The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

She was so close I could smell her, sea water laced with dark brown honey.

‘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.

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.

I learned to sleep through the day, so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable on to the vase of posterity. To release him from it, and make him Achilles again.

My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief. I want the world overturned like a bowl of eggs, smashed at my feet.

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

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.