Archive of Our Own ^beta

~"and here you are living/despite it all"~

Rupi Kaur

i. Thetis

When you are born, I hold you in my arms and look down into your eyes. You are already squirming and squealing and waving your tiny bunched up fists, and I feel the love like a tide rising relentlessly in my throat.

You will be immortal. I know this as well as I know my own name. You will be the best warrior the world has ever seen. They just don’t know it yet.

ii. Deidamia

When you leave Skyros for the war, I come down with you to the dock. Your warship is already bobbing there, fully fitted and ready, ready for years, really, since the Thessaly campaign you won for Agamemnon in one fell swoop of your sword. You’re impatient, tapping your foot as they load up the last of the supplies, and once it’s all done, you turn to me and tilt my chin up with your finger. There’s a truth behind your eyes that I don’t quite understand, and my breath catches in my ribs as you kiss me, more gently than you’d ever dreamed of before. Your hand falls to the curve of my stomach. The baby kicks against your palm.

“Keep him safe for me, won’t you?” you ask.

“Of course,” I tell you. Your forehead creases and your final kiss is like clouds, soft and sad and grey. Then you’re gone, up the gangplank. I stay there, waving, until your ship is out of sight, wondering if I’ll ever see you again.

iii. Hermione

Mother thought I was asleep when she brought you in to see me, but really the heavy tread of your footsteps had woken me up and I was looking at the two of you out of the cracks of my eyes. All I could really see of you was a shadow, but I could imagine from Mother’s stories just what you looked like, all raven-black curling dark hair and a smile so beautiful even the gods fell over themselves just to see it.

“This is my Hermione, Paris,” she says, her voice as soft and light as a feather. Her hand gently brushes my coppery curls from my face.

A quiet laugh. My toes tingle. “She takes after her mother,” you say, and there’s a quick silence. I assume now that she kissed you.

“I wish we could take her with us,” Mother says. I stiffen. What does she mean?

“We can’t deprive your husband of his wife and his daughter,” you reprimand. “That’s not fair.”

Mother’s voice is petulant. “He can keep the boys.”

“Helen.” You are adamant. “You know I would never wish to cause you pain…”

“I know, I know. Just…may we sit here awhile?”

You murmur something in response. I try to keep on pretending that I’m asleep, but my heart is thudding like the hooves of a thousand horses against my ribcage. What do you mean, you can’t take me with you? Where are you going? I want to sit up and cry and hug you and beg you not to go, but something keeps me still, keeps my eyes closed. You stay for so long that I must have fallen asleep at some point, but the next thing I know is the brush of lips to my hair, and a soft goodbye.

I never see your face again. In the morning, when I get up, you both are gone.

iv. Oenone

I knew you’d always leave me. You’re a prince, I’m a mere shepherd-girl, a nymph as bound to the land as you are to your city. It still hurts, though, to know that not six moons have gone by since you disappeared out of my life like frost at the break of a sunny day that you’ve found yourself another wife, that you’ve kidnapped yourself a queen.

They say she’s the most beautiful woman ever to grace the bowed back of the world with her dainty feet. I’ll never even compare. And the dreams, the dreams I’ve started seeing behind the backs of my eyes, are too horrible to bear thought. You, dead. Your city, burning. Everything you love, razed to ashes and smoke and screams. I can’t warn you. I can’t tell you that this is what they prophesy because of you and the wife you stole from Sparta. All I can do is hold our son close my chest and pray the someone makes you return her before it’s too late.

v. Iphigenia

I’m over the moon when the herald comes to Mother, telling her I’m going to be marrying you. Perhaps I’m a little too excited, for Elektra and Chrysothemis flounce around with faces as dark as Hades for days after, even though they are but twelve and ten and far too young to be thinking about marriage yet.

Mother sends me off to Aulis with a smile wider than the sun and a kiss on the head, my thin wrists heaped with jewels. On the way there, I practise my smile in a copper mirror.

When I see you for the first time, my breath catches in my throat. I’m no stranger to handsome men – my older brother is often hailed as one of the most handsome men in Mycenae – but the way you look, standing there, strong and proud with sunlight spilling in a mantle of gold over your shoulders is beyond belief. My eyes are fixed on yours, and you smile a little, the corner of your mouth quirking up at one side. All thoughts of my practise and decorum, head up Iphigenia, look like a princess, are forgotten. And then there are hands around my waist, pulling me backwards. I scream, in shock, in horror, I don’t know, because suddenly I can see my father, standing by a great white stone altar. They slam me down, and stars dance before my eyes. What is happening? What’s happening, oh gods, please, help me, help me!!!

I see the flash of the knife, and I see you, fighting out of the grip of four strong men and trying to get to me, your hand outstretched and a tide of horror spreading across your face. The pain is white-hot, like fire, like a falling star. A star, falling. That is what I am, spiralling down into heavens which have no end.

vi. Cassandra

I walk the walls, endlessly, staring down at the blurred mass of the Greek army hunkered down at the strandline, the beaked ships like irregular hunks of charcoal. If I close my eyes, I can imagine the faces, the kings, the heroes – just like the stories we were told as children. Somehow, their feats seem less glorious when its your own shores they invade, your own lands they conquer.

In my visions it didn’t look quite like this. Something they don’t say is that visions never quite translate to reality. I have a theory its because reality is too fine-grained to capture, too contingent on an exact sequence of events for any vision to ever be correct down to the very last detail. Reality is too tricky and wily for even Apollo to grasp, but don’t tell anyone I said that. It’s heresy, you know. I get away with cursing him more than others, but then again I’m mad, no-one believes me, and Apollo’s already exacted his punishment.

Madness can be a useful excuse.

I pace. The stones unfurl beneath my feet, grey, huge. Soldiers guarding squeeze themselves against the wall, as though I’ll infect them. Sometimes I bare my teeth and hiss at them, just to drive their perceptions home. I imagine them going back to their perfectly sane wives and concubines and children, and shuddering about their encounter with me on the walls.

When a vision comes on, none of it matters. The vision brims, bulges, threatens to overflow. I choke it down, swallowing it bitter and whole; they lodge themselves in my stomach, poison. Where else could they go? It’s not like I bother to say anything anymore. It’s not like anyone believes me. 

vii. Briseis

You always loved Patroclus more than me. That’s as true as the fact the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, but it doesn’t change the fact that I loved you just as much as that, maybe a little more. It started when you sauntered into the High King’s tent, with your pack of wolf-smiling warriors behind you, lean and scarred and deadly in the terrifyingly easy way of men who have proved their worth in battle. Agamemnon had been staring at me, undressing me with his eyes, and I had been steadily avoiding his gaze, trying not to dwell on what I knew would come.

You’d claimed me against the High King’s wishes, your voice firm and authoritative, but you were the best of the Greeks, and what could Agamemnon – fat, smelly, greedy Agamemnon – do about it? He would have had to challenge you to claim me back and god knows he was too smart for that. You’d have gutted him like a fish and had done with it.

I remember the feeling the chains rasping against my wrists as I stumbled behind you on the way back to your tent, my heart crashing against my ribs. I have never been vain. Rape is rape, no matter how beautiful the man who takes you against your will, no matter how much custom dictates that the women of the losing side are fair game to any victor who so wishes to have them. We got back to the Myrmidon encampment, and you had disappeared into the largest tent; the man holding my chains had shoved me gracelessly in after you, and I had collapsed to my knees, the bronze scraping against the delicate skin of my wrists.

You’d turned to me, after a moment. “Why are you chained?”

I’d stared up at you, mute. You sighed, gustily. “They haven’t cut your tongue out, girl. Answer me.”

“I…” I slid my tongue along the backs of my teeth. “I did not come quietly, when our village fell.”

“Hmm,” you’d said, bending down in front of me. I closed my eyes and clenched my muscles, but all that had happened was a click and suddenly my wrists were free. “Stay here,” you’d said, and then you were gone, and I was left sitting there, wondering what in Hades had just happened. I felt like that most of the time when you were around. You were a storm, terrifying and powerful and unpredictable, but somehow, I felt safe in your shadow.

We all know what happens next. The story will be passed up through the ages, fodder for storytellers for thousands of years, but they never knew what happened to me. I suppose that is the fate of women on the fringes of the tale; we become fragments, rubble, collateral damage. We were once something, and now we are forgotten.

I will tell you a truth: being forgotten is peaceful, Achilles, not boring, or undignified. Being forgotten is the easy, gentle, like the sunrise. You die, surrounded by your children, in your own bed in a little farm in Greece, wondering whether the person you loved most of all will be waiting on the far bank of the River Styx.

viii. Chryseis

I am a holy woman, and by all the gods you will pay for subjecting me to this. My father is a revered priest, and I am his only daughter, beloved of Apollo and sacred; no man should have ever touched me. Not that you cared. I remember, the wine-stink of your breath as you moved closer to me, the lascivious, lust-filled gleam of your eyes. I remember the way your hands felt on my skin, bruising, violating. I remember praying silently to Apollo to help me through this, to find a way to punish you for this transgression. I remember shutting my eyes and trying to liberate myself from my body, so I wouldn’t have to feel you, hot and hard between my legs, taking what was never yours.

A city, a woman. What’s the difference to a man like you?

ix. Polyxena

I’m fifteen when they sacrifice me over the grave of the great Achilles. What the blood of a Trojan princess will do for a dead hero is anyone’s guess, but I suppose it’s easier to be sanguine about it once you’re dead. I hated dying. I hated the look in my mother’s eyes, the trembling in my legs. I wanted to be as brave as my brothers, as brave as Hector, stare my executioner straight in the face and make him fear me.

He wasn’t much older than I was, this boy with the knife glinting in his hand. Oh what war has turned us all into.

Anyway. It’s over quickly, and that’s all I can say. One of the women must sneak up and perform the funeral rites, because all I know is that I am crossing the River Styx with a gold coin in my hand, the toxic black water parting stickily beneath the prow of the boat. Achilles is waiting on the other side, I know, by the arrow sticking out between his shoulder-blades, the thick braid of golden hair. I grew up watching him fight beneath our walls. He looks at me as I descend with as much grace as I can muster, at the now-painless gaping wound in my silvery throat. Something dashes across his face – regret, perhaps – and he holds my gaze for a moment, nods once, and turns away. Perhaps it was supposed to be an apology, or as close to one as men, shades, like him get. Who knows what my reaction would have been if I were alive enough to care about mortal things like apologies. I like to think I would have scratched his eyes out for the cheek of it.

“Polyxena,” a voice calls, and I turn to see them, all of my fifty brothers, all killed by the war.

At least down here I won’t be a slave, I think, stepping forward into their open, welcoming, ghostly arms. At least I died nearly free. It’s only an at least, but it’s the only thing I have.

x. Andromache

The Fates give, and they take away. When I was younger, I thought you would be the only man I would ever love, my sweet, brave, noble hero – who took a feisty wildcat of a girl and taught her that love could be more than bowing her head and acquiescing to her husband’s every demand, that love could be between equals walking side by side. It took me years to learn to love again, to open my heart after seeing you dragged through the dust behind that beast’s chariot, after his bastard son threw our baby from the towers and took me as his prize.

Those were dark years, my love. There were no stars in the sky, no sunbeams pouring over the horizon; I woke up cold and alone every morning with sore, bruised thighs, hugging my knees to my chest and crying for everything that I’d lost. How different to those dawn-lit mornings in the blessed years we had together, curled up with the soft breeze singing through the room and Astyanax gurgling to himself in his crib.

A secret, one I think you already knew: the sun always rises. Nothing they can do can stop Apollo mounting his chariot and driving out of the Gates of the Dawn to begin his pilgrimage across the silken sky. I have found love again, I have my Helenus and four small boys who crowd around our feet. We take care of each other, my love, and know that we shall be reunited in the afterlife with the ones we have lost.

xi. Helen

Why is it that men always forget I am half-divine? Ichor runs in my veins just as much as the rust-red of mortal heroes, mixing together in a wild, throbbing dance to the thud of my heart. Some were brutes, some were sweet, some were noble, but you all see the woman before you see the goddess. Woe betide you, those who want soft skin and fiery hair and the most beautiful face in the civilised world to be your comforter, your puppet queen, your wife to flaunt and show off as though my beauty makes you somehow greater than all other kings. Woe betide you, those who thought I was running because of you.

You all see what you want to see. I am not soft and gentle and passive; I am an inferno, I am the lightning, just like my father. I go where I want and do what I please, and every choice I make is for myself, no matter how much you all want to tell yourselves otherwise.

If you refuse to see a woman for what she is, you are wholly responsible for whatever awful fate you might bring down on your head. I laugh as Menelaus falls, and I dance as Troy burns. I do not concern myself with the lives of mortal men. Woe betide you all.

xii. chorus

you think

that because we are women

we can be left in the dust of history

clinging to the edges of your tales of battles won and blood spilled and glory found

but we know suffering you will never understand

we are the ones you left behind

the ones you killed, enslaved, dragged in your wake

but despite what history dictates

we are not silent

silence is what you get when you don’t listen carefully

listen

we are not just your victims

we are lions

hear us roar