I had never seen a battle so I tried to watch, but dust foiled my eyes. It sounded like a hundred smithies all beating hammers together; there were shrieks from men and horses. Some of them were war cries, I gathered; some were just the usual despair and pain.
`Come, you cannot see anything through the dust,' said Macaon. `It will be hours yet before they start to come back. I have to go and set a bone for the Myrmidons; would you like to meet Achilles the God-Touched?'
I nodded, fell in beside him and we traced a path across the tumbled and filthy sands.
`Why isn't he fighting? Arion said it was a quarrel over a girl.'
`Yes. Briseis, that's her name; as beautiful as Aphrodite, they say. She was captured below the city, in the bay; she's a Trojan. Agamemnon wanted her and what the Lord of Men wants, he takes. That's the ostensible reason for not standing with Atreides, although I don't know what he'd want with the girl or any girl.
`Achilles isn't afraid of war, nor has he been idle. He has been raiding up and down the coast, he and his ant-warriors, attacking as far as a league inland. No city is safe. Thousands must have died since the man-slayer came. He has no pity. His heart is of flint, and the hard flint they use to make arrowheads at that. When they come upon anyone - shepherd, goatherd, fisherman, trader - they steal all that he has, kill him and leave the corpse to be found by the terrified villagers.
`I believe that Ponticha in Caria surrendered, hoping to save some lives; but he killed them all anyway, as they stood in the agora; and burned the town around them. Not only men, women and children are slaughtered, but goats and dogs; nothing alive is left in a village after Achilles has called. Nothing alive will be there ever again, either, for he sows the acres with salt if he has time.'
`Is he a monster, then?' I asked, imagining a man bigger than Agamemnon or the Aias, with gripping hands and a snarling face.
`Oh yes, he's a monster,' said Macaon softly, and then, `Hail, Prince Achilles, hail Myrmidons! Macaon the healer and Chryse the Asclepid are here; you asked me to come.'
He added in a whisper. `Always announce yourself in a loud voice, even if they have begged you to visit. They're touchy. Two Argive messengers have been speared before they could get their message out.'
I stood beside Macaon as three armed warriors prodded us with stabbing swords into the camp. They had come up behind us and I had not heard a footstep.
Achilles was sitting on a throne - the spoil of some city - outside a wooden hut such as fishermen make. He did not look like a monster. He was slender, the same height as me, with soft golden hair falling to his waist, smooth cheeks which were still too young to shave, and delicate even features.
Patroclus, who was standing behind him holding a spear, smiled at us, and Achilles turned to look.
His eyes were remarkable, as grey as the sea before a storm, and as hard and polished as the granite pebbles in the pool at Epidavros where I had played as a boy. They were eyes which held the object of his regard for as long as he wished. Perfectly self-contained eyes; painted eyes on a heartless, perfect, marble Kouros, and underneath them quirked the unchanging immortal's smile.
I had always been comfortable with Thanatos who was Death; I knew I had nothing to fear from what he might do to me; indeed I had sought him most diligently when I had been mad.
Here was a man who sought death too, but who worshipped him as a god and a desirable end for all things. This was a Titan from giants; a son of Chaos, who wanted nothing but death, fire, ruin and waste, to the end of the world, in the triumph of strife and night. This was one whose touch evoked dead children, barren fields, slaughtered herds, pestilence and the sterile wind which stirred the plain of dust in the underworld.
I shook off the influence. I am a healer, I reminded myself, and this beautiful young man is mad, quite mad.
And I knew about madness, having been mad myself.
Macaon endured the stare of Achilles badly; he flinched and shook himself as a horse does when tormented by flies. `You called us to attend one of your comrades,' he reminded Achilles. The hero smiled and gestured with one strong hand and a man was brought to us. He had a fracture of the right arm.
Macaon sat him down on the sand and began to test his reflexes, pricking the palm of the hand with a silver pin. There was no jerk or twitch. The physician looked at me and I shook my head. The arm had been broken across both bones, and it was clear that the nerve was severed. Heavy inflammation purpled and swelled leaking tissues. It must have been very painful, but the soldier did not flinch as we turned his arm one way and another.
`Come,' said Achilles to me, and Patroclus added, `If you please, Asclepid Priest.'
I left the Myrmidon as Macaon began to flush the wound with boiled sea water, hoping to reduce the swelling so he could gauge if the arm would recover. I stood before the hero and looked again into his disturbing eyes.
`You are not afraid of death,' he said. His voice was light and clear.
`No, Lord.'
`Macaon is afraid.'
`So are most men, Lord.'
`Why are you not afraid of me? I could have you killed. I could spear you through - now,' and the point of his spear was indeed at my throat.
`What would happen then?' Achilles asked.
As an asclepid, I wore no armour. I was, I found, genuinely not afraid. I moved the spearhead down my body to illustrate my points as I spoke in a demonstrator's voice, as I had heard back in the temple when my master was explaining anatomy.
`Lord, if you strike here I will die in a few moments; if here in an hour, depending on whether you puncture the heart or the lung; if here, it may take me three days to die, in agony, but I will die; if here and you will rupture the great vessel in the groin, a gnat's life and I will be dead.
`In any case the dark angel will come for me, gentle as a mother, and carry me in his arms to my Chryseis who waits this side of the Styx, thirsting, for me to come.'
I waited for his response, wondering if he was going to kill me. There was no way of knowing or even guessing from the stone-grey eyes. I did not look away, but that would not have stopped him. My life hung on a thread, a whisker, a single hair.
He laughed, a child's laugh, golden and unequivocal, and Patroclus took back his spear.
`So Thanatos will come, eh? How do you know?'
`Lord, I have seen him. He nursed me as a child, and later he came and carried my Chryseis away.' I spoke simply, as one does to the mad, and he seemed impressed.
`You believe this?' he asked evenly.
`Lord, I have no need for belief; I know. Thanatos is as real as you are, Lord, or the sea, or this beach.'
`Perhaps we might ask the asclepid to sit down,' said Patroclus. `If you mean to talk to him, he might like some wine.'
Achilles nodded, and I was supplied with a chair and a goblet encrusted with pearls. The wine was winter mead, made of honey and grapes; the fruit of some village's cellar, stored against the bitter blasts of winter. Well, they would not need it now; not after Achilles had called.
`How goes the battle?' he asked, lounging back in his throne.
Patroclus said, `I cannot see, my heart. There is too much dust, but they have not gained the city.'
`And they will not, without me,' said the hero with satisfaction. `They do not appreciate me, Patroclus. Agamemnon took Briseis; I wanted her, I won her, it was my men who captured her, and he already had the maiden Araiea, when I went to all the trouble of killing her father and both of her bothers and her husband to get her. No, this coastal raiding is amusing.
`Agamemnon's army is lessening and sickening by the day, wasted in these battles; it will break against the walls of Troy. When he is at wit's end he will beg me on his knees, and I will refuse until he has given me treasure and the woman I want; then I shall issue forth and slay until the city is gutted and I return home with Priam's old head on a spear, his white hair my banner as I sail home in triumph. They made a prophecy about me, asclepid.'
`Lord?' I was being careful of what I said; the less the better.
`You can live long in peace and obscurity, or a short time in glory. I chose the glory, asclepid - what is your name?'
`Chryse, Lord.' I do not know why I did not tell him that my name was Diomenes; perhaps it was a remnant of the old superstition that to tell such a man gives him power over you. In any case I had decided to go back to my childhood name; that was how the sons of Asclepius knew me, and every time it was spoken it reminded me of my twin-wife. There was a Diomedes in the Argive army; I did not want to be confused with him.
`Golden,' mused Achilles. `A lucky name. Are you lucky?' he demanded.
`Yes, Lord. It is lucky to be alive - and lucky to be dead too. All life is a gift.'
He leapt to his feet, light as a deer, and I wondered if I was about to be doubly fortunate if I escaped back to the Argive lines with any breath in my body or pulse in my blood. Patroclus put a hand on the bare, smooth shoulder.
`Sweet Lord,' he said soothingly, `Achilles, my heart.'
`Fortunately for you, asclepid, I agree with you. Life has a value all of itself; and I garner more of it every day,' said Achilles. `Well, Macaon, Asclepius' son, how is my Myrmidon?' he got up and walked lightly down the sands to where the soldier sat at the healer's feet.
`There is nothing I can do,' confessed Macaon. `He is crippled.'
Achilles drew faster than thought, made a sideways slash with his sword, and the soldier lay decapitated on the sand. His comrades wrapped the body in a sailcloth and carried it away without wailing or comment.
After that there was not much to say, and Macaon and I were dismissed from the presence and escorted to the edge of the camp by Patroclus.
`Come again, Chryse,' he said, holding my hand in both of his. `He likes to talk to you. There are few whose conversation does not irritate him.'
`Why do you bear it?' I asked, though it was an impertinent and dangerous question to ask a stranger. The lips parted over white teeth as Patroclus smiled sadly. `I am the only person in the world that Achilles loves,' he said. `It would be a mercy and a blessing if you would share my burden.'
I nodded. Macaon and I walked away. Macaon was shaking and stopped to wipe his brow.
`That is the most dangerous man in the world,' he said.
Â
Before dusk we heard them coming. Wailing the names and titles of the life-bereft, the exhausted Argives staggered into camp, their wounded and dead dragged behind them.
I heard some of what had happened as I flooded wounds with salt water. In ten minutes my red tunic was stiff with gore. Surgeons wear a red tunic so that the blood will not show and terrify the patients. Macaon was right; one in fifty might be saved.
There were crush wounds from stones and hoofs and chariot wheels; all of them would die. There were broken bones from cast stones; most of them would live. There were head wounds, who might retain their wits; there were innumerable arrow and dart puncture injuries and they, too, would wait for Thanatos. Once the skin was breached, inflammation and death were sure to stalk along the dirty beaches where we laid the wounded.
Polidarius had made barley broth loaded with poppy to nourish and sedate them and he walked the camp of groaning men, dipping his ladle and filling small bowls for the battle-friends to feed their wounded lovers.
Bronze knives cured all that we could not relieve as men, sobbing or stone-faced, performed the last act of mercy and love. The dead were wrapped in their cloaks and carried away. The pile of bodies in the small valley which the Achaeans had taken for sepulture grew higher every day. The stench was unbelievable and the vultures feasted there.
Perhaps one hundred and thirty men had been killed; another two hundred were injured. Of those most would die.
`The enemy got back to Troy,' one soldier complained as I set his friend's broken leg. `Will he live?'
`It is a closed, clean break; yes, he will recover if you care for him. Come for soup every day, do not let him drink wine, and here is poppy for the pain. He must not move for a least two weeks; let him not even try to stand.'
I had drawn the heels down until they were even and bound the legs to a splint at ankle and knee. `Unless he wants to limp for the rest of his life, he must not put any weight on that leg until it is healed. The muscles will contract and try to pull the leg up; you must gently pull it down and re-tie the bindings. If you are diligent he will owe you his leg, as well as his life.
`So, the Trojans escaped back into the city?' I asked.
`Yes, Asclepid, although the god-like Diomedes hewed like a man cutting trees. He says he wounded Aphrodite, and fought Ares, Butcher of Men, off the Trojan Aeneas, yet he could not take him.
`They have more archers, and Mysian cavalry besides, and one of the Lacemedonians says some of the cavalry are women, Amazons - who ride like centaurs and cannot be caught. They drove us to one side after we had got behind them, between Scamander and the plain; many of us drowned trying to follow. They say Poseidon is on their side; for the river came up and a wave took many men.
`Come, my dear,' he lifted his friend and began to carry him down the beach. `Come, my heart, it will be better soon. I am here.'
I watched as a man killed his best-beloved, weeping like a fountain as the knife went home. I bandaged endless wounds which were already beginning to suppurate as I watched.
We three healers worked all night and, gradually, towards dawn when the torches burned pale, the groaning had died down. The dead had been carried away, the ones we had treated were sleeping with their friends. The camp was silent except for the sobbing of men in the arms of Morpheus, who exhibited again in his mercy the events that they could not bear to review when awake.
We sat down for the first time in ten hours, drank wine and blinked reddened eyes. When the sun rose we walked down to the sea to wash.