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I am a boy that should have grown up in Phthia, among the olive groves, beside the cliffs, and on the beaches. I should have grown up with my father, and even with Patroclus. That is a different life. Maybe a happier one, I’m not sure because I have never known it.
Instead I grow up in the kingdom of Thetis, offshore from her underwater domain. It is not bad there. I am taught things my natural talents make easy.
On my sixth birthday my weapons trainer, Glaucus, puts a spear in my hand and a target in the distance. I hit it.
On my eighth birthday, I can fight dually with a spear and a sword. I slice the stomachs open of two animals in one go.
There is not a lot I know about my father. Thetis does not tell me a lot, as if she doesn’t want me to get attached. But I knows she does not hate him, he is mortal and you cannot hate a mortal but pity them. Yet, there is an exception, she hates Patroclus.
Of all the things I’m taught, fighting, music, the stories of men I will become greater than, I am taught mostly to hate Patroclus, even though I’ve never met him.
Thetis tells me of Patroclus, the foster-son of Peleus. She teaches me that Patroclus is not the aristos achaion as the fates sometimes whisper.
Because I will become the new aristos achaion in the eventuality that I'll travel to join the war in Troy, and be better than the heroics of my father.
Patroclus is clumsy, I am told. He is lumpy and ungraceful. A murderer of his peers, an exile, a disgrace. He is everything I am not. Thetis tells me Patroclus is nothing I should aspire towards. Unlike my own father, Patroclus will not be remembered. The way Thetis tells me this, it sounds like Thetis herself will ensure it. Can you bury a dead man in this way? It makes me scared, I do not want to be forgotten as Patroclus will be.
While I am with Thetis, the war in Troy rages. The war I haven’t joined yet, but I will. Thetis says it is not time. One night one of the nymphs tells me a story from her time in Troy.
“Patroclus doesn’t fight like the others, when they go out for their raids, he stays behind.”
That shocks me, Patroclus must not have the drive for war I has. Even now, miles from Troy, I get urges to take up arms. People say that no one will kill Hector but I can, surely.
The war in Troy has raged for years and I am still trapped on the island, still training, still with rage in my bones as bright as my hair. And now, after what has happened, it burns more.
It was an accident, hearing what I heard. The nymphs were talking to close to the shore, without Thetis to quiet them.
“Some say he’s given up!”
“I doubt that. There must be some Greek war-like strategy against the Trojans making him hide away.”
I emerge from the bushes with the grace of a predator, “what’s this?”
The nymphs begin to slink away into the water but I stand tall and demand they stay.
“I have royal blood, the blood of heroes. You will tell me of gossip from Troy!”
“But Thetis would not–”
“–Thetis is not here!”
They peer at each other, but give in to the demands.
“Your father is there, at Troy.”
I falter, my father. His father, the man I want to me so desperately, at Troy.
“Go. Tell Thetis to meet me here.”
They go.
It takes persuading.
“I’m ready.”
“No, you are not.”
She stands there, like a cold idol refusing the whims of mortals.
“If I am the aristos achaion like you say I am then you will let me go.”
She takes days to consider it, but eventually it is decided.
“You will sail tomorrow!”
The boat journey is arduous. I did not know there was this much ocean in the world and this is my first time travelling. Thetis accompanies me on the journey, installing so much of what she has already taught:
To hate Patroclus. To, on arrival, claim the greatness of my father, and his father’s father. To remember that hubris will kill others but not me.
Along the way, I receive a piece of news.
Patroclus has died in Troy. In the throng of fighting.
And so has my father.
Such prominent figures in childhood. Gone, without ever meeting them.
I don’t see Thetis on the journey again after that, the nymphs say she is too wrapped up in grief and is already ahead at the Greek camp. Grief? The term puzzles me. I feel underwhelmed. I didn’t get the chance to meet my father or spit on Patroclus as I had so often imagined myself doing so. A lose of potential, I think, in their deaths.
There is an assembly in progress when I arrives. Thetis greets me on the shore, tells me how to act and what to say.
“Do not let them see you for your age, your inexperience doesn’t make you invaluable.”
When I stand at the entrance no one notices me, so I let the meeting play out before interrupting them.
Agamemnon and the others discuss the tomb of my father, and Patroclus.
“We should put it on the field where he fell,” Nestor says.
Machaon shakes his head. “It will be more central on the beach, by the agora.”
“That’s the last thing we want. Tripping over it every day,” Diomedes says.
“On the hill, I think. The ridge by their camp,” Odysseus says.
This angers me, the thought that Patroclus will be buried with my father as if they are equals. Now is my time to speak, while the anger in my voice will give false-sense of authority.
“I have come to take my father’s place.” I say, in a clear cut voice.
The heads of the kinds twist towards the tent flap.
I know how I must look. Hair bright red, the colour of the fire’s crust; beautiful, but coldly so, a winter’s morning.
“I am the son of Achilles,” I announce.
The kings stare. Most of them did not know Achilles had a child, after all I have been hidden away since birth by Thetis. Taken away from my mother, Deidameia.
Only Odysseus has the wits to speak. “May we know the name of Achilles’ son?”
“My name is Neoptolemus. Called Pyrrhus.” My father’s nickname; my hair. “Where is my father seat?”
I am a boy that should have grown up in Phthia, among the olive groves, beside the cliffs, and on the beaches. I should have grown up with my father, Achilles, and even with Patroclus, his lover and a surrogate-second-father. That is a different life. Maybe a happier one, I’m not sure because I have never known it.