"The Song of Achilles"

看到一半觉得有点味道太熟悉，果然豆瓣上有人吐槽说这就是同人文嘛。No matter, the conflicts between love and honour towards the end make for gripping tragedy. Madeline Miller smoothed out most of the kinks in Achilles' story, but I still can't imagine him disguised as a girl in Skyros.

• glowed with the giddy lightness of solitude.
• (witnessing first death:) but I had not seen this, the rattlle of it, the choke and scrabble, the smell of the flux.
• "I do not like to lie," he said. That's the sort of innocence other boys taunted out of you; even if you felt it you did not say it.
• His fingers touched the strings and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once.
• When he smiled, the skin at the corner of his eyes wrinkled like a leaf held to flame.
• there's an edge to me now, that familiar keeness of anger and envy, struck to life like flint.
• And as we swam, or played, or talked, a feeling would come. It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright were they dull.
• "Scops", Peleus took to calling me, owl for my big eyes. He was good at this sort of affection, general and unbinding.
• “She wants you to be a god," I told him.
  "I know." His face twisted with embarrassment, and in spite of itself my heart lightened. It was such a boyish response. And so human. Parents, everywhere.”
• “I almost did not come, because I did not want to leave it."
  He smiled. "Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere."
  The sun sank below Pelion's ridges, and we were happy.
• My pulse jumps, for no reason I can name. He has looked at me a thousand thousand times, but there is something different in this gaze, an intensity I do not know. My mouth is dry, and I can hear the sound of my throat as I swallow. He watches me. It seems that he is waiting. I shift, an infinitesimal movement, towards him. It is like the leap from a waterfall. I do not know, until then, what I am going to do. I lean forward and our lips land clumsily on each other. They are like the fat bodies of bees, soft and round and giddy with pollen. I can taste his mouth—hot and sweet with honey from dessert. My stomach trembles, and a warm drop of pleasure spreads beneath my skin. More.
• He seemed to swell beneath my touch, to ripen. He smelled like almonds and earth. He pressed against me, crushing my lips to wine.
• I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
  If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
  As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
  “Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.
• “Name one hero who was happy."
  I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.
  "You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
  "I can't."
  "I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
  "Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
  "I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
  "Why me?"
  "Because you're the reason. Swear it."
  "I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
  "I swear it," he echoed.
  We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
  "I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
• This is well-worded. Wealth and reputation were the things our people had always killed for.
• Achilles was looking at me. “Your hair never quite lies flat, here.” He touched my head, just behind my ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you how I like it.”
  My scalp prickled where his fingers had been. “You haven’t,” I said.
  “I should have.” His hand drifted down to the vee at the base of my throat, drew softly across the pulse. “What about this? Have I told you what I think of this, just here?”
  “No,” I said.
  “This surely then.” His hand moved across the muscles of my chest; my skin warmed beneath it. “Have I told you of this?”
  “That you have told me.” My breath caught a little as I spoke.
  “And what of this?” His hand lingered over my hips, drew down the line of my thigh. “Have I spoken of it?”
  “You have.”
  “And this? Surely I would not have forgotten this.” His cat’s smile. “Tell me I did not.”
  “You did not.”
  “There is this too.” His hand was ceaseless now. “I know I have told you of this.”
  I closed my eyes. “Tell me again,” I said.
• “I will go,” he said. “I will go to Troy.”
  The rosy gleam of his lip, the fevered green of his eyes. There was not a line anywhere on his face, nothing creased or graying; all crisp. He was spring, golden and bright. Envious death would drink his blood, and grow young again.
  He was watching me, his eyes as deep as earth.
  “Will you come with me?” he asked.
  The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death. “Yes,” I whipsered. “Yes.”
  Relief broke in his face, and he reached for me. I let him hold me, let him press us length to length so close that nothing might fit between us.
  Tears came, and fell. Above us, the constellations spun and the moon paced her weary course. We lay stricken and sleepless as the hours passed.
• I lay back and tried not to think of the minutes passing. Just yesterday we had a wealth of them. Now each was a drop of heartsblood lost.
• He seemed so much the hero. I could barely remember that only the night before we had spit olive pits at each other... I felt sorry for other kings who had to fight for their authority, or wore it poorly, their gestures jagged and rough. With Achilles it was graceful as a blessing,
• I learned to sleep during 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 onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.
• It turned out that she did know a little Greek. A few words that her father had picked up and taught her when he heard the army was coming. Mercy was one. Yes and please and what do you want? A father, teaching his daughter how to be a slave.
• the fragile ice-crust of fame
• her words were like new leather, still stiff and precise, not yet run together with use
• I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom.
• Where there's greed there's hope.
• Agamemnon’s boast of uniting Greece was not so idle after all. Even years later this camaraderie would remain, a fellow-feeling so uncharacteristic of our fiercely warring kingdoms. For a generation, there would be no wars among those of us who had fought at Troy.
• I couldn't speak, or think. I had never been angry with him before. I didn't know how.
• "To let him rape Briseis so that you might revenge yourself on him." Saying it out aloud was more shocking than I thought it would be... "Her safety for for my honor. Are you happy with your trade?" "There is no honor in betraying your friends."
• “Over your pride.” The word I use is hubris. Our word for arrogance that scrapes the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the gods.
• “You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?”
  We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. Now that we are twenty-seven, they still feel too hard.
  He is half of my soul, as the poets say. He will be dead soon, and his honor is all that will remain. It is his child, his dearest self. Should I reproach him for it? I have saved Briseis. I cannot save them all.
  I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.
• 'My life is my reputation,' he says. His breath sounds ragged. 'It is all I have. I will not live much longer. Memory is all I can hope for.' He swallows thickly. “You know this. And would you let Agamemnon destroy it? Would you help him take it from me?”
  “I would not,” I say. “But I would have the memory be worthy of the man. I would have you be yourself, not some tyrant remembered for his cruelty. There are other ways to make Agamemnon pay. We will do it. I will help you, I swear. But not like this. No fame is worth what you did today.”
• When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.
• Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.
  “But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?”
• Odysseus inclines his head. "True. 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." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles.
• “Then do something else. Send the Myrmidons at least. Send me in your place. Put me in your armor, and I will lead the Myrmidons. They will think it is you.” The words shocked us both. They seemed to come through me, not from me, as though spoken straight from a god’s mouth. Yet I seized on them, as a drowning man. “Do you see? You will not have to break your oath, yet the Greeks will be saved.”
  I did not let him answer. “Think! Agamemnon will know you defy him still, but the men will love you. There is no fame greater than this—you will prove to them all that your phantom is more powerful than Agamemnon’s whole army.”
  “Yes.” I pressed my hand to his. “Of course. I am not mad. To frighten them, that is all.” I was drenched and giddy. I had found a way through the endless corridors of his pride and fury. I would save the men; I would save him from himself. “You will let me?”
• That feeling again, of pure balance, of the world poised and waiting. My eye caught on a Trojan, and I threw, feeling the swipe of wood against my thumb. He fell, pierced through the thigh in a blow I knew had shattered bone. Two. All around me men screamed Achilles’ name.
• ACHILLES STANDS ON THE RIDGE WATCHING THE DARK shapes of battle moving across the field of Troy. He cannot make out faces or individual forms. The charge towards Troy looks like the tide coming in; the glint of swords and armor is fish-scale beneath the sun.
• “Hector!” he screams. “Hector!” He tears through the advancing Trojan ranks, shattering chests and faces, marking them with the meteor of his fury. He is gone before their bodies hit the ground. The grass, thinned from ten years of warfare, drinks the rich blood of princes and kings.
• He should have known better; I should have known. Those feet never stumbled, not once, in all the time I knew them. If a mistake had come, it would not be there, from the delicate bones and curving arches. Achilles has baited his hook with human failure, and the god has leapt for it.
• Hector’s eyes are wide, but he will run no longer. He says, “Grant me this. Give my body to my family, when you have killed me.”
  Achilles makes a sound like choking. “There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.” His spearpoint flies in a dark whirlwind, bright as the evening-star, to catch the hollow at Hector’s throat.
• ACHILLES RETURNS to the tent, where my body waits. He is red and red and rust-red, up to his elbows, his knees, his neck, as if he has swum in the vast dark chambers of a heart and emerged, just now, still dripping. He is dragging Hector’s body behind him, pierced through its heels with a leather thong.
• “I am sorry for your loss,” Priam says. “And sorry that it was my son who took him from you. Yet I beg you to have mercy. In grief, men must help each other, though they are enemies.”
• Priam’s voice is gentle. “It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.”
• 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.
• “Perhaps such things pass for virtue among the gods. But how is there glory in taking life? We die so easily. Would you make him another Pyrrhus? Let the stories of him be something more.”
• “There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said.
• 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.
• It was not honor that made Meleager fight, or his friends, or victory, or revenge, or even his own life. It was Cleopatra, on her knees before him, her face streaked with tears. Here is Phoinix’s craft: Cleopatra, Patroclus. Her name built from the same pieces as mine, only reversed.
• 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.
• We are men only, a brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.