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Chapter Text

Briseis is born quiet.

Her mother cradles her in her arms, barely rocking her because what is there to soothe? Briseis does not cry.

She looks up at her mother: her warm round face, her dark skin like roasted star anise, her nose long and with a hump, her long and curly oiled hair that has to be covered by a veil, her soft eyes that tell a story of hardships gone by, her hands that are drawn with red henna patterns to cover up the pink scars that trail her palms.

Briseis is exactly her mother. From her skin, to her nose, to her face, to her eyes, to her future, she and her mother are entirely connected.

𖤓⚜𖤓

O Artemis.

𖤓⚜𖤓

Briseis stares at her reflection in the river and she finds it ugly. The water is murky and brown and has ripples, but does that change how pretty she is? How will anyone want to marry her?

She goes to pray to Aphrodite on the edge of the riverbank and with her hands raised to the heavens. But all that she looks at is her palms. They are just like her mother’s—just too much like her mother. Pink lines scar on her dark skin like vines, her nails are not even, and they are much too wrinkly for her age. 

Does she know enough words to try and even explain what she feels inside? Did Aphrodite feel like this herself before she was named the most beautiful goddess?

But is beauty not vain? Aphrodite lost her epithet—her war-like desires—in exchange for beauty. Is that what Briseis wants? To be seen as warm and soft and like a clay doll instead of what she truly burns inside her heart? She wants the girls to cower behind her like a hero. She wants the boys to understand she is not like their mothers, the mothers who pierced their tongues with a stake to never upset the men, and so she will swing her unfamiliar fist into sand and into their well-oiled faces if it comes to that. She wants the men to cease their smiles and hushed whispers when she walks by, fear and respect should ring in their ears when she stomps by in her red peplos meaning a woman’s fury, and her jewelry in her ears and on her shoulders, just about anywhere because she was born wearing gold.

But oh, how the gossip of the townswomen and the country girls murmur in her mind when she hears their words carried by the wind! They buy their violet chitons, adorn themselves with as much gold as they can, crush the juices of pomegranate seeds to carefully design their lips and cheeks, labor over henna to decorate their hands and nails, and use kohl to darken their eyes. It is all their fun to get a husband through their wealth and beauty, and gods, Briseis does not know if she wants to or not.

Briseis is no fool. She will be married off, sooner or later, just until the blood of her womb trails down her legs. It is how she knows life, it is how her mother had her, just like her mother before her. She remembers it every time her mother grinds chickpeas underneath her fists while Briseis picks the pods right off the branch. The stems she grabs have tiny hairs that scratch her, the pods defend themselves with bristles that attack her hands. She always furiously claws at her skin—demanding relief because if she must be here when the Sun beams gloriously at them, she will at least stop one thing that she hates. Her mother will always click her tongue behind her teeth, telling her to stop lest she leaves marks like she always does, but Briseis does it anyway, and leaves the marks on her hands like a warrior does with their battle scars. Her mother swings her hands close to her face, examining every dip and every scar, dousing them in oil, hoping they fade because how else will a man ever desire her?

𖤓⚜𖤓

You know what I crave, you hear its wild shriek from my heart.

𖤓⚜𖤓

Briseis is to be married soon.

Nobody lets her do any labor anymore, telling her to simply sit and get ready to be a bride. Her mother smiles at her wherever she sees her daughter, but Briseis can see her wrinkles become more prominent, her eyes sagging from exhaustion. Her mother works for two, now that Briseis will be lured inside her domum.

The country girls buzz about her, bringing her fruits of their labor like yellow-green quinces, squeezing juices from pomegranates to dress her face, lining their henna to dye her hands red, and feeding her with their own hands to fatten her up because she is all bones from days outside.

She misses the Sun outside shining on her face, the way the wind blows through the fabric of her peplos and through her dark hair. What is a life with no freedom?

But she is wedded to a prince who takes a great deal of pleasure from merely gawking at her. She hates it all.

Hates the way he stares at her—like hunger rather than love. Hates the way she has to leave her mother’s side. Hates the way her mother cradles her face with her two scarred hands, tears crawling out of her eyes. Hates the way she never feels loved anymore.

Briseis sits in front of a loom all day now. She wakes up with her husband's arm slung around her like a cage. She finds her way out and heads for the balcony. It is just about the only way she feels the outside world now. Then a servant girl comes to fetch her—her husband awaits, after all. She will be served a meal to break her fast and she will barely eat it, much too nauseous and homesick to even try: she has always been a country girl after all. Then her husband pretends to be discreet and loving, running his hands over her body, as if he cares only about that. When he finally lets her go, Briseis sits in front of her loom and weaves. What else is there to do?

Gods, she has never hated anything more than married life.

Can she run now? Where would she go? To her mother? Her husband would search all over Troy for her. She is stuck. Just like her mother and her mother before that.

Sleep clings to her eyelashes and a tear slips past as she calls for the life she once had.

𖤓⚜𖤓

Free my fate, for it lays under torture, killing me alongside.

𖤓⚜𖤓

There is talk about war.

Briseis barely goes outside anymore, but it does not matter because the wind blows the town gossip into her ears and the servant girls do not know how to keep their mouths shut. 

They say the barely legitimate Prince of Troy has kidnapped the Queen of Sparta, the most beautiful mortal girl as Aphrodite had given her to him. As if women were someone to be traded with. He hides Helen in Troy, and so of course they will be ravaged by war on the account of the Greeks.

There is much noise outside, ringing through the corridors of her husband's place. There are squeals of denial and sorrow, there are also cheers of patriotism from the Trojan commonfolk.

The churning in Briseis’s head tells her differently. She desires to feel the same love her people have to their land and militia, but no. War is never good, and not against Greece, they are the more favored image in the Gods’ eyes.

It drives her mad, not being able to leave, talk freely, or to properly know what is going on.

One fateful night, disguised in a chlamys, she sneaks out of their room—a cage, it seems like nowadays.

Most people have retired for the night and so the usually crowded roads of Troy are quiet and empty. She arrives at the palace of King Priam and Queen Hecuba under the protection of Nyx. She is here for one thing only and she will find what she yearns for. The two men guarding the entrance of the magnificent palace bar her from entering, demanding her to give up the message she carries then turn back. It is foolish to think one is only a messenger simply for wearing a chlamys. Would they have treated the beloved god Hermes that way?

She has no message to deliver, and she says so. Briseis tears off her veil and hugs it around her shoulders, letting her dark curls fall down her neck and free the image of her face. The men’s eyes widen as they look at the frail girl. Frail girl she is, but a princess she is too. 

The men easily allow her to pass through the doors, turning a blind eye to the girl that wanders by.

The palace, Briseis notes, is simply marvelous. It is no Olympus, but it is covered in gold and marble. Such a palace could fit her small family and their future generations for years to come. This is how the nobles live, while people like her mother break their backs in the fields, tending to the agriculture and the children.

But she did not come here to gawk. No, no, she has to satisfy the crave in her mind. Is it even a crave anymore? It is an obstinate parasite that takes over her entire mind, leaving her reeling and terrified. The future hangs in a very special balance, and it seems she is the only one who sees the future of Troy as no more. Their seams are unraveling by fear itself already and Briseis is frightened to see what will happen when the Greeks descend on their shores.

A girl stands, hobbling on her heels, tugging on her red hair, tears falling from her eyes. Her breath is raggedy and she wheezes the same phrase. “The Greek will ransack. Troy will fall.”

Cassandra, beautiful daughter of King Priam.

She is hidden away from the public’s eye nowadays, even more so than regular noble girls. Everyone knows why, of course. They say she was fancied by the magnificent god Apollo. They say she rejected his advances, like almost any mortal by any god. They say Apollo grew angry at her, so furious like the kind only men have towards women. They say she was cursed by the God of Prophecies to churn out prophecies. Nobody ever believed her, no matter how wildly she flung her hands or twisted her orange locks or how vividly she described the future in her prophecies.

Briseis believes her. Oddly enough, she does.

“Yes, yes, Cassandra.” She shushes the priestess, much like a mother coaxing her baby. “I believe you.”

Cassandra has never been told such ever, since she halts in her movements, only lifting her head to stare at Briseis with wide eyes like a doe. 

“I believe you.” Briseis repeats. “Tell me more, please.”

Cassandra looks at her with suspicion, but perhaps her divine guidance tells her Briseis is genuinely kind because her eyes slip into unfocus.

“The Greeks’ tongues are covered in deceit. They will ravage. Troy will fall by year nine. It will be fought for ten years. Blessed be the Greeks, for Troy will be slaughtered. All its men, women, and children.”

Briseis knows what happens when the enemy finds the women of the other side. It is told as knowing over their labors, not as a story. They become slaves, concubines. They become less than the soil they leave their footprints on.

“They will never believe you, my princess.” 

Cassandra’s eyes look seemingly clear and focused in the gleam of the fire. “They will believe me when it is too late.”

Yes, a Greek’s tongue is covered in deceit, but a man's guilty finger will point any blame to a woman.

𖤓⚜𖤓

My spirit desires my warm country home, oh, let it free and roam.

𖤓⚜𖤓

When the Greeks descend onto their shores, they are angry and full of vengeance. They seek out all the Trojan’s blood. They desire to see their pitiable blood stain the bronze of their weapons, to see their salty tears drip onto their fruitful soil.

Briseis’s husband’s family domus is targeted soon enough.

She wants to die a dishonorable death—one where she closes her eyes so tight and with no pride. The Greeks, those murderous dogs, seizes her father-in-law first, and kills him with a sword through his elderly chest as Briseis looks down. She refuses to look, only seeing the red blood bursting high through the air, while in the back, a statue of Apollo stands haughtily. So much for the visionless gods.

She feels fingers grab her throat, disgustingly pale fingers from a man, wrap around her thin throat and force it up to see. They have grabbed her husband, whom they have gagged with a piece of fabric they have ripped from her dress. 

Gold like the Sun.

That is who kills her husband.

A man who seems more god than mortal with hair gold like the Sun and eyes as green as the fields in the summer. His gold helmet cannot hide his hauntingly beautiful face and long hair. His eyes are blown open wide as the red blood that is not his mars his face.

His golder than gold sword slices open her husband’s neck, and his sinful blood pools under her feet. It is warm and sticky—like the morning dew—under the pads of her toes. The gods have damned them all. Is this how Artemis saves her? By a massacre of her people?

The man clawing at her neck puts her in place with one hand and draws a sword near her pulse. The blade digs into her skin. 

She is going to die here.

Briseis will die at the hands of the men she wishes would leave her alone. Her spirit will roam the valleys of Asphodel, not by her childhood home. She prays to the gods who have never answered her. She prays it is a fleeting death. She prays her lifeless body will not be used as the sick ploys and twisted desires of these Greek dogs.

“Leave her.”

Her husband’s killer, the man golder than gold, saves her. He calls for her survival.

He stomps over, his sandals striking the white floors with the blood of her family. His fingers caress her chin, and he twists her face. 

“Beautiful.” He remarks. “A slave girl, then.”

Despair creeps over her.

Her beautiful life, ruined tenfold by men who believe they are great and think women and their bodies lay claim to them and their desires. Her marriage was the same, and now, war renders her the same once again. The gods work in such hateful ways, she wonders if she is their comedy.

 Perhaps she is, because when that day's conquest is over, they lay her and other captured girls out with the rest of the gold, jewelry, and weapons, like they are objects with meaning no more than just spoils of war. The night covers her dirty skin like a cloak, and she so wishes for a chlamys to cover up her bare arms and midriff. The Greek dogs pile in, looking at the girls and loot with desire. Briseis keeps her head down as the vile men keep coming and whistling at them. One of them barks for wine and slams down a bottle before pointing at the girl next to her. She has tears swimming in her eyes as she goes to pour the red drink of Dionysus into goblets.

The devil tongue blabbers all over, sounding like thousands of rattlesnakes hissing and rattling. It is vile and vicious and wicked, because they have all the power and they know that very well.

“—Dance, girl.” She hears a man jeer. When she picks her head back up, she finds all the men looking right into her—wanting, desiring, lusting.

A dance they want, a dance they shall get.

She hitches up her skirt, exposing her gold-wearing ankles, and starts dancing. Briseis swings her hips, letting the moon shine on the thin chain of gold she wears around her skinny waist. She moves her arms and hands dressed with gold and color bleeds on her face, keeping all the men's eyes on her. Her dark hair is woven with white flowers, spinning like the stars in the night sky.

The men hiss like snakes, their foreign tongue drips with filth, drunken messes, and absolute evil.

Briseis pays no mind—she is busy trying to keep the men’s attention on her and not on slaughtering them. She has survived all this way, through childhood, through girlhood, through the royal life, through womanhood. She will not die here, not now, not at the hands of men.

Golder than gold—Aristos Achaion, she learns—shines in the back when he comes in. His magnificent face worthy of godhood is cleaned of every speck of her people's blood. His gold hair is delicately woven around a fillet of fabric. He holds himself up with the behavior of a god: still and confident. His eyes are staring straight ahead, right at her. His greenfield eyes only break contact with her when another Greek man enters.

He seems oddly different from the rest. Her entire life, she has been raised to think most men are full of venom, and they will strike if she strays too far. And yet, this Greek man shies through the careful boundaries she has made easily.

It is in the way his eyes are round and downturned, as if waiting to scrunch up with happiness. It is found in the way the lines etched in his face are more smile lines than it is just wrinkles. It is in the way his presence does not exactly demand power or glory, but selflessness and respect. It is in the way just his fingers alone coaxes the golden man, just simply trailing his fingertips on the honeyed skin so gently.

No, Briseis, she thinks to herself. No, girl, the souls of her maternal ancestors and her late people scream at her. The Greek tongue piles with deceit and lies. They care only for themselves, their own desires.

Briseis pulls her arms down to the ground to her right foot before trailing her arms up and holding them open to the gods.

𖤓⚜𖤓

Am I just shadows on shadows? Can I not be light growing from the darkness? Does my spirit not rot in chains? 

𖤓⚜𖤓

And so begins the ceremony. All the men receive a prize based on their choosing, and many pick gold and other expensive trinkets. She even hears earnest sentiments: “wife would be beautiful!” It is sweet like sugar but would their wives at home wear those riches if they knew the bloodshed that happened to claim it? Would Briseis wear Greek gold if the Trojans slaughtered the Greeks? She does not know. Perhaps ignorance is bliss.

All the girls have their eyes trailed down, some even murmur wordless prayers with their lips moving. What god will answer their prayers now?

Briseis’s eyes end up on that warm Greek man again. His face is scrunched up and looks right at her. Their eyes meet for a bit and he looks at her with sorrow? That cannot be right. But even when he and she blink, he still looks at her with those eyes that speak more than words.

He points at her and tears his eyes from her to the golden man next to him. There is a look of urgency in the darker man's eyes, but a look of vacancy in Aristos Archaion's eyes.

“You are Aristos Achaion—,” she hears the darker man hiss. She does not understand the rest, she does not speak the Greek tongue.

One of the highly intoxicated men jeers something at the two men and that is the moment the empty look in the golden man's eyes begins to burn. 

“Am Aristos Achaion! The gods agree, fool!” That is all Briseis understands through the man's roar.

“Her.” He sneers, pointing at her. She stares back at the arm that points it. “I want her.”

And such is a girl's life, is that not so? They trade one prison for another. 

Aristos Achaion is smug with his decision, making the other Greek men falter. The dark-skinned man looks pleased, his lips showing the ghost of a smile. Yes, they all feel all sorts of emotions and not a single one is guilt. No guilt, no remorse. Nothing for her people's blood spilled.

But is it even the Greeks’ fault? That foolish boy, Paris, had awakened conflict, after all. It is by his hand that his people suffer. He still hides Helen, and his people pay the price. The Greeks will not stop until they receive what they came here for—the mortal pride and beauty of Greece.

And the Greeks are stubborn, insanely so, because even when mighty Aristos Achaion can have anything else of pristine value, he chooses her.

Like a clay doll.

𖤓⚜𖤓

So, guide me through the fleeting shadows. Grant me swift feet to flee.

Chapter Text

Briseis familiarizes herself with the Greek men now. She knows every detail about where each tent is, who houses them, and what they do. She is Achilles’s—the grandiose name of Aristos Achaion, they tell her—slave girl, but she is first loyal to the Greek war effort.

The men do not show her kindness. They look at her figure with lusting eyes, they trail their fingers on their smaller on-hand weapons when she passes by. Do they find her desirable or do they want to show their absolute dominance? Briseis does not know. She is not sure if the men themselves know, either. Achilles himself does not show her kindness. He barely ever glances at her, just allowing her to do her caring duties. But he does not ask of her body nor does he raise weapons in her fearful face. That, perhaps, is kindness enough.

Only good man Patroclus—that fellow dark-skinned man always by Achilles's side—seems to show her gentleness. He smiles at her whenever he enters, he thanks her with unfamiliar words whenever she does her basic slave girl duties, and he talks to her.

She does not understand much of it. Her Trojan tongue does not overlap much with his Greek tongue. But he still takes time to speak with her when the days are hot and dry and have nothing much to do. 

Briseis still remembers the first night upon being handed off to Aristos Achaion. She had slumped into a small curl along a tent corner after the darker man had coaxed her in with crinkled eyes and curved lips. Her shoulders shook with emotion, her eyes stung with no tears. The dark-skinned man had softly brushed his palm against her shoulder until it felt comfortable and until the goosebumps on her skin faded. 

He had shook his head while he had explained something to her in a language she could not understand. Aristos Achaion had lounged around the tent entrance and had rolled his eyes before saying something. The man had left her before walking over to Aristos Achaion and he had kissed the golden man. There was adoration in the darker man's hands but a slight relief in the golden man's eyebrows.

She was not part of their world yet, and she still called Aristos Achaion the Butcher, but she was better off under the lure of a homosexual boy than wily lustful men.

Briseis even picks up Greek from the camps and through Patroclus's speech. It is not much, but it makes it easier for her. It slightly hurls her up in reliability. Fewer Greek men look at her with lust or dominance, but even respect. Or as much as they, male Greek warriors, can give to female slaves.

They talk to her about many things, like which birds fly overhead, what the stars mean, what their future plans are, and most of all: their families back home. She learns Odysseus has a clever wife and a newborn son that would be around six now. She learns that Phoenix was Achilles's childhood tutor and Achilles's father's good friend. She learns that Diomedes is a king who had to secure his throne after his father was murdered in an uprising attack.

Patroclus teaches her about medicine. He has new kinds she has never seen before on Trojan lands. He shows her how to use it all, how to apply it, how it is made, and what it is for. He learned it from his and Achilles’s teacher, the wise centaur Chiron. When the war gets rough and the men trudge back with heavy armor and weapons and dimmed faces covered both in their blood and her people's blood, Briseis first fetches them water. The water is collected in pails from the cisterns and the water spills over her feet, cold and unforgiving. It stings in the very tiny cuts she gained from walking barefoot on the terrain. But Briseis has a duty she must fulfill, so she lugs the heavy pails to the nursing camps and takes clay cups to coax the men’s jaws open to feed them water. Patroclus is a good medic while she does that. He does what he can in a manner where the men relax and where she can follow him.

Achilles does not seem particularly fond of her. She does not know if she is particularly fond of him. Patroclus tells her that that is just the way Achilles seems to most people. Patroclus says it in such an endearing way—his eyes shining in a far-away look, his lips bursting at the seams to produce a smile—like he is the only one who knows Achilles. She thinks he does. That is the love Briseis will never have. Patroclus asks her to try with him. She has respect for Patroclus, so she does.

But how to even try with someone as great and as stoic as Achilles? She is nobody while he is everything. She just does her duties—washes his clothes, makes and delivers his food up to his standards, tending to his every possible need. Again, she is expected to give up her body to him but that is the one thing she refuses, and it is the one thing Achilles will never ask. She even starts to tend to Patroclus, as both of the men live in the same tent. She tends to him the same, though Patroclus needs it less. She supposes it is due to living the way he did before he met Achilles.

But once, when Briseis enters Achilles’s tent with a bowl to collect clothes hugged tightly to the divot of her waist, she sees him polishing a xiphos. It is shining a brilliant gold, too perfect. Achilles does not allow her nor anybody else to touch his prized weapons, so she just watches him hold the weapon delicately, a golden weapon fit for the golden man. The Butcher.

“My husband had a weapon like that,” she says as she piles clothes into her bowl. Achilles falters in his rhythmic movements. He looks up at her, eyes filled with cloudy emotions she cannot read. The words filter by her lips easily. What is there to hesitate on? She was married. She had a husband. She was married too young. She did not love her husband. She watched him get killed.

“How old are you now?” Achilles murmurs, tucking golden strands of hair behind his ear. It happens so nicely, like they are friends, talking while drinking tea. As if his epithets do not pile up in the light. The Butcher. “Old enough to be married, young enough to be blessed by Hebe…?”

“The years go by.” She responds, pursing her lips. She hates the cracks in her lips. It reminds her of good days past, when she did not care about meaningless beauty and more on childhood innocence. She counts on her fingers while Achilles watches her fingers flex. He blinks at the numbers she holds up. Nineteen. One-nine. Ten fingers then nine.

She looks down at her hands. They're still dark. It used to be lighter when all she used to do was stay inside, but those days are past and now she is outside more than not. Her past scars have dimmed but new ones make themselves known through the wars and calamities. She wishes she had her mother right about now. Her mother would whisper warm sweet-talks and would massage her hands with oil—and oh gods, her mother!

What kind of daughter is she, not even caring about the well-being of her mother? The years go by, but her love should not have—and through war, especially—gods, her elderly, fragile-hearted mother could not have survived such a calamity!

The bowl drops from her precise hands with a dramatic clang! She stares at her hands, as if glaring at them will give her an answer, a view of her mother.

“Briseis…?” She hears Achilles call. Achilles has never once called her name. He has no need to. She is always there in the background. Her fingers find themselves in the roots of her curly hair, tugging and pulling, just like their princess Cassandra. The tears blur in her eyes and her eyelids sting. There is both a pounding in her heart but also a gaping pit in there, a bottomless pit of dread.

In her rage-fueled panic, she fails to hear Achilles leave the tent and bring Patroclus, who appears in her vision dimly.

“Briseis!” He calls. His voice seems far away, like he is talking to her from two different ends of a tunnel. “Look at me.”

She tries to blink away her tears because she has respect for Patroclus and wants to obey him to make him proud of her. But also—the idea makes her pulse throb—they could kill her right now, right here. They have never seen her like this. Her nose snotty, her lips trembling, her hands tugging her hair maniacally, her eyes weeping, her in total ruin and shambles. Briseis has never been like that. She has always understood to be quiet, to be pleasant, so that she is well-liked or to survive. No one likes a hot-tempered, snapping girl, after all.

So she inhales a shaky breath, brushes her eyes, and looks at Patroclus. His eyes are slightly gray, a strange but flattering addition to his dark face. It is very different from her dark eyes that look black, but shine brown like fresh brewed tea in the glittering sunlight.

“Everything is fine,” Patroclus lies to her face. They are a few years into war and nothing is fine. If it is, well, it should not be. Briseis is a slave girl. Her people are dead. Her mother is not here. Nothing should be fine.

“My mother,” she echoes. “My mother is gone.”

She watches Patroclus's throat bob and Achilles turn his face away from her. The Greeks know what carnage they have posed. They have wiped out generations of people without even knowing their names. Will they ever make it past the River Styx?

“Yes,” Achilles’s voice floats over to her. “She most likely is.”

And that is all there is to say.

𖤓⚜𖤓

I can do it all, if you allow me under your good graces.

𖤓⚜𖤓

Briseis halts in her duties unlike a proper slave girl afterwards. Suddenly, she is rendered back to her wedded days, where she was simply a body. She sits in the tent all day long now; often she cries until her throat becomes hoarse, often the slave girls feed her with their own injured palms, often she tugs her own hair out when she goes to mindlessly braid her hair at night.

But she is a slave girl before she is anything else now—the thought burns in her mind angrily like fire to oil—and so she goes back to her duties on a random day.

It is not a good day, is what she observes. The sky is dim, like Apollo thought better than to bless them. A cough tears through her battered throat every once in a while, and her ankle pulses with pain as she walks. The pads of her feet conform to the jagged rocky terrain, back-and-forth, back-and-forth.

“Briseis!” She hears Patroclus call from his station in the nursing camp. “It is great to see you come back.” It makes her smile slightly, a delight to distract her mind with.

She nods obediently. 

Because that is all she is allowed to be now, is she not? She has become something that her younger self would be disappointed at.

But what more can she do? She will fetch water for the wounded warriors, she will help the other girls make meals, she will nurse the injured soldiers, she will tend to Achilles, and she will be stepped on. Just like her mother and her mother before her. Just like these Greeks’ mothers too, just perhaps not great Achilles’s divine mother. She is a deity, and Briseis could not dream of being as great and loved as a goddess. 

It is as she is hoisting pails of water when her earlier premonition rings true. She turns around and immediately startles at a man's body surrounding her figure. He is oddly tall and Briseis has to stretch her neck like a baby bird to meet his eyes. 

Lust. 

That is all there is. No sympathy, no humanity. Just pure, unbridled lust. And there is only one thing that happens when a man desires a woman with those predatory eyes. Achilles had not wanted it from her, but her bid did not stop under the Butcher's hand, not when there are men here who find it exciting to carnally desire a woman, especially if she is a woman because these men have not had enough time to ravage a woman because their wives are at home.

Red, red, red. That is who swallows her.

He chews through her, through her silence and through her frozen body.

Briseis is no virgin. She is not pure. That husband of hers usurped that promise from her. But still now, in this man's hold, it feels worse than when her husband took her purity on their wedding night.

The Greeks, she thinks, their tongues are covered with deceit. All those years with her walls built up high, and yet when she is secretly at her lowest does any man have the audacity to plow through them.

When she drops the pails of water onto the jagged terrain, the noise hides his lustful moans. When Briseis shifts her heavy head, she spots another slave girl standing there with her eyes wide. Help, Briseis mouths, her hand beckoning for her. Astynome, supposedly in fear, blinks at her and runs. And her own eyes tear up because she knows. This is all she leaves behind in the world: her spirit forever forgotten in the Greek camps of man.

Suddenly, she has a vision. A vision of her priestess Cassandra, flaming orange curls flying in the wind as she runs from seeking Apollo. Yes, she had her thoughts stolen away from her, cursed by the divine and spat on by her people; and yet, her resistance allowed for her survival. Cassandra’s resistance will not be the same as hers, not with the way this man latches onto her—hot skin digging into goosebumps—but gods be damned, she will try.

She feels his seed drip down her legs, too sticky, too milky, too much like her once husband. The wind is not kind to her. Though on rocky terrain, it feels like breathing through sand or in the heavy jungles. Her lungs demand too much. But with that vision of Cassandra and a picture of smiling Aphrodite from her childhood, she must do what she has to do.

Bringing up her hands from the sides of the Greek's large chest, she sees her red fingernails and a last effort. 

Her hands, once red with henna, now paint themselves red with blood as she clamps her fingernails into his back and drags down.

The Greek howls with pain and fury, the same anger that could and did burn a village ablaze and force women into shackles. His face contorts in an ugly fashion: his eyes aflame, his mouth a ferocious scowl, his skin red. 

“You bitch!” He yells at her, grabbing her throat tightly and tugging her up to look at him. The pain is not new to her and yet, tears prick in the corner of her eyes. Her nose burns as it takes in air too slowly for her heart.

“Put her down,” her ears ring as she hears someone say. It is Patroclus, shielding trembling Astynome behind one hand, holding a sharp rock with the other. In all her panic, she only thinks you came! But she cannot tell who she dedicates it to—Patroclus, a good man but a Greek all the same, or Astynome, she who left her but refused to let her rot under the domineering hand of a man.

The hand around her neck falters before she is thrown down. 

A weak shriek of pain flies past her teeth as her head breaks the fall, but she can breathe. 

She greedily sucks up breath after breath, feeling like when she would come up after sinking in a river when she was much younger. The world spins—or her head, she cannot tell, breathing feels much better to tend to.

“Only because you are Aristos Achaion's slave, are you freed,” the Greek hisses at her through clenched teeth as he leaves.

Astynome's bare feet barely make a sound as she swiftly carries Briseis into her arms. She holds her so gently, as they stand in small puddles of blood and a man's seed. 

They look at each other, two beautiful Trojan girls in such a terrifying situation because of their city-state and on account of their beauty. If Briseis squints, she can see fair Astynome, all long blonde hair and pale skin like cream. She thinks maybe if Astynome looks into her, she will see long black curls and dark skin like her mother’s star anise. 

“Thank Aphrodite.” Briseis whispers after a long time of simply breathing in Astynome's tender hold under the sights of Patroclus. 

𖤓⚜𖤓

O, freed Artemis, mystified daughter of Zeus.