The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

When at last they pulled off the veil, they say my mother smiled. That is how they knew she was quite stupid. Brides did not smile.

Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all. The sudden swoop of my stomach, the coursing anger. I was like a fish eyeing the hook.

Therapon was the word he used. A brother-in-arms sworn to a prince by blood oaths and love. In war, these men were his honor guard; in peace, his closest advisers. It was a place of highest esteem, another reason the boys swarmed Peleus’ son, showing off; they hoped to be chosen.

There was a vividness to him, even at rest, that made death and spirits seem foolish. After a time, I found I could sleep again. Time after that, the dreams lessened and dropped away.

I surprised myself with how much there was to say, about everything, the beach and dinner and one boy or another.

He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?

I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread: my father was not near, nor boys. I was not hungry, or tired, or sick. This feeling was different.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through the salt. It was enough.

As I ran, I promised myself that if I ever saw him again, I would keep my thoughts behind my eyes. I had learned, now, what it would cost me if I did not.

“I hoped that you would come,” he said.

Achilles had not gone to Chiron. He had waited, here. For me.

“There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.

“I almost did not come, because I did not want to leave it.” He smiled. “Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”

“You would not be displeased, I think. With how you look now.”

“It’s you,” I said, grinning foolishly. He looked up, and there was bright pleasure in his eyes. “I know,” he said.

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

I savored the miracle of being able to watch him openly,

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

No matter how many times I had asked, he answered me as if it were the first time.

“I’m going to be the first.” He took my palm and held it to his. “Swear it.” “Why me?” “Because you’re the reason. Swear it.” “I swear it,”

war was what the world would say Achilles was born for. That his hands and swift feet were fashioned for this alone—the cracking of Troy’s mighty walls. They would throw him among thousands of Trojan spears and watch with triumph as he stained his fair hands red.

“If you have to go, you know I will go with you.”

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

And despite my hurt, I would not wish to see it gone, to see him as uneasy and fearful as the rest of us, for any price.

It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

“Oh yes,” Odysseus called over his shoulder. “You’re welcome to bring Patroclus along, if you like. We have business with him, as well.”

Heracles would kill his wife again for a chance to come along.

I cowered, as men were made to do.

“If you go to Troy, you will never return. You will die a young man there.”

When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death.

His fame must be worth the life he paid for it.

A marriage for love, rare as cedars from the East. It almost made me want to like him.

“Patroclus. I have given enough to them. I will not give them this.”

“There is this, too.” His hand was ceaseless now. “I know I have told you of this.” I closed my eyes. “Tell me again,” I said.

I did not plan to live after he was gone.

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

But most ugly of all are his eyes: blue, bright blue. When people see them, they flinch. Such things are freakish. He is lucky he was not killed at birth.

“He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”

“I did not even see it,” I managed. He threw the thing aside, to lie blunt-nosed and brown among the weeds. He had broken its neck. “You did not have to,” he said. “I saw it.”

I closed my eyes, felt his lips on mine, the only part of him still soft. Then he was gone.

Constant terror had siphoned and drained me, even though somehow I always seemed to be in a lull, a strange pocket of emptiness into which no men came, and I was never threatened.

I look down at his blood and know my death is coming. But in the dream I do not mind. What I feel, most of all, is relief.”

No hands had ever been so gentle, or so deadly.

Our limbs slid against one another, on paths that we had traced so many times before, yet still were not old.

“Do you not ever want children?” she asked. The question surprised me. I still felt half a child myself, though most my age were parents several times over. “I don’t think I would be much of a parent,” I said.

He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.

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

He is half of my soul, as the poets say.