Better Days To Come

Summary: Sequel to The Gift. Dianeira & Eudorus adjust to each other as slave & master in short vignettes. Eudorus & OFC.

Note: To recap, Odysseus took a drunk Eudorus to Agamemnon's ship for the feast of kings, and when Eudorus left, he ran into a slave woman who was tossed from the ship by an irate guard when he caught her and Briseis trying to escape. Eudorus brought the woman back to camp and Achilles gave her to him; Eudorus would rather not accept, but can't refuse. He and another Myrmidon, Tydeus, had abused a captive girl past the point of suicide years earlier during a drunken, post-battle binge and he does not trust himself that those impulses have been fully conquered. At the end of the story, Eudorus sees the night's events not as something to be feared, but a chance to redeem himself for his past crime. He takes the woman back to her nearby farm and helps her bury her dead husband and, hopefully, his guilt.

The story will have alternating viewpoints with each short chapter.

Chapter 1

Dianeira

He puzzles me.

Clearer eyes I have never seen in man, woman or child. I have been told of seas that are so pristine, so flawless, that one can see the turtles and fish swimming beneath and see the scatter spray of shells and corals, dazzling in their colorful beauty. Riveting clarity, piercing and stark.

Such are his eyes. Sometimes I glimpse a hurting truth within their depths, but he is ever alert and watchful. When he catches me watching him, he kicks at the sand and the pools are obscured. I have learned to be furtive in my observations, but it is so very difficult. He is a soldier, trained to be wary and ready to sense action and threat. I am only a simple farmer's wife and am cursed with a slowness of mind. What do we do besides work and watch and wait? Crops to grow, stock to tend. Our days are frantic, scurrying about like unquestioning, busy little ants, our only occupation that of feeding ourselves and our betters.

I was a farmer's wife. My dear husband is dead, buried by my hands. And his, this man who holds my freedom and life.

He took me back to my farm when he learned of my husband's fate. We walked through the night, arriving as dawn soaked the horizon with a bloody aurora. My Krios was still there, slaughtered and left to rot above ground in the wrecked remains of the livestock shed. This man's people, the Myrmidons, had laid waste to the meager holdings that Krios and I had spent our short married life building. As much as I loved my husband, it wounded me more to see the smoking ruins of our home, the scorched skeletal structures tilting precariously at bizarre angles. They looked so miserable that I wanted to rush to them and push them over, if only to do the damage myself rather than let them be victim any longer to foreign forces.

I do not remember much else of that morning beyond looking into the ugly, death-disfigured face of my husband. What wife could erase such an image of one beloved? He was nary recognizable, a bloated, disgusting thing that made me scream, then weep.

I hear the keening wail even now, but I do not recall what happened afterward. I know I did not faint, I am proud to say. Krios would have chided me that I had been so frail as to weep, appalled if I had keeled over into the dust like a starved lily. He was a stiff and unemotional man, not wanting to be made a fuss of. I had indulged him for some years, been the strong and imperturbable wife who met crop disasters and the death of newborn babes with a stoic air. There was always work to be done, always neighbors worse off than ourselves. No time for self-pity, no time for weakness.

My cry of pain, of agony, was a bittersweet pleasure. I had lost him, but how good it felt to let my wound be free and bleeding openly, rather than smothered and staunched from public view. That one of the breed who had killed my husband was the only witness, I cared not.

I have spoken falsely; I do remember more of that morning. My cry still resounds in my ears, and I see before me my weary hands piling the final remnants of dirt on a grave that I never envisioned digging. But my hands are not alone. His were there as well, as dirty as mine, as weary yet determined as mine. We pushed mounds of earth against each other, digging and scraping. He had left me briefly to search for a spade, but he returned empty-handed. Did I weep then? Did I, grief-stricken, insist we put my husband to rest even if we had to break our fingers in the dry earth to do it? I don't remember. All I know is that he dropped to his knees, set to work, and made a widow's sleep more peaceful.

As I sit here in the Greek camp, in a makeshift hut on the beach head, I often find myself wondering why he was so caring, so dedicated to seeing buried a man he never knew, yet he cannot bring himself to look at me.

He does not want me, and I do not want him. Achilles, The Lion Among Greeks, thrust me into this man's care, his ownership. A gift! I have been the property of too many men before two suns had risen, passed from hand to hand through circumstances never of my own making. I am weary of it, but my husband's counsel often comes to me and says that I have already passed the worst and despair is pointless. "Leave it be!" he would say. "What is done is done!" How callous, how cruel that can sound, but it is all the assurance I have to comfort me, for it is true.

The soreness in my body is fastly fading, the rapes now in the past. I pray.

I pray there will be no more, no more of men setting themselves upon me like slavering dogs, and I pray that I am not carrying the sprout of a bastard seed. It is too early to tell, and I wonder what I will do on the day I discover such an ugly reality. I am a better farmer than I am a mother. Nothing that has ever taken root in my womb has survived. That used to be cause for lament; now I treasure that poisoned soil. But ill luck has fallen upon me in torrents of late, and the gods are fickle. It is possible that the divine Olympians decided my belly should finally produce something alive and strong!

But I can no longer think upon it. There are always things to do, even in a Greek encampment. These barbarian invaders do not loll about in dissolute pleasure and debauchery. They are not the weaklings our braggart priests and officials proclaim, not mediocre warriors whose only kills are made by divine intervention or foolish luck. If they are, they are perhaps the luckiest soldiers to ever wield arms. The mourning wails that rise from walled Troy attest to that.

The Greeks will not vanish because Troy wishes it so. They are clinging to the sands, and I am powerless to help remove them. If anything, I am aiding them. Slaves do as they are told and I now understand the distaste for allegiance to any one party. It makes betrayal completely moot.

What am I doing thinking of such weighty matters? There are reed mats to weave, and I must attend to it. My hands are constantly busy and I try to keep my mind similarly active. Rhymes, riddles, and reciting the stories of heroes that were told around the evening fire when I was a child. Simple things. Comforting things.

Anything, anything to bear another day.

The sun is warm upon my neck as I bend it to my task, the salty sea breeze creating a tangy taste on my tongue when I lick my lips in concentration. Whenever my hands grow sore, I look up and rest and watch the roll of the waves and the playful dance of gulls. The water is not blue, but a dull grey, and I wonder if I will ever see those pristine, far away oceans. Will I ever dive beneath the cool waters and skim over the sands?

And what treasures might I find?