Achilles by Elizabeth Cook

Author:Elizabeth Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Picador

GONE

Urn

They fell on your carcass like jackals. Those who would not have dared to come near you in life, suddenly very brave. Everyone wanted to get a look, a feel. They plan to boast about this for the rest of their lives, which for most of them is not long.

‘You should have seen the look in his eyes. Not fear. Surprise.’

‘I touched one of his hands – twice the size of mine. Little reddy-gold hairs on the back of it.’

‘So young, his face.’

Moments after you were felled – slamming into the ground like a huge tree – there was chaos. They did not want to let you go, these Trojans who had got you so suddenly. So undeservedly. But Odysseus and Ajax arrived, wielding their broad swords.

Ajax hooked his arms under your shoulders as Odysseus, fierce as a dog, drove back the Trojan scavengers. He snarled, menacing on all sides, laying about him with the butt of his spear then twirling it round to stab. He plied it nimbly, as if it were part of him.

Then Ajax, his own great body filled with sorrow, lifted you. He kneeled to insert his left shoulder under the place where your body folds and then, with a stamp and a loud exhalation, staggered to his feet.

Yes. Great Ajax staggered under the weight of you.

Now your body has been washed. Briseis has done this, her exile’s heart breaking, tears mixing with the clean water. She has dried you with her long hair and with linen. She has crushed herbs into the oil she anoints you with: hyssop, myrtle, juniper, rosemary. Maquis herbs that smell of Pelion’s shrubby mountainside in the sun.

Your glistening body, healed of its single wound, is laid out on the bier.

You saw how it would be when you buried Patroclus.

One by one your Myrmidons approach you. Each man saws at his hair with his sword’s edge and lays this tribute on you. Each man is weeping.

After the Myrmidons, the generals. Even Agamemnon weeps as he bows his head beside you, ashamed now of his greed. Your body under this soft piled blanket of black and brown, russet and gold. The wind detaches and lifts some of the locks. Bright hairs separate themselves and float in the air like strange insects. Sea horses of the air.

* * *

A TERRIBLE SOUND. A great wailing. A keening that never seems to exhaust itself but which moves in waves, each fuller than the one before. The sea has altered. Where before it was one bright blue, broken only by the myriad jagged flashes of sunlight, it is darker now. Purple waves, green ones, waves of a deeper blue roll in, one on top of the other, lipping it, chasing it, waves pouring in as if to flood the beach. As if racing to drown every creature that remains on the beach.

The sudden darkening of the waves makes the men look up at the sky, expecting to see signs of a storm. They find unbroken blue.

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