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Achilles is a woman, though none but her know this.
This truth has been her secret, her guilt, her only fear since she first looked at the way the slave girls moved and looked and thought: I want to be that, rather than I want to possess that, which is how her father and cousins and companions have always talked. She held this knowledge within her like a baby bird, shielding it from the wind, keeping it safe from harm. She lets it fly free only in little moments, far from any others- as she falls asleep, when she practices with her spear, she repeats a mantra to herself: I am Achilles, daughter of Peleus, and I am a woman.
When she meets Patroclus, she almost tells him at once. He knows her heart at once, and she his. They fall into patterns immediately, closer than brothers, fonder than friends. She loves him and he loves her, but she can’t tell him, no matter how much she trusts him. He would never tell another, she knows that, but more than anything, she fears how he would look at her if she told him the truth. He might love her now, but how quickly that could be turned to hate. She knows all the jokes, full of disgust, that they tell about men who wear women’s clothes and she knows that those jests always have violence hidden under them. She trusts Patroclus, loves, needs him, but this? This she knows she can share with no man, if she wants to survive.
Skyros is wonderful and horrible and confusing. Though she has never told her mother, she fears that Thetis sees the gleam of excitement mixed with disappointment in her eyes when she learns of her plan to hide her. Oh, Achilles wants to go to war, wants all the glory she can get, but to live as a woman, even as a disguise, even for barely any time, is almost as good of a reward. She is pretty in woman’s clothing, Patroclus tells her, with laughter in his voice. She punches him in the arm, if only to hide the gleam of pleasure that his statement brings. She finds that her swift feet are just as useful in dancing as in running drills and delights in it. Deidamia is clever and pretty and useful, teaching her how to do her hair and walk so that outsiders never suspect her to be a man. Achilles never tells her that she really is a woman, that this disguise is the truest face she’s ever worn, but the princess sometimes looks at her, calculating, and seems to guess more than she ever says.
She knows that something is odd about the traders the second they come into Skyros. They are too clever, too wealthy, too eager. Well, the skinny one with the beard is too eager, the younger man seems laconic almost to the point of silence. Nevertheless, she peruses the jewelry and cloth with her “sisters”, though she itches to pick up the spear and give it a thrust. She may be a woman, but she’s always been more inclined to Atalanta than Aphrodite. When the alarm rings and she does pick up the spear, whirling around in skirts to find and fight whatever there may be, she feels more like who she ought to be, more true, than she has ever felt before. But of course, it’s a trap, a trick and she ends up marching off to war.
The whole business on Aulis is terrible and that is really all she can say about it. If she could pick how she’d like to look, she thinks she would go for something like Iphigenia, in all her fresh-faced, wide eyed loveliness. It’s not right for her to die like this. She ought to die old and grey haired, in a warm bed, either with loving children near or near to the temple of Artemis. She shouldn’t be allowed to be slaughtered for a favorable wind, to fix the failings of her pathetic father. A bitter voice in Achilles’ mind say Be grateful you look like a boy, if you looked like a girl, look at what might happen to you. But that voice has been there for years, whispering cruel things than that, so she steels her heart and mourns the other girl quietly.
She sometimes wonders if Patroclus has figured her out. They never talk about Scyros, never has he asked her why she went along with it. She is grateful, because she doesn’t know if she could explain but she also wants to scream sometimes, wants him to ask, wants him to know her, because he is her heart and she wants to be with him until she dies but he doesn’t know her as well as he might think and she just wants someone to know and she trusts him to the end of time but her tongue ties itself up when she thinks to tell him or to ask him if he knows and she is the best of the Achaeans and fears no Trojan but she sometimes fears all her greatest friends. Patroclus kisses her sweetly and bandages her wounds and smiles with her, he loves her and she should tell him but she can bring herself to risk it.
Briseis stands with her hands loosely tied together and looks like she is somewhere completely different. She looks like nothing like Deidamia or Iphigenia; she is all sharp angles and wild hair. If anything, she is closest to Patroclus in her bearing and face. It takes her several days to loose the gentle, dazed look that she wore when she was first taken by the army. Once she does, Achilles quickly realizes her mind is as sharp as a sword. She learns Greek quickly and teaches Patroclus her tongue in quiet languages. She teases them and dances with them and sometimes it can almost be forgotten that she has seen most of her kin cut down and even if she could leave the camp, her home has burned. They would be great friends, the three of them, if they were all equals but they are not and never can be.
Achilles fights and kills and gains all the glory she’s always desired. She is feared and loved and not a soul besides her has any idea who she truly is.
She whispers it into the curve of Briseis’ neck one night, fear twisting her gut and exhaustion cutting at her mind, when Patroclus is asleep, but the slave girl is still awake.
“I am a woman, I have always been one, but I could not say it,” she says, breathing in the scent of the other’s hair, hiding herself away. She does not tell her because she trusts her anymore than Deidamia, love her anymore than Patroclus, but because she knows, no matter how much she wishes they could be equals, that if Briseis were to speak out her secret, none would believe her, she would be mocked for saying that the great and mighty son of Peleus is no man. She turns over, so they are face to face. Achilles cannot meet her eyes, staring resolutely at her mouth.
“Do you believe me?” she asks, as quietly as she can and still make a sound.
“Of course, my lady,” she replies and presses a soft kiss to Achilles forehead.
Achilles is a woman and one other knows this and loves her despite it and maybe even more for it and that will be enough for now.