The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“Patroclus.” It was the name my father had given me, hopefully but injudiciously, at my birth, and it tasted of bitterness on my tongue. “Honor of the father,” it meant. I waited for him to make a joke out of it, some witty jape about my disgrace. He did not. Perhaps, I thought, he is too stupid to.

After that, I was craftier with my observation, kept my head down and my eyes ready to leap away. But he was craftier still. At least once a dinner he would turn and catch me before I could feign indifference. 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 gaze, which had been following the circling fruit, flickered to mine. I did not have time to look away before he said, softly but distinctly, “Catch.”

“Patroclus.” Achilles did not slur my name, as people often did, running it together as if in a hurry to be rid of it. Instead, he rang each syllable: Pa-tro-clus.

“How many can you hold?” “I don’t know.” “Show me your hand.” I did, palm out. He rested his own palm against it. I tried not to startle. His skin was soft and slightly sticky from dinner. The plump finger pads brushing mine were very warm. “About the same. It will be better to start with two, then.

Time passed. In the moonlight, I could just make out the shape of his face, sculptor-perfect, across the room. His lips were parted slightly, an arm thrown carelessly above his head. He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight. I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.

At night I still dreamed of the dead boy. But when I woke, sweaty and terror-stricken, the moon would be bright on the water outside and I could hear the lick of the waves against the shore. In the dim light I saw his easy breathing, the drowsy tangle of his limbs. In spite of myself, my pulse slowed. 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 learned that he was not so dignified as he looked. Beneath his poise and stillness was another face, full of mischief and faceted like a gem, catching the light. He liked to play games against his own skill, catching things with his eyes closed, setting himself impossible leaps over beds and chairs. When he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.

He was like a flame himself. He glittered, drew eyes. There was a glamour to him, even on waking, with his hair tousled and...

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

Divine blood flows differently in each god-born child. Orpheus’ voice made the trees weep, Heracles could kill a man by clapping him on the back. Achilles’ miracle was his speed.

As if he heard me, he smiled, and his face was like the sun.

And as we swam, or played, or talked, a feeling would come. It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright where they were dull.

This feeling was different. I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp prickling till I thought it might lift off my head. My tongue ran away from me, giddy with freedom. This and this and this, I said to him. I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not have to worry that I was too slender or too slow. This and this and this!

My pulse jumps, for no reason I can name. He has looked at me a thousand thousand times, but there is something different in this gaze, an intensity I do not know.

The voice again, measured and deliberate. “I am assuming, Achilles Pelides, that this is why you have not yet joined me on the mountain?” My mind groped towards understanding. Achilles had not gone to Chiron. He had waited, here. For me.

I turned to face the centaur. “I will leave, if there will be trouble.” There was a long silence, and I almost thought he had not heard me. At last, he said: “Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”

“But why did the madness come?” “The gods wished to punish him,” Chiron answered. Achilles shook his head, impatiently. “But this was a greater punishment for her. It was not fair of them.” “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?” “Perhaps,” Achilles admitted. 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.

will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me. If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth. As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong. “Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.

“So what if he is?” The first time he had said something like this, I had been shocked. That his father might be angry and Achilles would still do as he wished—it was something I did not understand, could barely imagine. It was like a drug to hear him say it. I never tired of it.

We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.

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.

“Forgive me,” he said again. “I did not want it. It was not you. I did not—I did not like it.” Hearing it soothed the last of the jagged grief that had begun when Deidameia shouted his name. My throat was thick with the beginning of tears. “There is nothing to forgive,” I said.

All the girls but one. Before the final blast was finished, Achilles had swept up one of the silvered swords and flung off its kidskin sheath. The table blocked his path to the door; he leapt it in a blur, his other hand grabbing a spear from it as he passed. He landed, and the weapons were already lifted, held with a deadly poise that was like no girl, nor no man either. The greatest warrior of his generation.

“I thought you said it would be an easy campaign, home by next fall,” I managed. I had to do something to stop the relentless roll of their words. “I lied.” Odysseus shrugged. “I have no idea how long it will be. Faster if we have you.” He looked at Achilles. His dark eyes pulled like the tide, however you swam against it.

“If you go to Troy, you will never return. You will die a young man there.” Achilles’ face went pale. “It is certain?” This is what all mortals ask first, in disbelief, shock, fear. Is there no exception for me? “It is certain.” If he had looked at me then, I would have broken. I would have begun to weep and never stopped.

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.

“Will you come with me?” he asked. The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”

Achilles was looking at me. “Your hair never quite lies flat here.” He touched my head, just behind my ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you how I like it.” My scalp prickled where his fingers had been. “You haven’t,” I said. “I should have.” His hand drifted down to the vee at the base of my throat, drew softly across the pulse. “What about this? Have I told you what I think of this, just here?” “No,” I said. “This surely, then.” His hand moved across the muscles of my chest; my skin warmed beneath it. “Have I told you of this?” “That you have told me.” My breath caught a little as I spoke. “And what of this?” His hand lingered over my hips, drew down the line of my thigh. “Have I spoken of it?” “You have.” “And this? Surely, I would not have forgotten this.” His cat’s smile. “Tell me I did not.” “You did not.” “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.

It was that moment, perhaps, that our lives changed. Not before in Scyros, nor before that still, on Pelion. But here, as we began to understand the grandness, now and always, that would follow him wherever he went. He had chosen to become a legend, and this was the beginning.

As for the goddess’s answer, I did not care. I would have no need of her. I did not plan to live after he was gone.

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.

“May I give you some advice? If you are truly his friend, you will help him leave this soft heart behind. He’s going to Troy to kill men, not rescue them.” His dark eyes held me like swift-running current. “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.”

“Hydros,” Achilles said. Water-snake. It was dun gray, and its flat head hung brokenly to the side. Its body still trembled a little, dying. Weakness sluiced through me. Chiron had made us memorize their homes and colors. Brown-gray, by water. Quick to anger. Deadly bite. “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.”

He seemed so much the hero, I could barely remember that only the night before we had spit olive pits at each other, across the plate of cheeses that Phoinix had left for us. That we had howled with delight when he had landed one, wet and with bits of fruit still hanging from it, in my ear.

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.

I never tried to get closer to him, and neither did Achilles, who carefully turned from his glimpsed figure to face other Trojans, to wade off to other shoals. Afterwards, when Agamemnon would ask him when he would confront the prince of Troy, he would smile his most guileless, maddening smile. “What has Hector ever done to me?”

Dread rose in my chest. I took a breath, forced it away. “And then what?” “That’s the strangest of all. 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.” “Do you think it can be prophecy?” The question seemed to make him self-conscious. He shook his head. “No. I think it is nothing at all. A daydream.” I forced my voice to match his in lightness. “I’m sure you’re right. After all, Hector hasn’t done anything to you.” He smiled then, as I had hoped he would. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard that.”

And I was pleased, because I felt that he had seen her, had understood why I spent my days with her when he was gone. She was one of us now, I thought. A member of our circle, for life.

This is how I think of us, when I remember our nights at Troy: Achilles and I beside each other, and Phoinix smiling, and Automedon stuttering through the punch lines of jokes, and Briseis with her secret eyes and quick, spilling laughter.

The tent was very dark, but I could just see the features of his face, the strong jaw and gentle curves of his eyes. I wanted to wake him and see those eyes open. A thousand thousand times I had seen it, but I never tired of it.

“How can you let her go?” I ask, my teeth hard against one another. His face is blank and barren, like another language, impenetrable. He says, “I must speak with my mother.” “Go then,” I snarl. I watch him leave. My stomach feels burned to cinders; my palms ache where my nails have cut into them. I do not know this man, I think. He is no one I have ever seen before. My rage towards him is hot as blood. I will never forgive him. I imagine tearing down our tent, smashing the lyre, stabbing myself in the stomach and bleeding to death. I want to see his face broken with grief and regret. I want to shatter the cold mask of stone that has slipped down over the boy I knew. He has given her to Agamemnon knowing what will happen.

“Ah.” His eyes half-close, imagining it. I watch the bolt of his triumph sliding home. He is a connoisseur of pain. There is nothing that could cause Achilles greater anguish than this: being betrayed to his worst enemy by the man he holds closest to his heart. “If

“You chose her,” he says. “Over me.” “Over your pride.” The word I use is hubris. Our word for arrogance that scrapes the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the gods. His fists tighten. Now, perhaps, the attack will come.

When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light. “It is done then? She is safe? She must be. You would not have come back, otherwise.” “Yes. She is safe.” A tired breath. “You are a better man than I.” The beginning of hope. We have given each other wounds, but they are not mortal. Briseis will not be harmed and Achilles will remember himself and my wrist will heal. There will be a moment after this, and another after that.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.” “But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?” “You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?” We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. Now that we are twenty-seven, they still feel too hard.

I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

For the first time, he dreams of killing: the stroke of glory, his inevitable spear through Hector’s heart. My skin prickles to hear him say so. “Do you see?” he says. “It is the beginning!” I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

“If the camp falls, I will claim you as my husband. It may help some. You must not speak of what you were to him, though. It will be a death sentence.” Her hand has tightened on my arm. “Promise me.” “Briseis,” I say, “if he is dead, I will not be far behind.”

“Be careful tomorrow,” she says. “Best of men. Best of the Myrmidons.” She places her fingers to my lips, stopping my objection. “It is truth,” she says. “Let it stand, for once.”