It mattered to me, that obstinate little stone, and it still does. I have it here now on the palm of my hand.
When Iphis brought me clean, dry clothes and I put them on—or rather she did, I was standing there with no more feeling than a block of wood—I slipped the stone inside my girdle where it would press against my skin every time I moved. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was reassuring, reminding me of the sea and the beach—and the girl I’d once been and could never be again.
5
What I remember most—apart from the awful, straining, wide-eyed terror of the first few days—is the curious mixture of riches and squalor. Achilles dined off gold plates, rested his feet in the evenings on a footstool inlaid with ivory, slept under bedcovers embroidered with gold and silver thread. Every morning, as he combed and braided his hair—and no girl ever dressed more carefully for her wedding day than Achilles for the battlefield—he checked the effect in a bronze mirror that must have been worth a king’s ransom. For all I know, it may have been a king’s ransom. And yet, if he needed a shit after dinner, he took a square of coarse cloth from a pile in the corner of the hall and set off to a latrine that stank to high heaven and was covered in a pelt of black buzzing flies. And, on his way there and back, he would have to pass an enormous rubbish tip which was supposed to be burned off at regular intervals, but never was, and consequently had become a breeding ground for rats.
That’s the other thing I remember: the rats. Rats everywhere. You could be walking along the path between two rows of huts and suddenly the ground ahead of you would get up and walk—oh, yes, as bad as that! The skinny, half-wild dogs that roamed the camp were meant to control the rats, but somehow they never did. Myron, who was in charge of the upkeep of Achilles’s compound, used to organize the younger fighters into rat-hunting contests with prizes of strong wine for the winner. You’d see young men strutting about with rows of little corpses impaled on their spears: rat kebabs. But however many they killed, there always seemed to be plenty more.
I’m trying—rather desperately, perhaps—to convey my first impressions of the camp, though I was in no state to take anything in. In one way, it was a simple place: there was the sea, the beach, the sand dunes, a patch of scrubland and then the battlefield, which stretched all the way up to the walls of Troy. That’s what I could see, but of course we—the captive women—were confined to the camp. Fifty thousand fighters and their attendant slaves were crammed onto that strip of land. The huts were small, the paths between them narrow, everything cramped—and yet that space seemed infinite, because the camp was our entire world.
Time played curious tricks too: expanding, contracting, burrowing back into itself in the form of memories that were more vivid than daily life. Particular moments—like the few minutes I’d spent staring at the stone—expanded till they felt like years, but that would be followed by whole days that drifted by in a haze of shock and grief. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened on any one of those days.
Gradually, though, a routine began to emerge. My only real duty was to wait on Achilles and his captains at dinner. So I was on public view—not even veiled—every night, and that shocked me because I’d been used to leading a secluded life, away from the gaze of men. At first, I couldn’t understand why he wanted me there, but then I remembered I was his prize of honour, his reward for killing sixty men in one day, so of course he wanted to show me off to his guests. Nobody wins a trophy and hides it at the back of a cupboard. You want it where it can be seen, so that other men will envy you.
I hated serving drinks at dinner, though of course it didn’t matter to Achilles whether I hated it or not and, curiously, it soon stopped mattering to me. This is what free people never understand. A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s.
So, anyway, there I was, moving up and down the long trestle tables, pouring wine into men’s cups—and smiling, always smiling. Every eye was on me, and yet as I leant over their shoulders there was no groping, no whispered, obscene remarks. I was as safe here as I would have been in my husband’s palace; safer probably, because every man here knew if he overstepped the mark he’d have to answer to Achilles. To die, in other words.
Achilles sat at his table with Patroclus. They joined in the toasts and laughter until the conversation settled into a steady hum and then they spoke mainly to each other. If a quarrel broke out—and of course they did, frequently; these were men trained from earliest childhood to resent the slightest insult to their honour—Patroclus was on his feet at once, soothing, restraining, persuading the combatants to clasp hands, share a joke and, finally, sit down again as friends. Then he’d go back to Achilles and their conversation would start up again immediately. Theirs was not a relationship of equals, though Achilles always framed his orders courteously; always, at least in front of the men, he addressed Patroclus as “Prince” or “Lord.” Nevertheless, Patroclus was clearly second in command, subordinate. Only that wasn’t the whole story. Once, I saw them walking together on the beach, Patroclus resting his hand on the nape of Achilles’s neck, the gesture a man will sometimes make to a younger brother or a son. Nobody else in the army could have done that to Achilles and lived.
You seem to have spent a lot of time watching him.
Yes, I watched him. Every waking minute—and there weren’t many minutes I allowed myself to sleep in his presence. It’s strange, but just then, when I said “I watched him” I very nearly added “like a hawk,” because that’s what people say, isn’t it? That’s how you describe an intent, unblinking stare. But it was nothing like that. Achilles was the hawk. I was his slave to do what he liked with; I was completely in his power. If he’d woken up one morning and decided to beat me to death, nobody would have intervened. Oh, I watched him all right, I watched him like a mouse.
The last part of the evening, after dinner, I spent in the company of Iphis, who was Patroclus’s girl, given to him by Achilles. We used to sit on the bed in the cupboard and wait to be summoned. Patroclus sent for her most evenings, which was scarcely surprising, given her pale, delicate beauty. She was like a windflower trembling on its slender stem, so fragile you feel it can’t possibly survive the blasts that shake it, though it survives them all. We talked a lot, but not about the past, not about the lives we’d led before we came to the camp, so in one sense I knew very little about her. That’s the way it was—we were all born again on our first day in the camp. She knew she was lucky to have been given to Patroclus, who was always kind. I noticed how gentle he was with her, though I suspected he preferred her to the other girls largely because she was a present from Achilles.
In those early days, I distrusted Patroclus’s kindness because I couldn’t understand it. Achilles’s brutal indifference made a lot more sense. He’d still barely addressed two words to me, though I often, as my wariness started to wear off, talked to Patroclus. I remember once, very early on, he found me crying and told me not to worry, he could make Achilles marry me. It was an extraordinary thing to say; I didn’t know how to respond, so I just shook my head and looked away.