Read Online Achilles by Elizabeth Cook - Free Book Online

exhausted and told no one, not even Patroclus, about this nightly irritant of beauty. Seeking it again he’d made songs, plucking the strings of his lyre like a cat flexing its claws. He wanted to excise the bright, unwelcome pearl that troubled him.
    And Helen? Did she ever think of him?
    What she liked best about him was his absence. The fact that he was not there at Sparta with the rest of them – Odysseus, Idomeneus, Elephenor, Menelaus. All pressing in on her. All wanting her. Achilles’ indifference sat on her so lightly it was almost like love.
    When she dreamed of him his body stood out like a cut jewel against a ground of flame.
    Even in the egg she’d felt alone. Cut off. No mother’s heartbeat to ride on; no umbilicus to tether her. Just what was needed to build a perfect human form. Yolk and shelter.
    Locked in the hot, albumen-filled dark Helen could hear the chirruping of Castor and Polydeuces on the other side: their contentment, their togetherness. She afloat in her separate compartment.
    Then there was the moment when there was no longer enough room and she found herself pushing, pressing down with her right heel, her whole being concentrated in that place, till something gave.
    The sensation of air on her wet leg.
    Castor and Polydeuces still muttering to each other in their velvety white sac.
    She was ten when Theseus broke in. Her thin, sunned body – a source of pleasure and strength, the place where she lived – made tiny and bruised under his hands. Bones that had sung their green strength in her, turned delicate and raw as the bones of a bird devoured.
    When Theseus broke in she silently slipped out; back into the shell she could summon from that instant. It became a bivouac she could watch from. What she watched that first time was a big man with gleaming eyes and a red, wet mouth at the heart of his beard. He came up to her from behind to seize the proud bones that rose like little hills at each side of her belly. Then his hands grasped lower, tugging her apart like the halves of an apricot. Then not his hand but the blind brute of his penis, cramming itself in wherever it could.
    Where had they been, her brilliant brothers, to let this happen?
    With each other of course.
    When Castor and Polydeuces wrestled together she would hurl herself between them like a small, golden-haired meteor. Not trying to stop their fighting but to prise open a space in their intimacy and put herself in. If the twins were two lobes of a single heart, she wanted to be its heart. Heart of their heart.
    But they were not there when Theseus broke in – though they swore to protect her ever after (and honed her wrestling skills so she was equal with Sparta’s best). They are not there now that Hector lies dead and she walled in with those who desire her and hate her.
    She thinks, ‘I am the loneliest person on earth.’
    Men lining up for her.
    Having ideas about her.
    Fingering her in their thoughts while they finger themselves.
    They paste her with their thoughts till there is no air left to breathe.
    Not one of them has ever seen her.
    Only Hector saw her. Saw loneliness rather than beauty. He, like her, taut with the expectations and hopes of others. So at one with Andromache he lacked curiosity about other women – even the loveliest – as women. He spent time with Helen in the months before the war, before the Greeks arrived. It was Hector who taught her Troy’s language.
    On the day that he was killed she lost her only friend. If they had stripped her and left her on coastal rocks when the sea was high and raging she could not have felt more
exposed.
    *   *   * 
    S HE KNOWS they are waiting for her to grow old.
    â€˜You’re like the rest of us – flesh like curd, pouchy skin, teeth gone brown and rotten. See now if you get what you want.’
    She wants them to leave her alone.
    But the lovely tautness of her flesh never slackens. Her