The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“My father did not like music.” “So? Your father is not here.”

I did not want to give it up. I did not have to. Achilles had caught him by the wrist, midreach. “Yes, on that instrument if he likes.”

I could not play now. Not ever, if I could listen to him instead.

“The boy is an exile with a stain upon him. He will add no luster to your reputation.” “I do not need him to,” Achilles said. Not proudly or boastfully. Honestly.

He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight. I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.

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 if he heard me, he smiled, and his face was like the sun.

I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not have to worry that I was too slender or too slow.

I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

He smiled. “Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”

“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.

As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.

“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.

“Patroclus is my sworn companion. His place is beside me.”

Later, Achilles pressed close for a final, drowsy whisper. “If you have to go, you know I will go with you.” We slept.

“Who is this man, Pyrrha?” “No one!” Deidameia had seized Achilles’ arm, was tugging at it. At the same time, Achilles answered coolly, “My husband.”

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.

It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

“Whatever you became. It would not matter to me. We would be together.”

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

He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”