The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

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?

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? 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.

would know it in dark, or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.

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 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.

In the stories, the gods have the power to delay the moon’s course if they wish, to spin a single night the length of many. Such was this night, a bounty of hours that never ran dry.

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

My spear sagged forgotten to the ground as I watched. I could not even see the ugliness of the deaths any more, the brains, the shattered bones that later I would wash from my skin and hair. All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.

have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it

I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

Servant girls are sent to collect the ashes; 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. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

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.