Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space)

by Catherine Lundoff

  Even Andromache doesn’t know. But when she turns and looks at the sea, the waters are dark and sad, but preternaturally calm. Judgment has been passed on Neoptolemos—and his fate has been decided, for better or worse.

  Andromache opens and closes her hands, still cold from the sea-winds. Possessed by vengeance, or a tool of the gods’ justice? She isn’t sure anymore, if she ever was.

  She looks back at the Myrmidons, and one of the men in the front meets her eyes, the same crossing-point reflected in his dark irises. “In Thessaly, a slave murdering her master earns the death penalty,” he says calmly.

  “It’s a good thing we aren’t in Thessaly,” she shoots back, trying to remember to breathe.

  “It is.”

  She exhales, shuddering. She’s a princess, and if any of the men in front of her wanted her dead, they would have acted already. Besides, there are at least ten Trojan slaves to… forty Myrmidons. Never mind.

  “It’s a shame our king was standing so close to the prow. I was trying to save him.”

  The first Myrmidon’s eyes bore into her like daggers, and she can feel more of them throughout the ship. But she walks down the ship again, keeping her back straight. “As his wife—” and isn’t it wonderful how the truth becomes a tool, in the right hands? “I would like to make land and honour him. Of course, I’m only a woman. I will need advisors to help me navigate home to Thessaly. Or wherever we choose to go.” She chooses her words so carefully, they feel like scorpion’s stings on her tongue. The temptation to scream in desperation take me home is so strong that it hurts. But if she knows nothing else, it’s how to be a diplomat. It’s how to promise exactly what she has and make it sound like more.

  If she knows nothing else about men, she knows what they’re greedy for.

  “Neoptolemos’s wife? Is that how you’re playing this, woman?” comes the snort of derision. She turns and faces the man who spoke—tall, burly and dark-bearded.

  She shoves down the fear she feels, knowing she’s exposed in the flimsy dress she’s wearing, knowing she looks nothing like a wife should. “He needed one.”

  “Concubines don’t get a say. You can’t slaughter a good man in cold blood and then steal his title.” He spits at her, and it lands on her cheek.

  Andromache wipes it away slowly, carefully, with ice in her eyes. “There are many things in this life I cannot do,” she says, fixing her eyes on his and letting the sting come back into her voice. “I cannot bring any of my kinsmen back from Hades. I cannot rebuild the stones of Troy.” Her cheeks light up with fury. “But I have seen my husband and son avenged. And I have spent ten years protecting my homeland. Whereas you,” —her eyes sweep the Achaeans, battered and bruised and old and sore— “are your homes still waiting for you? Ten years gone? Ten years waging war on behalf of some king’s pride?”

  The man’s eyes drop in shame, and his cheeks burn. Andromache takes a step closer to him, and pulls the shortsword from his belt, claiming it for her own, and lets the tip hover at his chest. “My name is Andromache. Not concubine. Not woman. Not Trojan. Andromache.”

  “Andromache,” he spits.

  “And I am the wife of Neoptolemos. He took me for his own, before any Argive wife, and he left no heir.” She lowers the sword. “This ship belongs to me. If you have a problem with it, you may go down to the ocean floor and ask him for counsel.”

  His head bows in understanding. And then, so does the man next to him, and the next, and the next, until she’s surrounded by bowed heads and fists on chests. “Andromache,” they say as one, and suddenly she feels dizzy.

  It wasn’t supposed to work.

  ~4~

  That night, she is visited not by Hector (her dreams are not kind to her; the one face she wishes she could see again is lost to the underworld, possibly forever) but by Priam, his shamble accentuated in death, his beard long and twisted, his eyes closed in horror.

  I tried, she says. I tried. But he shakes his head.

  We hid. We all did. We put all our faith in one man—

  Once again, Andromache tries to claim that she tried. But the sinking feeling in her chest tells her something different, that if she hadn’t been a helpless woman, if she had been a warrior like Hector, she could have done more. Perhaps.

  But it’s hubris of the worst kind to believe she could have changed fate. She won’t fall into that trap.

  She looks down into the weight in her arms, expecting to see her son, but instead, there’s only empty air. She can feel him, heavy and warm and sleeping, but there’s nothing there. Only a distant wail, the sudden rush of air on her cheeks as she stands over the wall and reaches for him (too late), and the faraway, sudden, awful thud—

  For a moment, she thinks she’s woken up. It’s not until she realizes she’s surrounded by sisters that she realizes that she’s still dreaming. Helen is the one she sees first.

  I didn’t mean to, Helen whispers. The face that launched a thousand ships is screwed up with tears, and Andromache may have killed a man, now, but Helen has killed thousands without lifting a finger, and the weight of them all sits on her back. I didn’t want this. I just wanted to be happy.

  Cassandra is hiding from Andromache, behind the priestess’s veil. Andromache pushes past Helen (the sympathy is there, but it’s not enough to blank out the unending fury) and tries to lift the veil, but all she can catch a glimpse of are the lips muttering words, over and over again. What were you trying to tell me? She wonders. What were you trying to say?

  And then Hecuba. Her husband’s mother, frail and strong all at once, gone mad at the sight of her children’s bodies. The gods had spared her in some small way; she’d slipped out of Odysseus’s chains in the form of a cat, but the small kindnesses made the rest of the cruelty hurt more. Here, in the fate-dream, she is young and tall but her eyes are white voids, staring deep into the past.

  A warning, Andromache realizes. All three of them, a warning.

  She wakes up with a start, the dawnlight filtering through the tent’s thin fabric, and she gets to her feet. She goes down to the water, ignoring the men as they awake in bits and pieces. And she dips her head into the ocean, letting the past drift away as much as it can, washing away the stains from her eyes.

  ~5~

  The Achaean who had so quietly challenged and reassured her—the first one—is Phileas of Epirus, not even a Myrmidon at all. This puts her surprisingly at ease; that there’s at least one person on board this ship that isn’t tied to Achilles by blood, or a Trojan slave.

  “You’ve got guts, for a woman,” he says with a smile flickering around his mouth once she’s lifted her head from the water.

  “Is that a compliment?” she shoots back.

  “You’ve also got a mouth.”

  She isn’t sure how to respond to that. Slavery is meant to make her more obedient, but instead it’s ruined her, taken away all the little rules she’s spent her life following. She stares at the ground instead.

  “You have no intention of going to Thessaly, do you?”

  “Not if I can help it,” she murmurs. “I don’t foresee a warm welcome.”

  “Neither do I.” He sits down next to her, tapping his sword against his knee. “What do you want, then?”

  “Blood,” the answer jumps into her throat before she can stifle it. It’s a horrible answer. Vengeance solves nothing, but the blood-debt weighs on her shoulders, crying out to be paid.

  Phileas hums thoughtfully at that. “You can only make somebody pay in blood once, that’s the trouble. What do you do after you’ve slaughtered…well, I imagine your list is long. You’ve got more grievances than most.”

  “You’ve been paying attention.”

  “You’re Hector’s wife. Aren’t you?”

  “I imagine the rest of the crew is too stupid to put that together.”

  “More than you imagine. But no, most of us don’t waste our time with the marriages and petty squabbles of the kings.”

  “
Except when you fight their battles for ten years.”

  Phileas throws his head back and laughs. “Oh, you’re still on about that. You don’t know what Myrmidon currency is, do you?”

  She wrings out the last drops of water from her thick, dark hair, watching him curiously. “No.”

  “Two things. Loyalty and gold.”

  “And yours?”

  “More of the second than the first.”

  “You’re not really from Epirus, are you?”

  “Oh, I’m from Epirus. My mother’s from Crete.”

  Andromache sighs, staring at Phileas with an unimpressed glare. “Of course she is. So unless I can pay them and earn their trust, I’ll end up just as dead as Neoptolemos?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “Because, it might help you to know, nobody liked him.” Phileas nods to her arm—or, more specifically, she realizes, at the bruises that have slid back into view, and she yanks her dress back over them. “Achilles was a hero—a bit of a loudmouth, arrogant, but he had the right to be. He did great things. But nobody gets to ride on his father’s fame with nothing to show for it except sacrilege and the murder of old men and children.”

  Andromache can feel the blood drain from her face, and she yanks her eyes away from Phileas. She doesn’t want to think about it, but it’s too late.

  “My apologies, Your Highness.”

  “Don’t,” she mumbles. They sit there in silence for a moment, before she clears her throat. “So the rest – the Myrmidons – it’s about whether they hate being led by a woman more or less than by a teenaged bully.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re not filling me with confidence.”

  “You could always put me in charge.”

  “You’re Cretan,” she scoffed. “Not in a million years.”

  “That’s just cruel.”

  She puts her hand back into the water, watching the waves crash over it—then looks up at the horizon, squinting at the blur on it. It’s another ship, she realizes, and she’s seen enough ships come into the Trojan harbour that she knows what it looks like when a ship is listing, trying to find ground.

  And then, she knows what they’re going to do.

  “Myrmidons!” she calls out, and Phileas falls backwards in surprise, blinking up at her. “Arm yourselves, board the ship, and get ready for battle!”

  “What are you doing?” Phileas hisses. But the power in her voice is doing something because, true to their nature as warriors, the Myrmidons are obeying, hearing the call of opportunity—

  Andromache points out to the listing ship, and to the design she can just barely make out on the prow. “That’s the ship of Diomedes,” she says with a confidence she almost feels. “And I watched everything that went onto that ship.” She can’t help the giddy glee that fills her bones. “Time to pay my men.”

  Before she climbs onto the penteconter, she strokes her hand over the bronze ram on its front, and blesses it with every word she has. She doesn’t know how to sail a ship— but she knows how to inspire confidence in the heart of men, and besides, that’s what her generals are for.

  The rest, she’ll learn along the way.

  ~6~

  The night they bury Hector, Andromache can hardly breathe. Looking at his defiled body is too hard – instead, she keeps her mourning to herself, and instead cradles Astyanax in her arms, whispering courage to him and hopes of vengeance. Even then, she knows, deep in her heart, that she will not get to see her son grow old; she takes the knowledge and buries it somewhere in her mind where she can forget, so she can still hope for victory against their ruthless besiegers.

  Once the games have ended and the lights have gone out, she takes herself up to the wall and stares out at the massed troops by the shore. She’s watched their number dwindle over the years and began to familiarize herself with their patterns. There is Nestor, the old king, with his pattern as he walks among the tents; Diomedes who tends to the herds when he can’t sleep; and there, at the edge of the camp is Achilles. This is the first time in a long time Andromache has seen him alone, without Patroclus, and as much as she wants to hate him, as much as she wants to see him dead, she can’t help but stare at the empty space by his side with sorrow.

  How terrible it is, she thinks, that she can stare across the battlefield where her husband died and feel even a twinge of sympathy for his murderer? Then, she thinks, how terrible it is that instead of comfort in mourning, there is only more death to be found.

  She holds Astyanax close, and whispers, “You will be a great king one day.” She keeps going through the tears threatening to choke her. “A kind one. A good one. You’ll make your father proud.”

  Astyanax looks up at her with his father’s eyes and burbles into the empty darkness, and she buries her face into his mop of curls and cries.

  ~7~

  “If this is a joke,” Diomedes says with calm amusement, “it’s an excellent one.”

  Andromache stands over him with her arms crossed. “This would be the part where you ask for mercy.”

  “From a woman with a sword?” he replies wryly. “I don’t think so—ow,” he complains peevishly as one of the Myrmidons pokes him with a spear-tip. “You’ve one breast too many to be an Amazon, you’re disappointingly mortal, and I’ve got all my clothes on.”

  “I can change that.”

  “Suddenly I regret opening my mouth.”

  Andromache chuckles despite herself. She’s starting to see what men got out of all their squabbling and warfare. She has no interest in taking slaves, though—just all the Trojan treasures that Diomedes ‘liberated’ for his own treasury. “Phileas, take some of the men and take everything you can carry.”

  “I’ll have you know I won that all fair and square.”

  “And now I’ve won it back. If you didn’t want to be pirated, you should have fixed your ship.”

  Diomedes huffs. “I’ve been at war for ten years. I deserve a break.”

  “I was at war for ten years and lost. Save it.”

  He sighs. “Will you at least untie me before you leave?”

  “Hmm… No.”

  “Gorgon.”

  “Achaean.”

  “That’s not an insult.”

  “Not to you, perhaps,” she shoots back with a curve of her lip, and the paling of his face is all the gratification she needs. She lets her men rummage through the treasure, and she strides back onto her ship, feeling her back straighten and her messy braids tumble down her back.

  Once they’ve set sail again, Diomedes’s ship scuppered and floundering behind them, the Myrmidons behind her let out a cheer.

  “Where to next, my lady?” comes the cry from the oars, and she turns at the prow, eyes glittering.

  “Wherever we want. But first, let’s make land. Time to celebrate.”

  ~8~

  It’s a while before she truly earns their respect, and it takes looking the part—she still wears a concubine’s tunic, but over her exposed thighs she wears leather greaves, braces over her arms, and a bronze choker from Priam’s treasury around her neck. Some of the other Trojans remember how to braid her hair in the royal way; she pins the braids up and lets them frame her face like a Hittite painting, and darkens her eyes with kohl that used to live in Hecuba’s jewellery box, and the ship itself, soon to be only one of many under her command, bears painted teeth under the name ‘Astyanax’. One by one she captures the Achaean ships, Argive and Gerenian and Theban.

  With them come the slaves, Ilion and Dardanian, Thracian and Phrygian and Miletian, mostly female with a few young and beautiful men. Some of the children are already with child. Those are the ships that Andromache burns and lets the men jump into the sea. It’s not murder if she lets the gods sort them out.

  The years pass and slowly, the past slips through her fingers. At first she misses it. She cries silently in the mornings, when the rosy-fingered dawn steals away names, faces, memo
ries that used to be dearer than rubies. But they’re replaced with new accomplishments, glory she could never have won as somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother. She could never have imagined inspiring fear, not before feeling it so deeply that it shattered her inside and out.

  And soon, she locks the door behind her, and allows herself to be Andromache the Warlord, Andromache the Sword Queen. Phileas teaches her the sword. Epistor teaches her the bow. And the dark and inconstant and faithless ocean, that birthed Achilles and drowned his son, the ocean teaches her how to forget.

  ~9~

  Almost ten years pass since the sack of Troy, and Andromache is invited—politely, with the air of those seeking safe passage through the waters she now owns—to the island of Scheria. She might be a vicious warlord, but she’s known as a reasonable one, too, and so she goes in her finery, bronze armbands ringing her biceps and gems in her ears.

  Step one of any negotiation, after all, is presentation.

  She’s welcomed into the hall of King Alcinous by young men clearly meant to appeal to her—and it’s not that they don’t, it’s just that as much as her eyes stray, she’s not interested beyond enjoying the view - and then she sits down for a meal in his hall.

  “Queen Andromache,” the King greets her with a smile, and invites her to sit by his side. There’s another man with him, a man with cautious and cunning eyes, but he looks so wild that Andromache dismisses him without another thought - almost. “I’m pleased you accepted my invitation.”

  “I’m pleased to be here. It was very gracious of you to invite me. I know outsiders are not favoured on Scheria.”

  Alcinous scoffs. “Men bring destruction in their wake. But you’re no man, and I’ve heard of your ways.” He smiles and raises a cup to her. “Liberator of slaves, and not a drop of blood shed except for those who drown themselves in terror—you are always welcome on Scheria.”

  It’s flattery, but for all that, it’s true. Andromache doesn’t like the feeling of blood on her hands, for all that Neoptolemos never bled. She watched too much of it shed, for too little reason. “What do you want from me, Alcinous?”