33
NARRATED BY
They shut the trapdoor on us well before dawn, and we who had experienced darkness every night of our lives discovered what darkness really was. Opening wider and wider, my eyes strained to see, yet still there was nothing to see. Nothing. I was struck blind, the world a blackness tangible and unendurable. A day and a night, I found myself thinking – if we were lucky. At least a day and a night crouching in one spot without so much as one pinprick of light – no way to tell the time from the sun, each instant an eternity, ears so finely attuned that men’s breathing rolled like distant thunder.
My arm brushed against Odysseus; I shuddered before I could stop myself. My nostrils twitched with the smells of sweat, urine, faeces, malodorous breath, despite the covered pails of hide Odysseus had issued between each three men. I understood now why he had been so adamant about it. To have been soiled by excrement would have been beyond any of us. One hundred men struck blind – how did some men survive a lifetime of blindness?
I thought, I will never be able to see again. Will my eyes recognise light, or will the sheer shock of it dazzle me back into permanent darkness? My skin was tight, I could feel the terror licking all around me in the pit as one hundred of the most courageous men alive were stricken with mortal dread, incarcerated. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth; I reached for the water skin, anything to be doing something.
We did have air, cunningly filtered in through a maze of tiny holes punctured all over the beast’s body and head, but Odysseus had warned us that we wouldn’t see light through these holes while there was daylight outside because layers of cloth shielded them. Finally I closed my eyes. They ached so much from trying to see that it came as a welcome relief, and I found the blackness easier to bear.
Odysseus and I sat spine to spine, as did everyone. We ourselves were the only back rests our prison possessed. Striving to relax, I leaned on him and began to recall every girl I had ever met. I catalogued them meticulously – the prettiest and the ugliest – the shortest and the tallest – the first girl I had bedded and the last – one who had giggled at my lack of experience and one who had had barely enough strength to roll her eyes at me after a night in my arms. Girls exhausted, I began on all the beasts I had killed, the hunts I had attended – lions, boars, deer. Fishing expeditions in search of grampus and leviathan and vast serpents, though all we found were tunny and sea bass. I relived my days of training with the young Myrmidons. The little wars I had fought in their company. The times I had met great men, and who they were. I told over the tally of ships and Kings who had sailed for Troy. I thought of the name of every town and village in Thessalia. I sang the lays of the Heroes over in my mind. Somehow the time did pass, but snailed.
The silence deepened. I must have slept, for I awoke with a jerk to find that Odysseus had clapped his hand over my mouth. I lay with my head in his lap, my eyes starting from their sockets in panic until I remembered why I couldn’t see. A movement had aroused me, and as I lay collecting my wits it came again – a gentle jolting. Rolling over, I sat up, groped for Odysseus’s hands and clasped them tightly. He bent his head, his hair against my cheek. I found his ear.
‘Are they moving us?’
I felt his grin against my face. ‘Of course they are. Not for one moment did I doubt they’d move this thing. They fell for Sinon’s story, just as I knew they would,’ he whispered.
The sudden activity broke the suffocating inertia of our imprisonment; for a long time we felt brighter, cheerier as we lurched and jerked along, trying to work out our speed, wondering when we would reach the walls, wondering what Priam intended to do about the fact that the horse was too big. And for this span of time we rejoiced in being able to speak to each other in low but normal voices, sure that the noise our conveyance made as it groaned along would drown us out. We could hear our progress, though we couldn’t hear men or oxen. Just the roaring, squealing turning of all those wheels.
It wasn’t difficult to determine when we reached the Skaian Gate. Movement ceased for what seemed like days. We sat praying silently to every God we knew that they wouldn’t give up; that they would – as Odysseus had insisted they would – go to the lengths of demolishing the archway. Then we started to move again. There was a grinding, sickening jolt which knocked us sprawling; we lay still, our faces pressed against the floor.
‘Fools!’ Odysseus snarled. ‘They’ve miscalculated.’
After four such jolts we began rolling once more. As the floor tilted, Odysseus chuckled.
‘The hill up to the Citadel,’ he said. ‘They’re escorting us to the palace, no less.’
Then all was silent again. Come to rest with a mighty groan, we were left to our thoughts. The huge thing took time to settle like a leviathan into mud, and I wondered whereabouts exactly we had come to this final halt. The perfume of flowers came stealing in. I tried to estimate how long it had taken them to haul the horse from the plain, but could not. If one cannot see sun or moon or stars, one cannot gauge the passage of time. So I leaned back against Odysseus and wrapped my arms about my knees. He and I were placed right next to the trapdoor, whereas Diomedes had been sent to the far end to keep order (we had been told that if a man started to panic, he was to be killed immediately), and I wasn’t sorry. Odysseus was rocklike, unshakeable; just having him at my back calmed me.
When I let myself think about my father, the moments flew. I hadn’t wanted to think about him, fearing the pain, but in the anticlimax of our last wait I couldn’t hold out. And was shorn of any pain at once, for when I opened the shutters of my mind to admit him, I could feel him physically with me. I was a small child again and he a giant towering far above my head, a God and a Hero to a little boy. So beautiful. So strange with that lipless mouth. I still bear the scar where I tried to cut off my own lip to be more like him; Grandfather Peleus caught me at it, and whipped me soundly for impiety. You can’t be someone else, he said to me. You are yourself. Lips or no lips. Ah, and how I had prayed that the war against Troy would last long enough for me to go there and fight alongside him! From the time I turned fourteen and counted myself a man I begged both my grandfathers, Peleus and Lykomedes, to let me sail for Troy. They had refused.
Until the day when Grandfather Peleus came to my rooms in the palace at Iolkos with the grey face of a dying man and told me I might go. He simply sent me off; he didn’t mention the message Odysseus had sent him, that the days of Achilles were numbered.
As long as I live I’ll never forget the lay the minstrel sang to Agamemnon and the Kings. Unnoticed, I stood in the doorway and drank it in, revelling in his deeds. Then the harper sang of his death, of his mother and the choice she offered him, of the fact that he considered it no choice: live long and prosper in obscurity, or die young and covered in glory. Death. That was the fate I could never associate with my father, Achilles. To me he was above death; no hand could strike him down. But Achilles was a mortal man, and Achilles died. Died before I could see him, kiss his mouth without needing to be lifted an immense distance upwards, my feet far off the ground. Men told me I had grown to almost exactly his height.
Odysseus had guessed a great deal more than anyone else, and told me as much as he knew or suspected. Then he told me of the plot, sparing no one – least of all himself – as he explained to me why my father had quarrelled with Agamemnon and withdrawn his aid. I wondered if I would have had the strength and resolution to watch my reputation marred for ever, as my father had. Heart aching, I swore Odysseus an oath of secrecy; some inner sense was saying to me that my father wanted things to remain as they were. Odysseus assumed this was an atonement for some great sin he thought he had committed.
Yet even in the decent darkness I couldn’t weep for him. My eyes were dry. Paris was dead, but if I could kill Priam for Achilles, I might be able to weep.
I dozed again. The sound of the trapdoor opening woke me. Odysseus moved like lightning, but he wasn’t quick enough. A faint, dazzling light was seeping through the hole in the floor, and legs locked together flashed against its brilliance. There were sounds of a muted scuffle, then one pair of the legs tipped over. I sensed a body hurtling earthwards; from below there came a soft thud. Someone from the horse couldn’t endure his incarceration one moment longer; when Sinon on the ground outside pulled the lever which opened the trapdoor we had no advance warning, but one of us was ready to escape.
Odysseus stood looking down, then uncoiled the rope ladder. I moved up to him. Our armour was bundled in parcels in the horse’s head, and we had a strict order of exit; as we filed to the trapdoor the first parcel a man felt was his own armour.
‘I know who fell,’ Odysseus said to me, ‘so I’ll take my armour and wait until it’s his turn, then take his. Otherwise the men after him won’t get the right bundle.’
Thus I found myself the first to tread on solid earth, save that it wasn’t solid at all. Like a man stunned by a blow, I stood on headily perfumed softness – a carpet of autumn flowers.
Once all of us were down, Odysseus and Diomedes moved to greet Sinon with hugs, kisses. Crafty Sinon, who was Odysseus’s cousin. Not having seen him before we entered the horse, I was amazed at his appearance. No wonder the Trojans fell for the tale he pitched them! Sick, miserable, bleeding, filthy. I had never seen the nastiest slave treated so abominably. Odysseus told me afterwards that Sinon had voluntarily starved himself for two moons to seem more wretched.
He was grinning hugely; I came up to them as he started to speak. ‘Priam swallowed every bit, cousin! And the Gods were on our side – the omen Zeus sent was terrific – Lakoon and both his sons perished when they stepped on a nest of vipers, imagine that! It couldn’t be better.’
‘Did they leave the Skaian Gate open?’ asked Odysseus.
‘Of course. The whole city is in a drunken sleep – they really celebrated! Once the festivities in the palace started, no one remembered the poor victim from the Greek camp, so I had no difficulty in sneaking out to the headland above Sigios and lighting a beacon for Agamemnon. My fire was answered instantly from the hills on Tenedos – he should be sailing into Sigios around about now.’
Odysseus hugged him again. ‘You did magnificently, Sinon. Rest assured, you’ll be rewarded.’
‘I know that.’ He paused, then huffed contentedly. ‘Do you know, cousin, I think I would have done it for no reward?’
Odysseus sent off fifty of us to the Skaian Gate to make sure the Trojans weren’t given an opportunity to close it before Agamemnon entered; the rest of us stood armed and ready, watching the rose and soft gold creep over the high wall around the great courtyard, breathing deeply of the morning air and inhaling the perfume of the flowers beneath our feet.
‘Who fell from the horse?’ I asked Odysseus.
‘Echion, son of Portheus,’ he said shortly, his mind clearly elsewhere. Then he growled in his throat, shifted restlessly; not like Odysseus at all. ‘Agamemnon, Agamemnon, where are you?’ he asked aloud. ‘You should be here already!’
At which moment a single horn wound soaring through the sunrise sky; Agamemnon was at the Skaian Gate, and we could move.
We split up. Odysseus, Diomedes, Menelaos, Automedon and I took a few of the others and trod as softly as we could onto the colonnade, then turned into a high, wide corridor which led to Priam’s part of the palace complex. There Odysseus, Menelaos and Diomedes left me to take a side passage through the maze towards the rooms which housed Helen and Deiphobos.
A high, lonely, drawn out scream tore the stillness apart and broke over the head of Troy. The palace passages came alive with people, men still naked from the bed, swords in hands, dazed and stupid from too much wine. Which permitted us to take our time, parry clumsy thrusts easily, chop them all down. Women howled and screeched, the marble tiles beneath our feet became slippery with blood – they didn’t have a chance. Few realised what had happened. Some were alert enough to absorb the sight of me in Achilles’s armour, and fled shrieking that Achilles led the shades of the dead on a rampage.
Murder in my heart, I spared no one. As the guards tumbled out the resistance began to harden; we had some good fighting at last, even if it wasn’t battlefield style. The women contributed to the confusion and panic, made it impossible for the Citadel’s male defenders to manoeuvre. Others from the horse followed in my wake; thirsting for Priam, I left them to butcher as they willed. Priam alone could pay for Achilles.
But they loved him, their foolish old King. Those who had woken clear-headed enough had buckled on armour and run through the warren by devious routes, intent on protecting him. A wall of armed men barred my path, their spears held like lances, their faces informing me that they’d die in Priam’s service. Automedon and some others caught up with me; I stood still for a moment, considering. The tips of their spears steady, they waited for me to move. I swung my shield round and looked over my shoulder.
‘Take them!’
I leaped forwards so quickly that the man directly facing me instinctively stepped aside, unsettling their front. The shield like a wall, I crashed broadside into them. They had no hope of withstanding such a weight of man and armour; as I fell on top of them their line broke, spears useless. I came up swinging the axe; one man lost an arm, another half his chest, a third the top of his head. It was just like cutting down thin saplings. My height and reach unmatchable at close quarters, I stood and hacked.
Bloody from head to foot, I stepped over the bodies and found myself on a pillared colonnade running all the way around a small courtyard. In its middle stood an altar raised on a tiered dais, with a big, leafy laurel tree shading its table from the sun.
Priam, King of Troy, was huddled on the top step, his white beard and hair struck silver in the filtered light, his skinny body wrapped in a linen bed robe.
I shouted to him from where I stood, my axe hanging at my side. ‘Pick up a sword and die, Priam!’
But he stared vacantly at something beyond me, his rheumy eyes filled with tears; he neither knew nor cared. The air was charged with the noises of death and mayhem, and smoke was already lowering the sky. Troy was dying around him while he sat on the edge of madness at the foot of Apollo’s altar. I believe that he never did realise we came from the horse, so the God spared him that. All he understood was that there was no further reason for him to continue living.
An ancient woman hunched beside him, clinging to his arm, her mouth open on a constant succession of howls more akin to a dog’s than to anything human. A young woman with masses of curling black hair stood with her back to me at the altar table, her hands flat on its slab, her head tilted far back in prayer.
More men were arriving to defend Priam; I met their onslaught contemptuously. Some wore the insignia of sons of Priam, which only spurred me on. I killed them until one alone remained, a mere youth – Ilios? What could it matter who? When he tried to attack me with a sword I wrenched it from him easily, then took his long, unbound tresses in my left fist, my shield abandoned. He struggled, pummelled my greaves with his knuckles even as I tipped him onto his back and dragged him to the foot of the altar. Priam and Hekabe clung together; the young woman didn’t turn round.
‘Here’s your last son, Priam! Watch him die!’
I put my heel on the youth’s chest and hauled his shoulders clear of the ground, then smashed his head in with a blow from the flat of my axe. Suddenly seeming to notice me for the first time, Priam jumped to his feet. Eyes on the body of his last son, he reached for a spear leaning against the side of the altar. His wife tried to restrain him, howling like a she-wolf.
But he couldn’t even negotiate the steps. He stumbled and fell to lie at my feet with his face buried in his arms, his neck presented for the Axe. The old woman had wrapped her arms about his thighs, the young woman had finally turned and watched not me but the King, her face filled with compassion. The axe came up. I judged the stroke so there could be no mistake. The double-headed blade streaked downwards like a ribbon in the air, and I felt in that exalted moment the priest who lives in the hearts of all men born to be kings. My father’s axe completed the stroke perfectly. Priam’s neck gaped under his silver hair, the blade went through to meet stone on the other side, and the head leaped high. Troy was dead. Its King had died as kings had died in the days of the Old Religion, their heads proffered for the Axe. I turned to find none save Greeks in Apollo’s courtyard.
‘Find a room you can lock,’ I said to Automedon, ‘then come back here and put the two women in it.’
I ascended the altar steps.
‘Your King is dead,’ I said to the young woman – a great beauty. ‘You’re my prize. Who are you?’
‘Andromache of Kilikia, Hektor’s widow,’ she said steadily.
‘Look after your mother, then, while you can. You’ll be parted soon enough.’
‘Let me go to my son,’ she said, very controlled.
I shook my head. ‘No, that’s not possible.’
‘Please!’ she said, still in complete control.
The last of my rage left me; I pitied her. Agamemnon would never permit the boy to live. His order was the total extirpation of the House of Priam. Before I could deny her access to her son a second time, Automedon came back. The two women, one still howling, the other quietly imploring to be let see her son, were led away.
After that I left the courtyard and began to explore the labyrinth of corridors, opening each door and peering inside to see if there were more Trojans to kill. But I found no one until I reached an outer perimeter, opened yet another door.
Lying on a bed, sleeping soundly, was a very big and powerfully built man. A handsome fellow, dark enough to be a son of Priam save that he didn’t have a Priamish look to him. I entered without making a sound and stood over him with my axe very near his neck, then shook him roughly by the shoulder. Obviously the worse for wine, he groaned, but became abruptly alert the moment his eyes took in a man wearing the armour of Achilles. Only the axe blade against his throat prevented his making a flying leap for his sword. He glared up at me hotly.
‘And who are you?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Aineas of Dardania.’
‘Well, well! You’re my prisoner, Aineas. I’m Neoptolemos.’
A flash of hope lit his eyes. ‘What, I’m not to be killed?’
‘Why should I want to kill you? You’re my prisoner, nothing more. If your Dardanian people still think highly enough of you to pay the exorbitant ransom I intend to ask, you may yet be a free man. A reward for – er – being nice to us in battle sometimes.’
His face exploded into joy. ‘Then I’ll be King of Troy!’
I laughed. ‘By the time your ransom is found, Aineas, there will be no Troy to rule. We’re going to tear the place apart and send its people into slavery. Shades will walk the plain. I think your most sensible course would be to emigrate.’ I let the axe fall. ‘Get up. Naked and in chains, you’ll walk behind me.’
He snarled but did exactly as he was told, and gave me no trouble whatsoever.
A Myrmidon brought my chariot up through the burning, melting streets. I found some bits of rope, took the two women out of their prison and tethered them fast. Aineas held out his wrists for binding of his own volition. All three tied securely, I told Automedon to drive out of the Citadel gates and back to the Skaian Square. The sack was getting under way – not work for the son of Achilles. Someone hitched Priam’s headless body to the back of the car, as Hektor’s had been; it slid across the cobbles amid the feet of my three living captives. Priam’s head sat atop Old Pelion, his silver hair and beard soaked in blood, his dark eyes wide open, transfixed in grief and ruin, gazing sightless over burning houses and mangled bodies. Little children cried vainly for their mothers, women ran dementedly hunting for their babes or fled from soldiers bent on rape and murder.
There was no holding the army. On this their day of triumph they vented all the spleen of ten years of homelessness and exile, of dead comrades and unfaithful wives, of hatred for every Trojan person and thing; they prowled the smoke-palled alleys like beasts. I saw no sign of Agamemnon. Perhaps some of my hurry in quitting the city stemmed from reluctance to meet him on this day of utter devastation. It was his victory.
Not far from the Citadel, Odysseus emerged from a side lane, waving cheerfully. ‘Going already, Neoptolemos?’
I nodded despondently. ‘Yes, and as fast as I can. Now that my anger’s gone, my belly isn’t strong enough.’
He pointed at the head. ‘I see you found Priam.’
‘Yes.’
‘And who else have we got here?’ He inspected my prisoners, bowing to Aineas with an exaggerated flourish. ‘So you actually took Aineas alive! Now he was one I was sure would make it hard for you.’
I flicked the Dardanian a glance of scorn. ‘He slept like a babe through the whole business. I found him mother-naked on his bed, still snoring.’
Odysseus roared with laughter; Aineas grew stiff with fury, the muscles of his arms bulging as he fought to be free of the ropes. Suddenly I realised that I had chosen the more galling fate for Aineas. He was far too proud to stomach derision. At the moment I woke him, all he could think of was the throne of Troy. Now he was beginning to understand what his captivity would entail – the insults, the gibes, the mirth, the endless retelling of how he was found dead drunk while everyone else was fighting.
I untied old Hekabe and jerked her forward. Howling. Then I put the end of her tether in Odysseus’s hand.
‘A special gift for you. You know she’s Hekabe, of course. Take her and give her to Penelope as a serving woman. She’ll add considerable lustre to your rocky isle.’
He blinked, astonished. ‘There’s no need, Neoptolemos.’
‘I want you to have her, Odysseus. If I tried to keep her for myself, Agamemnon would have her off me for himself. But he won’t dare demand her of you. Let some other house than Atreus’s display a high-ranking prize out of Troy.’
‘What of the young one? You know she’s Andromache?’
‘Yes, but she’s mine by right.’ I bent to whisper in his ear. ‘She wanted to go to her son, but I knew that wasn’t possible. What’s happened to Hektor’s son?’
For a moment I saw a coldness. ‘Astyanax is dead. He couldn’t be allowed to live. I found him myself, and threw him from the Citadel tower. Sons, grandsons, great-grandsons – all must die.’
I changed the subject. ‘Did you find Helen?’
His chilliness vanished in a huge guffaw. ‘Indeed we did!’
‘How did she die?’
‘Helen, dead? Helen? Laddie, she was born to live to a ripe old age and die sedately in her bed with her children and servants weeping. Can you see Menelaos killing Helen? Or letting Agamemnon order it? Gods, he loves her better by far than he does himself!’
He calmed down, though he still chortled. ‘We found her in her apartments surrounded by a small guard of men, with Deiphobos prepared to kill the first Greek he saw. Menelaos was like a maddened bull! He took the Trojans on single-handedly and made light of it. Diomedes and I were mere spectators. At length he did for them all except Deiphobos, and they squared up to duel. Helen was standing to one side, head back, chest out, and eyes like green suns. As beautiful as Aphrodite! Neoptolemos, I tell you that there will never be a woman in all the world to hold a lamp to her! Menelaos got ready, but there was no duel. Helen got in first, skewered Deiphobos with a dagger between his shoulder blades. Then she fell on her knees. Chest out.
‘“Kill me, Menelaos! Kill me!” she cried. “I don’t deserve to live! Kill me now!”
‘Of course he didn’t. He took one look at her breasts and that was the end of it. They walked out of the room together without one glance in our direction.’
I had to laugh too. ‘Oh, the irony! To think you fought a group of nations for ten whole years to see Helen die, only to see her go home to Amyklai a free woman – and still Queen.’
‘Well, death is rarely where one expects,’ said Odysseus. His shoulders sagged, and I saw for the first time that he was a man nearing forty, that he felt his age and his exile, that for all his love of intrigue he wanted nothing more than to be at home again. He saluted me and walked away leading the howling Hekabe, then disappeared into an alley. I nodded to Automedon and we went onwards to the Skaian Gate.
The team plodded slowly down the road which led back to the beach, Aineas and Andromache walking behind, Priam’s corpse bouncing along between them. Inside the camp I bypassed the Myrmidon compound, forded Skamander and took the path to the tombs.
When the horses could go no further I untied Priam from the bar, twisted my left hand in the body’s robe and dragged it thus to the door of my father’s burial place. I propped Priam in the pose of a suppliant, kneeling over, and drove the butt of Old Pelion into the ground, piling stones about its base to make a little cairn. Then I turned back to see Troy on the plain, its houses spouting flames into the sombre sky, its gate gaping open like the mouth of a corpse after the shade has fled into the dark wastes below the earth. And then, at last, I wept for Achilles.
I tried to envision him as he was at Troy, but there was too much blood; a haze of death. In the end I could remember him but one way only, his skin shining oil from the bath, his yellow eyes glowing because he looked on me, his little son.
Not caring who saw me weep, I walked back to the chariot and climbed in beside Automedon.
‘Back to the ships, friend of my father. We go home,’ I said.
‘Home!’ he echoed on a sigh, faithful Automedon who had sailed from Aulis with Achilles. ‘Home!’
Troy was behind us burning, but our eyes saw nothing save the dancing sparks of the sun on the wine-dark sea, beckoning us home.