The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

I thought only of the small island flung out somewhere in front of me, and the fair-haired boy I hoped I would find there.

I had never seen him so upset.

“She said that if I did as she said, she would tell you where I was.”

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.

He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

It was not you.

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?

He no longer belongs to me alone.

“I asked her to protect you,” he said. “After.”

I did not plan to live after he was gone.

From Chiron,

of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.

Yet this beautiful spear had been fashioned not in bitterness, but love.

“You did not have to,” he said. “I saw it.”

“Stand behind me,”

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.

To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

I sent Achilles out to ask for them, to seek as many as he could,

It was easy to stay with them long and late, until I heard the creaking of the chariot, and the distant banging of bronze, and returned to greet my Achilles. It was easy, in those moments, to forget that the war had not yet really begun.

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,

He is such a flood, I thought.

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.

A thousand thousand times I had seen it, but I never tired of it.

“That the best of the Myrmidons will die before two more years have passed.”

Yet there was an emptiness to the scene, an ache of absence.

I could not live in such a life.

He is half of my soul,

I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

Another life.

“if he is dead, I will not be far behind.”

I do not say that I do not think I will ever leave Troy.

Perhaps if I had never known Achilles.

“Best of men. Best of the Myrmidons.”

“It is truth,”

This is his truest self, earnest and guileless, full of mischief but without malice.

But I am not Achilles.

I am unarmed and alone, and they know I am only Patroclus.

He must live, because his life, I think as I scrape backwards over the grass, is the final dam before Achilles’ own blood will flow.

The last thing I think is: Achilles.

Soon he will return, and Agamemnon will kneel. They will be happy again.

A king has fallen, or a prince, and they are fighting for the body. Who? He shields his eyes, but no more is revealed. Patroclus will be able to tell him.

But he would have to let go of me. He cannot.

Achilles weeps. He cradles me, and will not eat, nor speak a word other than my name.

as a fish sees the sun.

Achilles’ eyes lift. They are bloodshot and dead. “I wish he had let you all die.”

“Do you think you are the only one who loved him?”

“You care more for him in death than in life.” Her voice is bitter with grief. “How could you have let him go? You knew he could not fight!”

He was worth ten of you. Ten! And you sent him to his death!”

“He fought to save you, and your darling reputation. Because he could not bear to see you suffer!”

“You have never deserved him. I do not know why he ever loved you. You care only for yourself!”