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"Having bathed their wounded in the hot springs near Smyrna, called 'The Baths of Agamemnon'..." (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 160.y)
It was a cool night, and torch-gilded steam coiled up from the milky water. The steam was kind: it veiled the warriors' scars, their bloody limbs, their bruises and their grief.
There were girls somewhere. Odysseus could hear their high, clear voices, and the voices of men making them laugh and shriek. It was not a solace that interested him. He sat naked, chest-deep in warm, stinking water, and stretched his legs in front of him. The pool he had chosen was so small that his feet touched the bare rock of the opposite wall. A muscle in his calf spasmed and he leant forward to massage it. The water lapped comfortingly against his skin, like a hound.
The torch crackled and flickered. A footstep on the path behind him made him twist in the warm, opaque water. He cursed as the boar-scar on his thigh twinged.
A young man walked slowly along the edge of the pool, dark eyes fixed on Odysseus. He was naked except for the steam that drifted around him, and his long red hair glimmered like copper in the unsteady torchlight. A bracelet of red gold, no brighter than his hair, circled his wrist.
Odysseus had watched the others, in pairs and groups and singly, walk along the sanded path towards the larger pools below. Ajax had called to him to join them, but he'd only smiled. He had wanted to be alone, to think of the comrades who'd fallen in battle. Too many dead, and they had yet to find a pilot who could set a course for Troy.
Now Achilles halted beside the pool. He said nothing. He stood, invulnerably naked, and stared at Odysseus.
Odysseus met his gaze. He was weary already of challenges. He did not bother to drink in the sight of pale, steam-pearled skin or the elegant curve of torso and hip. Achilles was smiling slightly. His thumb rubbed over the fox-head terminus of the bracelet on his left wrist, over and over, like a caress. His penis, already half-hard, stirred in the dark curls at his groin.
The boar-scar on Odysseus' thigh flared like a call to arms. He leant his head back on the pool's rocky sill, still looking at Achilles. "Your cousin Patroclus," he said, "passed by a while ago. He asked if I had seen you."
Achilles' eyes glittered in the flickering light. There was something almost insolent in his broadening smile. Odysseus might have surged up out of the pool and wrestled that smile from his face, or put a different smile there. He was not foolish enough, any more, to be confident of how such a bout would end.
Achilles' stance provoked action. His hand fell from the bracelet to rub slowly across a dark bruise on his ribs. "What if I'd rather bathe with you?" he said, leaving space between the words for Odysseus to fill.
Odysseus shrugged. "I don't mind," he said, grateful to the cloudy water that hid his body's contrary response.
The stroking hand stilled. "You don't want ... You are sending me away?"
"I am weary after the battle," said Odysseus. "Your cousin will be a better companion."
"You grow old," said Achilles, without affection.
Odysseus gave him a level look. "Old enough to rule my passions, as any must who would grow old." He remembered prophecies, but did not speak of them.
For a moment it almost seemed that Achilles would speak of passion, seek solace, come to rest quietly beside him in the blood-warm water. It almost seemed that they might desire the same things. Then Achilles smiled at him suddenly, gloriously bright in the last sputtering flare of the torch.
"I'll leave you in peace," he said. "They'll be missing me."
The torch died, and the night crowded in around them. Odysseus sat in the dark and watched the shimmer of Achilles' back until the night veiled it. The warm water lapped at the day's aches. It numbed the edge of arousal that Achilles had left behind him.
"He won't grow old," he said aloud to the night.
-end-