Read Online Achilles by Elizabeth Cook - Free Book Online Page A

skin continues to exhale light. Maybe the albumen did it. Or having Zeus for a father. The fact is that nothing that happens to her – nothing that has happened to her – shows.
    And that is enough to make them hate her. Her beauty is like a smooth wall which resists all impressions. Paint will not stick to it, neither will mud. You cannot hack into it to make your mark. It makes you feel like you don’t exist. It makes you imagine all the things you would do to her, all the ways you could hurt her, so she’d eventually notice you and look like you’d touched her.
    And they hate her for that too: for the terrible things she leads them to think of.
    Theseus,
    Menelaus,
    Paris.
    Each more inventive than the last in his futile attempts to mark her.
    *   *   * 
    T HERE ARE Trojans who speak of the time when they saw her close – maybe at an upstairs window, or shaking a rug at a door; perhaps she even smiled. Others have only seen her far off, high on the battlements in her finery for the monthly showings Paris insisted on. Then they had to curl their fists up into funnels and look through the small apertures they made. Seeing such beauty (or imagining they did for she was a long way off) they cheered and their cheers were in Paris’ ears as he fucked her. He needed others to want her to want her.
    But no one thinks she is worth the death of Hector. Now when people see her they suck their teeth.
    There is no place for her grief at Hector’s funeral. She is quiet in her despair amidst the wailing and the clamour, watching from the citadel of herself. She does not hate Achilles for killing him but the dreams of flame increase and the form of Achilles grows smaller within the flames; as if he is vanishing and the whole world becoming fire.
    When Paris shoots him she takes no pleasure in it.
    *   *   * 
    P ARIS IS the next to be dead. Philoctetes shoots him through the eye with Heracles’ bow, making a mess of that handsome face. She is passed like a tasty bone from son of Priam to son of Priam. Deiphoebus is next in line.
    Loneliness draws her, early, while it is still dark, to stroke the flanks of the great wooden horse, parked and abandoned outside Troy’s gates. She has guessed its secret. Senses that it is full and waiting to hatch.
    She feels an exile’s longing to hear her own language spoken again and calls to each of the men crouched inside:
    Odysseus, Diomedes, Antielus, Euryplos, Eumelos, Eurydamas, Pheidippos, Leoneus, Meriones, Philoctetes, Meges.
    Neoptolemus, Achilles’ flame-haired son, newly arrived from Skiros.
    Menelaus, her lawful husband.
    She whispers to each of them, tenderly, caressingly, with the voice of each man’s wife. A life spent watching, listening, has made her flawless in mimicry.
    Odysseus, hearing the dark honey of his own Penelope, yearns to reply but suspects a duplicity which is equal to his own. He holds back and silently restrains the others, clamping a hand over Antielus’ mouth, putting a dagger’s point to his throat.
    When he hears her Menelaus knows that he will not be able to kill her as he’d planned. He almost giggles with pleasure as he remembers how she made him feel. His cock thickens and his fear of present danger grows smaller.
    Yet the voice he hears is no more her own than the voice of Penelope heard by Odysseus. What each man hears in her now is what each man who looks at her sees: his own desire reflected.
    She turns back and remounts the hill to the palace.
    She had whispered like this in the egg to her brothers. They had not answered either.
    *   *   * 
    T HE HORSE breaks open, a limb sticks out, then another one, till the whole form of a man slithers to earth. Man after man pouring out; dark, silent worms, crawling from the rotten egg that has harboured them. She sees it as clearly as Cassandra does.
    Cassandra’s cries rend the palace. Cassandra