Xeper
Disclaimer: See previous chapters; I don't like redundancy
It is in this very manner that the twelve days of mourning for the death of Troy's defender begin.
The manner is this: Sympathy runs boundless amid the streets of the place, like the plague in Egypt, but sympathy, empathy and all its compatriots are the cords of a very short and taut rope that expects proper recognition once one reaches the end of it. And Briseis is having none of it.
Day 1: Word has traveled all through the narrow yet unfettered alleys of the palace of Troy that Briseis was found by the tent of Achilles, and its inhabitants join together in a collective sigh of pity - and what Briseis briefly ponders to be sympathetic disdain. She was meant for such better things..., they say. Bad things happen to the best of them. They could only imagine. These are the words that run rampant from their steamrolling mouths.
She feels like a weather-beaten rock, shouldering the effects of endless frustration brought about by similar and repeat occurrences. She knows that they know nothing, and finds herself wishing for the company of her lover – and this isn't the first time.
Day 4: The clichés of pity have begun to wear thin, which is a part-relief to Briseis, as there is nothing more detestable than the overwrought use of clichés by misunderstanding, philandering peoples. Seeing Briseis, captive and weakness of the Greek demi-god, has become like an attraction to most decorated courtiers, and times show dangerous prospects of her becoming one of those mythic palace figures that mothers use to blackmail their children about: Now, they don't want to end up like poor Briseis, do they?
She is building layer upon layer of her self-restraint: she now has immeasurable disgust for these self-gratifying people of the court. She yells and rants and raves to Helen – the only woman with a status lower than her own, who only sits with her hands clasped tightly together in a more diluted form of frustration.
Day 7: The end of the sympathy rope is within reach. Expecting compensation for their lavish care and attention, the courtiers begin to grow restless with Briseis' lack of response, and they make sure that their feelings are verbalized when they convene at court, and at dinners. After all, the girl is conscious, her vocal cords aren't damaged, and the least she could do is tell the stories of her time incarcerated in the savage camp, correct? Apparently not: the girl is preferring to waste away her life by looking away and remaining locked in a prison of her own accord and its self-designed invisible walls.
Her stratifying of reactions becomes a melting pot of provocations, and finally she sees fit to leave an evening meal when the comment, Achilles must have been glorious in bed to have provoked such silence from his captive woman. She storms up to her chambers and sits quietly on her bed just to prove she knows better than them. Helen doesn't ask her about any of it, mostly because she knows better.
Day 12: There is a great deal of confusion and unrest in the palace, and it's all because of that priestess Briseis, niece of King Priam. Everyone knows that she's had a terrible time, but would it be so hard for her to just reassure everyone else and take a minute away from herself? Some people are whispering amongst themselves that the girl has gone crazy and is nothing like the girl she used to be: she refuses to drink wine amongst her compatriots, will not tell stories of her captivity, and spends her time solely amongst her cousins.
She is angry at the rampant idiocy of everyone else when everything is so plain to her. She is doubting that all of these people put together into one huge conglomerating, socialist brain have never truly known her, and that the warrior she spent days with knows her better. She hates these people for characterizing her as their very own traitor to flesh carnality just to add colour and texture to their own lithograph lives.
Far below her in one of the outer city walls, the Greek offering to Poseidon rests in the city courtyard. It is twilight. But this is wrong, because something is different, something has changed. Subtlety crosshatches fine lines over the previously mussed charcoal image. Briseis has a picture in her mind, and at first, she doesn't know what to think of it.
Because of that confusion she remains impassive in every sense as she overturns it in her mind's eye like a child might overturn a grayish, shimmering rock not for the glittering appeal, but for the possibility of finding insects underneath it.
It is an image that she will leave only with herself; unspoken, barely acknowledged, but so very evidently imbued in the very fibers of her clothes and skin and hair, and it makes resonating sounds of echoing, conversing explosions. She knows there will be images to follow.
This is an image she likes - it is the image she's retained from the series of captured movements and tonalities and sounds that was the frequency of the images of her dream last night. She had dreamt -well- and it was a rare thing indeed that Briseis would allow her expressions to relax themselves into prefabricated dreams, while in sleep. She now instead prefers his guard up. But this dream that she relived last night - it might change that.
(The dreams are the beginning and also the end of the two paths convergence in this strange story if one were recounting it backwards. For these purposes instead, it is the beginning of the great divide that at first does not seem so great, and Briseis can feel the rumble of its ascent. For as the reality deteriorates even without recognition of the decomposition -much like the bodies of dead people housed in their coffins- Briseis decides that she will use the dreams -and she's going to make sure that there are more- to make what should be. What she knows will come true.)
She had dreamt of one of the many times she had lain in his arms, softly talking:
He lies on his back, and she is cradled loosely in the crook of his arm, while the other comes up to stroke the column of her neck. The blankets are gathered around their waists, because the sweat on their skin has not yet cooled. His eyes follow the path of his fingers, softly touching the tendons in her neck and just as softly asking, "Would you leave Troy?"
The skin stretched over her jaw tightens when she bites the inside of her mouth, her gaze firmly fixed on the apple in his throat, for fear of catching the intensity of his eyes. "Never. Every Trojan is a part of Troy. So long as it stands, I could never leave it." She glances up only for a second, then back down.
There is a pause, then: "And when Troy falls? What then?"
Briseis takes a slow, hitching breath, but when she speaks, her voice is steady. "Troy will never fall. Its walls have not been breached." Her jaw is set firmly, and he smiles at that.
"It can and it will. It may never have been breached, but it has also never seen the likes of this army, or the likes of Achilles." His hand travels down, from her neck over her arms, down to lightly dust over her hip, sharply protruding, and her breath catches.
She whispers lightly, "You think so highly of yourself."
The corner of his mouth gives a tick, showing his amusement. "It is not thinking. The man who thinks highly of himself is a fool. A man who knows himself for what he is; that is fact." His eyes are bright, and certain. Achilles leans in, over her head, and lays a kiss on the hollow in her throat, then another on her collarbone, his hand still lightly dusting at her hip. He moves to kiss her lips, but then she says:
"Troy will not fall."
Laying a finger over her lips, he answers, "But if it did, what then? If every Trojan is a part of Troy, then could you not take it with you wherever you go?" There is a watchfulness in his eyes that makes her feel like prey.
It gives her a start, and she raises and cocks her head in contemplation over him. "What is this that you are saying, Achilles?"
He lies back and his hold on her loosens, and his eyes stray to the ceiling of the tent. "I suppose you will soon know, because Troy will fall."
She thinks on this, and lays back into the curve of his shoulder, her head on his chest. Briseis holds her breath, and then asks almost without thought, "Where would I go, Achilles?"
He smiles again, then gives a short bark of a laugh. Achilles glances down at her, at her despondent face, "Oh, the things I will show you…"
Running. She is running – and this is not a dream.
She is not quite sure of what actually happened; at one moment Troy was blanketed in a twilit tapestry of celebration of victory, and in another the Greeks were in every corner of every room, yelling and breaking and killing and stealing. As Briseis runs, she doesn't bother to ponder how, as opposed to how might she survive. She knows she cannot survive on her immaterial hopes of Achilles and heroism, because Achilles has assured her time and time again that if anything, he is not a hero and does not wish to be. Heroes willingly sacrifice their own loves and happiness in face of other people, and Achilles would not – he only wants the glory of bloodshed. And so she is on her own.
She stumbles, as if blind, through the hallways and through the sea of courtiers squirming like insects to get past one another. Her aimless running is both futile and dangerous: she finds not a trace of the royal family – not Paris or Helen or Andromache or Astyanax or Priam or Hecuba – and she knows that the time between now and when the fortified palace is completely overrun by the Greeks is short.
In this moment desperation fills her, for there is nobody for her to follow and only her own wits to carry her, and Briseis must appeal to herself to find a way out of this labyrinth of chaos. But, like a child, she recoils from the danger of self-expectation and runs to her protector, and that which she has been faithful to her whole life: the sun god Apollo.
This is not a smart move, she thinks. The grand shrine to Apollo within the palace is naturally situated at its center, so as to encompass everything, and it is filled with riches and perfumes and exotic cloths to draw the plunders like a bee to the flower. The shrine to Apollo is a symbol of Trojan power, and of the gods' favour upon her people, and would be the initial target once the invaders get inside the palace. But these are not the rational thoughts that Briseis thinks as she runs t the altar. Her hurry and faith is so powerful, drawn taut like a web to draw around her body, that she does not see her uncle, her king, Priam, fall under the hands of Agamemnon, because in that moment she is kneeling; in that moment, she sends up her high and shameless hopes for safety and security – and for it to come from within the breast of the Greek army - from Achilles.
But it is not his hands – calloused and finely-boned, like an artist's hands, only stronger and artful only over a sword, a spear and her skin – that grasp her from behind, and it is not his scent – sweat from battle, and wine from the stores, and salt from the sea - that surrounds her, and it is not his voice – caught in its perpetual smirk and with an upbeat of indestructible arrogance and power - that patronizes her sharply: it is Agamemnon's.
But this is all right, and this is why: because it is Agamemnon, and not Achilles, that grasps her so hatefully by the neck and by the hair, her hands and her dagger have no scruples at finding a sheath within the king of kings' neck where she had been so stricken by hesitation over the neck of Achilles.
He falls, and his peons grasp her, and their swords are unsheathed, and then he arrives – the light of his sheer dazzling power filling the altar as he cuts them down without a thought.
There, with him, and in his arms, Briseis thinks her faith has finally been rewarded – never has she so desperately asked anything of the gods and been awarded her due. She feels something akin to elation and –could it be?- hope swell within her at the touch of the iron under the skin of his arms.
But then Paris, and his arrows, begin to fly.