Page 78 of The Song of Achilles

“What do you mean?”

“I must speak to my mother.” He started from the tent.

I seized his arm. “We don’t have time. They will have taken her by the time you are back. We must do something now!”

He turned. His eyes looked strange, the pupils huge and dark, swallowing his face. He seemed to be looking a long way off. “What are you talking about?”

I stared at him. “Briseis.”

He stared back. I could not follow the flicker of emotion in his eyes. “I can do nothing for her,” he said at last. “If Agamemnon chooses this path, he must bear the consequences.”

A feeling, as if I were falling into ocean depths, weighted with stones.

“You are not going to let him take her.”

He turned away; he would not look at me. “It is his choice. I told him what would happen if he did.”

“You know what he will do to her.”

“It is his choice,” he repeated. “He would deprive me of my honor? He would punish me? I will let him.” His eyes were lit with an inner fire.

“You will not help her?”

“There is nothing I can do,” he said with finality.

A tilting vertigo, as if I were drunk. I could not speak, or think. I had never been angry with him before; I did not know how.

“She is one of us. How can you just let him take her? Where is your honor? How can you let him defile her?”

And then, suddenly, I understood. Nausea seized me. I turned to the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

My voice was scraped and savage. “I have to warn her. She has a right to know what you have chosen.”

I STAND OUTSIDE her tent. It is small, brown with hides, set back. “Briseis,” I hear myself say.

“Come in!” Her voice is warm and pleased. We have had no time to speak during the plague, beyond necessities.

Inside, she is seated on a stool, mortar and pestle in her lap. The air smells sharply of nutmeg. She is smiling.

I feel wrung dry with grief. How can I tell her what I know?

“I—” I try to speak, stop. She sees my face, and her smile vanishes. Swiftly, she is on her feet and by my side.

“What is it?” She presses the cool skin of her wrist to my forehead. “Are you ill? Is Achilles all right?” I am sick with shame. But there is no space for my self-pity. They are coming.

“Something has happened,” I say. My tongue thickens in my mouth; my words do not come out straight. “Achilles went today to speak to the men. The plague is Apollo’s.”

“We thought so.” She nods, her hand resting gently on mine, in comfort. I almost cannot go on.

“Agamemnon did not—he was angry. He and Achilles quarreled. Agamemnon wants to punish him.”

“Punish him? How?”

Now she sees something in my eyes. Her face goes quiet, pulling into itself. Bracing. “What is it?”

“He is sending men. For you.”