Chariot
Disclaimer: I still do not own any of this.

War isn't all blood and iron and death. There are times when it can get sweet: she lies with him sheltered by the blanket of night and a lack of courtiers to watch her, to judge her. He touches the curve of her cheek and she asks him questions in soft tones –Am I still your captive? She says— and though he remains impassive, there is a finality to him in this moment. When he corrects, "You're my guest…" there's that suggestion of undeclared sweetness, and she smiles. But even in this truce of an alliance, the lines are drawn. Life, reality, are not forgotten. And so the sweet becomes bittersweet.

Earlier they had played a makeshift game of chess. Achilles lifted the board and pieces off the pack of a dead Greek under his command –not one of his own, however—and they sat opposing each other on either side of the board. They would peer into each others eyes thoughtfully, strategizing and pondering, both of them noting similar discrepancies between the board and this life. There were no sacred squares on the board to denote temples, and the pieces were only roughly-hewn bits of wood with no loyalties, ambitions or loves. They were equally matched and there were no walls to hide behind. There were rules, and a winner and a loser.

(Achilles, of course, won the game.)

When she is older, Briseis thinks from within his arms, and the war has been over for a long time, these moments will be difficult to remember. She has never suffered from painful nostalgia before. She'll lie in her future bed and see the slaughter of her city's faithful, or the arrogant visage of the Greek king Agamemnon, or the view from the legendary warrior Achilles' bed, or the red-hot poker the soldiers had wished to brand her with, and she will think this is war. It is not about blood or politics or ethics. To talk about war, she'd have to talk about arrogance and hate and trust and love and betrayal. Now Briseis understands her cousin's consternation on those days after battles when Hector would arrive back sweaty and creased with thought, and how he could say nothing when asked by a fellow, "How was the war? What did you think of today's battle?"

(Or, if he did answer, he's say, "Complicated. It was complicated today, just as it is any day." And he would turn to Andromache, and her serenity would smooth the creases of his face over for the next day.)

And when Achilles calls her his guest, the complicated politics of the war begin to weigh down on her. She can almost feel the sagging of her shoulders, pushing her further into his arms and further into oblivion. The title of 'guest' suggests her own Trojan volition is involved with this affair, and she is not sure if she is ready for that kind of responsibility yet. "In Troy, guests can leave whenever they want."

"Would you leave now?"

Of course she won't.

There is no happy part of war, Briseis thinks. Not at its outset, nor at its conclusion, and certainly not in the midst of it, which is where most people do the dying. There is no happiness even for someone as untouchable as Achilles, she will learn. They are all affected because they are all human.

She had thought she had overheard the tail end of a happy war story during the morning. One of the men recounted his tale near the fire while she was taking a walk. She had thought the tale might fortify her position, might give her some strength to match her lover's:

"I met the woman who would be my wife in Corinth, when Agamemnon finally chose to take it. She, a Corinthian, and I, a Mycenaean, and she still tended to my wounds inflicted by her people, and when Achilles led us to victory and it was time to come home, she came with me."

The soldier stands up to murmurs in response, and makes for one of the barracks tents. That was a pleasant story, Briseis thinks, and she begins to walk back to her own tent thus protected and enamoured. Until: "It's a nice tale, of course, but he forget to mention the real ending," a soldier says to the gathering. "That happy ending…there's too much peace there. Nobody comes out of war pristine and loaded with spoils. Or at least not for very long. His Corinthian wife bore him a son, but when she returned –unaccompanied—to her home, her family sole the babe from its cradle and dropped it from the cliffs because it was tainted with the blood of Mycenae." The men roar. "You'd think she were Spartan."

That, Briseis thinks as she walks away, is a real happy story from the war. So she is not surprised, then, to see Achilles lose his young cousin to the war. What she does not foresee is that she, too, is part of this war. And she has not lost enough to tell her tale yet. When Briseis hears the name of Patroclus' killer and witnesses for herself the maddened glint in Achilles' eyes, she realizes that she is about to lose something else.

After Achilles is dressed and gone, Briseis makes her doomed attempt to escape. What goes through her head are moments both real and imagined, moments played all together and at the same time, moments with no real end.

She sees her beloved cousin Hector, a man of honour and love, probably the only man she knows truly deserving of the happiness in the life he leads. She sees her lover, the near-invincible Achilles, killing him.

Or Andromache, beloved, wise and beautiful Andromache, a woman Briseis calls mentor and closest friend. She sees her grief, her tears, and in her wise mind, she sees that Andromache can see Hector. Briseis is suddenly glad that Troy does not know of her role here in the Greek camp.

Or Achilles himself, a statue on his chariot as she pleads with him. Hysteria serves for nothing. He guides his horses ruthlessly and fearlessly, like Apollo himself, and she sees herself sink to her knees in the sand, the grains running through her fingertips. That familiar feeling of uselessness, of weakness, and she thinks, "what now?"

In that sense of desperation, Briseis decides to try to escape. What does she have to lose, she asks herself, but does not find the logic heartening in the least. Not while her cousin is not so far away, dying on Achilles' sword. She brings nothing from the tent with her, but does slip one final seed of pomegranate under her tongue, promising a solemn oath to Zeus that is she is successful, she will never eat the fruit again.

When she walks aimlessly outside, the men ignore her just as they ever have. As she nears the slope that divides the beach of Troy from the plains, Briseis unwillingly begins remembering sensations.

Achilles' light and confident touch over the column of her neck.

The exotic silk of the pallet they slept upon.

His helmet, tossed haphazardly in the sand.

Fingers constantly in her hair, lifting and smelling and playing.

The warmth of having him beside her at night.

The platter upon the ground.

Briseis looks around at the Greek soldiers, and wonder if she should start running. If she does and they notice, they will catch her. But what does she have to lose?

Achilles, seemingly asleep, and then, Do it.

She picks up the pace. When she is about halfway up the slope and with a mind blissfully blank like wave wet sand, she gains hope. Hope, in war, is a dangerous thing, because: "You girl!"

She stops for a single moment and considers turning around, laughing this initiative off and remaining under the guise of 'it never happened'. But Briseis thinks of Hector, thinks of his courage, and decides that she will never become the coward of the royal Trojan family. It is a moment supersaturated with colour and silence and truth, and she begins to run.

Of course, she doesn't get very far before they catch her.

They toss her roughly, but with a small sense of consideration (she is their lord's current lover, as it were), as if she were a petulant child, back into the tent. There she will wait, like the rest of them, for the inevitable return of Achilles.

The first time she sees him next, Achilles hasn't been told about her rather pathetic escape attempt. Briseis didn't care, she was ready for his anger, and she was far to occupied by memories of her cousin. She cannot bar to look at his killer, and she steals out of the tent to stand by the shore, tears running and sticking unprettily to her cheeks. She doesn't care.

It doesn't take long for Achilles to get up to speed, and by then she has heard the chattering of the men, heard of Hector's defeat, heard that his body has been dragged up beside his tent. Her body is shaking uncontrollably when Achilles comes to her, and asks her his questions in a voice that is so confident and strong that she wants to scream at him.

"Tell me why I should ever bother with you again."

She says nothing, afraid of the inelegant and undignified noises that may come out of her throat before words might be formed. He is not impressed. "Your attempt at leaving this camp speaks very well for itself. Why should I not cut you down where you stand? I've killed women before, it would be no novelty."

Unsurprised, she murmurs more into her chin than to her interrogator, "You have no right."

She flinches when he laughs, cold and hard and impersonal, like the monster she first suspected him to be before he laid hands upon her, and flinches further when he says, "You're mine. I have every right to do with you as I please."

"I have done you no wrong, so you have no right to hurt me. At least in that, you might somehow justify taking my cousin—because he killed yours." The tears continue, and she thinks fleetingly of Andromache. "And the men in battle that you kill—they would kill you as well. But I will not be a part of this. I refuse." Her chin shakes despite the hard set of her shoulders.

It is terrifying to her that he wears the same mask of impassiveness now as he does in moments of tenderness. The only thing that has changed is the words out of his mouth, and she has learned not to place much on the value of words. "I do not kill based on right and wrong, or on what is justified. I killed the priests when they were unarmed in your temple, did I not? I am ruled by nothing except my own judgment – what are you to do if that judgment turns against you?" He says, and begins to circle her as if she were prey.

Have I been a fool as well as a traitor? She thinks. Did I truly believe that I was not letting a coldblooded killer make love to me? When did I become such a fool?

"Do you have nothing to say in face of your own death?" He challenges, in front of her and his face close to hers.

And she snaps back, though without the strong timbre in her voice – hers is broken, and admittedly so. "And will you drag my body from the back of your chariot when you are finished? If you judge me by the same principles, will you exact the same punishment and say, 'this was Briseis, who defied and insulted the great Achilles one too many times'?"

The look of impassivity shifts into something unrecognizable, and if it were not for the waves, Briseis would have imagined that time had stopped just for this meeting.

He turns and walks back to the tent, but not before grasping her shoulders and answering in harsh tones: "If you think that I would release you from my reach so easily, then you are the fool I had not foreseen you to be."