Pain
Disclaimer: See previous chapters; I don't like being redundant.
Pain.
Not clichéd, not historical, not descriptive, just PAIN. Those terrible, gruesome four-letter words that all respectable people instruct you not to use. PAIN. There is no salvation to this PAIN.
Briseis shifts on the stone seat at the height of the staggering room, of the staggering scene, soreness left by stiffness and pain left by heartache making resounding tremors up and down the landscape of her torso. She is left rigid by the instinctual cordillera that her body now prefers to form at jagged intervals -a feeling she doesn't enjoy- in which she keeps her spine ramrod straight in order to show honour and dignity for the process at hand. For Andromache, who sits so stiffly beside her. For Hector, whose eyes are covering by the coins for Charon the boatman, whose body begins to burn atop the great pyre. For Troy, which contracts in its great outpouring of grief. And so she will not resign herself to the fluidity of her muscles and does not sink back into the seat, buts sits straight for this Troy, her Troy, a wounded Troy and a Troy she has betrayed.
Here, among the evidence of her past –the gods she had so respected painted upon the walls- Briseis feels as if she's trapped in the gridlines of a memory. The sharp edges of this box, the palace she once called home and the hall she now calls Hector's funeral pyre, are making her nervous and claustrophobic, but -as she has felt for a while now- she will not voice any word about it. After all, to whom would she confess the plagues her mind endures? To Paris, the suffering but ridiculously and still endearingly ignorant lovesick fool? To Priam, the god-devoted king of tunnel vision, who would betray his gods for nothing and would never identify with her plight? To Andromache, the greatest of all sufferers?
The walls are so starkly plain to her that she has been slowly eroded down into a realm of horror at the bleached bone effect surrounding her. Hers is a world of shifting and interlacing colours, moving together and apart like the brilliant colours of a vase juxtaposed onto falling folds of silk from the Asia Minor. The walls are all wrong.
And so she sits, thinking these thoughts, at Hector's funeral.
Andromache, dear Andromache, remains composed – she is a terrifying contradiction, and the very definition of regal to Briseis. She is selfishly wishing for her cousin to throw her a sign that might purport a celebratory move forward to make everything perfect perfect perfect again. But Andromache's features themselves -smooth and unmarred cheekbones and symmetrical forehead, unbroken and perfectly convex in the proper places, like her own- are as if carved of a curious mixture of rock and ice. And Briseis knows that rock and ice cannot be gay and celebratory. Not with the death of their owner's husband, as is the case with Andromache. Briseis retreats into herself.
I am made of rock too, she decides for herself: many layers of differing rock types. At the very core she loves her cousins so dearly that the rock of her emotions could be squeezed for tears, but the other layers shielding her have other business to take care of. She is locked inside her own reflexive shell - a cell of self-protectiveness that she knows nobody will know how to break. She must have this shell, because if any Trojan knew of her feelings towards Hector's killer, she would probably be stoned to death.
Her crazy metaphors and out-of-control personifications are making her smile. Briseis is wondering if she is going crazy.
Beside her, Andromache continues to sit immobile, tears slowly falling.
Briseis hadn't ever seen it coming. Not in a million years.
She was young, successful and devoted and beautiful in her own right, out in the real world (having built a life away from the royals and with the gods), and was riding off the high of so many people telling her how well 'things' were going to go for her - the generic, anonymous nature of the term "things" going unnoticed. She only laugh good-naturedly and reciprocate to her complimentors in similar kind out of manners and propriety, also accepting their complimentary goblets of wine and making astute, needling sarcastic observations around the alcohol in her mouth. Dizzying vortexes of people moving in and out of her life as if they were merchants down any old obscure trade route, so much life flowing like alcohol, so many purposes to be executed perfectly and all at once. "Things" weren't supposed to have gone this way. She had decided to become a priestess of Apollo, for who could be more protected than a maiden of the sun? So far away from the royalty was the entire proposal that it became a dazzling and alluring commodity that she hadn't the self-control to resist: it had taken less than a few days of piety for it all to come crashing down under the swords of the Greeks, and for her temptation to come in the form of a Greek demi-god warrior –
"Briseis?"
Andromache is blocking the light from the window, but she doesn't mind. Briseis turns her head in the appropriate, respectful distance, and opens her eyes.
That beautiful face. Carved of rock and ice. It could tell stories to burst the dimensions into tiny pieces of shattered glass and those smooth, rounded pebbles she used to find under the light waves of the Aegean Sea. Briseis sits up from her bed as her cousin sits beside her.
In those moments, she is filled with such hope that perhaps she might bring some light into her dear cousin's eyes, because it is all that Andromache deserves, but Andromache is wiser than all of them and she sees all. And after a few moments, she asks her, "You are not wearing your priestess robes anymore?"
And all is shattered.
There is silence, and Briseis will not meet the eyes of her cousin. But when she does…
"Dear Andromache…"
As Briseis says her name, Andromache stands from the bed and walks towards the door. In seeing her walk, Briseis knows that Priam must have told her where he had found their little cousin, the lovely priestess, and in whose company. Whose eyes had looked upon her so softly before they had driven away from the Greek camp on the chariot carrying Hector's body.
Andromache turns her head as she goes, and says, "There was nothing you could do." And she makes to leave the room.
"There was."
She stops on her path, and slowly turns to look at the young woman. Her eyes are unreadable.
Briseis will tell no lies to her beloved cousin. She stands, and with a curious shining of tears not yet fallen in her eyes, she walks towards Andromache, as she says, the words unspoken speaking volumes, "And when he returned,"
- after killing your husband and my beloved cousin –
"He asked me what I had to say if he should kill me…"
- because I had tried to run away while he was gone –
"and I asked him if he would drag my body from his chariot…"
- as he did to your Hector –
"because if that was what was done to my cousin, then I deserved worse for my crimes."
Briseis feels very young standing before the wife of her killed cousin, standing under her scrutiny, though it is what she deserves. And she wonders why she keeps avoiding the blade when Andromache steps forward and presses her lips against her temple, a motion that speaks volumes.
And Andromache leaves in a swish of skirts and without words, and Briseis is once again left to her own pain, unabated.