Warrior’s Prize

“…take him out of the play of spears,

a long way off, and wash him in the river,

anoint him with ambrosia, put ambrosial

clothing on him.”

Iliad, Homer, Book XVI

(Fitzgerald’s translation)

Something was crushing my heart and my bones. I was running down the shore. I had never run so fast. I heard screams. They were coming from me. I reached the water. I fell.

Then Diomede was kneeling by me. I lay face down in damp sand. My feet and the hem of my gown were in the water. Something was wrong with my lungs. It hurt to breathe.

“Come,” she said. “They’ve brought his body to us. Do you want—?”

“They’re lying!” I gasped. “He’s alive!”

But from afar I could hear the high, keening lamentations of the women.

She started to help me up. “It’ll do you no good to lie here. At the hut you can rest while we wash him, prepare his body for—”

“No!” The cry was torn from me. I pulled away from her grasp and leapt to my feet. “I must do it.” I started running up the shore.

In the courtyard the women stood about a bier, keening, making the ritual motions of mourning, dragging their nails down their arms, pounding their fists against their breasts. His men, the Myrmidons, stood behind them. When they saw me they all fell silent and made a space for me. As I approached, I thought, it can’t be him on that bier. Then I looked down at him and couldn’t breathe.

He lay as if made of stone, his skin so drained of color it looked gray. Someone had closed his eyes and smoothed the lines of anguish from his face.

Yet this was not Achilleus. He had gone far away and left me behind.

I raked my nails down my cheeks until the blood ran. Then I looked around at the men. “How—?” I asked.

Automedon spoke bitterly. “An arrow in the back. Another in his heel. We learned too late that the arrows were poisoned. He died—he died in—”

In agony, I thought, though Automedon didn’t say it. His face wore the same stunned look that I saw on the others’. “The best and bravest of us all, shot down from afar by the coward Paris.”

Helen’s lover. I remembered his weak-chinned, petulant face.

“But Paris could not have done it alone. Apollo himself guided the arrows.” The hairs rose on my arms. Had Achilleus felt the god’s malignant breath as he died?

“Now the Trojans are boasting,” Automedon said, “threatening us, because our invincible warrior is dead.”

I felt myself falling. The darkness threatened to swamp me, but I couldn’t let it. Not yet. When Diomede and another woman grasped my arms to lead me away, I struggled free. “I will tend him—wash him.” Though each word tore at me, I said, “The men must bear him to the spring, the spring of Simoeis.”

For a moment no one moved. Then Automedon said, “The guards at the gate will warn us if the Trojans try to attack. Do as she bids.”

Only then did the men come forward to lift the bier. Blackness fell over my eyes, but somehow I followed them to the spring.

“Lay him in the water,” I said. They lowered him into the spring, then left him to the women. The clear, pure waters ran over him, slowly clouding with a watery red as his wounds washed clean. I fell on my knees in the icy spring, and the water bore his weight so that I could hold him in my arms. Though it didn’t matter, I lifted his face above the surface. His hair flowed and rippled in the spring like water reeds.

Diomede knelt at my side, the other women behind her. But this duty was mine alone.

“Take the others,” I said to her. “Fetch herbs from his hut. Lavender, rosemary, hyssop.” Herbs like these must surely grow in the hills of his beloved Phthia, and their essence might comfort whatever part of his spirit lingered. “Bring oils to anoint him. The best, only the best.” He must be wrapped in fragrance and beauty. “Bring his finest tunic, his blue mantle. Wait, it’s soiled. Wash it, then bring it here.” Diomede hesitated. “Go!” I commanded.

They left, and I was alone at his side. It was better thus. No one who bore him a lesser love should be here. All those others who loved him were far away. I called out to them in my mind: his mother Thetis, priestess of the sea god; his aged father Peleus; his son Neoptolemos; even the mother of his son, Deidamia. Faces I couldn’t even imagine. How alone he had been in his life! But for Patroklos. But for me.

Patroklos, I prayed, be there to greet his spirit on the other side. Don’t leave him alone.

I bent and lifted his ice-cold body in my arms, running my hands over his strong shoulders, his torso, cleansing the bruises, the cuts. My heart turned over as I touched the cut on his arm, which I had tended only yesterday. I found the wound in his back, the deep puncture in his heel. Shot from behind. My fingers probed to wipe away the last of the dirt and poison. After I had finished, I held him against me and pressed my face to his still, cold chest.

The women returned, and we pulled him from the spring. I dried him with my loosened hair and with the clean linen Diomede had brought, then rubbed fragrant oils over his limbs. When the men came to fetch him, I stood, dripping wet, trembling. All my strength deserted me now that I had done this last duty.

I followed the men as they carried his body back to our camp. In the courtyard I stood by his bier one final time, memorizing each feature of his face so that I could hold it forever in my heart. I bent to kiss his lips, cold and hard, tasting of spring water and herbs.

Then I straightened quickly. I had one last gift for Achilleus. I looked at Automedon, who had a knife at his belt. I pointed. “Give it to me.”

He took it from its sheath, yet hesitated. I reached for it, and as my hand closed around the hilt, I thought how easy it would be to plunge the point into my throat. But there was the baby. Look after my child, Achilleus had said. I brought the blade to my hair, cutting all of its length in great hanks. Gathering them up, I placed them in his cold, still hands.

Now he belonged to the men. Automedon, Alkimos and others came to stand on either end of the bier. They would take him up the shore to the place where they had mourned over Patroklos. I flung myself across his chest and held on hard one last time until someone pulled me away, and the men took up the bier. Then he was gone forever from my sight.

I let my knees drop me to the ground.