The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“You are here because you killed a boy. You understand this?” This was the cruelty of adults. Do you understand? “Yes,” I told him. I could have told him more, of the dreams that left me bleary and bloodshot, the almost-screams that scraped my throat as I swallowed them down. The way the stars turned and turned through the night above my unsleeping eyes.

I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion’s tail hidden in his words. 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?

As I ran, I promised myself that if I ever saw him again, I would keep my thoughts behind my eyes. I had learned, now, what it would cost me if I did not.

“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.”

“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.

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.”

There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to hear what he had not said.

I watched him hang on the other man’s words. He is too trusting. But I would not be the raven on his shoulder all the time, predicting gloom.

It turned out that she did know a little Greek. A few words that her father had picked up and taught her when he heard the army was coming. Mercy was one. Yes and please and what do you want? A father, teaching his daughter how to be a slave.

A trumpet blew and my chest heaved. Now. It was now. In a clanking, clattering mass, we lurched into a run. This is how we fought—a dead-run charge that met the enemy in the middle. With enough momentum you could shatter their ranks all at once.

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.

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

There will be a moment after this, and another after that.

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

But my mind keeps slipping from his words, dragged downwards by the seeping gray of the sky, by the sand chilled and pallid as a corpse, and the distant, dying shrieks of men whom I know. How many more by day’s end?

The numbness now is merciful. A last few moments of it. Then, the fall.

If a mistake had come, it would not be there, from the delicate bones and curving arches. Achilles has baited his hook with human failure, and the god has leapt for it.

“I am sorry for your loss,” Priam says. “And sorry that it was my son who took him from you. Yet I beg you to have mercy. In grief, men must help each other, though they are enemies.”

“It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”

Look at how he will be remembered now. Killing Hector, killing Troilus. For things he did cruelly in his grief. Her face is like stone itself. It does not move. The days rise and fall. Perhaps such things pass for virtue among the gods. But how is there glory in taking a life? We die so easily. Would you make him another Pyrrhus? Let the stories of him be something more.

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.