The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

Perhaps most remarkable was his unself-consciousness.

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.

His presence was like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore.

My narrow world narrowed further: to the cracks in the floor, the carved whorls in the stone walls.

My chest trilled with something I could not quite name. Escape, and danger, and hope all at once.

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.

And now he had bestowed the long-awaited honor upon the most unlikely of us, small and ungrateful and probably cursed.

There was a vividness to him, even at rest, that made death and spirits seem foolish.

I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion’s tail hidden in his words.

“There is no one like you,”

You will be dead soon enough.

I do not know, until then, what I am going to do. I lean forward and our lips land clumsily on each other. They are like the fat bodies of bees, soft and round and giddy with pollen. I can taste his mouth—hot and sweet with honey from dessert. My stomach trembles, and a warm drop of pleasure spreads beneath my skin. More.

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 listened and did not speak. 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 will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

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

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.

Her divinity swept over us all, singeing our eyes, blackening the broken edges of the door. I could feel it pulling at my bones, sucking at the blood in my veins as if it would drink me. I cowered, as men were made to do.

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

“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.”

“Are you frightened?” I asked. The first call of a nightingale in the trees at our backs. “No,” he answered. “This is what I was born for.”

And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

“Will you tell me who hurt you?” I imagine saying, You. But that is nothing more than childishness.

“You chose her,” he says. “Over me.” “Over your pride.”

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,

I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

The last thing I think is: Achilles.

Give us both peace. Burn me and bury me. I will wait for you among the shades. I will—

achilles, it reads. And beside it, patroclus. “Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”

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.