I began to strip the armour from Hektor savagely, tearing out the unwelcome sorrow in my heart, willing the instinct to mourn out of my marrow with a curse for every piece I ripped away. When I had done the Kings came to form a circle about his naked body, Agamemnon staring down at his dead face with a sneer. He lifted the spear he carried and buried it in Hektor’s side; all the others followed his lead, dealing the poor defenceless warrior the blows they couldn’t while he lived.
Sickened, I turned away – a chance to fan my rage white-hot and so dry my tears. When I swung round again I discovered that only Ajax had refrained from doing Hektor’s body insult. How could men call him a lubber when he alone understood? I pushed Agamemnon and the rest away roughly.
‘Hektor belongs to me. Take your weapons and go!’
Suddenly shamed, they backed off, looking like nothing so much as a pack of furtive curs hunted from their stolen meal.
I took the purple baldric from its buckle on the cuirass and drew my dagger. Then I slit the thin parts at the back of his heels and threaded the dyed, encrusted leather through, while Ajax, face stolid, watched the end of his gift. Automedon drove my chariot up; I secured the baldric to the back of it.
‘Get down,’ I told Automedon. ‘I’ll drive myself.’
My three white horses were smelling death and plunging, but when I wrapped the reins about my waist they quietened. Back and forth beneath the watchtower I drove the car to an accompaniment of grief from the top of Troy’s walls and jubilation from King Agamemnon’s army.
Hektor’s hair came unbraided and dragged loose across the trodden earth until it was matted and grey; his arms trailed limply backwards on either side of his head. Twelve times in all I whipped my horses between the watchtower and the Skaian Gate, parading the hope of Troy beneath its very walls, proclaiming the inevitability of our victory. Then I drove to the beach.
Patrokles lay still and shrouded on his bier. Three times I drove around the square, then dismounted, cut the baldric free. To pick up Hektor’s limp form in my arms was easy, yet somehow to fling it away, to let it lie ungainly at the foot of the bier, was enormously difficult. Yet I did it. Brise darted away, frightened. I sat down in her place, my head between my knees, and began to weep again.
‘Achilles, come home,’ she said.
Intending to refuse, I looked up. She too had suffered; I could not let her suffer more. So I got up, still weeping, and walked with her to my house. She sat me down in a chair and gave me a cloth to wipe my face, a bowl to wash the blood off my hands, wine to compose me. Somehow she managed to remove that iron armour, then dressed the wound on my thigh.
When she began to pull at my padded shift I stopped her. ‘Leave me,’ I said.
‘Let me bathe you properly.’
‘I cannot while Patrokles lies unburied.’
‘Patrokles has become your evil spirit,’ she said quietly, ‘and that is to mock what he was in life.’
With a burning look of reproach I quit the house, walked not to the square where Patrokles lay, but down to the shingle, and there dropped like another stone.
My sleep was a trance of utter peace until into the featureless abyss wherein I dwelled a thready whiteness came, glittering with unearthly light, the blackness of the abyss looming through its tenuous coils. From the distance it moved ever closer inward to the centre of my mind, gathering form and opacity as it came, until it stood before the core of my spirit in its final shape. The steady blue eyes of Patrokles stared into my nakedness. His soft mouth was harsh, just as I remembered it last, and his yellow hair was streaked with red.
‘Achilles, Achilles,’ he whispered in a voice that was his and yet not his, mournful and chill, ‘how can you sleep while I still lie unburied, unable to cross the River? Free me! Let me loose from my clay! How can you sleep while I am unburied?’
I reached my arms out to him to plead for his understanding, trying to tell him why I had let him fight in my place, babbling explanations one after another. I took him into my arms and my fingers closed on nothing; he shrank and dribbled away in the darkness until the last chirrup of his bat voice faded, until the last lingering thread of his luminescence faded into nothing. Nothing! Nothing!
I screamed. And woke still screaming, to find a dozen of my Myrmidons pinning me down. Shaking them off impatiently, I stumbled back between the ships, men stirring and asking each other what was that awful noise?, the grey light of dawn showing me the way.
A night wind had blown the shroud onto the ground; the Myrmidons who formed his guard of honour had not dared approach close enough to retrieve it. So when I staggered into the square I saw Patrokles himself. Sleeping. Dreaming. So peaceful, so benign. A facsimile. I had just seen the real Patrokles, and knew from his lips that he would never forgive me. That heart which had given so generously from the days of our shared adolescence was as cold and hard as marble. Why then was the facsimile’s face so tender, so gentle? Could such a face belong to the shade haunting my sleep? Did men truly change so much in death?
My foot touched something chilly; I shivered uncontrollably as I looked down on Hektor sprawled just as I had left him the evening before, his legs twisted up as if they were broken, his mouth and his eyes wide open, his emptied white flesh showing the pink mouths of a dozen wounds, the one at his neck gaping like a gill.
I turned away as Myrmidons came from all directions, wakened by the sound of their leader screaming like one demented. They were led by Automedon.
‘Achilles, it’s time to bury him.’
‘More than time.’
We carried Patrokles across the waters of Skamander on a raft, and then walked garbed for war with his corpse on his shield shoulder high in our midst. I stood behind the shield with his head in the palm of my right hand as his chief mourner, the whole army dotting the cliffs and the beach for two leagues around to witness the Myrmidons put him in his tomb.
We bore Patrokles into the corbelled cavern and laid him tenderly on the ivory death car, clad in the armour he had worn to his death, his body covered in locks of our hair, his spears and all his personal belongings on gold tripods about the painted walls. I glanced towards the roof, wondering how long it would be before I too lay there. Not long, so the oracles said.
The priest fitted the mask of gold over his face and tied the strings under his head, arranged his gold gauntleted hands on his thighs, their fingers meeting over the sword. The words were chanted, the libations poured out on the ground. Then one by one the twelve Trojan youths were held over a huge golden cup standing on a tripod at the foot of the death car, and their throats were cut. We sealed up the entrance to the tomb and marched back to the camp, to the assembly ground in front of Agamemnon’s house, where funeral games were always held. I brought out the prizes and went through the misery of presenting them to the winners, then, while the rest feasted, I returned to my own house alone.
Hektor lay now in the dust outside my door, removed there after we had taken Patrokles from his bier; the memory of that wraith out of my dreams had urged me to inter him with Patrokles like a mongrel dog at the foot of a hero, but I couldn’t do it. I broke my vow to my oldest and dearest friend – my lover! – to keep Hektor with me instead; Patrokles had the price of the ferry ride: twelve noble Trojan youths. Enough and more than enough.
I clapped my hands; the serving women came running. ‘Heat water, bring the anointing oils, send for the chief embalmer. I want Prince Hektor prepared for burial.’
