Conscription
Disclaimer: See previous chapters; I don't like being redundant.
On a bright and cheerful afternoon (and not on a dark and rainy night), Briseis is unwillingly raised out of a reverie. Without thinking, she has watched her fellows prepare and pack amid Carthage, and she hasn't taken any note of it. When Paris comes to her on that cheerful morning in the library, she wonders to herself why she hasn't paid him much attention. She wonders about the meaning behind it while he leads her out, beyond the guard towers and stationed soldiers, to the plain of windswept sand.
There had been much talk amongst her people of departure, but Briseis has purposefully kept to herself. Her mind has laced doubt upon its threads like a slow-acting poison, and now in a nation of sand and blood and iron and ritual, she wonders about the trustworthiness of their leader Aeneas. Aeneas, who has barely spoken to their small party, so enraptured with the embrace of the Carthaginian princess Dido was he. She imagines the hard months of toil surely ahead of them while their leader will lead them periodically astray on a mythical quest for a new homeland that only Aeneas can find. There is no altering this predescribed fate, she thinks to herself; she has no choice in whether or not she must continue with her fellow Trojans. They unwittingly have her bound in a surreal landscape of tied knots and a labyrinth of intertwining strings, unless the boorish people of Carthage have anything to say about it.
Sometimes, she catches the generals watching her when he back is almost turned. At first, she feared violence, but no malice lay in the orbs of their eyes. Then she feared violation, but they did not leer at her as the men in rags on the streets so often did towards herself and Andromache. Their intentions towards her, even now, remain unknown, and so there is nobody and nothing else to help her decide her own fate.
On this day, Paris seeks to find his cousin because they must talk of the future. His temporary isolation in the brassy box of his mind gives Paris enough time to clearly sort his thoughts, sifting them like fine flour through the hairline cracks in his fingers and discovering the very essence his situation requires. He has been charged with the rather volatile quest of informing Briseis of the Trojans' imminent departure from Troy, at Aeneas' behest. A brief appeal to the very nature of his cousin, ingrained in short penstrokes over the expanse of her soul, instructs him on where to go to find her.
Within ten minutes he has finished golddigging through all spiderhole libraries within the palace. On the eleventh minute, he finds her.
She is perfectly fine, sitting and reading in the library: through the heavy wooden open door of the sanctuary he snipes her position, this pinnacle of solitude behind a cold stone table. He walks in and disturbs the silence of the books and strides over, sits across from her. As he does, Paris passes behind her and leans down; he drops a light kiss of greeting in the dark of her hair – and then it's gone.
Briseis is perusing the pages of her book – non-mythical philosophy – but she accords him a good draught of dignity as he sits in closing it quietly and putting her hands in her lap innocently. Her eyes meet his briefly, a yin-and-yang of clay against water, but his gaze falls upon her books: a slim tome of philosophy beside another about war, and he remarks to himself on her new sheer disregard for reading on the gods.
In his mind's eye, Paris sees metaphorical fingers flipping past the unmarked gallery of his memories' images, flashes of sturdy, unmoving colour tones streaming before him. He stops on one – a seemingly irrelevant one of Andromache telling him that their cousin refuses to talk of the gods anymore.
Now, this strikes Paris, and he finds it immeasurably tragic. Religion is full of devoted symbolism in the parallel universe of Briseis' life, he knows. It is because of this tragic quality to the lack of piety that makes him not comment upon it. He believes she has lost herself.
Instead, he intones solemnly, "I must speak with you."
The dancing in her eyes gives away her internal laughter, a struggle of mirth caused by depressive subjects. Paris tells the attendant not far from the table that she need not accompany Briseis any longer; Paris will escort her. This is the same attendant who, after a few minutes of oblique, stranger-like observation, decides through narrow-slatted eyes that they are a duo who have weathered the storm. She watches their reactions to each other and believes that they are great friends, and will be until death.
But are they?
On this plain of sand to which Paris brings her, Briseis regards him critically. There is a desperation in his eyes that she has seen few times before.
On this plain of sand, the quietism that surrounds her haunts Paris, and he waits for tumbleweed to cross the sheer expanse and be crushed under the heels of his sandals, but he is disappointed. He has brought the silent woman here with absolutely no logic in mind but to follow Aeneas' directions to inform her of their imminent departure, and to check on Briseis' well-being – and so a remarkable one-sided conversation ensues.
Conversing with Briseis now has to be the strangest thing he's ever done in his life, Paris decrees to himself as he forms his sentences. He looks at her both reprovingly and reproachfully, as if chastising her for not solving and being rid of this puzzle sooner, for not becoming tired of her silence. Strangeness.
On this plain of sand, Paris doesn't worry or wonder about whether or not he's doing the right thing because he knows this is what is best for the Trojans, and that is what he concerns himself with. Silence or no silence, scars or no scars, Briseis is the kind of girl that analyzes her every stratagem to the nth degree before performing or employing it, and in her quietude has the intuitional skills of a cat. She must realize that they must leave Carthage. Even so, he does waste the grains of sand that are the few seconds he spends reviewing his distorted image of logic, pinned to his thought process by strange and ulterior means. But there is nothing to stop him now.
On this plain of sand, Briseis stands before him like a beacon of personified fragility. There is something in her eyes as she looks at him, and there's something completely different in his own orbs. These are dangerous circumstances, and the equation that both would have it no other way is a heady mix of toxic intake.
"We are leaving Carthage in two days," he says in start.
The first shards of morning light are oddly pinned and distorted over the wisps of colour in the sky – the changing sands have such strange effects on the natural and pure. On this plain of sand, Briseis must face this new reality that has hit them all dead on in a mass ship collision, yielding a cut-off survivor count of their menial group of survivors.
"We Trojans need," Paris says in great certainty, "a new land to call our own." The unspoken words are deafening: a place to stay that didn't involve united empires knocking on city walls, or mile-long beaches and pristine walkways, or the false normalcy of unlocked doors. A place that would suit the broken Trojan party -the unlikely and balanced group- so that there would be an endless void of sound in which to drown Troy's white noise and sorrow, and an anonymity of being for Briseis, the undeclared traitor. They wanted the ability to disappear and not be noticed unless thus desired: they wanted such a tangible and manipulated invisibility that they could feel as sustenance under their fingers, theirs to capture and bottle indefinitely.
She says nothing. He sighs.
"Aeneas will leave the princess of Carthage for us. We all make great sacrifice in leaving this secure place, but like my father would have said," He pauses, wondering if he is worthy of invoking his father's memory, "the gods will reward us for our trials."
She says nothing.
"Apollo will give us a new home."
Nothing.
"Perhaps you might pray to him; pray for our quick deliverance."
Her eyebrows furrow, and he knows he has said the wrong thing. Her mouth opens, key in a lock, and for the first time in many weeks, her voice rings out and gets lost in the porous sand: "Do not mock what you do not understand."
Paris runs to her in euphoric excitement, grasping her shoulders and smiling greatly, for it was he who coaxed the words from her lips. "Briseis, we will create a new world for ourselves."
Nothing again, for it takes time for her to spill the words from her unwilling tongue, "Perhaps you might. I wish you all the luck that Carthage believes I possess, for I will not go with you."
And there it is.
On this plain of sand, there is a moment between these two in which a choice must be made.
Jaw set tightly and lips lacking words, Paris leaves her to the company of the sand, his hands curled into fists.
Neither of them realize, despite their differently careful natures, just how dangerous their ideas are. Dangerous for Briseis, because she is risking drowning herself in the facelessness of Carthage while seeking to disappear; dangerous for Paris and the Trojans, because they are still so young in body and in soul; but mostly, dangerous because they will all be alone some way or another, with none but their own sanity to keep themselves company.
(And of course, the most dangerous and tragic thing is to be left idle with no protection from your own mind. None of them know that they will need somebody to save them - from themselves.)