The Song of Achilles(97)

“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.