“我永远是你最忠诚的信徒。”

He falls on the body. The knowledge rushes up in him, choking off breath. A scream comes, tearing its way out. And then another, and another. He seizes his hair in his hands and yanks it from his head. Golden strands fall onto the bloody corpse. Patroclus, he says, Patroclus. Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only.

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.

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.

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.

I am made of memories.

He collects my ashes himself, though this is a woman’s duty. He puts them in a golden urn, the finest in our camp, and turns to the watching Greeks. “When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.”

Priam’s eyes find the other body, mine, lying on the bed. He hesitates a moment. “That is—your friend?” “Philtatos,” Achilles says, sharply. Most beloved. “Best of men, and slaughtered by your son.”

“There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”

There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that.

“You are destroying yourself. You will not be loved for this, you will be hated, and cursed. Please, if you—” “Patroclus.” The word was sharp, as he had never spoken it. His eyes bore down on me, his voice like the judge’s sentence. “I will not do this. Do not ask again.”

He is half of my soul, as the poets say.

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 onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

“He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”

I could see the tug of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He was enjoying it, licking the crowd’s worship off his lips. He did not know, he told me later, what was happening. But he did not question it; it did not seem strange to him.

He stirs and the air stirs with him, bearing the musk-sweet smell of his body. I think: This is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: How long do we have?

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.

When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.