The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“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.

Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. 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.”

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.

“Her safety for my honor. Are you happy with your trade?” “There is no honor in betraying your friends.”

“I could not make him a god,” she says. Her jagged voice, rich with grief. But you made him.

“Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”