The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

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

“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.

His eyes were unwavering, green flecked with gold. A surety rose in me, lodged in my throat. 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.

He had chosen to become a legend, and this was the beginning.

Yet this beautiful spear had been fashioned not in bitterness, but love. Its shape would fit no one’s hand but Achilles’, and its heft could suit no one’s strength but his. And though the point was keen and deadly, the wood itself slipped under our fingers like the slender oiled strut of a lyre.

He leaned towards me, framed by bronze, smelling of sweat and leather and metal. I closed my eyes, felt his lips on mine, the only part of him still soft. Then he was gone.

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.

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.

I wanted to wake him and see those eyes open. A thousand thousand times I had seen it, but I never tired of it.

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.

The funeral pyres burn through the night, their greasy smoke smeared across the moon. I try not to think how every one is a man I know. Knew.

The smile is thick in her throat. “I am glad.” I do not say that I do not think I will ever leave Troy. I draw her to me, fill my arms with her. She lays her head upon my chest. For a moment we do not think of Agamemnon and danger and dying Greeks. There is only her small hand on my stomach, and the softness of her cheek as I stroke it. It is strange how well she fits there. How easily I touch my lips to her hair, soft and smelling of lavender. She sighs a little, nestles closer. Almost, I can imagine that this is my life, held in the sweet circle of her arms. I would marry her, and we would have a child.

The last thing I feel is her hand, squeezing mine in farewell.

Achilles’ eyes fill; he looks away so the old man will not see. Priam’s voice is gentle. “It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”

“I have done it,” she says. At first I do not understand. But 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.”

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.