Huge thanks to LazyChestnut & ConcreteHole for their feedback and behind-the-scenes encouragement. You both help me get stuff written instead of keeping it all in my head.

Chapter 4

Eudorus II

"Drink this, my Lady. It will start to dull the pain. You've been roughed up considerable."

"I have no need of it!" Briseis declared, turning away.

I watched as Dianeira sank to her knees beside the disheveled priestess and pulled lank, tangled hair away from a face already tender and swollen from slaps and leering pinches at the hands of Agamemnon's soldiers. Her lip was split and a small trail of caked blood ran down her chin. Briseis shrugged the gesture aside with a brusqueness that had me offended on behalf of the woman graciously trying to set her at comfort and ease.

"Please drink it," Dianeira repeated, showing no signs that she had taken the insulting rebuff to heart. A damp cloth was clutched in one hand and she held it against the priestess' forehead with admirable insistence as her other tried to foist the cup of brew into limp, unresponsive hands.

Briseis bowed her head, burying it in her arms. It was as though all that mattered was hurt and misery, kindness and comfort unwelcome. Or, I suspected, that she would rather ache in silence than admit that she needed care.

"Leave us."

Achilles' voice was low, and within it was a trace of soft impatience. It was an order, and Dianeira wisely interpreted it as such. She rose, her face expressionless as she turned away with unsullied rag and full cup. Achilles brushed past her, making straightway to the object of his stubborn devotion over these past tense days.

Dianeira spared him a glance before moving past me. As she did so, the first hint of her own frustration was betrayed when she threw the cloth over the cup and strode out through the leather flaps of the door with a sharp shrug of her shoulders.

There were no further orders from Achilles, so I ducked out through the door with less visible irritation then Dianeira had shown. As soon as I stepped outside, I saw her standing to the right of Achilles' hut, one hand pressing the cool rag to her back of her neck while she drank deeply from the cup.

She lowered the cup from her lips and tossed the remains into the sands with a snap of her wrist. When she noticed my presence, she said with a wry smile, "I tried, didn't I? The royal would have none of it!"

I inclined my head apologetically. "She will be more accepting in the morning. Tonight, she is not thinking clearly."

"Would that I had suffered as few indignities as she," she muttered. "When we were both prisoners aboard Agamemnon's ship, she was spared while I--" She looked away, up at heavy clouds that had blotted out the moon and stars. The storm had yet to arrive, and I felt a prickling of impatience crawl along my skin at the delay. It would do some damage; any storm always did, and I wanted to know the measure of it instead of this constant anticipation.

The same tense feelings were slowly making themselves known in every corner of my body, and it had nothing to do with the approaching storm. Watching her, the slouched and weary slope of her back and shoulders, the hand that dangled at her side with the cup barely grasped in her fingers, the picture she presented made me want to embrace her again as I had done earlier. As with the storm, something was happening, would happen, and I wanted to know the extent of the damage.

Taking her in my arms had been spontaneous, unthinking. Her confession of her nighttime terrors had sparked my own within me, and we had clung to the other as equals. The dreaded memory of that long-ago girl had intruded eventually, and forced me away, but I was shocked that it had come so late. For the most part, it had been nothing but warm and right.

And she knew. She knew why I slept as I did, why I spent my waking hours as I did, and why I was caring for her as I did. All without a direct confession on my part. It was cowardly to not lay the matter out in words, but words were wasted when the meaning was clear.

'Whose screams torment you?' she had asked. 'Am I your penance?'

You are, and I will not fail you.

But I would learn more of you. Please tell me.

"I do not even know your age," I said. "In there, you were as a mother tending a child."

Her hand immediately went to her stomach. "I suppose I was only pretending what might have been," she said, her irritable mood fading. "None of my children survived past the cradle." When I looked away, she sighed. "Just as well. They would have been of an age ripe for slaughter, had any of them lived. I was spared that."

Then, as if she remembered I had asked her about age rather than issue, she added, "More than twenty and less than thirty, I expect. Krios took me to wife at eleven; he was elder by some years. I do remember that exactly. Since then, it has been harvests and reminders that our home would ever be the two of us."

It was the longest she had ever spoken to me, or anyone that I was aware of. There was also a creeping warmth in every word, as though she was reacquainting herself with her life before being ripped from her hearth and forced to bed and tend to strangers. There was no obvious sorrow, but rather a wondering tone in recalling such an uneventful past as child bride and farmer's wife.

Here, alert in the darkness, she was not tormented by nightmares of a vulnerable mind. Her tongue had loosened, and I felt the urge to gift her honesty with some of my own.

"Dia--"

"Do you think they have finished?" she asked wearily, referring to our co-habitors. "I need rest."

"Most likely," I replied, unsure whether I should be glad of her interruption. My words had been impetuously ill-formed and would have no doubt sounded clumsy and at odds with my intentions.

She stuffed the rag into the cup and approached me. The nearby campfire flared as a small gust brought it to bright, fervent life. Shadows clung to her eyes, which were slightly hooded from the effects of the brew she had drunk, and her face looked more drawn and pinched than in the light of day. But for all that, her tread was still light, and she graced me with another wry smile on her broad mouth.

"They may have finished, but how many hours left until dawn?" she asked. Clearly, she did not expect to get much rest.

"Enough," I assured her. "And beyond. You may sleep all of tomorrow, if you wish."

She blinked in surprise, and the corners of her mouth tugged downward as her eyes flashed in suspicion. Understandable if she suspected a motive.

Then, her tense features relaxed, a sight that gladdened me more than I would have imagined.

"I think I would like that."

The hut was only a short distance away, for it was my duty to be within Achilles' reach. It was now dark, and no sounds of rut marred the night air. The revels had ended.

I allowed her to enter first and thought I heard a weary, resigned moan from her as the smell of wine and sex greeted both of us. Far from being heady, it made the already close quarters of the hut more stifling.

"Dianeira?"

The leather straps of our pallet creaked sharply, then stopped. "Yes?"

"We need not stay in here if it--"

"It does reek, doesn't it?"

I wondered what she truly felt; her frightened confession to me of what tormented her seemed as though it had come from another person. This Dianeira was not weak, but almost artificially hardened. I suppose it was no different from soldiers who jest about dark matters before and after battles to mask fear and sorrow.

"--if it reminds you--"

"I'm tired," she said, the words clipped, and I feared I had tread too closely to the truth. "I shall sleep here, even if you do not. It is the same as a stock shed to me - awful at first, but the nose becomes numb to it. Eventually."

A rumble of thunder rolled over the sea, whipping the waves and intensifying their break against the rocks, sands, and beached ships. The storm was building slowly, yet steadily.

"I do not want to sleep outside, and neither do you," she finished.

Another rumble followed quickly on the heels of the first one. Perhaps it would break sooner than I expected. The close and intensifying thunderclaps would be welcome; as it was, the two Myrmidons were snoring soundly and would have made it difficult to sleep on a normal, calm summer night. The thunder just might muffle them.

The pallet straps creaked again, and I waited for her to settle in comfort before following her. Lightning made its first appearance, and as I lay down on the hides, I heard her counting softly under her breath.

"How far away?" I asked.

"I don't know," she replied. "I was once told it means something, but I counted as a child to learn numbers and...not be frightened." She spoke this last piece more softly, as if ashamed of such a childish fear.

I nodded, and turned my head towards her. The gaps between the stakes and reed mats of the hut walls were narrow enough to shield occupants from sun and wind, but water and light knew no confinement. Another flash of lightning, and it cast a rapid spray of mottled shadows across her face.

The counting resumed, each number floating softly on the air until the roof above us began to vibrate, the hide battered by immortal tears falling from the heavens. For whom did they weep? Menelaus, Ajax and the men who had died today for Greece? Or was it for the Trojans, and only the gods knew of a future doom?

I felt her flinch and pull at the blanket. "It's leaking," she said.

A fat drop splashed against my face, followed by another. "So it is."

She tussled with the blanket, cursing softly as she struggled to find the edge of it in the dark. Then, with a fluid motion, it covered me like a shroud, and her breathing came louder to my ears.

It was like children playing a game, or travelers shielding themselves from the elements. We were swathed in solitude, separated from the outside world by only the thickness of a wool blanket, but I felt as though sturdy walls had been thrown up around us, a complete world that mirrored the one outside.

I could smell her breath, on it a mixture of herbs both bitter and sweet from the intoxicating brew. My blood stirred, and the space between us seemed intolerably immense.

I want you. Can you not sense it? You must; you have a keen eye about you. Surely you cannot be so blind? Do not be frightened of me.

Even as I felt the urge to act on my desire, I tried to brutally thrust it away. I had been down this path before, and my mind was not in such a haze that I could only heed one call. Two voices within me vied for my final decision.

At that moment, as my hands itched to reach out to her, she spoke, forcing my mind elsewhere, plucking me from the brink onto which I tottered.

"I don't think the blanket will keep us dry much longer," she said. "We'll be sleeping in a puddle ere yet."

As soon as she spoke, the memory threatened to assail me. I had slept in blood-soaked bedclothes that distant night, the girl's essence congealing around me, strangling and suffocating my sleep for years after.

Were I sleeping alone, as I had done for years, I would have felt water seeping into the blankets and nothing else, but Dianeira was doing as much to remind me of my crime as provide hope that it was eternally behind me. I had made no advances, had not even desired to do so until tonight. Her fragility and her strengths had shown themselves to me tonight, and I wanted to guard them from harm and yet show her that she had made it possible for me to reclaim that part of myself I had long thought lost.

I wanted to hold her, show her, tell her. More than that, I wanted to hear her say that she had found the same for herself within me.

"My lord?"

I heard the guarded tone. I had been quiet, much too quiet, and only now I realized how tense my body was. Willing myself to relax, every muscle protested and my lip was rolled between my teeth to stifle any sound of pain that might come.

"Yes?" I asked, sounding calmer than I could have ever felt.

"You were going to tell me something outside Achilles' quarters, but I interrupted. What was it?"

I shrugged, an effort since I knew exactly what I had wanted to say, and the words were now lined up in my head as straight as soldiers. But I dared not speak them.

"I don't remember."

The blanket undulated around me as she shifted on the pallet. Her breathing was no louder, nor could I feel it against my cheek more intensely. She was still keeping a distance, and I wanted to thank her for it. My desire felt a tug of regret and frustration, but was soon relieved at the enforced inaction.

Patience, Eudorus. Patience. There could be a battle tomorrow. Think of that, and that alone…

After awhile, I realized that the roof above us no longer hummed under the beating rain. The blanket had shed some of the rain, but not all. I felt damp, and the wool was quickly beginning to smell. Shoving it gently aside, I discovered that the storm had lasted most of the night, and the clouds were only beginning to break. Dawn was fast approaching; through the gaps in the walls, I could see a red and purple aura along the horizon. The beginnings of a day fit for fighting. With luck, Achilles would be of similar mind now that he had his priestess.

The hut was slowly filling with light, and I looked down. Dianeira lay on her side, facing me. Her regular breathing indicated deep, even sleep and I noticed that the tendrils of hair at her temples and forehead were rain-damp and clung to her skin. Gooseflesh stood up on her bare arms from the cool morning air.

Slowly I left the bed, taking infinite care to not wake her, and retrieved another blanket from under the pallet. It was dry and had not been in the path of the small rivulets I now noticed had been cut through the sand of our hut floor. What a raging night it had been, but it was now calm. And so was I.

I shook out the blanket and let it fall over her gently. She still did not stir. Rounding the pallet, I knelt by her head and let my fingers play over her hair before bringing my lips to the soft crown and placing a silent kiss.

With a sense of peace and warmth flowing through every limb, I rose and left to meet the day.

Who knew what the day held for me, or anyone? This might be the last I would ever see or feel of her.

But the memory of her hair against my lips - and anticipation of doing so again - would arm me for battle as much as sword and shield.

It was foolish, but I believed it.