The Half God's Name Game by Travis Flatt
He could name every man he killed on the battlefield, a game we’d play most nights, sitting around the campfire on the beach, egging him on for more and more names.
He could have been making them up, of course, but they poured like a waterfall, nothing to betray deliberation: the list went on forever.
And, not only names, or how he’d killed them, but the color of their eyes, their scents, their last words, even their histories, their father’s names, the first time—we asked once for a laugh—they slept with a woman, her name, the names of the gods that they prayed to—because he was half god, after all, and could see on the glint of the blade the number of times his squire, Patroclus, had run his sword across the grindstone—which had to be five, a number sacred to him for some reason: he was always tapping his wine goblet five times before drinking, or lacing and unlacing his boots a fifth time—before bringing the weapon to him before battle each morning.
More importantly, he could tell us how many soldiers the Trojans were bringing afield, and how they were armed, their ranks and formations—all of this on the heat-hazy dawn of Troy’s beaches, or sometimes before sunrise, and sometimes before the Trojans even left the gates, because his vision wasn’t strictly tethered to time.
We discussed what that might be like while he slept, or pretended to—he’d grown up pretending to do many mortal things to fit with the other boys—and it made us dizzy.
The best we could do—it was Odysseus, of course, who proposed this—was decide that whatever dumb chaos a bug makes of its world with its brutal bulging eyes would be us, and by comparison, Achilles would see as a man sees.
“Exactly, like that: a bug against a man,” we all said, cheering and laughing.
But, when we got drunk and excitedly put that to him, Achilles laughed, called it a crude metaphor, which made Odysseus grin his sly grin, pretending not to be insulted.
Achilles clapped Odysseus on the back, said not to be angry, that there were more senses than mortals could imagine.
Odysseus said he knew that much, then reminded Achilles he’d taken a goddess, (or, so he claimed) as a lover, meaning Pallas Athena, who Odysseus would boast he had mounted, would tell and retell this lie some nights when deeply drunk, then swagger around the fire, talking outlandishly, after he’d gone too long without attention, saying that Pallas Athena made him feel things that he’d never imagined possible.
And then they laughed and hugged—Odysseus and Achilles.
It was that same grin we saw on Odysseus’s face when Achilles lay wailing in the tent, his leg ruined, begging to be released from his misery, which, of course, none of us could do.
Remember that Achilles had never felt this before—pain—and that he, who’d never so much as nicked himself shaving, who couldn’t so much as bruise his shin, couldn’t bear it, this man who’d killed six hundred and sixty-one men and could name them all.
Still, Odysseus gripped Achilles’s hand, grinned, smoothed his sweat-soaked hair, and told him to start back from the first man he’d killed in the war, to tell us each of their names—Achilles loved the game, although he pretended it bored him—and Achilles said: “Mursili.
I stabbed him through the throat with my spear; he wore a helmet he’d stolen from a Greek corpse the day before.
Diomedes thought I’d killed one of ours for a moment.
Huzziya.
I pierced him through the eye with an arrow; his beard was braided in knots on his chin to mask burn scars.
He didn’t go quickly, but cried out for his sister-in-law, over and over as he kicked and flopped, dying.”
By the time Achilles got to the fifth name, his face was white, his lips were blue, his eyes stared unseeing, and he whispered the names of the men he’d soon meet in hell.