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This wasn’t Troy. This wasn’t even the world. This was the journey through the Beyond.
Katarina wondered what was to come next. If she’d reunite with her family who, presumably, were still awaiting their fates in the mortal realm. Her mother, one of the ladies-in-waiting to Queen Hecuba would surely reach her soon; it was logical that the Palace would fall first. Though she tried to downplay her anticipation, she wanted nothing more than to bury her face in her mother’s chest and forget both their sorrows.
At present however, she was in the company of strangers. Though being part of the heavens as they were, they probably knew her by heart; she simply had to catch up with them in turn. They were the family of the strange woman with whom she’d spoken before the Greeks had stormed the city. Priestess Cassandra would hiss and spit at the thought of her and her associates as anything but a sorcereress and evil spirits, but none of them were at all like that.
Her new Lord- no, he had asked to be named as ‘Doctor’- had accepted her into the blue box Priestess Cassandra had marked for sacrifice. Katarina had assisted her in pouring it over with oils and ignitive perfumes, and listened as her overseer cursed it twenty times over. But now, while Cassandra’s life faltered and ran out of fuel in the ruins, Katarina had found herself trapped in this casket. Yet she didn’t mind. It was better than the pits of Troy, transformed by the Greeks into Tartarus, that she’d left behind. Perhaps that made her a coward.
It was a strange sort of heaven, not at all like what Cassandra had sketched from her dreams. It was a deep, mellow white, with corridors stretching out onwards from the entry room. The entry room itself was rectangular, with an altar at its heart. At first this altar had breathed and sighed and wheezed, but then it had stopped. They had reached the place of perfection. Or so she’d thought, until the Doctor had denied it.
“At least, that is, we shall be stopping at a lot of places before that.”
That’s what he had said, sounding just as hopeful as the King had when he declared an end to the war. Katarina was sure he’d be right this time. The Greeks couldn’t hurt her now, not when she was already traversing safe passage to the Underworld.
Then he had commanded her to attend to the Grecian idol, Steven. He’d entrusted his care into her shaking hands whilst he left the box to seek a cure to the man’s personal purgatory.
He wasn’t what she’d envisaged for a foreign soldier.
During the war there had been plays depicting the Greeks as thoughtless and frightening and murderous, she had watched her brother play many such parts over the years. Katarina had believed it all. And she’d even been proven right, when they marched on Troy and charted the slaughter of the city. They were the enemy.
But Steven wasn’t. He was a whimpering, dirtied mess. When Katarina had seen him in the heat of battle he hadn’t known how to wield a sword nor parry one of her fellow Trojan’s blows. Now he was laying in a despairing heap on a bed the Doctor had prepared for him.
In the moments just following their departure from Troy, she and the Doctor had shrugged off his tunic to reveal the wound beneath. On his right side the skin was slashed from shoulder to elbow, a horrible berry-red gash that she imagined must feel like death itself. She almost pitied him. She almost hoped there was a cure. Nobody deserved to suffer in the afterlife, not even a Greek.
Not long after the Doctor had left, he’d fallen back into the world of dreams, leaving Katarina the sole attendant to his flesh. She was to watch the rise and fall of his pale chest and mop his burning brow. The Doctor said he was sick, not just from the pain of the wound but a deeper reaction to it within his body. His spirit was out of balance, leaving him hot and mewling in agony.
As Katarina watched him groan and sigh, his muscles clenched in pain, she wondered if he was to die. If the Doctor would find the miracle he searched for and save him. If it would be her fault if he succumbed. She was supposed to be praying for him, that was what saved dying men, but she couldn’t find it in herself to be the girl she’d been in life.
Instead she resigned herself to studying him. If he truly were the enemy, then it was her duty to learn him and decide whether his soul could be saved. In another universe, she hoped, he could have been a dutiful Trojan.
This couldn’t have been his first injury on the front lines, she noted. He was littered with pockmarks and etched-in scars, although none appeared as though they’d come from a sword’s blade. There was a cluster above his hip, marking the same side this present pain sprouted from, that suggested he’d been burnt. As if he’d fallen to the ground in a blaze of fire and glory-
Surely not glory? The Greeks didn’t deserve such words. Glory was reserved for the likes of the late Prince Hector, or his great father. No glory could come of a Grecian campaign. She couldn’t start attributing traits to Steven that he couldn’t possibly possess. Even if the Doctor had given him the grace of his transport, he was still one of them.
He was a broad, well-fed man; like the other Greeks she’d seen ransack the city, she supposed he was treated to a regular fill of rations delivered from his homeland. In contrast, Troy had been relying on the army’s mobile force which often failed to break the border and deliver enough food. Katarina considered herself lucky, she was fed the scraps of the royal family who were, of course, privileged to take the best rations.
Kataraina couldn’t help but notice that, apart from the hastily applied cloth sling that obscured part of his side, he was shirtless. She and the Doctor had decided against clothing him, he was too delirious and heavy with sweat for anything substantial. So there he was, laying bare and exposed, like he was simply another Trojan soldier surrendered to the High Priestess and her handmaidens being prepped for death. He even bled like a Trojan, too.
However he had none of the dignity of the warriors from her homeland. Instead his whole body was posed tensely and awkwardly as if he rejected the idea of death entirely. As if he believed that death by dagger was somehow beneath him. His nose was even upturned in that sickly, superior way she’d seen play out on Prince Paris’ face when he pricked his finger on a thorn. Trojan men had ten times the composure Steven currently had when they faced death.
Still, Katarina thought he must be brave despite that. If the gods had thought him worthy enough for this place. Then again they’d let her enter the box too, and she was anything but brave. She was just a handmaiden, if anything Cassandra should have come in her place. She could barely even remember which scriptures to thank them with, let alone how to lull a man back from his agony.
“Are you brave?” She faintly muttered to Steven’s body, wetting his brow with the charged sponge the Doctor had handed her before he left. “Is that why the gods have forgiven you?”
He didn’t respond; she hadn’t expected him to.
“This is a beautiful place.” She continued aimlessly. “Our Lord was good to let us stay. You must be thankful, he is finding help. Then you shall make it to the place of perfection.”
The words felt heavy on her tongue. She couldn’t promise that for him. Only Priestess Cassandra was allowed to practice prophecy; only she was allowed to determine his fate. What Katarina said would have no effect on his purgatory, all the words would do was echo around the heavens without meaning.
“I’m sorry.” Steven showed no sign of accepting her apology for blasphemy, but Katarina hoped it could reach him. “I shouldn’t be here.”
She didn’t understand why the gods had chosen her. While Troy was lost in ruin, why had she been found? Handmaidens weren’t made to be remembered. The heroes and rulers of Troy were supposed to be the immortal ones, forever seen and known, not her.
Instead they’d been discarded. King Priam and his family, the everyday citizens, the beauty of the city itself, they were all gone. Troy was frozen in time, its glory never to be recaptured. The heart of the city was likely never to return, it had been lost the moment the Greeks opened the gates. Katarina could only hope they too would lose themselves in the ashes of their conquest.
Troy was supposed to be hers forever. It was her city, her home. It was where she’d been born, raised, and had died. She was supposed to have belonged there forever.
Now however she’d been whisked away to a world not so lost. Outside the Doctor’s box was a fantasy greener than anything she’d ever known, with strange cries falling on them both from above. It was nothing like Troy. Or the place of perfection.
Even knowing she wouldn’t receive a response, she tried to find solace in voicing herself to Steven. “What is this place?”
Slowly, she continued: “Is it just us whom the gods found? Will we be alone on this passage?”
These were the kinds of questions she feared asking a conscious man, but Steven was anything but. And besides, despite the pain on his face, he was too soft, too unsoldierlike to object to her. Or at least she hoped he was.
“Do you have people waiting for you?” Surely he had to. Even if he was headed for a part of the heavens reserved for Grecians, there had to be people who missed him. “You must. They will be looking forward to seeing you again.”
Then, suddenly feeling bolder as if invigorated by the gods, she started to speak once more.
“I thought Troy was to be the end of me. That I was to die and know nothing more. I thought I’d be lost too then. But the Doctor found me, just as he is to find help for you. I don’t know why. My life was made for nothing more than serving the High Priestess. Yet I am here. In this unfamiliar land. Having been found.”
Katarina hoped this pale speech would compensate for her neglect of her temple duties. Even if she hadn’t prayed to the gods, she’d still acknowledged and thanked them. Perhaps this time that would be enough, without Cassandra’s watchful gaze ready to scold her.
She gently grabbed Steven’s free hand, it was hot and she could feel his heartbeat under his sweating skin. Despite their shared deaths, it felt alive. No doubt a merciful illusion from the gods. Katarina was glad she wasn’t faced with a shade. And that she herself hadn’t become one.
Instead she felt delightfully real. Like she was being looked upon for the first time.
“We shall have to stay together. Until we must part at our own heavens’ doors. I shall be here for you when you awake. If we were found together, we shall stay together.”