Achilles Read Online Free PDF Page A

hardly move.
    Scamander longs for the sea. So near he could smell it if it weren’t for this stinking freight. If he could only flow to join it, this vile cargo would disperse. Then he could breathe again. But now he is so weighed down, so clogged. Like a dying man he cannot raise his head to meet the longed-for water near his mouth.
    But Scamander will not die. He rouses himself from his deepest fundament, draws up his strength … and heaves.
    And heaves again. A terrible, dry retching as he throws the bits that choke him out onto his banks.
    Sodden mangled corpses:
    men,
    horses,
    tackle …
    and again he can breathe and flow. Now he will drown the man who has hacked so many sons of Troy into his waters.
    When the river roars at him Achilles jumps in, ready to take him on. Scamander clasps him, grabs him by the throat, and rises in a tower over his head.
    Like a slab of rock over his head.
    Like his funeral pile heaped over his head.
    Water, the stuff of his mother, is now so heavy.
    She never said this would happen: that he would die like a boy whose boat’s turned over, his dead flesh waterlogged, teased apart by fish, buried at last in silt.
    And Hector alive.
    Summoning all his strength he rears, like Atlas rising to slide the heavens from his back. Moving through water he sees a tree – an elm – its trunk leaning out over the river. He grabs it with one arm and hauls himself up till he has wrapped his legs around. But the weight of Achilles and his heavenly armour is more than the roots of this tree can bear. They try to grip the earth they’re dug in, send out new fingers to fasten into the bank. The tree doesn’t want to drown either. It clings to the bank but the bank cannot hold on to itself and breaks away, clod by fat clod, ripping the sinews of root and fibre that bound it. It falls away like cake, a new island carried by the rushing river, Achilles still straddling the tree.
    Achilles hurls himself towards the open wound of the bank and the River Scamander gathers itself up into a wall. So high it blots out the sun.
    This wall of water comes after Achilles.
    ZEUS HELP ME!
    The cry hits target. Though Achilles is not his son – because Achilles is not his son – Zeus loves him. He sends his brother Poseidon and his grey-eyed brainchild Athene to clasp the man’s hands and bear him up. They assure him he will kill Hector. Nothing can take this from him.
    But Scamander won’t let up. His wall of water’s poised to crash down even on the gods. Zeus and Athene call on Hephaestus: ask him for fire.
    Hephaestus lobs fire down and, for a moment that all who survived will remember for ever, a river of molten flame pours through the sky. As it meets land it roars into a blaze, romping over the heaped bodies that Achilles killed that morning, eating them whole.
    Hungry still, it makes for the river; breathes on the water which shrinks, scalded, from its banks.
    Scamander – a hot, narrow vein in a bed of baking mud – surrenders.
    *   *   * 
    T HE T ROJAN soldiers – what’s left of them – are scuttling back behind the walls. How small they look in flight; men who even yesterday shone with power as they poured across the beach. The women watching from the ramparts see the small wounded dots hauling their way up the hill. Husband, brother, child. Something in the configuration of each moving mark is unmistakeable to eyes made sharp by love. Hephaestus’ flames have eaten the dead. But the wounded are brought home on stretchers of shields or dragged, slumped across their companions’ shoulders. The dust on the paths is rosy with blood. Men tumble through the gate. Men without arms, men with barely half a face, a hole where the nose was. One unstraps his helmet and, as he tugs it off, the skull flaps back and his brains slide down his neck.
    QUICK!
    CLOSE THE GATE. ACHILLES IS COMING.
    Those who have only heard of