The Lies of Lemnos
by Taurenelle
Lines 209-236 - Reimagined in Prose
Something was afoot.
The sound of marching strangers bit through the silence, poisoning his plans and forcing Philoctetes to tread carefully. He was now more akin to his beastly companions than the nobleman he once was. His eyes, now like an owl, spotted their anchored ships; his skin, now like a viper, sensed the vibration of his visitor’s helm; his ears, now like a bat, heard the trespassers traversing his humble home.
On Lemnos, he lived in loneliness for longer than he’d like to admit. And when the odd merchant took refuge on his deserted shores, they neither approached him as friend nor foe, slayer nor savior, but painfully indifferent to his woes and woefully indifferent to his pain. But these footsteps were heavy and familiar, like those of a ghost, striking fear, flaming hope, and disrupting his miserable existence.
He looked to the sea for comfort, but the waves had abandoned him, and the winds waved goodbye. He looked to the hill for answers, but even the boars were bored of his questions. He looked to the cave he dwelt in, which held two mouths but offered no words of wisdom. Philoctetes was alone, save for his bow, which never missed, and these strangers venturing further into the woods.
He counted sixteen men in all. They were standing by his rags and laughing at his riches. The youngest among them, barely a man— half the age he was when cursed Odysseus left him to die—seemed to be in command. He could kill the boy in an instant. Even these makeshift arrows with basalt tips could pierce a supple neck when shot from his Herculean bow. Perhaps he should aim for the boy’s heel. Watch him leap about like a wretched mule.
Or perhaps—
The pain slithered from his ankle to his knee, sinking its teeth into his veins and wrapping its torment around his nerves, bleeding his mind of what little soundness remained. The relentless disease released his blood like water from a well, taking enough to quench its thirst but never allowing it to run dry. A suffering that rose as surely as the sun—and thrice as often.
Philoctetes wailed and groaned and crawled like a creature toward the curious crowd. Using his bow as a crutch, he hoisted himself to his feet, swallowed his anguish, and trepidatiously approached the troops with the dignity of the man he once was. Though he knew he no longer looked nor smelled like the son of Poes.
“Announce yourselves. From where do you hail?” he demanded.
The young man glanced toward his comrades and back at Philoctetes.
“Speak. Speak,” he begged more than commanded, for they wore their armor as if they were wearing his memories. And for a moment, he was ten years younger, sailing to Troy with a shield very much like that. A prince. A hero. A name history would remember, and poets would sing.
“You’re Greek, aren’t you?” He let a tear run down his cheek. “I may look like death, but I don’t wish to bring it. Say something, child. If you are Greek, let me hear your words so I know that I still speak a common tongue and have not replaced it with the babbling of a babe or the ramblings of a madman. Speak.”
“Indeed. We are Greek,” said the boy.
Philoctetes took a step closer. “Tell me everything, oh bringer of the sweetest sound. Tell me who you are.”
Lines 753-820 - Reimagined in Prose
The scream was at once close and distant, foreign and familiar, the verity of pain and the illusion of relief. A scream his lips had ushered in a thousand times, but here, before the boy, felt anew: a wretched cry with an edge of shame, like an arrowhead laced with poison. But what stung Philoctetes all the harsher was realizing that the tales of his grief did not reach the shores of Skyros or the plains of Thessaly or anywhere further than the jagged rocks that he limped to for his daily scavenge.
“How can you not know?” he begged the boy, hoping to will compassion into existence.
“I know nothing of your pain other than the grief it brings you at this very moment,” Neoptolemus responded, looking not at him but to the open sea.
The eyes of a deserter.
Eyes Philoctetes had seen once before, though he knew not what they were when they were worn by the men who once called him their captain or when they accompanied Odysseus' deceptive smile. But he knew them now.
“Don’t be scared, friend. Do not leave me. Unlike me, the pain only stays on Lemnos briefly,” Philoctets laughed. He found it quite comical that men could murder their enemies and bury their allies, yet the sight of bloody veins turned them all into toddling babes who wanted nothing more than to bury their heads in the comfort of their mother’s bosom.
But the wretched disease had no appetite for jest, only for toil.
As his screams serenaded the birds and the beasts and his reluctant companion, scenarios danced in Philoctetes mind. Traders happened upon him, helpless, and robbed him of his only possession. Soldiers, fleeing war, took refuge in his dwelling and seized from him the spoils their cowardice deprived them in Troy. Hercules himself descended from Olympus and reclaimed what was once his. The fears danced and danced until he decided that trust was his only option.
But trust was a moving target.
“Here, boy. Take my weapon. Take my quiver. An archer you may be not, but my bow never misses. Guard it, child. Should anyone come, man or beast, take aim, take lives, and take care not to let it fall into anyone’s hands.”
At once, grievous pain plagued his foot and melted his mind. The sky was filled with stars, though the sun was shining, and Philoctetes was no longer a crippled man lying on the grass, but a virile soldier, cursing his commanding officers. Wishing an equal pain upon Agamemnon, willing that he suffer for ten years before returning to his loving wife, and demanding that Menelaus leave Troy short a bride and full of torment.
But mostly, he was cursing death, who, despite his beckoning, refused to pay him a visit. Soon, he knew not what he was saying or whom he was speaking to, but he felt someone pulling his bow from relenting fingers, and he drifted into a place between reality and illusion.
Shouting to everyone and no one all at once, he was a suppliant to the silhouette who stood before him. “Why are you quiet? Don’t leave. I beg. Don’t leave.”
“Fear not. I am commanded to stay,” the voice said.
A glimmer of doubt echoed in his mind. Who commands a deserter?
Trust was a moving target.
But the thought left as quickly as it came, and he looked to the sky. “Up, up,” he demanded. “Take me to where the earth will swallow me.”
The sky and the earth spun into a singular peculiarity. And a wretched man succumbed to peaceful slumber.
Lines 918-974 - Reimagined in Prose
Troy.
Troy?
Troy!
“What are you saying, stranger?” Philocetets head swirled as if the disease was attacking him, yet he was as sober as the day he set sail from Thessaly.
“That you are needed at the citadel of Priam,” Neoptolemus gripped the weapon tightly.
“My bow is needed, you mean?”
“Both, woeful man. In what position are you in to refuse a rescuer?”
“In what position are you in to take what is not yours? Has not Odysseus done the same to you, depriving you of the arms of Achilles? And now, you wish to deprive me of my only means of survival. Whose son are you? The seed of Pelus or the seed of Laertes? Give me back my bow.”
Philoctetes stood tall, and for a moment, he was as straight as a man with two flat feet. His outreached palm sternly demanded to be filled, like the expectant hand of a merchant.
“My orders forbid it,” Neoptolemus yanked the bow a bit further away.
Philoctetes wished he could steal fire like Prometheus and rain it down like Zeus, burning the boy where he stood, or that he could release the entrapped wind of Aeolus from an ox-skin sack and blow the traitor’s body into the furthest reaches of the sea. But no bards would sing about the rage of Philoctetes, only the ruin, only the sorrow, only the tears.
“Please, master,” he bowed as much as his pain would allow, “do not rob me of all I have.”
But the boy turned his back on him, marching toward his men.
Begging commands and adjuring pleas snaked around the soldiers’ ears, plummetted to the quiet ground, and were trampled underfoot. Neither head nor spirit were moved by the wretched man’s words. So, Philoctetes dug unkempt nails into his bare chest, for only a ghost can be so ignored.
But he felt the pain.
He always felt the pain.
Once a prince, he was now nothing more than a prize to be paraded about.
“A hallow prize,” Philoctetes whispered to the trees. Does this boy not know he’s slaying a corpse? Does he not know he attempts to shackle the shadow of smoke? What sort of meal is a flea to a boar? What kind of bait is a worm to a whale? What sort of prize is a broken man to a greedy king?
“What victory would befall him if I were younger?” he asked the jagged cliffs, “or even now, should I have my bow?”
“None,” he answered himself before collapsing onto the ground. “Alas, I don’t have my quiver. I don’t have my strength. I don’t have a band of friends who will come to my aid. Only you, Lemnos. Only your lifeless cliffs and your tongueless beasts who, at least, speak no trickery.”
He watched as a bird of prey plucked a baby mouse who was hopelessly fleeing in the field. He reached for a bow that was no longer by his side. He could kill the winged creature and nourish himself by sundown. But now, he was the mouse, running through the wild, half believing he would make it home, half knowing he wouldn’t survive the night.
“It is only fair,” he shouted at distant boars, “that you feast on my flesh for once.”
Neoptolemus appeared over him. “What are you on about, wretched man?”
“Slaughter for slaughter. The way it should be. For it is better to kill a man with sword or tusk than with falsehoods. But you know no glory, boy. When they sing songs of Troy and the deeds of Neoptolmeus, you will have to cover your ears so they do not bleed from metered lies.”
The boy leaned on the bow like a crutch, succumbing to the weight of the words.
“Die, bastard. But not yet. Lest your deceiving mind tricks itself into doing what is right.” Philoctetes wiped the blood from his ever-draining wound on a soiled rag and flung it toward Neoptolemus. “Another prize to add to your fool’s lot.”
A proud moment passed before Philoctetes begged.
Not for the last time.
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