stayed calm, speaking quietly, gently, reassuringly, until at last the horse was steady, though sweating heavily. Pyrrhus moved to the other side of him, keeping his head averted so he didn’t have to see the dreadful birds. And they were dreadful—they seemed so even to me who had no reason to fear them—cawing raucously in the fading light, their flight feathers like outstretched fingers beckoning the night. Only when he was well past Priam’s body did Pyrrhus ease the rope and let Ebony move his head freely again.