Achilles Read Free Page B

does. She trains him in the arts of being a girl and takes him – her lovely daughter Pyrrha – to the court of King Lycomedes at Skiros …
    Â Â where she tips him
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â into the shoal of girls.
    â€¦ watched by Deidamia, King Lycomedes’ daughter.
    When Deidamia catches a fish, she keeps it in a bowl for a while, watches it curvet and turn, imagines she is training it as her father trains his horses. Then she’ll tip the fish back into the water it came from, follow it with her eyes … till with one quick turn the fish dissolves the trail and she can no longer tell it from all the rest.
    This fish – the one that Thetis slides into the shoal – goes on being different. Deidamia, half-concealed by a pillar, observes the strange new girl:
    Auburn hair in tight coils down to the collar bone; long limbs; a straight and supple back. This Pyrrha does not smile as the other girls would have done. She appears not to mind whether anyone likes her.
    Deidamia wants this fish for herself.
    Achilles knows perfectly well that the girl is watching him. Not just this one; all of them. It is new, this sensation of being stared at from all sides. It’s like standing in the sun at midday, feeling the heat cooking you. Only in sunlight you can strut or box the air, make little eddies in the heat. These twenty-five pairs of girls’ eyes on him make him less free to move. He wishes he were busy at something – whittling some wood to a spear point would be good – but his mother took his knife from him when she dressed him in this thin girl’s tunic. He fiddles with the bracelets on his arm; turns them, draws them up to the wrist and lets them fall back towards his elbow. The gentle clash of metal.
    With these eyes still on him he burns. Senses his power.
    These are the bodies Achilles knows:
    1. Thetis’. Made of the sea. Cool hands that refresh him; wash pain away; wash away blood and dirt from his limbs. Her silent gowns are greens and blues and silver grey. This body is there whenever he seeks it but he does not caress it or know its contours – just the feel of it rinsing heat away.
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    2. Chiron’s body. Wide horse back to straddle, vault and sometimes arc yourself across. Man’s waist, chest and shoulders rising firm, sure as a prow. So many textures and smells in one body: close nap of horse hair, darker along the spine and set at a different angle; the sticky, resinous feel of this pelt if you run your hand against the grain; the silky, hairless flesh near the genitals – a place of comfort and burrowing. A hoof, knocking his cheek in reproof when he tries, exploring, to prise out the pouched, retracted member. The smells of man sweat and horse sweat; the mat of springy blonde curls on chest and beard that he’d tugged as a baby, still tugs sometimes now. This body taught him itself and nearly all else. The hoof that drew shapes in the dust showed him how stars moved.
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    3. His father’s body: less intimately known than Chiron’s but also loved and familiar. A stillness in Peleus like rock. Watching him sometimes you’d wonder if he’d ever move again. Then when he does move it is swift as a snake’s tongue. A body smoother than Chiron’s – you can trace where the flesh puckers and coarsens into scar. Each wound a story. When he was small Achilles would choose a scar and poke it with his finger, demanding a tale which ended here; testing to see if the story was the same as the last time. In his mind he cast a net over Peleus’ body. Where the lines joined there were scars. He learned how to spin a story from link to link, from scar to scar. These, the stories of his father’s body, were his first.
    He also knows the body of his cousin Patroclus.
    But the nearest he has got to a girl’s body is his own, togged up