Free Achilles by Elizabeth Cook

thing. If she, this slender ten-year-old child, could use her wrestling skills to throw him off and kill him she would do it, but he has her pinned down. She tries to cry out to her brothers but the fingers clamp down on her mouth. As he pushes in tighter and breaks her she knows that the smell on his fingers is partly her own.
    *   *   * 
    T HE MASSACRE begins in silence.
    To each home in Troy, a Greek soldier. He enters by stealth like a burglar, jemmying open the locks; or he slides himself in through a window like a cat. He stands before a door, still, gathering the poise and purpose of a diver on the edge of a high dive. Then he kicks the door down with a sudden release of force. He eases himself, belly down, across a roof until he finds a weak point to dismantle – make a hole large enough for his body to drop through.
    Throughout the city the throats of sleepers are cut.
    Then the dogs start up their rumpus.
    Mothers who run out into the street with their babies are met by dark-clothed soldiers with knives and clubs and ropes. Some attempt to hide their babies – in chests, in the jars where bread is stored, up chimneys. One tells her child to hide in the well she’d often forbidden him to climb down. There is a little shelf a short clamber down the well-shaft where he’s crouched many times, hiding from friends. He stays there, shivering, listening to the dogs and the screams, seeing the bright gleam of the moon reflected in the water below him. After many hours the silver of moonlight is replaced by the gold of flame.
    It is ten years since these Greek men have seen the families they left. Mothers and fathers have died in that time. Wives given birth to other men’s children. Now they show what this has been like; the harm that’s been done to them. Listen to the little sigh a child’s body makes when you pierce it. See the mother’s expression as you rape her with your hand, your penis, your spear, in the presence of her dead or dying child.
    The palace is like another city; so many dwellings and quarters, linked by passages instead of streets, halls instead of market places. And while soldiers whose names we’ll never know give vent to their injured lust and imagination to murder, loot, rape and torch the citizens of Troy whose names are also forgotten, the Greek commanders – the celebrated warriors – do much the same amongst the palace’s royal inhabitants. There are only so many parts you can slice or hack from a man or a woman; only so many holes and crevices you can fuck.
    Of all the destroyers who move through the palace that day it is Neoptolemus who excels; who is the most unremitting. He makes his way through the rooms, eliminating life, thinking to emulate the father he’s never met, whose armour he now wears. He wants someone to say, ‘It’s as if Achilles were living and moving again.’ But not one person does.
    Helen hears the cries of Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, Polyxena, the shrieks of the baby Astyanax, as if they were her own. The cries she has never been able to utter from that perfect, unfailingly beautiful mouth. And just as those cries are her cries, so the sheer, screaming, terrified chaos of the palace is hers also, as she sits composedly in her high room, waiting.
    Flames from the town have already begun to lick the sides of the palace when Menelaus and his rout stumble, almost by accident, into the small room. They find her sitting, perfectly still, like a good little maid who has finished her job of hulling the strawberries and is now lost in reverie, bowl in lap, enjoying the sweetness of sun on her cheek. The others, drunk with the killing they’ve already accomplished, see only another object to destroy. It looks to Menelaus as if his own men will go for her.
    â€˜Leave us,’ he says, barring their way with his spear.
    The men brake themselves with difficulty.
    Nothing in her appearance