When Achilles reached the doorway of Helen's house, he could see that the hedge had disappeared, and in its place was a ring of fire surrounding the house. He knew that there was no way he could destroy it, so he decided to say his final words:
'What, fried by fire? Was this the will of Zeus?
Then, Proteus, to thy work! Come, burn me up;
I reck not though this hour thou tak'st my life.
Too many friends have perished by my folly:
Patroclus, lying poisoned by the Sirens;
Old Phoenix next, and Troilus and his love,
Who followed me to this accurséd house.
Come then, consuming fire, dear foe who brings
To fools like me a funeral fit for kings!'
And with that he would have rushed forward, if Thetis hadn't materialised in front of him at that moment, and passed a soft cool hand over his brow as though he was a sick child, and kissed him and said, 'Oh, Achilles, my beautiful boy! You don't really think you've come this far just to be defeated by a sea-monster, do you? Have you forgotten that you're the son of a sea-goddess, a shape-shifter like Proteus?'
'For Zeus's sake, mum, do you have to embarrass me in front of my enemies?' groaned Achilles. 'I'm a grown man, I've been fighting in Troy for nine years, if I'm going to die I'll do it on my own terms! I don't need you running up to put a plaster on my knee and give me a lollipop!'
'I know, darling, and when you are fated to die, I can't stop it happening. But I can give you some help for now. I'll give you the power to shape-shift for one hour, and that should give you time to defeat Proteus. And then, when you meet the Sphinx...'
But Achilles wasn't listening any more, because he had turned into a huge rain-cloud and was doing his best to extinguish the fire-Proteus. So Thetis sighed, melted into thin air again, and left them to it.
The battle of Achilles and Proteus was a truly epic one, and I wish I was enough of a poet to describe it properly, but I can't. Proteus turned from a fire into a cobra, and Achilles became a mongoose that launched itself at the back of Proteus's neck, bit him behind the hood and hung on tightly as Proteus thrashed around. Proteus became a breath, and Achilles became a piece of glass on which the breath condensed. Proteus became a light-beam, and Achilles became a blackboard that absorbed the light. Proteus became a fly, and, as quick as a flash, Achilles became a Venus fly-trap, snapped shut on him, and ate him, and that was that.
And so, as the hour was up, Achilles turned back into a man, feeling slightly queasy with the remains of Proteus in his stomach, but otherwise unhurt. He called to the others that it was safe to come out now, and after a few minutes they emerged, rather slowly, with Helen, Troilus and Cressida helping each other carry the rolled-up tapestry showing what had happened. Achilles rolled his eyes when he saw it. 'What do you need a tapestry for?' he snapped.
'Well, I thought maybe we could give it to Paris and Oenone as a present – just to say sorry for all the trouble I've caused them, you know,' explained Helen. 'Or if they don't want it, it'd look nice in the palace in Sparta. But I ought to take something as a present for the Trojans, and this and my plants are the only things I've got left – by Demeter, I nearly forgot the plants!' And with that she dropped the tapestry, hurried back inside, and returned a few minutes later with a tray full of a dozen little clay plant-pots, with a different herb in each one, and little labels saying things like 'cures fever', 'anti-depressant', 'protects against being turned into a pig by witches' and 'tastes good with pasta and olive oil'. 'I've had to grow these on my windowsill, because Proteus wouldn't let me out of doors,' Helen explained, as they walked back to the ship, 'but I'm sure most of them will grow happily in the garden when we get back to Sparta. A bit of sunlight's bound to do them a world of...'
But at that moment she stopped, for there in front of them, lying in the sand, was the biggest creature any of them had ever seen. It was as tall as a high building even lying down, and would have been even bigger if it had stood up. It looked like a gigantic cat, covered in golden fur, and far bigger than any lion or tiger in the zoo, but it had wings like an eagle's, and a face that somehow reminded each of them of someone very beautiful, although afterwards they couldn't even agree on whether it was a man's or a woman's face. To Cressida it looked like Troilus, and to Troilus it looked like Cressida. To Helen, it looked like Paris the evening they had first met, laughing in Menelaus's banqueting hall in Sparta; and to Phoenix it looked like his father's girlfriend who had been hardly any older than Phoenix himself when he was a young man; and to Achilles, it looked like a proud, brave woman whom he hadn't met before, but really, really wanted to stay with now that he'd met her. But the truth was that none of them really noticed the rest of the Sphinx's face, because its eyes were so beautiful. They were golden, or red or green or blue or purple, depending on how the light hit them, and they looked terrifyingly wise, as if the Sphinx was looking into your soul and knew all your secrets, and knew many more things that were far beyond your understanding.
'Greetings,' it said, in a voice with a purr that could easily turn into a snarl. 'So, I take it one of you was the genius who defeated Proteus?'
Achilles stood forward: 'Yes, I did that: Achilles, son of Peleus.'
The Sphinx yawned: 'Ah, yes, Thetis's boy. Yes, with your mummy's help I suppose you could have managed it. Not like Oedipus – no, poor Oedipus answered his own riddle with his own brains, without his parents' help. But we couldn't ask Achilles to do that, could we?'
'I can answer it! The answer is: exactly where you left it!'
The Sphinx seemed to laugh silently, or perhaps it was just yawning again. 'So impetuous! Shouldn't you have waited to see what the question was?'
'Well, what was it, then?' demanded Achilles.
'To be or to be known: that is the question.'
'Oh.' Achilles began striding up and down, trying to work out the answer, and muttering to himself:
'To be or to be known, that is the question:
Enjoy long life, and then obscurity,
Or fight, and be remembered when I'm dead
And care no more if poets write about
The wrath of mighty Peleus' greater son
And how I fought and killed, and how I died,
Was buried, and have turned to fruitful loam;
Or else to quest for everlasting life,
Like Gilgamesh, who dived beneath the waves
To pluck the flower off the Tree of Life,
Which yet a serpent stole, ere he could eat,
And Gilgamesh's immortality
Was but to have his quest inscribed in clay...'
'Well?' said the Sphinx. 'I'm waiting for an answer.'
'Come on,' pleaded Achilles, 'it's a good question, and I want to do it justice. I'm a philosopher, I need more time to think it over.'
'So how long do you need?'
'Well, say about fifty years...' began Achilles. but his voice tailed off as the Sphinx gazed steadily at him with its great golden eyes, and he became very still and rigid, as still as stone.
Phoenix stepped forward, and bowed to the Sphinx. 'Please, great Sphinx, couldn't you take my life instead of Achilles?' he begged. 'Let him go home to his father, old King Peleus. There's no-one who needs me, and Peleus is going to be devastated if his only son doesn't come home.'
The Sphinx half-closed its eyes: 'You seem to know a lot about fatherly love.'
'I know Peleus. He was better than a father to me and to Patroclus when we were exiled from our homelands. He made me tutor to the boys and...'
'And you must have had so much to teach them about respecting their elders,' purred the Sphinx. 'After your own father banished you because you seduced his girlfriend, you must have been an ideal role model.'
Phoenix started to shake with anger. 'It wasn't like that!' he snapped. 'I just wanted her to split up with my dad so that he'd get back together with my mum and our family could go back to normal! I don't believe the gods would condemn what I did!'
'I see,' said the Sphinx. 'I suppose men as wise as you have a far more – sophisticated moral philosophy than ordinary people. So, will you tell me, out of your wisdom, just one thing? Is an action holy because the gods approve of it, or do they approve of it because it is holy?'
Proteus screwed up his brain trying to work out the answer. He was sure the answer must be that the gods approve of good actions because they are holy, but, according to the legends, Zeus had overthrown his father, Cronos, who had overthrown his own father, the Sky-Father, who was married to the Earth-Mother even though some people said he was also the son of the Earth-Mother, and so if it was okay for the Sky-Father to marry his mother, why was it wrong when Oedipus did it, and who had been the Sky-Father's father anyway? And yet, now that Zeus was the chief god, he seemed very sure that children should always obey their elders, because he didn't want any of his own offspring overthrowing him. And if the gods were just more lawless, irresponsible versions of humans, why should anyone care what they thought? But if the real gods weren't like that at all, then could you be sure they even cared about how humans behaved? He was sure there must be an answer, but his brain was going too slowly to work it out, slowing – down – to – stone.
'Why are you only asking the men questions?' asked Helen. 'Are you afraid to let women think?'
'On the contrary! You shall have your riddle too, my dear Helen. Now, you must have seen, in your years in Egypt, that cats nearly always land on their paws, don't they?' Helen nodded. 'And toast, on the other hand, nearly always lands butter-side down, doesn't it?'
'Well, usually...'
'So,' continued the Sphinx, 'if you strap a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat and throw it off the top of a pyramid – is the cat alive or dead?'
Helen opened her mouth to say, 'Yes,' but then she wondered whether that was too obvious to be the right answer, and whether she ought to say something else, like, 'Does the toast have marmalade on, or just butter?' or 'How high is the pyramid?' or 'Is there an expensive carpet underneath?' And so, because she hesitated, she turned to stone without saying anything at all.
And then it was Troilus's turn. He knew he couldn't answer the Sphinx's riddles, but he thought that if he could only distract it enough, Cressida might have a chance to run away. So he hurled his spear as hard as he could at the Sphinx, but the Sphinx just batted the spear aside as if it were a bothersome fly, snapping it in two, and then yawned and said, 'Don't worry, I haven't forgotten you, and your riddle is an easy enough one. I saw a lion turn into a hare, and the hare turned and chased after a wolf. Why was that?'
Troilus blushed deeply. He knew perfectly well what the Sphinx meant: that he had been as ferocious as a lion when he was fighting for Troy, and that all of a sudden he had run away on account of Cressida. It had all seemed so obviously right, when Pandarus had asked him to look after Cressida, but now the Sphinx's face didn't look at all like Cressida, but a bit like Hector when he was kissing his wife and his little boy goodbye before going out to battle, and a bit like King Priam whenever they held a funeral for yet another of his sons, and Troilus wondered how on earth he could explain to his father or his brothers why he had deserted Troy in its hour of need. He longed to turn to stone so that he could escape that steady, sad, noble stare.
And then only Cressida was left. 'Come on,' she said, taking the stone right hand of Troilus's statue in both her own, 'you'd better turn me to stone as well.'
'Now, now, we must do things properly,' said the Sphinx. 'What animal runs on four legs by night, and on two by day, but is ruined when it goes on three?'
Suddenly Cressida was too angry to be afraid: angry that the Sphinx knew all their secrets, and did nothing with the knowledge but taunt them. But she knew that if she lost her temper, she'd just turn to stone, like the rest, so she forced herself to say, calmly and levelly, 'A werewolf.'
The Sphinx purred: 'Ver-ry good! You're free to go.'
'Not quite,' said Cressida. 'It's my turn to ask you a riddle now:
'I gave my love a cherry without any stone;
I gave my love a chicken without any bone;
I gave my love a love without longing.'
It was the only riddle she could think of on the spur of the moment, and the moment it was out of her mouth, she wished she'd thought of a trickier one. The youngest child in Troy could have answered that one. But the Sphinx seemed puzzled. It twitched its tail, sat up on its haunches, and began to wash its huge shoulder with its tongue, just like a giant cat. At last it said, 'Is this one of these ones where the sentence stops in the middle of the line, so it's really, "Without any stone I gave my love a chicken; without any bone I gave my love a love?"'
'No,' said Cressida firmly, 'it means what it says:
'How can there be a cherry without any stone?
How can there be a chicken without any bone?
How can there be a love without longing?'
The Sphinx washed its other shoulder, rolled over in the sand to wash its stomach, and then realised that this didn't look very dignified and went back to crouching on all fours. 'Well?' it said crossly at last. 'What is the answer?'
Cressida smiled.
'When the cherry's in the blossom, there is no stone;
When the chicken's in the egg, there is no bone;
When the love is fulfilled, there's no longing.'
And as Cressida finished, she realised that the Sphinx had turned to stone, and that it didn't look like Troilus or anyone else any more. Its features hadn't changed, exactly, but now that it was dead, it had lost the power to control what she thought she saw, and she could see that its face wasn't a human face at all, but just a giant cat. And now Troilus was holding her hand in his, and Achilles and all the others were staring round, wondering what had happened. 'What was the answer, anyway?' asked Achilles. 'About being alive or being remembered? I've been trying to work it out for years.'
'I don't know,' said Cressida. 'What did you mean by "Exactly where you left it"?'
Achilles looked embarrassed. 'Well,' he said, 'I just assumed the question was going to be, "Where do you find a one-legged tortoise?" It usually is.'
Everyone laughed, and then stopped, because they'd heard the sound of marching feet, and someone beating a drum, and women – perhaps thousands of them – singing:
'Marching, marching on, marching on now, sister,
Marching, marching on, into death or glory,
Marching, marching on, marching on now, sister Amazon!'
