Miller, Madeline - The Song of Achilles

Thetis comes. I watch her, withering the grass where she stands. I have not felt such hatred for her in a long time. She made Pyrrhus, and loved him more than Achilles.

She is looking at the scenes on the tomb, death after death. She reaches, as if she will touch them. I cannot bear it.

Thetis, I say.

Her hand jerks back. She vanishes.

Later she returns. Thetis . She does not react. Only stands, looking at her son’s tomb.

I am buried here. In your son’s grave.

She says nothing. Does nothing. She does not hear.

Every day she comes. She sits at the tomb’s base, and it seems that I can feel her cold through the earth, the slight searing smell of salt. I cannot make her leave, but I can hate her.

You said that Chiron ruined him. You are a goddess, and cold, and know nothing. You are the one who ruined him. 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.

“What more?” she says.

For once I am not afraid. What else can she do to me?

Returning Hector’s body to Priam, I say. That should be remembered.

She is silent for a long time. “And?”

His skill with the lyre. His beautiful voice.

She seems to be waiting.

The girls. He took them so that they would not suffer at another king’s hands.

“That was your doing.”

Why are you not with Pyrrhus?

Something flickers in her eyes. “He is dead.”

I am fiercely glad. How? It is a command, almost.

“He was killed by Agamemnon’s son.”

For what?

She does not answer for some time. “He stole his bride and ravished her.”

“Whatever I want,” he said to Briseis. Was this the son you preferred to Achilles?

Her mouth tightens. “Have you no more memories?”

I am made of memories.

“Speak, then.”

I ALMOST REFUSE. But the ache for him is stronger than my anger. I want to speak of something not dead or divine. I want him to live.

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

She closes her eyes. The skin over them is the color of sand in winter. She listens, and she too remembers.

She remembers standing on a beach, hair black and long as a horse’s tail. Slate-gray waves smash against rocks. Then a mortal’s hands, brutal and bruising on her polished skin. The sand scraping her raw, and the tearing inside. The gods, after, tying her to him.

She remembers feeling the child within her, luminous in the dark of her womb. She repeats to herself the prophecy that the three old women spoke to her: your son will be greater than his father .

The other gods had recoiled to hear it. They knew what powerful sons do to their fathers—Zeus’ thunderbolts still smell of singed flesh and patricide. They gave her to a mortal, trying to shackle the child’s power. Dilute him with humanity, diminish him.

She rests her hand on her stomach, feels him swimming within. It is her blood that will make him strong.

But not strong enough. I am a mortal! he screams at her, his face blotchy and sodden and dull.

WHY DO YOU not go to him?

“I cannot.” The pain in her voice is like something tearing. “I cannot go beneath the earth.” The underworld, with its cavernous gloom and fluttering souls, where only the dead may walk. “This is all that is left,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the monument. An eternity of stone.

I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you . My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms.

The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.

THE SUN IS SETTING over the sea, spilling its colors on the water’s surface. She is beside me, silent in the blurry, creeping dusk. Her face is as unmarked as the first day I saw her. Her arms are crossed over her chest, as if to hold some thought to herself.

I have told her all. I have spared nothing, of any of us.

We watch the light sink into the grave of the western sky.

“I could not make him a god,” she says. Her jagged voice, rich with grief.

But you made him.

She does not answer me for a long time, only sits, eyes shining with the last of the dying light.

“I have done it,” she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. ACHILLES, it reads. And beside it, PATROCLUS.

“Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”

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 of the sun.

Character Glossary

Gods and Immortals

APHRODITE. The goddess of love and beauty, the mother of Aeneas, and a champion of the Trojans. She particularly favored Paris, and in Book 3 of the Iliad she intervened to save him from Menelaus.

APOLLO. The god of light and music, and a champion of the Trojans. He was responsible for sending the plague down upon the Greek army in Book 1 of the Iliad, and was instrumental in the deaths of both Achilles and Patroclus.

ARTEMIS. The twin sister of Apollo and the goddess of the hunt, the moon, and virginity. Angry about the bloodshed the Trojan War would cause, she stopped the winds from blowing, stranding the Greek fleet at Aulis. After the sacrifice of Iphigenia, she was appeased and the winds returned.

ATHENA. The powerful goddess of wisdom, weaving, and war arts. She was a fierce supporter of her beloved Greeks against the Trojans and a particular guardian of the wily Odysseus. She appears often in both the Iliad and the Odyssey .

CHIRON. The only “good” centaur, known as a teacher of the heroes Jason, Aesculapius, and Achilles, as well as the inventor of medicine and surgery.

HERA. The queen of the gods and the sister-wife of Zeus. Like Athena, she championed the Greeks and hated the Trojans. In Vergil’s Aeneid, she is the principal antagonist, constantly harassing the Trojan hero Aeneas after Troy has fallen.

SCAMANDER. The god of the river Scamander near Troy and another champion of the Trojans. His famous battle with Achilles is told in Book 22 of the Iliad .

THETIS. A sea-nymph and shape-changer, and the mother of Achilles. The fates had prophesied that Thetis’ son would be greater than his father, which frightened the god Zeus (who had previously desired her). He made sure to marry Thetis to a mortal, in order to limit the power of her son. In post-Homeric versions of the story she tries a number of ways to make Achilles immortal, including dipping him by his ankle in the river Styx and holding him in a fire to burn away his mortality.