The Song of Achilles (16 page)

“Odysseus said it would storm tonight.”

An Aegean storm, quickly here and quickly gone. Our boat was safely beached, and tomorrow would be clear again.

Achilles was looking at me. “Your hair never quite lies flat here.” He touched my head, just behind my ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you how I like it.”

My scalp prickled where his fingers had been. “You haven’t,” I said.

“I should have.” His hand drifted down to the vee at the base of my throat, drew softly across the pulse. “What about this? Have I told you what I think of this, just here?”

“No,” I said.

“This surely, then.” His hand moved across the muscles of my chest; my skin warmed beneath it. “Have I told you of this?”

“That you have told me.” My breath caught a little as I spoke.

“And what of this?” His hand lingered over my hips, drew down the line of my thigh. “Have I spoken of it?”

“You have.”

“And this? Surely, I would not have forgotten this.” His cat’s smile. “Tell me I did not.”

“You did not.”

“There is this, too.” His hand was ceaseless now. “I know I have told you of this.”

I closed my eyes. “Tell me again,” I said.

L
ATER
, A
CHILLES SLEEPS
next to me. Odysseus’ storm has come, and the coarse fabric of the tent wall trembles with its force. I hear the stinging slap, over and over, of waves reproaching the shore. He stirs and the air stirs with him, bearing the musk-sweet smell of his body. I think:
This is what I will miss.
I think:
I will kill myself rather than miss it.
I think:
How long do we have?

Chapter Sixteen

W
E ARRIVED IN
P
HTHIA THE NEXT DAY.
T
HE SUN WAS
just over the meridian, and Achilles and I stood looking at the rail.

“Do you see that?”

“What?” As always, his eyes were sharper than mine.

“The shore. It looks strange.”

As we drew closer we saw why. It was thick with people, jostling impatiently, craning their necks towards us. And the sound: at first it seemed to come from the waves, or the ship as it cut them, a rushing roar. But it grew louder with each stroke of our oars, until we understood that it was voices, then words. Over and over, it came.
Prince
Achilles! Aristos Achaion!

As our ship touched the beach, hundreds of hands threw themselves into the air, and hundreds of throats opened in a cheer. All other noises, the wood of the gangplank banging down on rock, the sailors’ commands, were lost to it. We stared, in shock.

It was that moment, perhaps, that our lives changed. Not before in Scyros, nor before that still, on Pelion. But here, as we began to understand the grandness, now and always, that would follow him wherever he went. He had chosen to become a legend, and this was the beginning. He hesitated, and I touched my hand to his, where the crowd could not see it. “Go,” I urged him. “They are waiting for you.”

Achilles stepped forward onto the gangplank, his arm lifted in greeting, and the crowd screamed itself hoarse. I half-feared they would swarm onto the ship, but soldiers pushed forward and lined the gangway, making a path straight through the crush.

Achilles turned back to me, said something. I could not hear it, but I understood.
Come with me
. I nodded, and we began to walk. On either side of us, the crowd surged against the soldiers’ barrier. At the aisle’s end was Peleus, waiting for us. His face was wet, and he made no attempt to wipe aside the tears. He drew Achilles to him, held him long before he let him go.

“Our prince has returned!” His voice was deeper than I remembered, resonant and carrying far, over the noise of the crowd. They quieted, to hear the words of their king.

“Before you all I offer welcome to my most beloved son, sole heir to my kingdom. He will lead you to Troy in glory; he will return home in triumph.”

Even there beneath the bright sun, I felt my skin go cold.
He will not come home at all.
But Peleus did not know this, yet.

“He is a man grown, and god born.
Aristos Achaion!
”

There was no time to think of it now. The soldiers were beating on their shields with their spears; the women screamed; the men howled. I caught sight of Achilles’ face; the look on it was stunned, but not displeased. He was standing differently, I noticed, shoulders back and legs braced. He looked older, somehow, taller even. He leaned over to say something in his father’s ear, but I could not hear what he said. A chariot was waiting; we stepped into it and watched the crowd stream behind us up the beach.

Inside the palace, attendants and servants buzzed around us. We were given a moment to eat and drink what was pressed into our hands. Then we were led to the palace courtyard, where twenty-five hundred men waited for us. At our approach they lifted their square shields, shining like carapace, in salute to their new general. This, out of all of it, was perhaps the strangest: that he was their commander now. He would be expected to know them all, their names and armor and stories.
He no longer belongs to me alone.

If he was nervous, even I could not tell. I watched as he greeted them, spoke ringing words that made them stand up straighter. They grinned, loving every inch of their miraculous prince: his gleaming hair, his deadly hands, his nimble feet. They leaned towards him, like flowers to the sun, drinking in his luster. It was as Odysseus had said: he had light enough to make heroes of them all.

W
E WERE NEVER ALONE
. Achilles was always needed for something— his eye on draft sheets and figures, his advice on food supplies and levy lists. Phoinix, his father’s old counselor, would be accompanying us, but there were still a thousand questions for Achilles to answer—how many? how much? who will be your captains? He did what he could, then announced, “I defer all the rest of such matters to the experience of Phoinix.” I heard a servant girl sigh behind me. Handsome and gracious, both.

He knew that I had little to do here. His face, when he turned to me, was increasingly apologetic. He was always sure to place the tablets where I could see them too, to ask my opinion. But I did not make it easy for him, standing in the back, listless and silent.

Even there, I could not escape. Through every window came the constant clatter of soldiers, bragging and drilling and sharpening their spears. The Myrmidons, they had begun calling themselves,
ant-men,
an old nickname of honor. Another thing Achilles had had to explain to me: the legend of Zeus creating the first Phthians from ants. I watched them marching, rank on cheerful rank. I saw them dreaming of the plunder they would bring home, and the triumph. There was no such dream for us.

I began to slip away. I would find a reason to linger behind as the attendants ushered him forward: an itch, or a loose strap of my shoe. Oblivious, they hurried on, turned a corner, and left me suddenly, blessedly, alone. I took the twisting corridors I had learned so many years ago and came gratefully to our empty room. There I lay on the cool stone of the floor and closed my eyes. I could not stop imagining how it would end—spear-tip or swordpoint, or smashed by a chariot. The rushing, unending blood of his heart.

One night in the second week, as we lay half-drowsing, I asked him: “How will you tell your father? About the prophecy?”

The words were loud in the silence of midnight. For a moment he was still. Then he said, “I do not think I will.”

“Never?”

He shook his head, just the barest shadow. “There is nothing he can do. It would only bring him grief.”

“What about your mother? Won’t she tell him?”

“No,” he said. “It was one of the things I asked her to promise me, that last day on Scyros.”

I frowned. He had not told me this before. “What were the other things?”

I saw him hesitate. But we did not lie to each other; we never had. “I asked her to protect you,” he said. “After.”

I stared at him, dry-mouthed. “What did she say?”

Another silence. Then, so quietly I could imagine the dull red shame of his cheeks, he answered, “She said no.”

Later, when he slept, and I lay wakeful and watching under the stars, I thought of this. Knowing that he had asked warmed me—it chased away some of the coldness of the days here in the palace, when he was wanted every moment and I was not.

As for the goddess’s answer, I did not care. I would have no need of her. I did not plan to live after he was gone.

S
IX WEEKS PASSED
—the six weeks that it took to organize soldiers, to equip a fleet, to pack up food and clothing to last the length of the war—a year perhaps, or two. Sieges were always long.

Peleus insisted that Achilles take only the best. He paid for a small fortune in armor, more than six men would need. There were hammered-bronze breastplates, graven with lions and a rising phoenix, stiff leather greaves with gold bands, horsehair plumed helms, a silver-forged sword, dozens of spearheads, and two light-wheeled chariots. With this came a four-horse team, including the pair given to Peleus by the gods at his wedding. Xanthos and Balios, they were called: Golden and Dapple, and their eyes rolled white with impatience whenever they were not free to run. He gave us also a charioteer, a boy younger than we were, but sturdily built and said to be skilled with headstrong horses. Automedon, his name was.

Finally, last of all: a long spear, ash sapling peeled of bark and polished until it glowed like gray flame. From Chiron, Peleus said, handing it to his son. We bent over it, our fingers trailing its surface as if to catch the centaur’s lingering presence. Such a fine gift would have taken weeks of Chiron’s deft shaping; he must have begun it almost the day that we left. Did he know, or only guess at Achilles’ destiny? As he lay alone in his rose-colored cave, had some glimmer of prophecy come to him? Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.

Yet this beautiful spear had been fashioned not in bitterness, but love. Its shape would fit no one’s hand but Achilles’, and its heft could suit no one’s strength but his. And though the point was keen and deadly, the wood itself slipped under our fingers like the slender oiled strut of a lyre.

A
T LAST THE DAY
for our departure came. Our ship was a beauty, finer even than Odysseus’—sleek and slim as a knifepoint, meant to cut the sea. It rode low in the water, heavy with stores of food and supplies.

And that was only the flagship. Beside it, forty-nine others, a city of wood, rolled gently in the waters of Phthia’s harbor. Their bright prow-pieces were a bestiary of animals and nymphs and creatures half in between, and their masts stood as tall as the trees they had been. At the front of each of these ships, one of our new-minted captains stood at attention, saluting as we walked up the ramp to our vessel.

Achilles went first, his purple cloak stirring in the breeze from the sea, then Phoinix, and me with a new cloak of my own, holding the old man’s arm to steady his steps. The people cheered for us and for our soldiers, filing onto their own ships. All around us final promises were shouted: of glory, of the gold that would be stripped and brought home from Priam’s rich city.

Peleus stood at the shore’s edge, one hand raised in farewell. True to his word, Achilles had not told him of the prophecy, merely hugged him tightly, as if to soak the old man into his skin. I had embraced him too, those thin, wiry limbs. I thought,
This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old.
And then I remembered: he will never be old.

The ship’s boards were still sticky with new resin. We leaned over the railing to wave our last farewell, the sun-warm wood pressed against our bellies. The sailors heaved up the anchor, square and chalky with barnacles, and loosened the sails. Then they took their seats at the oars that fringed the boat like eyelashes, waiting for the count. The drums began to beat, and the oars lifted and fell, taking us to Troy.

Chapter Seventeen

B
UT FIRST, TO
A
ULIS
. A
ULIS, A JUTTING FINGER OF LAND
with enough shoreline to beach all our ships at once. Agamemnon had wanted his mighty force assembled in a single place before it sailed. A symbol perhaps: the visible power of Greece Offended.

After five days churning through the rough waters of the Euboean coast, we came around the last hitch of the winding straight, and Aulis was there. It appeared all at once, as if a veil had been yanked off: shoreline thick with vessels in every size and color and shape, its beach covered in a shifting carpet of thousands upon thousands of men. Beyond them the canvas tops of tents stretched out to the horizon, bright pennants marking the kings’ pavilions. Our men strove at their oars, guiding us towards the last empty place on the crowded shore—big enough for our whole fleet. Anchors dropped from fifty sterns.

Horns blew. The Myrmidons from the other ships were already wading ashore. They stood now at the water’s edge, surrounding us, white tunics billowing. At a signal we could not see they began to chant their prince’s name, twenty-five hundred men speaking as one.
A-chil-les!
All along the shore, heads turned—Spartans, Argives, Mycenaeans, and all the rest. The news went rippling through them, passing one to another.
Achilles is here
.

As the sailors lowered the gangway we watched them gather, kings and conscripts both. I could not see the princely faces from the distance, but I recognized the pennants that their squires carried before them: the yellow banner of Odysseus, the blue of Diomedes, and then the brightest, the biggest—a lion on purple, the symbol of Agamemnon and Mycenae.

Achilles looked to me, drew in a breath; the screaming crowd at Phthia was nothing compared to this. But he was ready. I saw it in the way he lifted his chest, in the fierce green of his eyes. He walked to the gangway and stood at its top. The Myrmidons kept up their shouts, and they were not alone now; others in the crowd had joined them. A broad-chested Myrmidon captain cupped his hands around his mouth. “Prince Achilles, son of King Peleus and the goddess Thetis.
Aristos Achaion!
”

As if in answer, the air changed. Bright sunlight broke and poured over Achilles, went rolling down his hair and back and skin, turning him to gold. He seemed suddenly larger, and his tunic, wrinkled from travel, straightened until it shone white and clean as a sail. His hair caught the light like buoyant flame.

Gasps amongst the men; new cheers burst forth.
Thetis,
I thought. It could be no one else. She was pulling his divinity forth, mantling it like cream on every inch of his skin. Helping her son make the most of his dearly bought fame.

I could see the tug of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He was enjoying it, licking the crowd’s worship off his lips. He did not know, he told me later, what was happening. But he did not question it; it did not seem strange to him.

A pathway had been left open for him, straight through the crowd’s heart to where the kings gathered. Each arriving prince was to present himself before his peers and new commander; now it was Achilles’ turn. He strode down the plank and past the jostling ranks of men, stopping perhaps ten feet from the kings. I was a few paces farther behind.

Agamemnon was waiting for us. His nose was curved and sharp like an eagle’s beak, and his eyes glittered with a greedy intelligence. He was solid and broad across his chest, firmly planted in his feet. He looked seasoned, but also worn—older than the forty years we knew him to be. At his right side, a place of honor, stood Odysseus and Diomedes. On his left was his brother, Menelaus— king of Sparta, cause of war. The vivid red hair that I remembered from Tyndareus’ hall was touched now with threading gray. Like his brother he was tall and square, his shoulders strong as a yoke-ox. His family’s dark eyes and curving nose seemed softer on him, more temperate. His face was smile-lined and handsome where his brother’s was not.

The only other king that I could identify with any surety was Nestor—the old man, chin barely covered by a sparse white beard, eyes sharp in his age-whittled face. He was the oldest man living, it was rumored, the canny survivor of a thousand scandals and battles and coups. He ruled the sandy strip of Pylos, whose throne he still clutched stubbornly, disappointing dozens of sons who grew old and then older, even as he bred new ones from his famed and well-worn loins. It was two of these sons who held his arms steady now, shouldering other kings aside for a place at the front. As he watched us his mouth hung open, breath puffing his threadbare beard with excitement. He loved a commotion.

Agamemnon stepped forward. He opened his hands in a gesture of welcome and stood regally expectant, waiting for the bows, obeisance, and oaths of loyalty he was owed. It was Achilles’ place to kneel and offer them.

He did not kneel. He did not call out a greeting to the great king, or incline his head or offer a gift. He did nothing but stand straight, chin proudly lifted, before them all.

Agamemnon’s jaw tightened; he looked silly like that, with his arms out, and he knew it. My gaze caught on Odysseus and Diomedes; their eyes were sending sharp messages. Around us the uneasy silence spread. Men exchanged glances.

My hands clutched each other behind my back as I watched Achilles and the game he played. His face seemed cut from stone as he stared his warning at the king of Mycenae—
You do not command me
. The silence went on and on, painful and breathless, like a singer overreaching to finish a phrase.

Then, just as Odysseus moved forward to intervene, Achilles spoke. “I am Achilles, son of Peleus, god-born, best of the Greeks,” he said. “I have come to bring you victory.” A second of startled silence, then the men roared their approval. Pride became us—heroes were never modest.

Agamemnon’s eyes went flat. And then Odysseus was there, his hand hard on Achilles’ shoulder, wrinkling the fabric as his voice smoothed the air.

“Agamemnon, Lord of Men, we have brought the prince Achilles to pledge his allegiance to you.” His look warned Achilles—
it is not too late
. But Achilles simply smiled and stepped forward so that Odysseus’ hand fell off him.

“I come freely to offer my aid to your cause,” he said loudly. Then turning to the crowd around him, “I am honored to fight with so many noble warriors of our kingdoms.”

Another cheer, loud and long, taking what felt like minutes to die. Finally, from the deep crag of his face, Agamemnon spoke, with patience that had been hard won, hard practiced.

“Indeed, I have the finest army in the world. And I welcome you to it, young prince of Phthia.” His smile cut sharply. “It is a pity you were so slow to come.”

There was implication here, but Achilles had no chance to answer. Agamemnon was already speaking again, his voice lifted over us all: “Men of Greece, we have delayed long enough. We leave for Troy tomorrow. Repair to your camps and make yourselves ready.” Then he turned with finality and strode up the beach.

The kings of Agamemnon’s innermost circle followed him, dispersing back to their ships—Odysseus, Diomedes, Nestor, Menelaus, more. But others lingered to meet the new hero: Thessalian Eurypylus and Antilochus of Pylos, Meriones of Crete and the physician Podalerius. Men drawn here for glory or bound by their oath, from every far-flung crag of our countries. Many had been here for months, waiting as the rest of the army straggled together. After such tedium, they said, looking slyly at Achilles, they welcomed any harmless entertainment. Particularly at the expense of—

“Prince Achilles,” interrupted Phoinix. “Please excuse my intrusion. I thought you would wish to know that your camp is being prepared.” His voice was stiff with disapproval; but here, in front of the others, he would not chide.

“Thank you, worthy Phoinix,” Achilles said. “If you’ll pardon us—?”

Yes, yes, of course they would. They’d come by later, or tomorrow. They’d bring their best wine and we’d broach it together. Achilles clasped hands with them, promised it would be so.

I
N CAMP,
Myrmidons streamed around us hefting baggage and food, poles and canvas. A man in livery approached and bowed— one of Menelaus’ heralds. His king could not come in person, he regretted, but had sent the herald here in his place to welcome us. Achilles and I exchanged a glance. This was clever diplomacy— we had not made a friend in his brother, so Menelaus did not come himself. Yet, some welcome was due to the best of the Greeks. “A man who plays both sides of the fence,” I whispered to Achilles.

“A man who cannot afford to offend me if he wants his wife returned,” he whispered back.

Would we accept a tour? the herald asked. Yes, we said, in our best princely manner. We would.

The main encampment was a dizzying chaos, a bedlam of motion— the constant fluttering of pennants, laundry on lines, tent walls, the hurrying bodies of thousands and thousands of men. Beyond this was the river, with its old watermark from when the armies had first arrived, a foot higher on the bank. Then the marketplace center, the agora, with its altar and makeshift podium. Last, the latrines—long, open ditches, busy with men.

Wherever we went, we were observed. I watched Achilles closely, waiting to see if Thetis would again make his hair brighter or his muscles bigger. If she did, I did not notice; all the grace I saw then was his own: simple, unadorned, glorious. He waved to the men who stared at him; he smiled and greeted them as he passed. I heard the words, whispered from behind beards and broken teeth and callused hands:
Aristos Achaion
. Was he as Odysseus and Diomedes had promised? Did they believe those slender limbs could hold against an army of Trojans? Could a boy of sixteen really be our greatest warrior? And everywhere, as I watched the questions, I saw also the answers. Yes, they nodded to each other, yes, yes.