The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

There was violence in that room, with so many princes and heroes and kings competing for a single prize, but we knew how to ape civilization.

One by one, Achilles caught the remaining fruits, returned them to the table with a performer’s flourish. Except for the last, which he ate, the dark flesh parting to pink seeds under his teeth. The fruit was perfectly ripe, the juice brimming. Without thinking, I brought the one he had thrown me to my lips. Its burst of grainy sweetness filled my mouth; the skin was downy on my tongue. I had loved figs, once.

This was the cruelty of adults. Do you understand?

He was utterly still, the type of quiet that I had thought could not belong to humans, a stilling of everything but breath and pulse—like a deer, listening for the hunter’s bow. I found myself holding my breath.

He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?

“I mean—” I broke off. There was an edge to me now, that familiar keenness of anger and envy, struck to life like flint. But the bitter words died even as I thought them. “There is no one like you,” I said, at last. He regarded me a moment, in silence. “So?” Something in the way he spoke it drained the last of my anger from me. I had minded, once. But who was I now, to begrudge such a thing? As if he heard me, he smiled, and his face was like the sun.

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.

It was not murder that had exiled me, it was my lack of cunning.

Among our bragging, ranting heroes, Peleus was the exception: a man of modesty.

Gods were cold and distant, far off as the moon, nothing like his bright eyes, the warm mischief of his smiles.

“I know.” His face twisted with embarrassment, and in spite of itself my heart lightened. It was such a boyish response. And so human. Parents, everywhere.

“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.

The boys’ voices had been sharp with excitement, their color high. But when I tried to imagine what they spoke of, my mind slid away, like a fish who would not be caught.

There was a wildness in me, of hope and terror.

Our mouths opened under each other, and the warmth of his sweetened throat poured into mine. I could not think, could not do anything but drink him in, each breath as it came, the soft movements of his lips. It was a miracle.

There was no time that passed but our breaths.

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.

“You don’t think he will be angry?” He paused now, considering. I loved this about him. No matter how many times I had asked, he answered me as if it were the first time.

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”

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.

His trust was a part of him, as much as his hands or his miraculous feet. And despite my hurt, I would not wish to see it gone, to see him as uneasy and fearful as the rest of us, for any price.

I remembered how hard a thing indifference was to bear.

She was shivering, like something just born. Always before, her hurts had been small, and there had been someone to offer her comfort. Now there was only this room, the bare walls and single chair, the closet of her grief.

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

You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”

This was a frequent fault of his: the more precarious his position, the more unlikable he became.

I listened to every word, imagining it was a story only. As if it were dark figures on an urn he spoke of instead of men.

When I would think of all the tears that he had made fall, in all the years that had passed. And now Andromache, too, and Hector grieved because of him.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

I try not to think how every one is a man I know. Knew.

But there was a line of rallied Greeks behind me screaming my name. His name. I did not stop.

Always, its muscles betray it, seeking life instead of the peace that spears bring.

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.