The Run

The Sun beats down on the great plain, on the great city that sits behind high walls in its centre, and on the forest of tents that surround the city. Heat rises in stultifying waves from parched earth, and the bodies that litter the plain.

It's relentless glare glances off white walls and off of the armour on men living and dead, on cracked helmets and dropped swords. And it beats down, down, down on a ragged figure that shambles around the walls of the doomed city, a broken puppet, and on another figure, tireless and titanic, that relentlessly, mercilessly, follows it.

Hector runs. He runs without grace, without style, without pride and without honour.

He runs, quite simply, for his life.

Gods, the Prince of Troy thinks, panting, crying, this bastard is fast.

He tries, through a mind exhausted by hours of relentless flight, tempered by heat and by exhaustion into a steady, forlorn tramp, to understand how he got here. How did he lose his sword?

How did he lose his shield?

How did he lose his balls? His bravery, his bravado, his bonhomie (He’s already lost plenty of blood). Crucially, actually, how did he lose his breath?

Hector can barely breathe. His lungs are burning in his chest. He feels like he could vomit blood, but that’s bothering him less than the fact that this bronze clad lunatic is, when he swings his head back, still a steady, foreboding, deadly figure in the middle distance, Herculean legs pumping as he pursues.

Why won’t he give up? Why won’t he quit?

Hector thinks back to the battle the previous day, of his comrades, his brothers, slaughtered. The good men fallen, butchered. He knew many of those men, nay, knew most of those men, and now?  Far, far too many of them, his soldiers and his friends, fallen, to the gleaming, blood-stained automaton that now chases him around his own city in an endless, battered game of tag.

The prince rounds a parapet. He can, through his peripheral vision, sense the archers he himself posted on the wall far above, archers surely suffering under this brutal sun.

They are, Hector realises, shouting encouragements, and futile advice. Hector wants to reach out and touch the sun-blistered stone that keeps him, and ten thousand Greeks, from getting in to his beautiful city. He wants to touch the stones that reach up, up, into the burning sky, into the hot midday sun, and that condemn him (don’t think it don’t think it don’t think it, he tries to tell himself) to death at the hands of the Greek champion.

‘Run, my lord!’

‘Have faith, Lord Hector!’          

In the steadily shrinking part of his mind not concentrating on this insane, endless, charge, on this low, cowardly, righteous escape, Hector reflects on the futility, of their love, their admiration in the face of his present circumstances, in the face of this monstrous bastard. This Trojan-murdering, pitiless fuck.

Feet slap against sun-baked mud.

Achilles.          

The God-Prince had come out of the swirling dust, through bloody, cowering, scuttling men, the man that was not quite a man, a thing of metal and blood and fury, and Hector had stared into the dark gaps in that gleaming, infamous helmet. And he had seen those hateful eyes staring back, and he had known. He had known, and he, Prince Hector, Heir to the Kingdom, Protector of Troy, and all-round hero, had run.

Now, the Protector of Troy takes a risk, and spins again. His breath is jerking through a parched throat, as his bloodshot eyes turn to look behind.

The shape follows.

Hector spins back, tears welling in his bloodshot eyes. It is just so unfair.

He thinks of his wife, of his new son. Men said Helen was the face to launch so many thousands of ships, but for Andromache, Hector thinks, he would happily have launched a thousand, would have sent a million men to their deaths to see her and his little boy again. Even as he runs, half falling now, the Prince of Troy remembers for what is surely the last time his wife’s smile, and the sound of his son’s infant laugher, and, for all that he is ragged and exhausted and surely dying, he smiles through cracked lips.

He can see a shadow on the ground, stretching longer and longer beside the flickering shape he himself casts. He’s dimly aware that his legs are kicking out more than they are actually finding purchase, and then his foot catches on something, on a rock or a branch or a body. The Prince of Troy’s legs finally fail, and the he falls on his face like a drunk, choking on dust.

And footsteps draw closer, and slow, and finally stop.

The shadows flicker and lengthen in the twilight as the sun sets on the plain, on the great white city, on the broken things that lie thrown across it, and then they are still.