It's a dull grey dawn, some time in the interminable tenth year. Nothing moves on the beach except for a dog sniffing at the corpse of a sea bird. Achilles, greatest of the Greeks, is walking up the beach away from the sea. Reaching the edge of the scrubland, he steps into the brackish water of a small, shallow river and wades upstream against the current. Clear water splashes over his salt-speckled shins. After a while, behind him, he hears the corresponding splashes of another man's steps.
The stream runs through a head-high thicket, already buzzing with crickets. Achilles smells sage, the sea, and woodsmoke from the camp: but here on the riverbank, he can see no further than the dense growth that surrounds him.
He stands in the cool flowing water and waits.
"Am I your dog, to follow you thus at a look?" Patroclus is grinning, and his expression plucks the sting from his words.
Achilles raises a single red-gold brow and looks his friend up and down, lingeringly. Patroclus' tunic is patched, his leather jerkin stiff with blood and dirt. Still, he is whole of limb and mind: they both are, though so many of both armies have fallen or are falling to the siege.
"I judge a man by his actions," Achilles says at last.
"Or a dog?"
"Or a dog," Achilles agrees Then they are both laughing, arms around one another. It's a fine thing to fight shoulder to shoulder, to huddle next to each other at the camp fire when night comes down, to stand close when the sacrifice is made and the burnt bones and sizzling fat send up messages to the gods. But this, this ... this intimacy has no place in war. They must make room for it.
Now Achilles draws Patroclus down to sit -- for now -- beside him, on the bank of this small stream. Their weight crushes the thyme and clover, sending up a sharp scent. Achilles is gentle this morning, and the kiss is like a greeting. Kissing is their shame: more intimate than one man taking another, an act that can be heard twenty times a night within the camp. Warriors must seek relief, and there is a comfort in that act, though none speak of it. But Achilles and Patroclus love, and that is not a warrior's choice.
When they were boys together, love was allowed. They would grow out of it. Every year there were new weapons, new armour, new tunics and sandals. The year he was fourteen, Achilles had been given a new longbow, as tall as himself. His cousin Patroclus, the taller of the two, had drawn the bow more easily.
"You're too weak yet," he had teased. "Like a girl."
"Like a girl, is it?" Always, before, Achilles would have knocked him over for an insult like that, rolling on the floor like a pair of hounds until Patroclus -- almost always Patroclus, for all his height and weight -- begged laughingly for peace.
That time, Achilles just looked askance at his cousin. "Like a girl," he said again, scowling. "We shall see."
Patroclus was uneasy: worse, he didn't know how to make amends to this new, cold Achilles. He handed back the longbow and watched as Achilles set himself to master it. Even so young, his concentration was terrifying. He studied, fought, trained with that same single-minded intensity, as though everything was a challenge that he must win.
Now he turned that same expression upon his cousin, and Patroclus was almost afraid of him.
The day sped on, Apollo's chariot hurtled towards the west, the sky darkened and ghosts walked among the cypress trees on the mountain. Achilles had disappeared, and Patroclus gathered up his cousin's armour from the corner of the training ground. Achilles was still growing fast: the armour was almost of a size with his own. Soon they'd be able to share one another's arms, as warriors did.
The armour clattered to the ground in the grove between the training ground and the house, where something heavy and fast-moving cannoned into Patroclus and knocked him to the ground.
Faintly, under the sound of beaten metal impacting with trees and earth, he heard the hiss of his cousin's breathing.
"Achilles..."
"Like a girl, am I?" Achilles demanded, voice low and furious in his ear. "We'll see who is like a girl. Who takes it like one."
Before that, it had been half a joke: passionate kisses bestowed with outrageous simpering, shared hilarity at the sheer fun of discovering how different it felt when the hand was someone else's. Now Achilles' whole body wound itself around Patroclus like a snake, like an octopus, and his mouth was hot and sharp against Patroclus' skin.
Patroclus was fighting back before he started to think about it: after that, he had to pretend to fight still, because a sudden surrender would have been too honest for either of them. He let himself give in gradually, gloriously, instead, let Achilles conquer him.
"Like a girl," Achilles murmured afterwards, and Patroclus chuckled and stretched and said, "it's true, what they say about women getting the best of it."
Which was, it turned out, enough of a challenge to give him Achilles' surrender too.
Neither of them will ever surrender to anyone else. Once Patroclus -- in Achilles' armour, a perfect fit at last -- has fallen to Hector's hand, Achilles will have to find other ways to love.
The blood will ooze like sap from the slits in Hector's ankles when he slits them. Hector will be dead already: it won't be him who Achilles intends to wound by this act. Maybe wounding will not enter his mind at all. Maybe as he threads his belt, bloodily, through the sinews of the prince's ankles, as he secures the looped leather to the back of the chariot, he'll be thinking of fastening the belt around Patroclus' waist, dressing him after a stolen hour in the early morning.
Three times around the walls, and Achilles will not be seeing the Trojans thronging the walls. He will be seeing Patroclus, gloriously bright, vanquishing Hector with the blow that missed. He will be celebrating with Patroclus as the smoke of Hector's pyre rises in the still air above the city. He will deck Patroclus in gold chains and precious stones from Priam's treasure-hoard for the simple pleasure of stripping each item from Patroclus again. He will have forgotten that the treasure is payment for Hector's abused corpse.
He will forget everything except Patroclus. He will remember taking Patroclus like a girl, that first time beneath the cypress trees, when he is raping the corpse of the Amazon queen. He'll cut locks of his hair and cast them upon Patroclus' bier, and he will forget -- staring at the corpse -- that Patroclus is dead.
The moment he lives in will be one when Patroclus is with him, close by, solid and strong and warm. Ready to fight, or sleep, or watch the smoke of sacrifice rise up.
Achilles will ignore the whimpering shade that, like a dog, follows him to his death.
-end-
Written in 56 minutes for a contrelamontre challenge