Achilles Read Free Page A

awkward angle, to take his head into the cave of her mouth. She can’t reach and his wrap around her tightens. The lion Thetis feels herself squeezed almost beyond bearing. Held now, she wants not so much to escape as to fight. Being squeezed she lets herself go beyond the point where breath is lost – where lion expires – brings herself smaller, tighter, so she is now one lithe tube.
    A snake.
    So narrow she could slip away if she chose.
    She’s coiled herself around him and now it is he who is near to expiring for want of breath. For a moment he panics. He is near to losing all the benefit of Chiron’s wisdom, about to go against the will of Zeus and Juno, and let go.
    Only he can’t. She has him so fast in her grip. Now her snake tongue darts into his mouth and its sharpness is so sweet to him he wants to hold it there. Practised on the filament of fire he concentrates the whole of his being on drawing that sweet sting out of her.
    So they ride for a while, she fast around his body, covering him with her coils; he fast around the fine pulse of her tongue, intent on extracting its bag of nectar.
    He feels it will happen soon. She is gathering herself. The tongue is withdrawn. He is still held fast but the dryness of snakeskin has gone; replaced by flesh which is softer, wetter. More enveloping.
    Ten pulsing arms are lapping him and on their undersides are a great many mouths which adhere to him: tiny, searching mouths suckling on him; rubbing his flesh against the bony ridge of their toothless gums. There is no surface of his body that she – this cuttlefish – does not contact and which he in turn does not long to have drawn up and used by her. He is very near to losing himself – and if he does so he’ll lose her, though just now he doesn’t have the mind to care.
    Now she has stopped escaping him. She needs him to find her. She cannot feel beyond the next need which is that the nub, the palate of each tiny mouth, be met by him; pursued right in to the tight star which burns at its centre.
    He has no choice. The labyrinth now has no false corridors. He can only travel to the centre.
    Â Â Â Hit.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Met.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â The stars dissolve.
    He is covered in sticky black ink.
    Thetis, a woman, under him. He draws himself up for a moment to look on his new wife with tenderness. Then he turns her over, enters her again, and empties himself of all the forms he has ever been.
    Neither of them wake until the sun has removed itself from the beach.
    *   *   * 
    A CHILLES IS the seventh.
    Six times Thetis has taken a wet new infant up by the heels and dunked it, umbilicus trailing, in the Styx where she’d let it go.
    â€˜Immortality,’ she said, ‘I’m burning away their mortal parts in the fire of this river.’
    â€˜You’re drowning my sons,’ he said.
    â€˜They’re living on Olympus,’ she said.
    â€˜Not with me they’re not,’ he said.
    The next time they made love he became an eagle (he’d learnt) and in the after-sleep he dreamed of holding his son in his beak and flying him free of scalding waters. When the seventh son comes she begins again on the same rigmarole, but she lingers over it more, holding him by the left ankle as she turns him in the fiery waters, basting him on every side.
    The burning baby yells with all the force of unimpeded lungs. Peleus comes running – that sound has hooked into his bowels – and wrenches the child from her grasp. Just a little patch of flesh unburnt: the area held between pincers of thumb and forefinger.
    For weeks, using all the skill that Chiron has given him, he tends the poor burnt flesh of his child.
    Till Achilles is as mortal as he.

His Girlhood
    The world is never large enough to hide in.
    Thetis has always known the war would come; that any son of hers would be moth to its flames. What she can do she