The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?”

He is half of my soul, as the poets say. He will be dead soon, and his honor is all that will remain.

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

long ago, while Achilles grinned at me from the shadows. There was no blood on his hands then, and no death sentence on his head. Another life.

That night I lie in bed beside Achilles. His face is innocent, sleep-smoothed and sweetly boyish. I love to see it. This is his truest self, earnest and guileless, full of mischief but without malice.

They have confounded him, tied him to a stake and baited him. I stroke the soft skin of his forehead. I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.

Hector must live, always; he must never die, not even when he is old, not even when he is so withered that his bones slide beneath his skin like loose

rocks in a stream. 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.

Achilles’ face is contorted with effort and focus. He is

fighting at the edge, the very edge of his power. He is not, after all, a god.

And I think: do not fear for Troy. It is only Hector that he wants. Hector, and Hector alone. When Hector is dead, he will stop.

Hector’s eyes are wide, but he will run no longer. He says, “Grant me this. Give my body to my family, when you have killed me.”

Achilles makes a sound like choking. “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”

You have killed him and taken your vengeance. It is enough.” “It will never be enough,” he says.

“When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.”

There, at last, is his heart. Blood spills between shoulder blades, dark and slick as oil. Achilles smiles as his face strikes the earth.

they carry them to the golden urn where I rest. 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. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.

We cannot bury one without the other.”

Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest. I would give my life again to make it so.

Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.”

“We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?” He smiles. “Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.” “I doubt it.” Odysseus shrugs. “We cannot say. We are men only, a brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please. Patroclus may be such as will rise in the future.” “He is not.”

Was this the son you preferred to Achilles? Her mouth tightens. “Have you no more memories?” I am made of memories. “Speak, then.”

want him to live. 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.

We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.

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

“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.