Achilles Read Free

and hand, every cleft and dimple. She comes from the sea and is made of it, but separate in her woman’s shape she can enjoy it more, dive cleanly into it, ride on it, play. Sometimes she turns herself into a wheel and rolls round and round on herself in the water; then she straightens out to move like an arrow down to the sea bed where she grazes the floor along with the flat-bellied fish. When she comes out she lies slabbed on a rock while the sun licks her dry.
    The last thing she wants is some man clambering all over her.
    So he stalks her.
    She has come to this place for eight days now. A little bay, shaped like a new moon, cradling the sea between the delicate horns of its headlands. The sand on the beach is shockingly white: if a crab moves across, denting the drift with heavy claw, its darkness can be seen from the cliffs above. You don’t need eagle eyes to see like an eagle here, everything is so sharpened and magnified. Beyond the beach, some rocks. Vegetation. A cave, sandy-floored, cool, its entrance screened by myrtle.
    A good lookout.
    Only Thetis does not look out. She sleeps, confident that only birds and animals know this place.
    While she sleeps Peleus watches her, the myrtle his screen too. She is lying on her back, left arm stretched up, face turned towards it. Her right knee slightly bent.
    What would it take to take her?
    He watches her all afternoon. The sun, all stealth, slides in and lays itself along her like a sword. She does not wake and the sun moves on.
    Peleus waits and watches; getting to know the shape of her, the edges of bone and the warm furrows. The heft of her as he’ll lift her on his cock.
    Feet quiet, close as dust, all edges but one softened.
    Now!
    So little violence required: just enough to clasp her waist with two hands, tip her back into an arch, hold her steady while he scabbards himself fast.
    Now!
    His right arm scooped under her back, knee wedging thighs apart. She wakes to the man covering her, darkening her like a tent, coming between her and the light.
    Her arched back held, she arches more
    and bucks.
    Her body now one sentient muscle:
    A HEART,
    AN EEL,
    A FISH.
    He feels the charge of her bucking like a thunderbolt. It flings him breathless to the ground.
    On his back now.
    Hold on!
    As he falls he reaches out, pulls on whatever substance his fingers find. It burns him and his fingers stick. If he were to pull away his skin would come away too, charred like fish-skin stuck to hot stone.
    Has he become fish to meet her?
    But she is fire now. Roped flame. A long exhalation of searing heat. Tongue upon tongue of it, each twined on itself, an avid, wildly flickering spiral. Howling with pain he opens his throat and drinks in the flame. He’ll be her scabbard, her sheath, her cup. No lover entered him so thoroughly.
    But she is not yet lover.
    He tries to hold on; to cleave to the flame that cores him, to move in closer, tighter.
    Not rope but thread now.
    A fine fuse.
    Close now. Move with it. Let it tune you. Notice how it gets sharper as it gets finer: that should help you stay with it.
    Whatever you do, hold on; keep it in view.
    But Peleus, cored by this flame, is dissolving. The rest of him is falling away. What is there in him that can follow?
    There is nothing of him to hold on with.
    Not fire now, but water.
    Does she think to elude him? She cools him. Restores him to his edge. Rinses his scalded, crazy flesh so it feels clear again.
    But as she streams off him she starts to flee – as water – into the sand.
    DON’T LEAVE ME!
    He sprawls across the ground, crushing himself into it. He takes up damp sand in fistfuls and plasters it across his chest. She’ll not get away. He’ll have her, he’ll find her, whatever form she takes to.
    Even a lion’s?
    Even a lion’s.
    A lion now, she straddles him; would maul him between her huge paws but he wraps himself round her, legs and arms clasping her trunk as she tries, at this