The Song of Achilles(54)

Then the girl stumbled. I remember Achilles frowning. I remember him shift, to catch her.

But she wasn’t falling. She was being dragged backwards, to the altar behind her. No one had seen Diomedes move, but his hand was on her now, huge against her slender collarbone, bearing her down to the stone surface. She was too shocked to struggle, to know even what was happening. Agamemnon yanked something from his belt. It flashed in the sun as he swung it.

The knife’s edge fell onto her throat, and blood spurted over the altar, spilled down her dress. She choked, tried to speak, could not. Her body thrashed and writhed, but the hands of the king pinned her down. At last her struggles grew weaker, her kicking less; at last she lay still.

Blood slicked Agamemnon’s hands. He spoke into the silence: “The goddess is appeased.”

Who knows what might have happened then? The air was close with the iron-salt smell of her death. Human sacrifice was an abomination, driven from our lands long ago. And his own daughter. We were horrified and angry, and there was violence in us.

Then, before we could move: something on our cheeks. We paused, unsure, and it came again. Soft and cool and smelling of the sea. A murmur went through the men. Wind. The wind has come. Jaws unclenched, and muscles loosened. The goddess is appeased.

Achilles seemed frozen, fixed to his spot beside the dais. I took his arm and pulled him through the crowd towards our tent. His eyes were wild, and his face was spattered with her blood. I wet a cloth and tried to clean it away, but he caught my hand. “I could have stopped them,” he said. The skin of his face was very pale; his voice was hoarse. “I was close enough. I could have saved her.”

I shook my head. “You could not have known.”

He buried his face in his hands and did not speak. I held him and whispered all the bits of broken comfort I could find.

AFTER HE HAD WASHED his stained hands and changed his bloodied clothes, Agamemnon called us all back to the marketplace. Artemis, he said, had been displeased with the bloodshed this huge army intended. She demanded payment for it, in advance, in kind. Cows were not enough. A virgin priestess was required, human blood for human blood; the leader’s eldest daughter would be best.

Iphigenia had known, he said, had agreed to do it. Most men had not been close enough to see the startled panic in her eyes. Gratefully, they believed their general’s lie.

They burned her that night on cypress wood, the tree of our darkest gods. Agamemnon broached a hundred casks of wine for celebration; we were leaving for Troy on the morning’s tide. Inside our tent Achilles fell into exhausted sleep, his head in my lap. I stroked his forehead, watching the trembles of his dreaming face. In the corner lay his bloodied groom’s tunic. Looking at it, at him, my chest felt hot and tight. It was the first death he had ever witnessed. I eased his head off my lap and stood.

Outside, men sang and shouted, drunk and getting drunker. On the beach the pyre burned high, fed by the breeze. I strode past campfires, past lurching soldiers. I knew where I was going.

There were guards outside his tent, but they were slumping, half-asleep. “Who are you?” one asked, starting up. I stepped past him and threw open the tent’s door.

Odysseus turned. He had been standing at a small table, his finger to a map. There was a half-finished dinner plate beside it.

“Welcome, Patroclus. It’s all right, I know him,” he added to the guard stuttering apologies behind me. He waited until the man was gone. “I thought you might come.”

I made a noise of contempt. “You would say that whatever you thought.”

He half-smiled. “Sit, if you like. I’m just finishing my dinner.”

“You let them murder her.” I spat the words at him.

He drew a chair to the table. “What makes you think I could have stopped them?”

“You would have, if it had been your daughter.” I felt like my eyes were throwing off sparks. I wanted him burnt.

“I don’t have a daughter.” He tore a piece of bread, sopped it into gravy. Ate.

“Your wife then. What if it had been your wife?”

He looked up at me. “What do you wish me to say? That I would not have done it?”

“Yes.”

“I would not have. But perhaps that is why Agamemnon is king of Mycenae, and I rule only Ithaca.”

Too easily his answers came to him. His patience enraged me.

“Her death is on your head.”

A wry twist of his mouth. “You give me too much credit. I am a counselor only, Patroclus. Not a general.”

“You lied to us.”

“About the wedding? Yes. It was the only way Clytemnestra would let the girl come.” The mother, back in Argos. Questions rose in me, but I knew this trick of his. I would not let him divert me from my anger. My finger stabbed the air.

“You dishonored him.” Achilles had not thought of this yet— he was too grieved with the girl’s death. But I had. They had tainted him with their deceit.

Odysseus waved a hand. “The men have already forgotten he was part of it. They forgot it when the girl’s blood spilled.”

“It is convenient for you to think so.”

He poured himself a cup of wine, drank. “You are angry, and not without reason. But why come to me? I did not hold the knife, or the girl.”

“There was blood,” I snarled. “All over him, his face. In his mouth. Do you know what it did to him?”