After a time they stopped and conferred and went on to the main Akhaian camp to speak with Agamemnon and the other captains. Eventually they returned to Troy looking discouraged; Andromache rushed at them.
"What did they say?" she demanded, though it was obvious they had had no success; down on the plain, Akhilles's chariot was still dragging the body around in circles. It seemed he meant to go on at least till sunset, perhaps longer.
Aeneas said, "They will do nothing to stop Akhilles; they said that he is their leader, and he must do as he will with his own captives and prisoners. He killed Hector and the body is his, to ransom or not as he chooses."
"But that's monstrous," Andromache said. "You hesitated not a minute to grant a truce for burying and mourning Patroklos! How can they do this?"
"They didn't want to," said Paris. "Agamemnon could not look me in the eye. He knows they are violating all the rules of warfare - rules they themselves made and we agreed to honor. But they know they have no chance of triumphing without Akhilles; they angered him once, and they will not risk making him angry again."
The sun had slanted down considerably and the plain of Troy was now partly in the long shadow of the walls. Paris said, "There is nothing for it but this, then. We must go out and fight for his body." He called his arms-bearer and started putting on his armor.
"Summon the Amazons; their charge and their arrows can cover us. They are fierce fighters, fiercer than any man," Aeneas said. "I will vow my best horse to the War-God if he grants us to win Hector's body."
"I'll vow more than that if he grants me Akhilles," said Paris. "Hector and I were not always close; but he was my elder brother, and I loved him; and even if I had not, kinship's dues would forbid me to stand by and see his corpse dishonored. Even Akhilles can have no quarrel with the dead."
Kassandra said, "I remember how Hector said he and Patroklos would have much to talk about in the afterworld."
"Aye," said Aeneas sombrely. "If Akhilles paused to think, he would know that Hector and his friend would feast side by side as comrades in the halls of the afterlife."
"I trust it is no God's will I meet Akhilles as a comrade on the other side of death," said Paris grimly. "Or, I swear, unless I learn something there that I have not been given to know in this life, I shall disrupt the peace of that world itself when I meet Akhilles there."
"Oh, hush," said Aeneas, "none of us know what we shall think or do past that gate; but in this world, we all have been properly taught that enmity ends at death, and what Akhilles now does is an outrage and an atrocity—as well as being plain bad manners. He should show respect for a fallen foe; you know that, I know it, the other Akhaians know it. And I give you my word, if Akhilles does not know it, I shall be happy to give him a lesson, here and now. Are the soldiers armed and ready?"
"Yes," called Paris, "open the gates."
Priam came slowly through the ranks and went to the wall where the women stood. He himself was as white as death, Kassandra thought, and he had been weeping.
"If you rescue the body of my son for honorable burial," he said, as Aeneas passed him on his way down to the gate, "it needs no saying that you may ask whatever reward you will."
Aeneas knelt for a moment before him and kissed the old man's hand.
"Father, Hector was my brother-in-law and my brother in arms; I want no reward to do for him what I know well he would be the first to do for me."
"Then the blessings of every God I know how to call be upon you," said Priam, and as Aeneas rose, embraced him quickly and kissed his cheek. Then he let him go and the men went down to the gate.
As Troilus would have joined them, Hecuba cried out, "No! Not you too!" and caught at his tunic; but Troilus pulled away, and Priam gestured to the Queen to let him go. Hecuba collapsed weeping.
"Cruel old man! Unnatural father! We have lost one son today; will you lose another?"
"He is no child," Priam said. "He wishes to go; I will not forbid him. I would not make him go if he wished any excuse to stay; but you should be proud of him."
"Proud!" she raged, looking down on the chariots as they raced out through the gates. "There is more than one madman here!"
CHAPTER 8
Kassandra had seen the Amazons fight many times before; she wished that she were riding forth with them. Yet if she had thought the morning's battle was fierce, that was nothing to the ferocity of this battle for Hector's body.
Time after time the Trojan soldiers made what seemed like a suicidal dash at Akhilles's chariot trying to overturn or crash it and cut free the body; but the joined forces of Hector's soldiers and the Amazons could not come near him. It seemed that the War-God himself rode with Akhilles and more than a dozen of the soldiers and seven of the Amazon warriors died in these charges before Agamemnon's charioteers, led by Diomedes and the strongest of the Spartan archers, came and drove them off a final time.
When it was almost too dark to see, at last the Trojans retired and when Troilus fell to an arrow shot by Akhilles himself, Aeneas finally yielded and called off the attack, carrying Troilus inside the walls.
"He didn't want to live," Hecuba wept over his body. "He blamed himself—I heard him—that his brother died—"
In the flaming sunset, the cloud of dust behind Akhilles's chariot was undiminished. "It looks as if he means to keep that up all night," said Paris. "There is nothing else we can do."
"I can probably see better in the dark than his horses," said Aeneas. "We might try again by moonlight—"
"There is no reason to do that," said Penthesilea. "You have one brother to bury and to mourn; tomorrow will be time to think again about Hector."
Hecuba, kneeling before Troilus's corpse, raised her face, swollen with tears, looking suddenly twenty years older.
"If I must, I will go to Akhilles and beg him, for the love of his own mother, to let me bury my son," she said. "Surely he has a mother and pays honor to her."
"Do you truly think anything human gave birth to that monster?" wept Andromache. "Surely he was hatched from a serpent's egg!"
"As a keeper of serpents, I resent that on their behalf," Kassandra said. "No serpent was ever wantonly cruel; they kill only for food or to defend their young, and no serpent ever made war against another, whatever God they may serve."
"Let us leave it for tonight," Andromache said. "Perhaps a new day may bring him reason." She turned away from the wall, deliberately looking away from the sight of Akhilles's chariot and the cloud of dust where Hector's body was hidden. She raised Hecuba up gently by the arm taking, Kassandra noted, a good deal of the older woman's weight. Together the two went up the steep street toward the palace.
Kassandra bent over the lifeless body of Troilus. She remembered when he had been born, what a sweet red round-faced baby he had been, squalling and thrusting out his little fists. How her mother had prayed for a son, and how happy she had been when he had arrived, her fourth or fifth actually. But then she had always been happy with every son born in the palace, even those born to the concubines; the Queen was always the first to have every baby in her arms, however humble the mother.
Well, she had promised to tell Polyxena; she went slowly up the steep streets of the city toward the Maiden's Temple. The winds at that height dragging against her cloak and hair, she reached the outer court, where the statue of the maiden stood.
She had now spent so many years as a priestess that she had almost ceased to trouble herself about the nature of Gods or Goddesses, whether they were truly from some place beyond humanity, or whether they were from some soul of humankind seeking to worship the greater virtues and the divine within. Yet now, looking at the serene face of the Maiden in the outer court, where her statue stood, she wondered again; could anything, human or divine, be brought unmothered to birth and was not that very concept a blasphemy against all that was divine? She herself had brought no child to birth; yet within her the unfed passion for motherhood had brought Honey into her arms and she knew she would protect her with her very life, as any other mother would do.