The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

On one of these days he sat closer to me than usual; only a table distant.

For a second our eyes held, and I felt a shock run through me.

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.

“Show me your hand.” I did, palm out. He rested his own palm against it. I tried not to startle.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?

This morning he had leapt onto my bed and pressed his nose against mine. “Good morning,” he’d said. I remembered the heat of him against my skin.

He ran at me, pushed me backwards onto my cot. Leaned over me. “I’m sick of talking about her,” he said. The heat rose up my neck, wrapped fingers over my face. His hair fell around me, and I could smell nothing but him. The grain of his lips seemed to rest a hairsbreadth from mine.

Screaming

He watches me. It seems that he is waiting.

For Chiron liked to teach, not in set lessons, but in opportunities.

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.

“Because you’re the reason. Swear it.”

and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.

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

With a roar he throws Antilochus from him, knocks down Menelaus. He falls on the body. The knowledge rushes up in him, choking off breath. A scream comes, tearing its way out. And then another, and another. He seizes his hair in his hands and yanks it from his head. Golden strands fall onto the bloody corpse. Patroclus, he says, Patroclus. Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only.

“When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.”

then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. achilles, it reads. And beside it, patroclus. “Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”