The Song of Achilles(23)

“You are frightening the boy,” Chiron said.

“He does not belong here,” she said. Her lips were red as newly spilled blood.

Chiron’s hand landed firmly on my shoulder. “Patroclus,” he said. “You will return to the cave now. I will speak with you later.”

I stood, unsteadily, and obeyed.

“You have lived too long with mortals, Centaur,” I heard her say before the animal skins closed behind me. I sagged against the cave’s wall; my throat tasted brackish and raw.

“Achilles,” I said.

His eyes opened, and he was beside me before I could speak again.

“Are you all right?”

“Your mother is here,” I said.

I saw the tightening of muscle beneath his skin. “She did not hurt you?”

I shook my head. I did not add that I thought she wanted to. That she might have, if Chiron had not come.

“I must go,” he said. The skins whispered against each other as they parted for him, then slipped shut again.

I could not hear what was said in the clearing. Their voices were low, or perhaps they had gone to speak elsewhere. I waited, tracing spirals in the packed earth floor. I did not worry, any longer, for myself. Chiron meant to keep me, and he was older than she was, full grown when the gods still rocked in their cradles, when she had been only an egg in the womb of the sea. But there was something else, less easy to name. A loss, or lessening, that I feared her presence might bring.

It was almost midday when they returned. My gaze went to Achilles’ face first, searching his eyes, the set of his mouth. I saw nothing but perhaps a touch of tiredness. He threw himself onto the pallet beside me. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“As well you should be,” Chiron said. “It is much past lunch.” He was already preparing food for us, maneuvering in the cave’s space easily despite his bulk.

Achilles turned to me. “It is all right,” he said. “She just wanted to speak to me. To see me.”

“She will come to speak with him again,” Chiron said. And as if he knew what I thought, he added, “As is proper. She is his mother.”

She is a goddess first, I thought.

Yet as we ate, my fears eased. I had half-worried she might have told Chiron of the day by the beach, but he was no different towards either of us, and Achilles was the same as he always was. I went to bed, if not at peace, at least reassured.

She came more often after that day, as Chiron had said she would. I learned to listen for it—a silence that dropped like a curtain— and knew to stay close to Chiron then, and the cave. The intrusion was not much, and I told myself I did not begrudge her. But I was always glad when she was gone again.

WINTER CAME, and the river froze. Achilles and I ventured onto it, feet slipping. Later, we cut circles from it and dropped lines for fishing. It was the only fresh meat we had; the forests were empty of all but mice and the occasional marten.

Snows came, as Chiron had promised they would. We lay on the ground and let the flakes cover us, blowing them with our breath till they melted. We had no boots, nor cloaks other than Chiron’s furs, and were glad of the cave’s warmth. Even Chiron donned a shaggy overshirt, sewed from what he said was bearskin.

We counted the days after the first snowfall, marking them off with lines on a stone. “When you reach fifty,” Chiron said, “the river’s ice will begin to crack.” The morning of the fiftieth day we heard it, a strange sound, like a tree falling. A seam had split the frozen surface nearly from bank to bank. “Spring will come soon now,” Chiron said.

It was not long after that the grass began to grow again, and the squirrels emerged lean and whip-thin from their burrows. We followed them, eating our breakfasts in the new-scrubbed spring air. It was on one of these mornings that Achilles asked Chiron if he would teach us to fight.

I do not know what made him think of this then. A winter indoors, with not enough exercise perhaps, or the visit from his mother, the week before. Perhaps neither.

Will you teach us to fight?

There was a pause so brief I almost might have imagined it, before Chiron answered, “If you wish it, I will teach you.”

Later that day, he took us to a clearing, high on a ridge. He had spear-hafts and two practice swords for us, taken from storage in some corner of the cave. He asked us each to perform the drills that we knew. I did, slowly, the blocks and strikes and footwork I had learned in Phthia. To my side, just at the corner of my vision, Achilles’ limbs blurred and struck. Chiron had brought a bronze-banded staff, and he interposed it occasionally into our passes, probing with it, testing our reactions.

It seemed to go on for a long time, and my arms grew sore with lifting and placing the point of the sword. At last Chiron called a stop. We drank deep from waterskins and lay back on the grass. My chest was heaving. Achilles’ was steady.

Chiron was silent, standing in front of us.

“Well, what do you think?” Achilles was eager, and I remembered that Chiron was only the fourth person to have ever seen him fight.

I did not know what I expected the centaur to say. But it was not what followed.

“There is nothing I can teach you. You know all that Heracles knew, and more. You are the greatest warrior of your generation, and all the generations before.”

A flush stained Achilles’ cheeks. I could not tell if it was embarrassment or pleasure or both.