The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

When at last they pulled off the veil, they say my mother smiled. That is how they knew she was quite stupid. Brides did not smile.

“This is Patroclus,” Achilles said. “He does not play, but he will learn.” “Not on that instrument.” The man’s hand swooped down to pluck the lyre from my hands. Instinctively, my fingers tightened on it. It was not as beautiful as my mother’s lyre, but it was still a princely instrument. I did not want to give it up. I did not have to. Achilles had caught him by the wrist, midreach. “Yes, on that instrument if he likes.”

I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through the salt. It was enough.

I promised myself that 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.

“A wound in any of them will eventually be fatal. But death is quickest here.” His finger tapped the slight concavity of Achilles’ temple. A chill went through me to see it touched, that place where Achilles’ life was so slenderly protected. I was glad when we spoke of other things.

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

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.

My mother’s lyre. He had brought it with him. “I wish I had known,” I said the first day, when he had showed it to me. “I almost did not come, because I did not want to leave it.” He smiled. “Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”

“Achilles,” I said. His eyes opened, and he was beside me before I could speak again. “Are you all right?”

Our eyes met, and we did not speak. Fear rose in me, sudden and sharp. This was the moment of truest peril, and I tensed, fearing his regret. He said, “I did not think—” And stopped. There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to hear what he had not said.

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.

It was like a drug to hear him say it. I never tired of it.

They never let you be famous and happy.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you a secret.” “Tell me.” I loved it when he was like this. “I’m going to be the first.” He took my palm and held it to his. “Swear it.” “Why me?” “Because you’re the reason. Swear it.” “I swear it,” I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes. “I swear it,” he echoed. We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned. “I feel like I could eat the world raw.”

“Father, I do not see a place for Patroclus.” My blush went even deeper. “Achilles,” I began in a whisper. It does not matter, I wanted to say. I will sit with the men; it is all right. But he ignored me. “Patroclus is my sworn companion. His place is beside me.”

I had thought only of Achilles’ danger, of how I would try to keep him here, if I could. I had not even considered myself.

We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence. Later, Achilles pressed close for a final, drowsy whisper. “If you have to go, you know I will go with you.” We slept.

Had she really thought I would not know him? 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.

I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

I had to nudge him, beneath the table. “What is it?” he asked me. “The princess wants to know if you are well.” “Oh.” He glanced at her briefly, then back to me. “I am well,” he said.

His death. I felt as if I was dying just to think of it, plummeting through a blind, black sky.

“I would not care,” I said. The words scrabbled from my mouth. “Whatever you became. It would not matter to me. We would be together.”

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

He was spring, golden and bright. Envious Death would drink his blood, and grow young again.

This is what it will be, every day, without him. I felt a wild-eyed tightness in my chest, like a scream. Every day, without him.

“Your honor could be darkened by it.” “Then it is darkened.” His jaw shot forward, stubborn. “They are fools if they let my glory rise or fall on this.” “But Odysseus—” His eyes, green as spring leaves, met mine. “Patroclus. I have given enough to them. I will not give them this.”

He stirs and the air stirs with him, bearing the musk-sweet smell of his body. I think: This is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: How long do we have?

“But you will forgive me?” I reached for his hand and took it. “I have no need to forgive you. You cannot offend me.” They were rash words, but I said them with all the conviction of my heart.

He stood, something limp and long as a piece of wet rope dangling from his fingers. My eyes stared at it, uncomprehending. “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.”

The pain on his face struck me, and I was ashamed. Where was my promise that I would forgive him?

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.

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.

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

He is half of my soul, as the poets say.

I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.

There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.

He holds me so tightly I can feel the faint beat of his chest, like the wings of a moth. An echo, the last bit of spirit still tethered to my body. A torment.

I see his face as if through water, as a fish sees the sun. His tears fall, but I cannot wipe them away. This is my element now, the half-life of the unburied spirit.

“I wish he had let you all die.”

Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine? I think of the snowflakes on Pelion, cold on our red cheeks. The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach.

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this.

“This is all that is left,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the monument. An eternity of stone. I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms.

“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.