I've heard Aretus complain that he never got to see Achilles get Memnon. Personally, I'm glad that I didn't; I had seen enough bloodshed that day to glut me until the end of time. It was grisly enough when Achilles came back to our tent, holding something; he was covered in blood, which was only what you'd expect, and when he finally jerked the thing into the firelight, we saw that it was Memnon's head. "Here you go," he said, and handed it to our father before disappearing again.
The eyes were cloudy, the mouth open, and streams of blood had issued forth from nose and mouth; Memnon bled as red as any of us. Odysseus used to say that Achilles never knew when to stop; I had always written this off as jealousy, misunderstanding, exaggeration, but looking at Memnon's head, I knew that it was true. I had no desire to touch it, and wound up having one of the infantrymen put it in a wicker basket.
"Got his armor, too," Achilles said when he came back.
"Oh," my father said from the corner where he'd dozed off. "Did you, now?"
"Yeah. I thought you might want to have it."
Aretus and I looked at each other. Then again, Memnon would have stripped Antilochus, if we'd given him half a chance. We all stripped our enemies; there was no shame in it. And Memnon had had exceptionally fine armor. "Sure," I managed, "bring it on in, whenever you get a chance." I don't know how I managed to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth, which felt incredibly dry.
Looking back on it now, it seems to me that I sleepwalked my way through the days after my brother's death. I don't remember very much of what happened immediately afterwards, except for parts of the funeral, and I can't even remember much of the way I felt—just an incredible, shocked numbness, and the feeling that nothing would ever, ever be right again.
Antilochus had been the baby of the family. When he was little, and we weren't so very much older than he had been when he came to Troy, our father had impressed on us the importance of looking after him. In time, Father no longer had to repeat the charge, but it stuck with us, especially after we discovered he'd run away from home to join us at Troy.
Small wonder, then, that I felt that I had failed him, and my father, and myself. I was glad that Echephron was writing to Mother; I couldn't have been able to put into words how sorry I was that all this had happened. It had torn her up enough the first time, when she hadn't known where Antilochus had gone or why. At least this time she would know where he was, although not why—never why.
None of us could have conveyed to Mother that, in the end, there was no why, and Antilochus' death, stupid and senseless though it was, was just a logical part of this entire grisly nightmare played out across the Troad.
Because he was so much younger than we were—a different generation, really—I had always assumed that Antilochus would bury us. I had known, coming to Troy, that it was likely one of us at least would have to be left behind in the grave mounds, and that we were lucky to have made it so far into the war without a death in the family.
I remember watching, dry-eyed, as people came in and out the tent with condolences, apologies, reminiscences; we played the parts of old soldiers, stoic in the face of adversity, as though there was nothing to be done for it. In a way, there wasn't, but I still wanted to curse the gods, as though this weren't the rankest of impiety—still hoped against hope that it had been a nightmare, or that death was an ill-timed practical joke and that my brother might still be brought back.
When, finally, during a break in the skirmishes, we laid him on the pyre and the fire devoured the dry wood first, I knew that there was no hope, no chance that he might ever return to us outside a dream. The flames engulfed Memnon's dark head and golden armor—we had lain them on the pyre too, not sure what else to do with them—and when they reached my brother's feet, I turned, not wanting to watch him go forever.
"He was a good kid," Achilles said. I nearly jumped, and realized that he had been standing behind me in the mourners' queue.
"Yeah."
"'M sorry."
"Ah, well, what can you do." I could feel the tears stinging my eyes, and forbore; I was not going to weep now. I had a pillow back at the tent; I could cry into that, at night, when no one would see me.
"It's not fair."
"No."
Neither of us were inherently social; the conversation died at that point. I couldn't very well say, But you have no brothers—you couldn't know what I feel, and he couldn't very well rail against the war. It was his calling, his element; it might have been Antilochus', too. What was the sense in their earning glory that never died, if their bodies were going to be burnt and scattered?
When I turned back around again, all that remained was a handful of dust and a few white scraps of bone, just enough to put in an urn. Antilochus was gone.