Free Achilles by Elizabeth Cook Page B

embedded. When he moves, walking or galloping, he has the sensation of it dangling from his chest, its shaft a little bit longer than the distance between chest and ground so it drags and catches, causing the point to stir in his heart and release more gusts of pain.
    He has found no antidote to the poison the arrow was dipped in. Searching and intimate, it crawls and flashes around his body at all times.
    The wound has become his laboratory.
    In May the air on Pelion is sweet with the scent of apple blossom. Pelion’s apples are the best in the world (no human there would choose a gold one). It is also the home of sweet and bitter herbs: demulcents, hepatics, astringents, analgesics, diuretics, emetics, expectorants, vulneraries, tonics and deadly poisons.
    He has proved the effects of them all on his body. All the grated rhizomes, pappy stalks, crushed leaves and macerated seeds that he prepares he applies to his own wound. He feels how they affect the living tissue; how some contain enzymes which change its nature, eating it away, while others momentarily soothe and are balm to its rawness. But there are others yet that aggravate, making him wish he could tear off the caustic layer with his nails. There are times he could tear the heart from his horse’s breast.
    Years of experiment and practice made him a great and wise healer. But it is suffering – his own – which makes him the best. Because he can bear to suffer (though he cannot bear it, that is the trouble) he can judge exactly the extent of another’s need and when it has been assuaged.
    He knows who to treat, when to treat, and when to stop.
    He knows that the smallest quantities are often the most effective.
    He has taught (but only Asclepius has ever understood this) that the weapon which wounded you may sometimes be used to heal you.
    The pain of others, far away on the plains of Troy, or the agony of a creature mangled in a trap: these nudge the phantom arrow tip and make his heart bleed.
    He needed no visitor to tell him the war had begun. It was as if a herd of terrified cattle had crashed down off the edge of a precipice to land with all their hooves embedded in his breast.
    AAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!
    The hooves continue their lacerations for ten years. Sometimes it’s a steady grinding; at other times a sharp and detailed agony makes him vomit and want to rear. If his body were less solidly planted, his nervous system less disciplined, he would dance wild with it, skittering crazy in the longing to cast it off.
    But when Apollo’s arrow pierces Achilles it is not pain he feels. For once there is no pain.
    Instead, a sense of stopping. A silence, as if all the waterfalls that spout and gush down Pelion’s sides have ceased, their waters pooled somewhere else, somewhere still. As if life and colour have been sucked from the world. As if his own heart has suddenly emptied.
    *   *   * 
    I T IS the curse of immortality to see those you care for die. (Even Zeus knows it, all those variously beloved mortal children – he cannot deify them all – snuffed out after a little breathing space.) Your children should be your immortality. Your pupils too. Chiron has seen too many of each grow up and die. Not all had the chance to grow old.
    Which is worse? To watch the ardent child you’ve trained and nurtured grow dim-eyed, dried-out and faltering, while you, his father and teacher, remain unchanged – not young exactly, but unimpaired.
    Or to see that child cut off before age has begun to eat his powers?
    Either way, it feels wrong.
    He climbs up onto a lip of rock that overhangs his high cave. From here he can see the Bay of Iolkos below him. Its wide, generous curve. Jason set out from here in the beautiful, fifty-oared ship – oars cut from the trees of this mountain. Two other foster sons – Peleus and Heracles – were part of that unparallelled crew. And Orpheus, who had the nerve to