No One But You

Chapter Thirteen : Easier To Run

'It's easier to run
Replacing this pain with something numb
It's so much easier to go
Than face all this pain here all alone'

Linkin Park, 'Easier to Run'

Neoptolemus watched Briseis out of the corner of his eye as they sailed into the harbour at Phthia. The young woman stood at the edge of the ship, her hands resting lightly on the ship's rail, and her head held up: a proud defiance directed at the curious onlookers that lined the low cliffs surrounding the harbour. But Neoptolemus could see the dead, haunted look in her eyes that told him that her bravado was nothing but a show. Since her miscarriage Briseis had changed. It was as if a part of her had died. No spark of life danced in her eyes, and her voice, when she did speak, was hollow and distant. The girl he had thought he knew was long gone: in her place stood a woman, scarcely twenty, and yet whose face betrayed wisdom and sorrow far beyond her years.

Neoptolemus sighed slightly, turning away from the grieving girl, to look with remote, unfeeling eyes at his new subjects. They stared back with an equal coldness, and he already knew what whispers were going around about him, about his cruelty, his heartlessness. 'And let them talk,' a vicious part of his brain said; it wasn't as if they said anything that wasn't true. They should fear and respect him, and pray not to fall under his displeasure.

It was nearly over: the long, torturous journey that he had to endure with an untouchable beauty. Soon he would be far away from her and everything that he desired. He would be back on the sea with his men: each as merciless and ruthless as himself, and soon the new Neoptolemus; the one that desired for a woman and had the decency to hold himself back, the one who cared for the welfare of someone other than himself, would be gone, and the world would once more be at rights.

Briseis stood, her hands folded demurely over the rail in front of her, as she watched the approaching coastline of her new home. She was scared. No, she was terrified. It was the same fear that had gripped her stomach when she had come to Troy as a child, with Hector, good, kind Hector, not much more than a child then, by her side. It was the fear of new places, of new people, of the unknown. But now it was a thousand times worse. She was no longer a child, with childish fears. Now she was a woman: a woman without honour, a woman without a family, a woman without a husband, or even a lover.
If she did not look to either side she could imagine that she was coming into Phthia with Achilles and the Myrmidons. Maybe not as his wife; but she could live with that as long as he was there. She could endure any amount of shame, as long as he was by her side. He had been her strength. Strength to defy her family, to walk tall, even without honour, strength to love him. And when he was gone, she had found strength in his child. It wasn't Achilles come back to life; she knew that. But somehow she had found the will to live and the courage to carry on with her life when all she wanted to do was curl up and die, and it had come from the knowledge that she had a job to do: she had to carry Achilles' child, to raise him and to love him.

And now, what reason did she have to live? She was little more than a Trojan slave. Perhaps the people lining the harbour walls no doubt thought her to be Neoptolemus' new whore. She was worse than nothing. For one long, terrifying moment, Briseis saw her whole life opening up in front of her: she saw herself hated by Achilles' mother for being the cause of death of her son, she saw herself scorned by the people of Phthia and despised by the slaves in the palace.

But the moment passed, and Briseis' straightened up, pushing her shoulders back and raising her eyes. She would no be cowed by people who had no idea of what she had been through. She, and she alone had the right to judge herself. No one could see her thoughts: the doubts and the shame that had filled her when she had lain in Achilles' arms for the first time, later to be replaced by a tragic love for him. She would not let herself be looked on with contempt and pity. She had loved Achilles, and she made no excuses for that. She loved him still, and would probably always do so. It didn't, at that moment, matter to her whether history put her down as a whore, as a priestess who abandoned her God, or as a faithful lover. She had loved him, Gods but how she had loved him! Nothing apart from that mattered.