Free Achilles by Elizabeth Cook Page A

suggests the years that have gone by. Her skin is so soft you would imagine a breath might bruise it, let alone all those things her body has done and had done to it.
    For a moment Menelaus is humbled by the wondrous thing that she is. Then a kind of glee begins to drift up through him in little bubbles; more and more of them, till he is fizzing with it.
    â€˜Mine,’ he thinks. ‘She’s mine.’
    He takes down one of the tapestries from the wall and wraps her in it to protect her from the flames.
    In the well it grows hot. The flames that are romping through the city, eating it up, suck out the air from the well-shaft till there is none left to breathe.
    And Neoptolemus – they call him Pyrrhus because of his hair – wipes his sword clean when he sees there is no one left to kill.

Vulnerary
    When Chiron who made the ash spear gave it to Peleus on his wedding day he saw beyond Peleus to the son. And to the son’s son and what he would do with it. He saw the blade gleam in the flames of the burning city.
    Yet as he passed it to Peleus it was balanced so easily across his outstretched palms you might have thought it as light as a piece of cloth and not of a weight to make men stagger.
    The tree which made it was always meaning to become a spear. He wonders now if there is a moment in the destiny of a tree when its future is open. When it is simply a quantity of wood – a material which may be used in a variety of ways to give shelter or fodder, adorn or destroy? Is he responsible for the outcome of what he made – did his seeing contribute to its destiny? For he never saw it as other than it became.
    The tree began like any other – as a tiny, germinated sprout from a handful of green keys. Chiron had seen that the way above the shoot to the sky was unobstructed. He’d watched it grow and lopped back rival growth, keeping the vertical pathway clear so the tree was drawn up, as through a funnel, exceptionally tall and straight. The slender, central trunk divided into branches like burnished grey antlers, each nubbed with a sentient black bud, like a little hoof.
    It had grown like a mast, pointing to heaven. But he knew it would not make a mast.
    He sensed the ghost of the spear in the small sapling; saw the terrible bronze tip Hephaestus would make for it. It poked out through the leaves at the top of the tree, glinting in the sun.
    It cut into the sky.
    For twenty-two years he watched the ash tree grow and helped it on. When he saw it was ready he took an axe (whose handle he’d made from an ancestor of the tree) and felled it. He peeled the wood, seasoned it, planed it till it was perfectly smooth and taper. Tested the weight and balance. When Hephaestus delivered the spear-head, he fitted it; stepped back when Athene pushed in, insisting it was her job to finish it.
    She blew a mist of breath on the shaft and buffed it with the edge of her shawl till it shone like polished bone.
    *   *   * 
    T O SAY that Chiron suffers is like saying that earth receives rain or that olive trees accept the winds which pummel and mould them till each is shaped like no other. Some people find a strip of seaweed which they hang at their window frame to catch the mood of the weather. By its puckerings and sweats they discover what they fail to read in the tissues of their flesh. The soft mouth of Chiron’s wound catches every shift of wind: whether the air carries dryness, moisture, balm or ice. It catches each breath of animal pain and shares it.
    This wound, received from Heracles, would have killed any creature able to die. The arrow went in to his breast, just under the left foreleg, pressing in between ribs to lodge its tip in the smooth muscle of his large horse heart. Where it continues to bleed: a steady, agonising leak of blood which cannot kill him (the god-heart he carries in his man-trunk ensures this) and cannot ever be healed. It feels as if the arrow is still