As I step outside there is a terrible cracking, like a ship’s hull tearing apart, like a giant tree smashing to earth. The wall. Screams follow, of triumph and terror.
All around me are men carrying fallen comrades, limping on makeshift crutches, or crawling through the sand, dragging broken limbs behind them. I know them—their torsos full of scars my ointments have packed and sealed. Their flesh that my fingers have cleaned of iron and bronze and blood. Their faces that have joked, thanked, grimaced as I worked over them. Now these men are ruined again, pulpy with blood and split bone. Because of him. Because of me.
Ahead of me, a young man struggles to stand on an arrow-pierced leg. Eurypylus, prince of Thessaly.
I do not stop to think. I wind my arm under his shoulder and carry him to his tent. He is half-delirious with pain, but he knows me. “Patroclus,” he manages.
I kneel before him, his leg in my hands. “Eurypylus,” I say. “Can you speak?”
“Fucking Paris,” he says. “My leg.” The flesh is swollen and torn. I seize my dagger and begin to work.
He grits his teeth. “I don’t know who I hate more, the Trojans or Achilles. Sarpedon tore the wall apart with his bare hands. Ajax held them off as long as he could. They’re here now,” he says, panting. “In the camp.”
My chest clutches in panic at his words, and I fight the urge to bolt. I try to focus on what is before me: easing the arrow point from his leg, binding the wound.
“Hurry,” he says, the word slurring. “I have to go back. They’ll burn the ships.”
“You cannot go out again,” I say. “You have lost too much blood.”
“No,” he says. But his head slumps backwards; he is on the edge of unconsciousness. He will live, or not, by the will of the gods. I have done all I can. I take a breath and step outside.
Two ships are on fire, the long fingers of their masts lit by Trojan torches. Pressed against the hulls is a crush of men, screaming, desperate, leaping to the decks to beat at the flames. The only one I can recognize is Ajax, legs widespread on Agamemnon’s prow, a massive shadow outlined against the sky. He ignores the fire, his spear stabbing downwards at the Trojan hands that swarm like feeding fish.
As I stand there, frozen and staring, I see a sudden hand, reaching above the melee to grip the sharp nose of a ship. And then the arm beneath it, sure and strong and dark, and the head, and the wide-shouldered torso breaks to air like dolphin-back from the boiling men beneath. And now Hector’s whole brown body twists alone before the blankness of sea and sky, hung between air and earth. His face is smoothed, at peace, his eyes lifted—a man in prayer, a man seeking god. He hangs there a moment, the muscles in his arm knotted and flexed, his armor lifting on his shoulders, showing hip bones like the carved cornice of a temple. Then his other hand swings a bright torch towards the ship’s wooden deck.
It is well thrown, landing amid old, rotting ropes and fallen sail. The flames catch immediately, skittering along the rope, then kindling the wood beneath. Hector smiles. And why should he not? He is winning.
Ajax screams in frustration—at another ship in flames, at the men that leap in panic from the charring decks, at Hector slithering out of reach, vanishing back into the crowd below. His strength is all that keeps the men from utterly breaking.
And then a spear point flashes up from beneath, silver as fish-scale in sunlight. It flickers, almost too fast to see, and suddenly Ajax’s thigh blooms bright-red. I have worked long enough in Machaon’s tent to know that it has sliced through muscle. His knees waver a moment, buckling slowly. He falls.
Chapter Thirty
ACHILLES WATCHED ME APPROACH, RUNNING SO HARD my breaths carried the taste of blood onto my tongue. I wept, my chest shaking, my throat rubbed raw. He would be hated now. No one would remember his glory, or his honesty, or his beauty; all his gold would be turned to ashes and ruin.
“What has happened?” he asked. His brow was drawn deep in concern. Did he truly not know?
“They are dying,” I choked out. “All of them. The Trojans are in the camp; they are burning the ships. Ajax is wounded, there is no one left but you to save them.”
His face had gone cold as I spoke. “If they are dying, it is Agamemnon’s fault. I told him what would happen if he took my honor.”
“Last night he offered—”
He made a noise in his throat. “He offered nothing. Some tripods, some armor. Nothing to make right his insult, or to admit his wrong. I have saved him time and again, his army, his life.” His voice was thick with barely restrained anger. “Odysseus may lick his boots, and Diomedes, and all the rest, but I will not.”
“He is a disgrace.” I clutched at him, like a child. “I know it, and all the men know it too. You must forget him. It is as you said; he will doom himself. But do not blame them for his fault. Do not let them die, because of his madness. They have loved you, and honored you.”
“Honored me? Not one of them stood with me against Agamemnon. Not one of them spoke for me.” The bitterness in his tone shocked me. “They stood by and let him insult me. As if he were right! I toiled for them for ten years, and their repayment is to discard me.” His eyes had gone dark and distant. “They have made their choice. I shed no tears for them.”
From down the beach the crack of a mast falling. The smoke was thicker now. More ships on fire. More men dead. They would be cursing him, damning him to the darkest chains of our underworld.
“They were foolish, yes, but they are still our people!”
“The Myrmidons are our people. The rest can save themselves.” He would have walked away, but I held him to me.
“You are destroying yourself. You will not be loved for this, you will be hated, and cursed. Please, if you—”
“Patroclus.” The word was sharp, as he had never spoken it. His eyes bore down on me, his voice like the judge’s sentence. “I will not do this. Do not ask again.”
I stared at him, straight as a spear stabbing the sky. I could not find the words that would reach him. Perhaps there were none. The gray sand, the gray sky, and my mouth, parched and bare. It felt like the end of all things. He would not fight. The men would die, and his honor with it. No mitigation, no mercy. Yet, still, my mind scrabbled in its corners, desperate, hoping to find the thing that might soften him.
I knelt, and pressed his hands to my face. My cheeks flowed with tears unending, like water over dark rock. “For me then,” I said. “Save them for me. I know what I am asking of you. But I ask it. For me.”
He looked down at me, and I saw the pull my words had on him, the struggle in his eyes. He swallowed.
“Anything else,” he said. “Anything. But not this. I cannot.”
I looked at the stone of his beautiful face, and despaired. “If you love me—”
“No!” His face was stiff with tension. “I cannot! If I yield, Agamemnon can dishonor me whenever he wishes. The kings will not respect me, nor the men!” He was breathless, as though he had run far. “Do you think I wish them all to die? But I cannot. I cannot! I will not let him take this from me!”
“Then do something else. Send the Myrmidons at least. Send me in your place. Put me in your armor, and I will lead the Myrmidons. They will think it is you.” The words shocked us both. They seemed to come through me, not from me, as though spoken straight from a god’s mouth. Yet I seized on them, as a drowning man. “Do you see? You will not have to break your oath, yet the Greeks will be saved.”
He stared at me. “But you cannot fight,” he said.
“I will not have to! They are so frightened of you, if I show myself, they will run.”
“No,” he said. “It is too dangerous.”
“Please.” I gripped him. “It isn’t. I will be all right. I won’t go near them. Automedon will be with me, and the rest of the Myrmidons. If you cannot fight, you cannot. But save them this way. Let me do this. You said you would grant me anything else.”