The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

The boy stepped closer. He lifted a fist. “Are you calling me a liar?” I knew that he would hit me now. He was just waiting for an excuse. I could imagine the way my father would have said it. Coward. I planted my hands on his chest and shoved, as hard as I could. Our land was one of grass and wheat. Tumbles should not hurt. I am making excuses. It was also a land of rocks.

He stopped. “Drills.” “Alone?” “Yes. No one sees me fight.” The words came as if he were used to saying them. “Why?” He looked at me a long moment, as if weighing something. “My mother has forbidden it. Because of the prophecy.” “What prophecy?” I had not heard of this. “That I will be the best warrior of my generation.”

He knew, but it was not enough. The sorrow was so large it threatened to tear through my skin. When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him. I opened my mouth, but it was too late. “I will go,” he said. “I will go to Troy.”

Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.

You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

“What if I will not?” His words have gone stiff. “Then you will not.”

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.