A Thousand Ships(27)
The following evening, when Patroclus’ body was returned, stripped of the armour which had once belonged to Achilles but had been stolen from his friend’s still-warm body by Hector, Briseis was waiting for him. While Achilles raged with grief, she washed Patroclus, and laid him out in his finest clothes. She was able to do for this man, her captor and her owner, what she had not been permitted to do for her husband. But she did not weep.
She did not weep when Patroclus was placed on his funeral pyre. Nor did she weep when Achilles, raging like a mountain lion deprived of its young, returned to battle to avenge his dead friend, although everyone knew that the tide of the war had now changed: you could smell it in the air, like a storm coming in from the sea. And she did not weep when Achilles returned from the battlefield with a battered corpse tied to the back of his chariot wheels, having dragged the body of the slain Hector around the walls of the city three times.
Achilles left the Trojan hero rotting outside his tent and Briseis thought of sneaking out in the early hours to wash Hector’s body and prepare him for burial, or the funeral pyre, but she did not dare. Three nights later, she was listening when the aged king of Troy, a man she had heard of but never seen, came begging Achilles to return his son’s body to him. She heard Priam’s voice crack as he pleaded for mercy from this most merciless killer, and she was astonished when Achilles softened and let the old man buy back his dead son with a pile of treasure.
Having held off for so long, she thought her eyes would not remember what to do. But many days later, standing in front of the funeral pyre of Achilles – cut down in battle by Apollo, they said – she did weep. And she wept for everyone but him.
11
Thetis
Tears did flow for Achilles, but they mingled imperceptibly with the seawater which surrounded them. Thetis wept for her son at his death as she had done countless times during his life. Indeed she had wept long before he was born. The other sea nymphs had always mocked her propensity for tears: the deep, green waters of Ocean himself were replenished by Thetis and her endless sorrows. Had she been a wood nymph, another Nereid spitefully remarked, her forest grove would have soon become a bog.
She had first wept when Peleus, a mortal man and nowhere near the equal of a Nereid, had claimed her hand in marriage. She sobbed again when it became clear that Zeus would not save her from the degrading union. A prophecy had foretold that Thetis’ son would be greater than his father and, mindful of his own impervious hide, Zeus was determined that the boy be half-mortal.
She had always known that her son would cause her grief. Greater than his father? What man would not be? She despised the mortal blood of her husband, loathed to think of it running through the veins of her son, where ichor should flow instead. She longed for him to be a god, so she bathed him in the waters of the Styx to thicken his thin human skin. And she tried to keep him safe when the war came. She knew, had always known, that if Achilles went to Troy he would not return home; Zeus was not the only one to hear prophecies. She hid Achilles away when the Greek commanders came for him, but they rooted him out nonetheless. The pestilent Odysseus was too clever to fall for her tricks. It was a grudge which she would nurture in her breast for as long as Odysseus lived. The sea would never be safe for the king of Ithaca, not while she dwelt in its murky depths.
But through nine long years Achilles had stayed safe. The list of his dead grew longer and more glorious, but he remained unhurt. She had let a brief moment of hope flare up when Achilles withdrew himself from battle in the tenth year of the war, some trivial dispute over a mortal girl. But whenever he asked for her advice, she could not refuse to tell him. She left the warm dark sea and told her son what she had always known: that he must choose between a long life and brief renown, or a short life and eternal glory. Only half of him was a god, after all. He could not have both.
She knew as soon as her damp words dripped into his ears that the decision was already made. Her son would never choose life over fame. His godly heritage rejected any such notion. And so she persuaded Hephaestus to forge new armour, a new shield for Achilles, after his had been stolen by the filthy Trojans from the body of his friend. With the protection of the gods, she thought, Achilles would have a little longer to carve his name into stone.
Still, she knew that once Hector was slaughtered, and once Penthesilea was added to the long list of heroes whom Achilles had left on the cold ground, her boy would soon follow them across the River Styx. And when her son was cut down by Apollo (his disguise as the adulterous Paris might fool some, but not Thetis), she wept even though she had known the day was coming. His body was so lovely that she had scarcely believed he was dead. A tiny wound, a single arrow from the toxic Archer was all it had taken to kill her beloved son. And now he dwelt on the Isle of the Blessed, and she knew that he wished he had made the other choice. One day, Odysseus would find him in the Underworld and he would ask him what death was like, and her son would reply that he would rather be a living peasant than a dead hero. And this filled her with anger and shame. He truly was mortal, her son, if he valued his precious life more than anything else. How could he be so stupid, so ungrateful, when she had given him so much? Sometimes the thought slid into her that she could not truly know her son’s mind, because she would never die. But this only made her despise him more: the blood of his father ran through his veins more thickly than she had believed. And so she wept, but her tears tasted of nothing.