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2. Briseis - Earth

Even as I stand before my tent, I know that you are not inside. You cannot bear to be here, watching me prepare to do battle with your cousin. My legs dig into the sand, and I wish I could root my whole being in the beach of Troy, a place that I would gladly make my home, if only I could forsake this madness.

With little hope, I glance around for you in the half-born light, and for a moment there is nothing more I wish than to find words convincing enough to explain why I have to seek revenge against Hector. But you would never want to come close to understanding it.

You are so much wiser than I will ever be.

We built our dream world on sand, Briseis, and even before they told me Patroclus was dead you knew that. My arm, out of a will of its own, shot out and wrapped itself around your neck in inhuman wrath. How limp you went and how terror spread across your features in an instant. But you said nothing because you understood that our time together had come to an abrupt end. We were enemies once more and the world outside had crashed on us with the force of the gods' punishment.

I screamed denial and rage because I refused to face the truth. And that because of the choices I had made, Patroclus lay dead.  It was me who had decided to leave the war and take the path I never thought I would tread. I thought nothing of sacrificing my reputation as a warrior and everything that I'd ever stood for, to have a chance at the other life that I'd only just glimpsed. I was beginning to understand how meaningless my existence had been up to that point and how many amends I needed to make in order to please this new self that was slowly awakening in me. The feeling that it was all worth it - that you made it all worth it - never left me while I was with you and for the first time in my life I believed in what I was doing.  Let someone else fight for glory and immortality, I told myself. I choose life, however fleeting and imperfect it may be.

Yesterday, I thought it all possible. The early morning battle did not even cause me to stir. Let Hector drive the Greeks back to their ships, burn them all down if he so pleased, teach the invaders the lesson they so direly needed. It was no longer my fight. For in my arms I held you - my future - and I would have forsaken my past and all the immortality in the world for it.

But now I know better: Apollo's revenge was sweet indeed. The Sun god exacted a just punishment on the mortal who dared to desecrate his statue. Striking me down would have been quick and painless. Instead he chose to mete out his punishment by granting me one great love and a few hours of happiness, only to tear them away from me when I had just begun to taste them.

I had sailed across the Aegean to fight a war that wasn't mine. Instead I had found you and for the length of time we spent together, I believed that I was given a choice by the gods. Much the same way, I trusted that the warrior that had inhabited my body thus far would slowly retreat to give way to a new man. For a few days, I almost believed it. I say almost because the sounds of battle and dying were never too far away. They rang on the battlefield in the day or drummed incessantly in my ears at night. Yet steadily, being close to you managed to drown out most of the clamor. I had not told anyone before, but in the long hours of sleeplessness, the sounds of the dying, their screams and curses, all directed at me, haunted me constantly. They made me afraid of what may await me in Hades. I was not afraid of dying, only of what might happen afterwards…

Odysseus said that women had a way of complicating things, but he was wrong. I thought life was simple enough before I met you: take life in battle and live to fight another day. But it proved simpler still when the shadows of the men I had killed slowly dissipated and my vision was filled with images of how my life could be with you. And it seemed like nothing had ever been clearer or less complicated. That I did not fully understand it did not daunt me. Could there be forgiveness for the lives I'd taken? Or even respite from the life I had not really chosen to live except by being born? Even now I ask myself what it was that made me look inside my soul and wish, like I had never wished anything before in my life, to see someone else. Of course I was furious with myself at first. No woman had remotely made me feel inadequate. I had been called all manner of names, be it dumb or brute or divine or hero. Yet no one before you had asked me if I the life I led was my own choice. I wanted to show you that I wasn't like that, in the beginning. But after that first night, and the following day, I began to realize how little that mattered to you and that much as I wanted, my past could not be changed. And the thought started creeping into my mind that maybe, just maybe, I could shape my future. Into something that would become our future.

I would have persuaded you to leave Troy with me. I know it. And you would have come with me, knowing that my absence was all your countrymen needed to drive the invaders away from Troy. But most of all, you would have come with me because you had given up your whole life as you knew it, your vows of virginity, your family and homeland only to love me. And who was I to turn away from that most precious of gifts?

To be continued