A Thousand Ships(19)

‘I’m sorry for what you have lost,’ said Chryseis, using the formulation she had heard her father say so many times.

The woman nodded curtly. ‘Our losses will be shared,’ she said. ‘You should save your sorrow for yourself.’

Chryseis looked away and found herself staring at the tall woman with the blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry for what you have all lost,’ she said.

At last the golden-haired statue looked down and seemed to see her for the first time. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Her voice was low and soft, her accent less guttural than the other woman’s.

‘May I sit beside you?’ Chryseis asked her.

The woman in shadow replied on the statue’s behalf. ‘You can sit where you like, Trojan. The men will divide us up in the morning. It will make no difference then.’

‘Just for tonight, then,’ Chryseis said. She had convinced herself that if she could have this one wish granted, her lot would improve. ‘I have no one else,’ she added.

The statue patted the ground beside her, and they sat down together. ‘I have no one else either,’ the woman said quietly.

‘No one?’ asked Chryseis. An inappropriate feeling of warmth began to creep over her. If this woman was alone too then Chryseis, paradoxically, felt less alone. The woman shook her head. She looked less like a statue up close, now Chryseis could see the tiny golden hairs on her skin.

‘He killed them all,’ she replied. ‘My husband, my father, my three brothers. They were fighting to defend our home, and he cut them down as if they were stalks of wheat.’ Her voice was strangely melodic, so even as she told her terrible story, Chryseis half-imagined it was a poem, a song about another woman, another lost family. She could not bear to think of this woman experiencing anything so terrible.

‘It was so quick. One moment they were there, armed and ready to attack. And then they were on the ground, all of them at once. I thought they were playing a trick at first. There’s a pause, you know, before the blood starts to flow out beneath them.’

Was this what had happened with the shepherd boy? Had his blood paused like that? Chryseis could not bring herself to interrupt the woman, when she had lost so much and Chryseis so comparatively little: just one boy, just tonight, the memory of whose fingers wrapped round her wrist still made it feel warm. She felt her eyes prick but she would not allow herself to be overcome, because she did not want to distract this woman from her own tale.

‘For a heartbeat before that happens, they could still be alive. But then it pools beneath them, so much, more of it than you can imagine. He’d killed them all, just like people said he would. And I thought I had lost everyone when I saw a grey-haired woman, mad with grief like a Maenad, hurl herself at the legs of his horse. She didn’t have a weapon. I don’t know what she was trying to do. Unseat him, kill him, kill herself? His horse didn’t even break its stride. He just leaned a little to his right, it looked like he barely moved his sword arm, and then she was on the ground too, cut right through at the neck. I didn’t understand at first that it was my mother he had killed. My mother lying there on the hard dry earth next to the men she had lost. So when I tell you I have nothing, you know I speak the truth. They took me before I could throw a handful of earth on any of them, so I don’t even have that.’ Chryseis gazed at the woman, whose eyes were not puffy, whose hair was not torn and whose tunic was not ripped. The woman saw her looking and nodded. ‘They will not see my grief,’ she said. ‘They have not earned it. I will grieve for my family when I am alone.’

‘What if you never are?’ Chryseis asked.

‘Then I will weep for them in the darkest hours of the night,’ the woman replied, ‘when no one can see. What is your name, child?’

‘Chryseis,’ said the priest’s daughter. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Briseis,’ said the blue-eyed woman.

*

Chryseis huddled up against Briseis’ back, as the sky began to lighten. She had not slept. She had never been in such close proximity to so many women; her mother’s untimely death meant she had grown up in an often-empty house. She had always longed for a sister, almost as much as she had wished for her mother. She had spent the night thinking of Briseis’ family, their bodies lying unburied while their souls must be wandering the banks of the River Lethe, with nothing for the ferryman, no way to cross and enter the Underworld, until someone took pity on them and threw a few grains of dust over them. How long would they wait?

But Briseis was as good as her word. She did not weep or wail. She merely spread her cloak on the ground beneath her. She patted it: there was room for Chryseis here too. The girl curled up beside her and felt the warmth radiate from the woman’s body. Her golden hair smelled of grassy herbs and something Chryseis could not name. An animal smell, comforting.

The talkative woman from the night before – Chryseis never did find out her name – had been given meal and water by the Greeks. She made a warm, flavourless broth for the women, which Chryseis ate, nonetheless. By the time the flaps of the tent were flung open and two men ordered them all outside, it was a relief, because the waiting was over.

The women were placed in a line by the guards, in an order which was meaningful to them but not to the women. Every now and then they would stand for a moment, arguing about whether someone should be to the left or the right of her neighbour. The older women were furthest away from Chryseis, and she wondered if they were ordering them by years. But that did not look quite right: Briseis remained right next to her, though there were two other girls who were visibly closer to her age. After more pulling and shoving, she found herself at the end of the line. She understood some of what the men said, but the guttural speed made it difficult to follow.