The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

Achilles flushed as if he’d been struck. It was one thing to wear a dress out of necessity, another thing for the world to know of it. Our people reserved their ugliest names for men who acted like women; lives were lost over such insults.

Our men liked conquest; they did not trust a man who was conquered himself.

We had thought we would surprise the Trojans, but they knew we were coming.

Dumb

He leaned towards me, framed by bronze, smelling of sweat and leather and metal. I closed my eyes, felt his lips on mine, the only part of him still soft. Then he was gone.

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.

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

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.

But fame is a strange thing. 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.

We are men only, a brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.