W E WAKE TO SHOUTS AND THUNDER, A STORM THAT has burst from the blue of the sky. There is no rain, only the gray air, crackling and dry, and jagged streaks that strike like the clap of giant hands. We hurry to the tent door to look out. Smoke, acrid and dark, is drifting up the beach towards us, carrying the smell of lightning-detonated earth. The attack has begun, and Zeus is keeping his bargain, punctuating the Trojans’ advance with celestial encouragement. We feel a pounding, deep in the ground—a charge of chariots, perhaps, led by huge Sarpedon.
Achilles’ hand grips mine, his face stilled. This is the first time in ten years that the Trojans have ever threatened the gate, have ever pushed so far across the plain. If they break through the wall, they will burn the ships— our only way of getting home, the only thing that makes us an army instead of refugees. This is the moment that Achilles and his mother have summoned: the Greeks, routed and desperate, without him. The sudden, incontrovertible proof of his worth. But when will it be enough? When will he intervene?
“Never,” he says, when I ask him. “Never until Agamemnon begs my forgiveness or Hector himself walks into my camp and threatens what is dear to me. I have sworn I will not.”
“What if Agamemnon is dead?”
“Bring me his body, and I will fight.” His face is carved and unmovable, like the statue of a stern god.
“Do you not fear that the men will hate you?”
“They should hate Agamemnon. It is his pride that kills them.”
And yours . But I know the look on his face, the dark recklessness of his eyes. He will not yield. He does not know how. I have lived eighteen years
with him, and he has never backed down, never lost. What will happen if he is forced to? I am afraid for him, and for me, and for all of us.
We dress and eat, and Achilles speaks bravely of the future. He talks of tomorrow, when perhaps we will swim, or scramble up the bare trunks of sticky cypresses, or watch for the hatching of the sea-turtle eggs, even now incubating beneath the sun-warmed sand. But my mind keeps slipping from his words, dragged downwards by the seeping gray of the sky, by the sand chilled and pallid as a corpse, and the distant, dying shrieks of men whom I know. How many more by day’s end?
I watch him staring over the ocean. It is unnaturally still, as if Thetis is holding her breath. His eyes are dark and dilated by the dim overcast of the morning. The flame of his hair licks against his forehead.
“Who is that?” he asks, suddenly. Down the beach, a distant figure is being carried on a stretcher to the white tent. Someone important; there is a crowd around him.
I seize on the excuse for motion, distraction. “I will go see.”
Outside the remove of our camp, the sounds of battle grow louder: piercing screams of horses impaled on the stakes of the trench, the desperate shouts of the commanders, the clangor of metal on metal.
Podalerius shoulders past me into the white tent. The air is thick with the smell of herbs and blood, fear and sweat. Nestor looms up at me from my right, his hand clamping around my shoulder, chilling through my tunic. He screeches, “We are lost! The wall is breaking!”
Behind him Machaon lies panting on a pallet, his leg a spreading pool of blood from the ragged prick of an arrow. Podalerius is bent over him, already working.
Machaon sees me. “Patroclus,” he says, gasping a little. I go to him. “Will you be all right?”
“Cannot tell yet. I think—” He breaks off, his eyes squeezed shut.
“Do not talk to him,” Podalerius says, sharply. His hands are covered in his brother’s blood.
Nestor’s voice rushes onward, listing woe after woe: the wall splintering, and the ships in danger, and so many wounded kings—Diomedes, Agamemnon, Odysseus, strewn about the camp like crumpled tunics.
Machaon’s eyes open. “Can you not speak to Achilles?” he says, hoarsely. “Please. For all of us.”
“Yes! Phthia must come to our aid, or we are lost!” Nestor’s fingers dig into my flesh, and my face is damp with the panicked spray of his lips.
My eyes close. I am remembering Phoinix’s story, the image of the Calydonians kneeling before Cleopatra, covering her hands and feet with their tears. In my imagination she does not look at them, only lends them her hands as if perhaps they were cloths to wipe their streaming eyes. She is watching her husband Meleager for his answer, the set of his mouth that tells her what she must say: “No.”
I yank myself from the old man’s clinging fingers. I am desperate to escape the sour smell of fear that has settled like ash over everything. I turn from Machaon’s pain-twisted face and the old man’s outstretched hands and flee from the tent.
As I step outside there is a terrible cracking, like a ship’s hull tearing apart, like a giant tree smashing to earth. The wall . Screams follow, of triumph and terror.
All around me are men carrying fallen comrades, limping on makeshift crutches, or crawling through the sand, dragging broken limbs behind them. I know them—their torsos full of scars my ointments have packed and sealed. Their flesh that my fingers have cleaned of iron and bronze and blood. Their faces that have joked, thanked, grimaced as I worked over them. Now these men are ruined again, pulpy with blood and split bone. Because of him. Because of me.
Ahead of me, a young man struggles to stand on an arrow-pierced leg.
Eurypylus, prince of Thessaly.
I do not stop to think. I wind my arm under his shoulder and carry him to his tent. He is half-delirious with pain, but he knows me. “Patroclus,” he manages.
I kneel before him, his leg in my hands. “Eurypylus,” I say. “Can you speak?”
“Fucking Paris,” he says. “My leg.” The flesh is swollen and torn. I seize my dagger and begin to work.
He grits his teeth. “I don’t know who I hate more, the Trojans or Achilles. Sarpedon tore the wall apart with his bare hands. Ajax held them off as long as he could. They’re here now,” he says, panting. “In the camp.”
My chest clutches in panic at his words, and I fight the urge to bolt. I try to focus on what is before me: easing the arrow point from his leg, binding
the wound.
“Hurry,” he says, the word slurring. “I have to go back. They’ll burn the ships.”
“You cannot go out again,” I say. “You have lost too much blood.”
“No,” he says. But his head slumps backwards; he is on the edge of unconsciousness. He will live, or not, by the will of the gods. I have done all I can. I take a breath and step outside.
Two ships are ablaze, their masts wrapped in the fiery glow of Trojan torches. A surge of men thrashes against the burning hulls, their shouts a frantic chorus as they scramble to the decks to beat out the flames. Among the chaos, I spot Ajax, his massive frame a dark silhouette against the sky, braced on Agamemnon’s prow. He ignores the flames, focusing instead on driving his spear downwards, fending off the Trojan hands that swarm like ravenous fish.
As I watch, paralyzed, I see a hand suddenly reach above the fray, grasping the sharp nose of a ship. The strong, dark arm follows, pulling a body into view—Hector’s whole figure emerging from the writhing mass of men below. He rises, bare and smooth, like a dolphin breaking the surface, suspended between sea and sky. His face is serene, his eyes lifted in a moment of prayer or communion with the gods. His body, sculpted and poised, stands between the elements, his armor lifting to reveal his hip bones like the carved cornice of a temple. Hector’s free hand then swings a blazing torch towards the ship’s wooden deck.
The torch is expertly thrown, landing amidst old, rotting ropes and discarded sail. The flames catch immediately, racing up the rope and igniting the wood beneath. Hector smiles, triumphant. Why shouldn’t he? He is prevailing.
Ajax’s frustration erupts—his roar of anger directed at the burning ships, the men leaping in panic from the fiery decks, and at Hector slipping away, vanishing into the tumult below. Ajax’s strength alone keeps the men from complete collapse.
Then, from beneath, a spear point glints in the sunlight, silver as a fish scale. It moves too swiftly to follow, and before I can fully grasp what’s happening, Ajax’s thigh erupts in bright-red blood. I’ve spent enough time in Machaon’s tent to recognize the wound—a deep cut through muscle. His knees buckle, trembling, and he collapses.
