A Thousand Ships(26)
The shouts turned to silence. The king could not mean what he had just said, could he? Odysseus was leaning against the trunk of a long-dead tree, his brow creased in confusion. ‘Are you quite sure that’s what you want me to do?’ he asked, straightening his back slowly.
‘Of course.’ Chryseis could hear the doubt behind the bluster. So could his men, she was sure. But he would not back down. ‘Fetch me his girl, and someone escort mine back to her cursed father.’
*
Briseis had once promised the Trojan girl that she would not let these Greeks see her weep, and it was a promise she kept far longer than she had anticipated. She had not wept for her family, and she had not wept when Achilles chose her as his reward for looting her town. She did not weep when Patroclus took her to his bed, even though the memory of her husband was still so raw that she could sense his presence, hovering behind her, refraining from judgement. Her husband had always been a kind man. And so would Patroclus have been, in other circumstances.
She did not weep when Odysseus arrived in the Myrmidon camp and told Achilles that Agamemnon had claimed his girl. Achilles wept, from impotent rage, and Patroclus wept to see his friend so angered. But Briseis, carried away to another man’s tent, and another man’s bed, did not. She also did not resent Chryseis, whose father had the ear of the god and who had taken her back to Troy. What would be the point in that?
The Myrmidons’ war came to an abrupt halt on the day she was moved to Agamemnon’s tent. In fury at the Argive king’s behaviour, Achilles withdrew himself and his warriors from the battlefield. Briseis listened to the other tribal leaders – Diomedes, Ajax, Odysseus, Nestor – counsel their king. Don’t worry, they said. His wrath cannot last long. He will miss the killing, the warmth of blood on his hands. Agamemnon did not care what the Myrmidon prince did or did not do, he claimed. The Greeks did not need him when they had so many heroes who fought on their side, and the gods, who understood that a man could not seize another man’s wife and expect to go unpunished. They did not need him, for all his speed and the sharpness of his sword.
Briseis also heard the counsellors when they left Agamemnon’s quarters, as they murmured to one another that Achilles would never soften his rage against their leader. He had sworn not to fight and he would not. They did have many other warriors, all anxious to return to battle, now the blight had passed over. But the men saw Achilles as more than a warrior; he was a talisman, a figurehead. First the plague and now the loss of their greatest fighter: it was not clear to everyone that the gods were still on their side.
Nonetheless, they returned to the plains with their spears and their swords, and they fought. Every day they came back blood-spattered, carrying their comrades on makeshift stretchers. After sixteen days of the worst losses the Greeks had known in more than nine years of war, Agamemnon’s advisers told him he must act. The Greeks needed a wall built to protect their ships. Without it, there was a grave risk that the Trojans, emboldened by Hector’s recent victories, might push the Achaeans back into their camp, back to the water’s edge, back to their tall ships. If the Trojans reached the ships, they would set them ablaze. And this was the greatest horror of every Greek who marched out each morning to fight for Agamemnon. If the ships were burned, no one would ever return home.
At first, as was his habit, Agamemnon refused to listen. But then his brother Menelaus arrived, red hair turned sandy by the sun, red face turned purple by the embarrassment. He could no longer guarantee his own men – the Spartans – if the Greeks did not build a wall. No quantity of threats nor bribes could persuade them to stay if there was a chance they might end up stranded on the Trojan peninsula, to be picked off by their enemies. His men had not set sail ten years ago to die far from home. He could not promise that they would not rise up against him and the war, and set sail for Sparta without him. At this, Agamemnon wailed like a child whose favourite toy had been smashed. But he gave in and agreed to build the wall.
A day after building was completed, Hector and his Trojans pushed the Greeks back so hard that they nearly lost the wall, and their lives, and their ships. The men were now openly mutinous and many were gathering their few belongings, ready to sail home at last, and dismiss the past decade as an unfortunate mistake. Nestor, the oldest man in the camp, and the one who held the greatest sway over Agamemnon, persuaded him to send an embassy to Achilles. Return his girl, the men urged. Give him ten more girls. Beg him to return to the battle.
Agamemnon resisted this too, but not for long. Even his monstrous vanity could see that the Greeks were asking for the only thing that could save them. Achilles sent away the men who went to plead Agamemnon’s case. Eventually, they sent Nestor, thinking that a young man could not spurn the pleas of an old one. But he continued to refuse to fight, even while the greatest of the Greeks were begging him on bended knees. Nestor turned his attention to Patroclus, whose rage was not so terrible as that of his friend. Eventually, he persuaded the lesser man to step back onto the battlefield in Achilles’ stead, if Agamemnon would return Achilles’ prize. No one was happy, but some professed themselves content.
After eighteen days in the tent of Agamemnon, witness to every twist in his temper as he was overcome first by the advances of the Trojans and then by the advice of the Greeks, Briseis was relieved to be sent away from the vicious, petulant commander. She was returned to Achilles, and therefore to Patroclus, the night before the latter went to battle the Trojans. Patroclus combed her hair for her carefully, almost lovingly.