Book Thirteen

"A drink! A toast! To those who must die."

—Christopher Logue

The buddleia struck its colors, the dawnproving somewhat a disappointment, as so often.Blood stained the sand beside cracked spear-shafts,

dented kettles, frayed hawsers, the moanof the dying. Hektor and his thugscould be seen far off, skirmishing, hurling torches,

trying to set the fleet ablaze. A godmight have put on his sunglasses, ignoringthe insect life that goes on below.

Seeing the Trojans come forward like beetles,I felt a curious fascination, as if I were rubberneckingat some fender-bender. It was not much of a wall,

mostly piles of trash and sandy embankment.From its rock perch, a knife-tailed hawkdropped like a stone. The priests called it

the descent of a god, which was fineif you followed some filthy Eastern religion.When the Trojans leapt the thrown-together defenses

like ballet dancers, the gods were nowhere.The Greeks, well, they fought like Greeks,shields overlapping like fish scales,

helmets touching like men in bed together,their ridiculous shakos chopped from horse tails;but against us slouched the leviathan Hektor,

morbidly obese, as hard to stop as a dump truck.Men battled in pairs, singly, swarming in confusion,like brokers waving their arms on the floor at Wall Street.

Teukros caught one of Priam's sons-in-lawwith a spear point below the ear,just where the carotid fetches into the brain.

The blood hosed every man in range.Then a long spear came wheezing through the lines.Teukros ducked and the harpoon caught Amphimachos

below the breast bone. It was that funny.The big man screamed like a girland dropped stone dead, his armor clanging like chimes.

Multiply the scene a hundred times. Hell, a thousand.Men cut the heads off fresh corpses,then rolled them through the lines like bowling balls.

Our kings stole armor from the rotting deadand tossed it in a slave's direction. That was justanother way of doing business. On went the fandango

through the afternoon, the afternoons,chariots wheeling, horses hamstrungalong the shingle, gutted men beside them

broken up like toys, and the poets back in Greecealready thumbing up the right metaphor—say, a lion or a mountain boar, not that the poets

had seen many lions, or mountain boars.Tuned to the lyre, the death of a warriorbecame the felling of a thick-shanked oak.

The poets had learned the wisdomof getting their war dispatches secondhand.One after another, the son of so-and-so—

some petty king or minor godwho once had it off with a big-tittied girl—took a spear to the liver, the gut, the throat,

any place that promised a fountain of blood.A man cut across the bellywatched his own intestines bloom,

blue as sausages; and another sawhis cock nipped off neat as a rose bud.No one dared say, This is weird—it's just like a movie.

It was better than special effects.If you believed the eleven o'clock news, the godssaw everything, masked as at Mardi Gras—

they veiled their favorites when the dancing got thick,casting up mysterious steams of camouflage.I saw a lot of men die, often turgidly,

squealing for their mothers. I knew more than a fewof those boys, and one or two with reputations;but, a year later, who could point out

exactly where some apple-cheeked myrmidonstopped breathing, his chest sliced openas if by a scalpel, so you could see the pink pleats

of his lungs, the purple sturgeon of his liver?No one could remember his last words,or if he whispered any through the blood.

I laughed when Menelaos cold-cocked Peisandroswith an axe, making his eyes pop out,then made a speech, the way soldiers do in poems,

the death stretched out on hexameter like a tanned hide,though in battle mostly you heardFUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!

There were other things, Ajax the Oakbeaning Hektor with a rock, like Bob Feller,or standing...