Friday, May 24, 2019

4.29: When Are You Comin’ Home, Son?

1183 BCE - Achaean Base Camp.

Briseis had finished the preparations for Patroclus’s burial by the time Achilles returned. Like the other Greek soldiers, Patroclus would be burned, and then his bones would be carefully preserved in an urn to be interred deep beneath the seabed. When the waters returned to Troa’s shore, the men's remains would be six feet below thirty feet of water, beyond the reach of any vandals. Patroclus’s body was wrapped in the finest cloth, and anointed with perfumes and crushed flowers. Briseis remembered Patroclus’s favorite blooms on Troa’s shores, and was sure to include them.
When Achilles rolled into camp, he looked remarkably unhealthy, even for one as deep in grief and battle as he was. He was talking to himself, arguing with himself, and he was sickly looking, as if his body had somehow betrayed him - something that shouldn’t have been possible for godkin. He took Hector’s body out of the chariot and carried it up to Patroclus’s corpse.

“It’s done Patroclus, it’s done. He’s paid for the lives he’s destroyed. No, no that’s different. Why? Because he killed you first.”

“Achilles?” Briseis asked, “Who are you talking to?”

Achilles tossed Hector’s body to the ground where the kitchen scraps were collected for the camp’s dogs.

“Patroclus and Hector,” Achilles said, “Their voices, I think I can hear them. I think they’re haunting me. Ares as well... and someone else... or maybe that someone else speaks with their voices?”

Briseis looked at Hector’s badly mutilated body, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Achilles burst out crying, sobbing. The other men slipped away and left Briseis to manage the volatile demigod – the sight of Achilles being emotional was always disquieting for the soldiers.

“He’s never coming back,” Achilles sobbed, “And I will never see him again. And it’s all my fault!”

“We talked about this, Achilles. We all have some fault in Patroclus’s fate. Even him. It was his choice to take your old armor into battle, and his choice to fight Hector. But Patroclus’s fate doesn’t have to be yours, you can still live beyond this petty war.”

“What’s the point?” Achilles said, “What’s the point of any of it?!”

“What would Patroclus have wanted you to do without him?” Briseis pressed, “Go home? See the world?”

“He still wanted the three of us to go see Asia,” Achilles said.

“Well, do you think Patroclus would be insulted if we do that without him? Or would he want us to? He’d want you to be happy, wouldn’t he?”

A chance to find happiness. Hector’s words echoed in Achilles’ memory, and for a brief moment he saw Hector’s wife and son as if they were as clear as day. Achilles began sobbing again.

Darkness descended around them, reducing the camp fires around them to a dim glow, and when the light returned, Adresteia was standing in front of them… with King Priam. Achilles stood and drew his sword, reacting reflexively to the intrusion. Adresteia waved her hand, and arcs of blue energy flowed out of Achilles’s armor, collecting in the palm of her hand. The lights on the armor dimmed and it made a pitiable wining noise before automatically disengaging and falling off Achilles.

“Why have you come here?” Achilles asked.

“My purpose is to bring justice to the world where I can,” Adresteia said, “Surely you did not think her scales tipped only in the favor of Greece?”

“If you’ve come to kill me, I’d remind you that this is a blade forged by Hephaestus himself, more than capable of cutting you.”

“You are no more shielded from its harms than I am,” Adresteia said, “Don’t make me take the weapon away and feed it to you.”

“Please,” Priam begged, “thousands of Greek soldiers and Trojans have been buried in the past 10 years. Ares, Patroclus, and now my son, Hector. My wonderful, good son.”

“Patroclus’s murderer,” Achilles said.

“Oh get the fuck over yourself,” Adresteia said bluntly, “It’s a fucking war. How many men have you killed, Achilles? How many women and children have you condemned to slavery? Have you even kept count? Did you think none of them had people who loved them? That none of them had their own loved ones, none of them had people so stricken by grief that they’d rather die than live without them? Have you never walked around the walls of Troy? The earth is littered with the bones of widows and their infants, unburied because the Trojans can’t leave their city. Left for the flies, and the crows, and the dogs.”

“None of them loved as Patroclus and I loved one another.”

Priam sat down across from Achilles, too weary to stand, “Hector has only one child, a son, Scamandrius. It’s a family name, a terrible name. We all call him Astyanax. He’s only a year old. A man in his mid-forties with only one child? Imagine that. By his age I already had over a dozen. But Hector was the first, and that doomed him. When Hector was born, we were still rebuilding Troy – physically and diplomatically – from the last Greek invasion of our shores. I was busy. There was much work for me to do as Troy’s King, and I was young and didn’t have the advising court I have now to help me. I loved Hector, more than anything in the world, but my duty to my country always came first.

“He would come to me at night, and ask me to tell him a bedtime story, but instead I’d light a candle in my office, and tell him to go to his mother. Eventually he stopped asking. Then he came to me in the mornings, and asked me to play games with him. To talk to his soft toy animals, or simply to play catch. But I was too busy meeting with Troy’s merchants to meet Hector’s imaginary friends or toss a ball around, so I told him to go play with one of the slaves’ children. Eventually he stopped asking. Then he began his studies, and he would come to me and ask for help with his mathematics or his readings, but I was too busy reviewing the accounting and the legislation, so I told him that was what his tutors were for. And again, eventually he stopped asking.

“But Troy prospered as Hector grew into a man. I had more children by then, but I also had more time to spend with them. But not Hector. Hector was part of the reason I had time to spend with the others. He was intelligent, diligent, responsible. He took over many of the duties that had once been mine, without my even asking him to. Then I would go to him and ask, ‘why don’t you come to dinner, and eat with your family, son?’ But he was always too busy, preparing for a trip or a meeting, training our soldiers, or arbitrating disputes between citizens. ‘Next time,’ he would say. Always ‘next time,’ until it became ‘someday’ and then eventually we knew we were running out of ‘someday’.

“Hector waited to have a child because he didn’t want to neglect his own as I had him. He wanted to put Astyanax to bed at night. He wanted to have little meetings with him in the morning, to play ball with him in the afternoon, and to train and teach him in the evenings. He wanted to take him on trips to the countryside to see Troy’s beauty, and to travel to our allies’ lands to see their customs and art. So he waited.

“But with age comes difficulty, and by the time Hector was done waiting, Andromache was no longer the young woman he’d married. He could have had other women, of course, but she was the one – the one he wanted to be the mother of his child. So they tried, and tried, and tried, even in the midst of your terrible war. That war turned against us, though, when Ares joined your side. We denied it for a long time, but when it finally became clear that your victory was inevitable, Hector and Andromache decided it was time to give up – any child they might bear would likely be doomed, cursed to see the world fall down around him. At best, his parents would soon be too old to raise him properly. But no sooner had they given up trying, than it happened, and months later Hector was holding little Astyanax in his arms, promising him that everything would be alright. That he’d save us all – mama, nana, papa, and all his uncles and aunts. Hector promised his son he would hold the Achaean wolves at bay, and then he put him back in his mother’s arms, strapped his sword to his side, and left. He still saw the boy for an hour or so a day, usually when the child was sleeping. But he didn’t see Astyanax roll over for the first time, or sit up, or crawl. The only gift fate gave him was this morning, when he heard a single word in his boy’s voice.”

“Dada,” Achilles remembered Hector’s last words.

They looked at Hector’s corpse, mangled and lying face down in the garbage. A dog was coming to sniff around, but Briseis chased the animal off. Priam sobbed.

“Well,” Achilles said, trying and failing to sound completely cold, “Too late for him.”

“I only want to take my son’s body home, so that we can bury it properly.”

“What’s the point?” Achilles repeated his earlier refrain, “There is nothing after this life. We’re all wormfood.”

“Then why have you done all of this for Patroclus?” Briseis asked, “Why did you even bother killing Hector? You knew it would not bring him back, and you believe that he is dead and gone, with no soul to ask for justice or revenge. Why didn’t you walk away?”

“Priam’s not asking for Hector’s sake,” Adresteia told Achilles, “he’s asking for Andromache’s sake, and Hecuba’s sake. The only salve for their pain is the thought, the hope that maybe Hector will be waiting for them in the next life. Too late for Hector, yes,” Adresteia said, “and too late for Patroclus, but you got your closure, didn’t you? And all it cost was a boy’s father. The least you can do is give Hector’s family their own closure. Their relief costs you nothing.”

“If you want to have Hector’s cold meat returned to his family so badly, why didn’t you simply kill me and take his body?”

“Because I don’t see anything left to kill,” Adresteia said, “But I wanted you to have a chance to prove me wrong.”

They sat in silence for a long time before Achilles finally relented, “Take him home. Take him home and bury him properly. We’ll have a truce for one week, which all men will honor under penalty of death at my hands. Gather the bones of the women and children outside your walls and bury their husbands. Go to your allies for food and wine to sacrifice in their honor, and to celebrate their memories. We will see to our fallen as well, and seven days hence, we can settle this war honorably.”

Priam wept and offered his gratitude. Adresteia hated to watch it – Achilles was offering the least respect the Greeks should have offered their enemies from the beginning. There was a time when the Achilles would have understood that. She created a blanket to wrap what was left of Hector’s body, picked the bundle up gently, and led Priam back to Troy under her veil of darkness.



No comments:

Post a Comment