In your sleep, you are in Troy again.
Before you, the battlefield, strewn with bodies, nameless and stripped of their history–hair shorn, clothes ripped, skin bloodied–what set them apart before now rendered unrecognizable by the mangling jaws of death.
There is a scent of myrrh in the air, and the wind breathes just so that sand blows against your face and gets in your eyes, making you turn away at the crucial moment. This is how you know what day this is.
Finally spurred to action by Patroclus's death, Achilles is fighting at your side, and Ajax, his cousin, is fighting at his, arms and shield ripping through your enemies like some minor deity parting a sea. And if you hadn't turned away at that cursed moment, perhaps you would have spotted Paris's poisoned arrow before it planted in Achilles's heel.
When you turn back, your eyes now clear, Achilles is writhing on the ground, and Ajax fallen over his cousin's body lets out a roar that, for a moment, stops your heart–
And then, suddenly, it is later, and you are standing in front of Achilles's funeral pyre. Polyxena, his other lover, swears to kill her brother Paris with her own hands, cursing her mother's milk that fed them both when they were young. Ajax, a brother to her in everything but blood, does his best to comfort her–but what comfort can one whose heart is freshly broken give to another?
And then it is the moment that the blood-thirsty goddesses they call the Erinyes will not allow you to forget: in your great grief over Achilles's death, and moved by Polyxena's pain, you turn toward your servant, the old Trojan man you had captured the day you arrived at Ilium's gate and presented your gift horse. He had been Paris's and Hector's teacher in his youth, and you took no joy in turning him into a wine-bearer in his old age–but war had its rules, and its own god to preside over them. So now, your mind run away from you for only a moment, you take the knife fastened at your belt and strike the old man down. He is before you now as he was then: his neck slit, his eyes looking at you while he bleeds out on the ground of his homeland, his expression not one of pain, but one of surprise.
Next