Chapter 15 - Hector at the Gates
The days after Hector’s death were worse than the battle itself.
Battle gives people tasks.
Carry water.
Close gates.
Move wounded.
Fetch bandages.
Prepare weapons.
Grief gives people nothing to do.
Troy waited for Hector’s body.
Achilles kept it.
That fact spread through the city like sickness.
People whispered about what he had done.
Every retelling became crueler.
Whether each detail was true stopped mattering.
What mattered was that our prince, our defender, our certainty, lay in the enemy camp.
Priam vanished from public view for several days.
Then one night, something extraordinary happened.
The old king left Troy.
Quietly.
Not with an army.
Not with trumpets.
He went to Achilles.
I did not witness the meeting.
No Trojan commoner did.
What we learned came later.
Priam entered the camp of the man who killed his son.
He knelt before him.
He begged for Hector’s body.
Some said he kissed Achilles’ hands.
The same hands that had killed Hector.
When I first heard that, anger rose in me.
Then I imagined Priam.
An old father sitting before the killer of his child because grief had made pride useless.
I understood.
Achilles returned the body.
At dawn, word reached the city.
The gates opened.
A wagon approached.
People gathered along every street leading inward.
No one spoke above a whisper.
I stood with Ione, Myrine, Dymas, Sira, and hundreds of others.
The wagon passed.
Hector lay beneath coverings.
Priam walked near him.
The king looked older than he had a week before.
That is not a figure of speech.
Grief had changed his body.
His shoulders bent.
His face seemed smaller.
When the wagon passed us, Myrine lowered herself to her knees.
Others followed.
Soon nearly everyone along the street knelt.
I did too.
Not because Hector was a prince.
Because for years he had ridden out through the gate so that others did not have to.
His funeral lasted days.
Wood was gathered.
Women mourned publicly.
Songs were sung.
Stories spread through the city.
Men spoke of battles.
Women spoke of kindnesses.
Children spoke of the way he looked in armor.
Andromache’s grief was unbearable to witness.
She did not lose a symbol.
She lost the man who came home tired.
Astyanax lost the shoulders he used to ride upon.
Hecuba lost a son.
Priam lost something I do not have words for.
Helen mourned too.
That surprised some people.
It should not have.
Hector had treated her with more kindness than many in Troy.
I stood at a distance during part of the rites and watched smoke rise.
This was where some stories would end.
Hector dead.
Patroclus dead.
Achilles still alive.
A war suspended inside grief.
But Troy did not end there.
War rarely respects satisfying endings.
Fighting resumed.
New allies came.
New champions rose.
Old ones fell.
Even Achilles did not escape forever.
The story of his death reached us later—an arrow, Paris, divine guidance if you believe the singers. I did not see the fatal strike closely enough to swear how it happened.
I saw only the effect.
For once, the name Achilles stopped moving on the battlefield.
Some Trojans celebrated.
I did not.
By then, I had lost the ability to celebrate another man’s death simply because he belonged to the other side.
Too many graves had taught me the price of that pleasure.
After Hector's funeral, Ione and I walked through the market at dusk. Many stalls were closed. A boy was repairing a broken basket where his father had once sold grain. A woman I did not know swept ash from a doorway. The city had resumed living before grief was finished.
'It feels wrong,' I said.
'What?'
'That everything continues.'
Ione looked at me.
'What should it do?'
'Stop.'
'For how long?'
I had no answer.
She took my hand.
'Theron, that is what living is. Continuing when stopping would make more sense.'
I wrote that down later. She complained, as always.
New commanders replaced dead ones. New alliances were made. New weapons arrived. Boys who had once played Hector in alleys became soldiers. The machinery of war did not mourn. It filled empty places.
Even Achilles' death, when it came, did not end anything. Greeks mourned him. Trojans breathed easier. Then the next morning, guards still went to the walls.
Still the war continued.
Hector gone.
Achilles gone.
Patroclus gone.
And still men fought.
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That was when I understood the worst truth about war.
It can outlive the people who seemed to cause it.
