The vastness of eternity

Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity.
And so we ask ourselves, will our actions echo across the centuries. Will strangers here our names long after we've gone and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved...

The temple

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;"

― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

She heard it when the horns sounded. One would have thought she would have ran away, but she knew her land, she knew how long it took to run - or even ride - from the temple to the walls of the castle. She would never make it in time.

She had never seen the true face of war, but she knew of it. Had heard the horror stories of men throwing children from city walls when they invaded. Heard many more things she preferred not to think about, but that haunted her dreams none the less. No one understood why she should think of that so much… and Briseis understood no one when they told her not to worry about such bloody things.

Why should she not worry? They lived with war every day. They had many enemies and were attacked by armies ever few years. Even though true war, at their gates, had not touched Troy for many years, Briseis still feared its shadow. She knew nothing of it, everyone protected her from that knowledge, but the void was something more frightening than the tales. Even when Hector had tried to lessen her fear of the unknown with little tales of the Spartan wars, Briseis could sense his holding back.

And now she knew what he had been hiding: he had never given her the cruelty. Never described the blood, the iron, the death in the air. Her cousin was good man, he did not relish in the blood he spilled. He did not speak of it.

Everything horrible that Briseis knew of war, she had learned from his silences.

But not anymore…

The priests hid her under a hidden compartment of stone, behind Apollo's statue, but neither she nor the priests that hid her had any idea what would come to pass. They had thought that the Greeks, no matter how barbarian, would not desecrate holy ground… but they had been wrong. So wrong. The proof of it was all around her.

The trembling hands tightly pressed over ears did nothing to muffle the sounds of death downing the air. Briseis still heard everything. Her old mentors were slaughtered, brave soldiers of her city died while she hid and trembled, doing nothing more than hearing them scream and moan as they passed.

Then the Greeks started looting, destroying. No sense or reason. Nothing was theirs here, they owned not anything… perhaps that was why they destroyed all they fell upon with such pleasure.

The laws of war said that that very beach she had played in as a child would belong to the Greeks in the afternoon, because they wet its sand with Trojan blood. It did not matter to war that usurpers only took to destroy, that they held only hatred for this land. Noting mattered to war but death and blood.

It was so sad that a place so filled with harmony was no overrun by hate. And Briseis - young heart had no doubt of that - these foreign men must hate Troy and Trojans - why else would they kill so fiercely? How else could they find it within their hearts to destroy so recklessly?

But then came the question, what kind of hate was so strong to make them risk laying down their own lives, just for the sake of destruction. Just to possess something they didn't even want to keep. Hector said they were coming to Troy just to burn it to the ground. They didn't really want to rule here, just to wipe them out.

It was so unfair.

And the mindless violence behind it, the sheer bloodthirst, was frightening.

Why...

But Briseis could not understand. She could not comprehend the mind of a killer...

At one point she had been pulled out from her hiding place. By then she was hardly even there. She could not feel her own body… perhaps that was why she didn't remember much of what had happened. So out of her own mind was she that when they men spoke between themselves as they restrained her, she didn't understand them at all. Briseis spoke several languages, Greek being only one of them, but that had nothing to do with her inability to understand. The screams of men dying were still battering her ears. She could not feel their hands bruising her - she was numb from head to toe, truck dumb and deaf and blind. The possibility of death tinkled her, but she could not gather enough sense to be afraid.

Or at least so it seemed at first.

But when a blow slammed into her with force of the likes she had never felt, reality also slammed into life was at its end and Briseis finally shocked herself into being alive. The present time - where she was, what was happening to her - started to become clearer. The immediateness of her own death, the sudden understanding of her situation pierced her like tiny needles, pushing deeper and deeper into her skin with every breath.

She started to see the soldiers now. The vibrant read splattering their armors, the fierce sight they made with their helmets… they were visions from her nightmares.

Now she knew why her friends considered her so very strange for ever wondering what war would be like. She knew why her cousin Hector never really wanted to speak of it.

Because he knew that war could not be told. War, like bone-chilling terror, could only be felt.

And she was feeling it now.

Her breathing sped up as reality came awake, as she faded out of her numbness.

Was this war? Was this what hid in Hector's silences?

The soldiers spoke directly the Briseis, but she only stared at them trying to hold back tears, trying to retain some of what she was in the way she stood straight, not bawling, not begging. She did not possess nightmares so terrible as to know exactly what would happen, but she knew it would be a fate worse than burning.

She was a captive now.

Welcome Briseis, to war.

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TBC:::