The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

It felt like I had run for miles, though when I looked down I saw that my feet had beaten the same circle over and over again, flattening the same dry grass as if preparing a dancing field. 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. It was a measure of my dullness, my dizziness, that it took me until midafternoon to see that this was Achilles’ doing. His gaze was on me always, preternaturally sensing the moment when a soldier’s eyes widened at the easy target I presented. Before the man drew another breath, he would cut him down. He was a marvel, shaft after shaft flying from him, spears that he wrenched easily from broken bodies on the ground to toss at new targets. Again and again I saw his wrist twist, exposing its pale underside, those flute-like bones thrusting elegantly forward. My spear sagged forgotten to the ground as I watched. I could not even see the ugliness of the deaths anymore, the brains, the shattered bones that later I would wash from my skin and hair. All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.