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“May I?” Patroclus asked.
Thinking he meant to untie her she quickly answered, “Yes.”
But he didn’t untie her. He simply swept her up and into his arms to carry her through the soldiers’ camp.
They called out jokes and suggestions for what Patroclus should do to the girl in his arms until he shouted back, “She’s meant for Achilles.”
All were silent.
“Fools and heathens,” Patroclus said to her as they passed through an endless sea of round wooden huts and smaller leather tents. “If you serve Achilles well, he will do right by you and marry you when the war ends. He is noble to the sinew and bone.”
“It speaks much that his shield-bearer speaks so highly of him,” Lia said, amazed that, just like last time, the words she needed to say came to her so easily, like she had memorized a script.
“We are like brothers,” he said. “More so in some ways.”
As they passed one of the smaller stone huts, Lia was able to see inside through a gap in a curtain. A buxom young dark-haired woman lay on her back, naked, breasts bouncing, as an older man rutted on top of her, grunting. She panted under him, writhing.
Lia wanted to look away but couldn’t. The woman laughed with the man, and Lia prayed she was a camp prostitute and not a prisoner like herself. She found herself clinging harder to the neck of Patroclus.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Some sights are not fit for a young lady’s eyes.”
“I am no maid,” she told him. “And have you forgotten where you are taking me? And why?”
“I suppose I have,” he said, and laughed softly. He held her closer, like a father with a child. He, too, seemed noble, noble to the sinew, noble to the bone.
She caught herself staring at his profile, an elegant profile. Gray hair at the temples, a neatly trimmed brown-and-gray beard, and eyes just the same, brown with flecks of gray.
“We are nearly there,” he said.
“How do I please him?” she asked. “I have enemies enough in this camp. I wouldn’t like to make another.”
“You will please him,” he assured.
“How are you so certain, sir?”
“You please me,” he said. “And he and I share the same soul between us.”
“Do you share his tent?”
He paused, looked at her, smiled slightly. “I almost wish I did.”
They reached their destination, the tent nearest the battlefront. The position of greatest vulnerability in an army camp—it spoke of Achilles’s confidence that he’d chosen it. A man stood guard outside the largest of the soldiers’ tents. More a hut than a tent. The quarters of a wealthy soldier, indeed.
Patroclus opened the leather flap of the door, and carried her into the hut and set her gently onto her feet. Lia immediately collapsed onto the nearest pillow. She saw bronze shields and swords piled in a corner of the hut, a bow and quiver of arrows, boxes filled to overflowing with silver and gold coins, richly painted amphorae, and yards and yards of silk and other fine cloth. A fortune in war spoils.
Patroclus knelt in front of her and untied the rope from her wrists. He worked slowly when untying the rope from her ankles, and as he pulled them from her body, his fingertips brushed across the tops of her small bare feet. The touch was deliberate. She knew it. He knew it. She met his eyes; he met hers. Immediately he stood, putting distance between them.
“Do you require anything before I leave you? Food? Water? Wine?”
“No, thank you,” she said. “You have excellent manners for a soldier.”
“Soldier, yes,” he said. “Not savage.”
“My servant, a stooped and sickly woman of sixty years or more who tended me from my birth, had a sword put through her belly today. I buried her with a sprinkling of ashes from the fire grate.”
“I am sorry for her death, but it is good and right that wars are so vile,” he said. “Otherwise there would be more of them.”
“Strange words from a soldier.”
