In the sequel to her Iliad retelling The Silence of the Girls, told from the perspective of captured queen Briseis, Barker moves on from war to its aftermath
Troy has fallen. Its warriors, even its unborn male babies, are all dead. The mutilated body of the sacked city’s king, Priam, has been left lying in the dunes by the Greek camp, stinking and covered all over – as Pat Barker’s narrator horribly notes – with “flies, thousands of them … like a fuzz of black bristles”.
Now somebody has tried to bury Priam. The Greek Pyrrhus, who hacked him to death at the foot of an altar, is displeased. He wonders who could have attempted this act of respect. It must have been a Trojan. But which one? Alcimus, Pyrrhus’s chief lieutenant, points out that there are “only two Trojans in the camp”. He is thinking of Calchas, the priest, and Helenus, the Trojan prince who – under torture – revealed the information that enabled the Greeks to enter the city. But Alcimus is wildly, blindly wrong. There are plenty of other Trojans in the Greek camp, hundreds of them. These other Trojans, though, are of no account. To Pyrrhus and Alcimus they are doubly invisible because they are slaves and because they are women.