The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

His eyes open, and his mouth begins to move. I clap my hands over my ears. The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad. I must not hear him speak.

No one spoke to me. I was easy to ignore. It was not so very different from home, really.

At least once a dinner he would turn and catch me before I could feign indifference. Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all. The sudden swoop of my stomach, the coursing anger. I was like a fish eyeing the hook.

I could not play now. Not ever, if I could listen to him instead. “You play,” I said.

But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?

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.

A god. I could not imagine him so. Gods were cold and distant, far off as the moon, nothing like his bright eyes, the warm mischief of his smiles.

I turned to face the centaur. “I will leave, if there will be trouble.” There was a long silence, and I almost thought he had not heard me. At last, he said: “Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”

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.

“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 voice was remote, almost careless. “You would not be displeased, I think. With how you look now.” My face grew warm, again. But we spoke no more of it.

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

This, and this and this. We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

I loved this about him. No matter how many times I had asked, he answered me as if it were the first time.

Yes. I would be horrified to find Chiron upset with me. Disapproval had always burrowed deep in me; I could not shake it off as Achilles did. But I would not let it separate us, if it came to that. “No,” I told him.

“I know. 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.”

I understood, suddenly, the weight of Chiron’s words: war was what the world would say Achilles was born for. That his hands and swift feet were fashioned for this alone—the cracking of Troy’s mighty walls. They would throw him among thousands of Trojan spears and watch with triumph as he stained his fair hands red.

Peleus’ hand looked withered by comparison, threaded with trembling veins. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that

he had been a warrior, that he had walked with gods.

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.

Who was he if not miraculous and radiant? Who was he if not destined for fame?

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

Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”

“My mother told you the rest of the prophecy.” “She did.” “And you think that no one but me can kill Hector.” “Yes,” I said. “And you think to steal time from the Fates?” “Yes.”

“Ah.” A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. “Well, why should I kill him? He’s done nothing to me.” For the first time then, I felt a kind of hope.

His eyes, green as spring leaves, met mine. “Patroclus. I have given enough to them. I will not give them this.” After that, there was nothing more to say.

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?

This, out of all of it, was perhaps the strangest: that he was their commander now. He would be expected to know them all, their names and armor and stories. He no longer belongs to me alone.

It was as Odysseus had said: he had light enough to make heroes of them all.

Pride became us—heroes were never modest.

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

“He is not—” “But he is. The best the gods have ever made. And it is time he knew it, and you did too. If you hear nothing else I say, hear that. I do not say it in malice.”

Good, I wanted to say. But what did I know? I did not have to win my immortality with war. I held my peace.

It was easy, in those moments, to forget that the war had not yet really begun.

I would wait, pacing and unsettled. What could she possibly have to say to him for so long? Some divine disaster, I feared. Some celestial dictate that would take him from me.

“That’s the strangest of all. I look down at his blood and know my death is coming. But in the dream I do not mind. What I feel, most of all, is relief.”

“Do you think it can be prophecy?”

“No. I think it is nothing at all....

“I’m sure you’re right. After all, Hector hasn’t done anything to you.” He smiled then, as I had hoped he would. “...

Over us, every second, hung the terror of Achilles’ destiny, while the murmurs of war among the gods grew louder. But even I could not fill each minute with fear. I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such

a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom.

I knew he killed men every day;

But there were moments, like now, when that knowledge overwhelmed me.

He seemed to sit across the world from me then, though he was so close I could feel the warmth rising from his skin.

No hands had ever been so gentle, or so deadly.

“It is strange,” he said. “I have always said that Hector’s done nothing to offend me. But he cannot say the same, now.”

My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that

seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief.

When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.

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