A Thousand Ships

Patroclus laughed. “They will call [Achilles] the greatest hero who ever lived,” he replied. “What are the lives of your kin, against the hundreds he has killed already?”

“Is that the only measure of greatness? Killing so many that you have lost count? Making no distinction between warriors and unarmed men and women?”

“You argue well for a woman,” Patroclus said. “Your husband must have been a patient man.”

“Don’t speak of my husband,” she said. “Or I will not speak to you at all.”

“Do you think that’s true?” Polyxena asked her mother. “Achilles was destined to be a killer?”

Hecabe shrugged her shoulders, but the cool breeze coming off the sea turned it into a shudder. Polyxena unwound her stole—once a fine wool, dyed a bright saffron yellow before it was smeared with grey streaks—and stood up to wrap it around her mother.

[…]

“If you think of him like that,” Polyxena said, “it means he had no choice in what he did. So how can we hate him, if he was just acting as the Fates demanded? If he had no more say in his life than you or I?”

For a terrible moment, she thought she must have done something wrong: worn an ugly dress or applied her make-up inappropriately. But her mother’s slaves had been unanimous in their praise of her. She was correctly attired for a wedding.

And then she saw the glint of her father’s knife in the morning sun and she understood everything in a rush, as though a god had put the words into her mind. The treacherous stillness in the air was divinely sent. Artemis had been affronted by something her father had done, and now she demanded a sacrifice or the ships would not sail. So there would be no marriage, no husband for Iphigenia. Not today and not ever.

[The dress] was so incongruous that Polyxena almost laughed, like seeing a perfect flower amid a sea of mud. She reached her arms upwards, and the women helped her into the ceremonial gown. The last time she would ever put on a new garment, and she had women to help her, just like in Troy. She gave thanks once again to Artemis for saving her from the indignity of servitude. Better to die than live as these women, frightened by every gust of wind.

She wove the cloak poorly, although she had once been a fine craftswoman. The last cloak she had woven had been for Hector—dark and bright for him to wear into battle—and it had been exquisite. It was slashed in two by Achilles when he drove his fierce blade into her husband’s body […]

But sometime during the process of weaving [the cloak], she found herself wanting to finish it so she would not be cold. And although she did not understand it immediately, this was the first sign of her life after death.