A Thousand Ships(24)

Briseis had heard these compliments – and many more like them – since she was a child. Men and women alike had stopped in their tracks to touch her hair and remark upon its extraordinary colour. She had her beauty to thank for her husband, her enslavement and her life, she knew. If her husband had not sought her hand, if the Greek men had not noticed her, she might have remained a free woman. Or she might have been slaughtered where she stood.

‘Did you always look so sad?’ he continued. She repressed the urge to scream.

‘Do you have a sister?’ she asked instead. He shook his head. ‘A mother, then?’ she suggested.

‘She died when I was young,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember her.’

‘Who do you love most?’ she asked.

He thought for a moment. ‘Achilles.’ He shrugged. ‘We have been close since we were children.’

‘Can you imagine for a moment how you would feel if he were taken away from you?’ Briseis asked.

‘I’d like to see someone try,’ Patroclus smiled. ‘It would be a swift death at his hands.’

‘What if someone took you from him?’ she asked. ‘Your sword hand is not quite as fast as his, perhaps?’ She thought the man would colour when she reminded him of his inferiority, but he did not. His devotion to Achilles precluded envy.

‘Then I would feel as you feel,’ he said. ‘Deprived of my greatest happiness.’

‘I watched your beloved friend slaughter my greatest happiness,’ she said. ‘I watched them bleed into the sand. How can you ask me if I was always sad?’

‘I didn’t ask if you were always sad,’ he corrected her. ‘I asked if you always looked sad. You have a face which is enhanced by suffering. You have a hollowness here.’ He reached out and touched her cheekbones and then her collar-bones, one after the other. ‘I wondered if you had always looked like that, or if it is a consequence of your enslavement.’

‘Freedom matters less to me than grief,’ she said. ‘I would gladly have given up my freedom to keep my husband and my brothers safe.’

‘But you lost everything instead,’ he said. ‘The gods favour Achilles. Your city should have acknowledged its place in his story, and surrendered. Now, all that is left of Lyrnessus will be half a line in the bard’s song about this war.’

Briseis glared at him but saw he was not trying to goad her. The Greeks were all the same: they saw no worth in any but their own. ‘The lives of my family cannot be measured by their deaths. And your friend should hope the bards treat him so kindly. Many men would see no glory in the murder of an old man and his wife. Perhaps they will sing of his senseless cruelty and lack of honour.’

Patroclus laughed. ‘They will call him the greatest hero who ever lived,’ he replied. ‘What are the lives of your kin, against the hundreds he has killed already?’

‘Is that the only measure of greatness? Killing so many that you have lost count? Making no distinction between warriors and unarmed men and women?’

‘You argue well for a woman,’ Patroclus said. ‘Your husband must have been a patient man.’

‘Don’t speak of my husband,’ she said. ‘Or I will not speak to you at all.’ The silence lay between them, as they both wondered what Patroclus would do in the face of her anger. He sat in silence for a moment, then jumped to his feet and strode across the tent. He took the comb from her hands and placed it on the couch beside her.

‘I don’t know what Achilles gave those guards, to prevent Agamemnon from claiming you,’ he said. ‘But it would have been worth double.’

Briseis did not reply.

*

The following day, the first goats died. This was not so unusual, as the goats on the Trojan peninsula were scrawny things, with none of the sleekness or sturdiness of their Greek counterparts. So no one thought it was anything important. But the next day, the pens held more dead goats than live ones, and the heifers – which the Greeks had stolen from every smallholding nearby – were sickening too. The cows were made of sterner stuff than the goats, and it took them correspondingly longer to die. In fact, the first Greek soldier was dead almost half a day before the first cow collapsed to the ground and sputtered its last foaming breath.

The fever came on so suddenly it was hard to detect. By the time a man understood he was ill, and not simply hot because the sun beat down on them from above and there was so little shade in the camp, he was moments from death. Even the healers could do little. They were battle-trained, and their skills were in binding cuts and cauterizing wounds. Their herbal concoctions had no effect on this blight, which swept across the camp like the hot south wind. Men scratched at phantom insects which crawled over their skin, tearing weals into their arms and ulcerating their legs. Blisters formed in their mouths and on their eyelids, and sharp nails soon opened these up into raw wounds. Like the goats, the cattle and even the few dogs which had made the camp their home, the men were dying. First their comrades prayed, and then they wept. When neither of these helped, they went to their king.

*

Chryseis was sitting in her usual hiding place, behind Agamemnon’s tent, when the men made their appeal. She knew something was wrong, some illness. One of the women who washed clothes at the river in the mornings had died the previous day, and now another was ill. No one had seen Briseis or any of the women from the Myrmidon camp for several days. The thought of her beautiful friend lying stricken was more than Chryseis could bear. After everything she had lost – everything they had both lost – were their lives the next thing to be taken from them? She wanted to send a message to Briseis, but there was no one she trusted to take it. Besides, the rumour among the other women at the water’s edge was that the Myrmidons were refusing to meet with the other Greeks. No one in the Myrmidon camp had yet been afflicted, so people said. The blight must be like the swords of his enemies: nothing touched the godlike Achilles.