Perhaps she would be the hero, then, rather than Hector or Paris?
But nothing happened; the carts trundled along slowly and the Amazons rode behind them.
When the early winter sunset stretched the shadows to ragged wavering forms, and the Amazons gathered their horses in a tight circle surrounding the wagons, to camp, Penthesilea voiced what had been in all their minds.
“Perhaps, with the caravan so guarded, they will not attack at all; perhaps we shall simply waste a weary long journey.”
“Wouldn’t that be the best thing that could happen? For them never to attack at all, and the caravan to reach the end of its journey in peace?” one of the women asked. “Then it would be settled without war . . . ?”
“Not settled at all; we would know they were still lurking, and the moment the guard was withdrawn they would swoop down again; we could waste all the winter here,” another said. “I want to see these pirates disposed of once and for all.”
“Imandra wants the lesson taught that the caravans from Colchis are not to be attacked,” said one of the women fiercely. “And that lesson will be a good thing.”
They cooked a stew of dried meat over the fires and slept in a ring around the wagons; many of the women, Kassandra noted, invited the men from the wagons into their blankets. She felt lonely but it never occurred to her to do the same. Little by little she heard the camp fall silent, until there was no sound except the eternal wind of the plains; and everyone slept.
It seemed that the same day was repeated over and over again; they crawled like an inchworm wriggling across a leaf, keeping pace with the heavy wagons, and at the end of that time Kassandra, looking back over the vast plain, thought they seemed no more than a single good day’s ride on a good fast horse from the iron-gated city of Colchis and its harbor of ships.
She had lost count of the tediously limping days that brought no greater adventure than a bundle falling from a wagon, and the whole line of wagons coming to a halt while it was gathered up and laboriously hoisted back up again.
On the eleventh or twelfth day—she had lost count, since there was nothing by which to mark the time—she was watching one of the tied bundles inching its way slowly backward under the tarpaulin that covered the load. She knew she should ride forward and notify the caravan master, or at least the wagon driver, so that it could be lashed tighter, but when it fell, at least it would be a break in the monotony. She counted the paces before it would become unbalanced and tumble off.
“War,” she grumbled to Star. “This is hardly an adventure, guarding the caravans; will we travel all the long way to the country of the Hittites? And will it be any more interesting than this?”
“Who knows?” Star shrugged. “I feel we have been cheated—we were promised battle and good pay. And so far there has been nothing but this dreary riding.” She twitched her shoulders.
“At least the country of the Hittites will be something to see. I have heard that it never rains there; all their houses are made of mud bricks, so that if there was ever a good rain, houses and Temples and palaces and everything would wash away and their whole Empire would fall. But here, there is so little to think about that I am half tempted to invite that handsome horse-keeper into my bed.”
“You would not!”
“No? Why not? What have I to lose? Except that it is forbidden to a warrior,” said Star, “and if I had a child, I should spend my next four years suckling the brat, and washing swaddling clothes, instead of fighting and earning my place as a warrior.”
Kassandra was a little shocked; Star spoke so lightly of such things.
“Haven’t you seen him looking at me?” Star insisted. “He is handsome, and his shoulders are very strong. Or are you going to be one of those maidens who are vowed to remain chaste as the Maiden Huntress?”
Kassandra had not thought seriously about it. She had assumed that for years at least she would remain with the Amazon warriors who took chastity as a matter of course.
“But all your life, Kassandra? To live alone? It must be well enough for a Goddess who can have any man she will,” said Star, “but even the Maiden, it is said, looks down from Heaven now and again and chooses a handsome youth to share her bed.”
“I do not believe that,” said Kassandra. “I think men like to tell those tales because they do not like to think any woman can resist them; they do not want to think that even a Goddess could choose to remain chaste.”
“Well, I think they are right,” said Star. “To lie with a man is what every woman desires—only among us, we are not bound to remain with any man and keep his house and wait on his wishes; but without men we would have no children, either. I am eager to choose my first; and for all your talk I am sure you are no different from any of us.”
Kassandra remembered the coarse shepherd who would have violated her, and felt sick. At least here among the Amazons, no one would insist that she give herself to any man unless she chose; and she could not imagine why any woman would choose such a thing.
“It’s different for you, Kassandra,” Star said. “You are a princess of Troy, and your father will arrange a marriage with any man you wish; a king or a prince or a hero. There is nothing like that in my future.”
“But if you want a man,” Kassandra asked, “why are you riding with the Amazons?”
“I was given no choice,” Star replied. “I am not an Amazon because I wished for it, but because my mother, and her mother before her, chose that way of life.”
Kassandra said, “I can imagine no better life than this.”
“Then you are short on imagination,” Star said, “for almost any other life I can imagine would be better than this; I would rather be a warrior than a village woman with her legs broken, but I would rather live in a city such as Colchis and choose a husband for myself than be a warrior.”
It did not sound like the kind of life Kassandra would wish for, and she could not think of anything else to say. She returned to watching the heavy wagon’s bundles as they shifted, and she was half asleep in her saddle when a loud yell startled her and the wagon driver fell over headlong to the trail, an arrow through his throat.
Penthesilea shouted to her women, and Kassandra slung her strung bow swiftly to her breast, nocked an arrow and let fly at the nearest of the ragged men who were suddenly swarming on the plain, as if they had sprung like dragon’s teeth from the sand. The arrow flew straight to its target; the man who had sprung up beside the driver fell off screaming, and at the same moment the heavy bundle clanged to the rocky path, crushing one of the attackers who was trying to pull himself up on the wagon. Man and metal rolled together down the slope, and one of the warriors leaped from her horse and ran toward him, thrusting quickly with her javelin.
One of the running men grabbed at Kassandra’s saddle straps and hauled at her leg; she kicked, but he grabbed her off, and she struggled to get her knife free.
She thrust upward and he fell across her, blood streaming from his mouth; another thrust, with the javelin this time, and he fell lifeless across her body. She struggled to get herself free of his weight. Then there was a javelin aimed at her throat; she thrust upward with her knife to knock it aside and felt a tearing pain in her cheek.
A man’s hand was gripping her elbow; she knocked the elbow into his mouth and felt blood and a tooth sprayed into her face. Over her shoulder she could see many men hauling at the bundles of metal, flinging them down into the roadway; she could hear Star screaming somewhere and the sound of arrows singing in flight. All around her was the high shrilling of the Amazon battle cry. Kassandra thrust her javelin and the man attacking her fell dead; she jerked the weapon free and found it covered with blood and entrails. Hastily unslinging her bow again, she began shooting at the invaders, but as every arrow flew she was afraid it would hit one of her companions.
Then it was all over; Penthesilea ran toward the wagon, beckoning her women to rally close. Kassandra hurried to catch her horse, which, to her amazemen
t, had come through the thick of the flying arrows untouched. The driver of the wagon was dead, lying back along the roadway. Star lay half crushed under her fallen horse; the beast had been slain by half a dozen of the strangers’ arrows. Shocked, Kassandra ran to try to heave the horse from her friend’s body. Star lay still, her tunic torn, the back of her head smashed into a reddish mess, her eyes staring straight ahead.
She wanted a battle, Kassandra thought. Well, she had one. She bent over her friend and gently closed her eyes. Not till then did she realize how badly she herself was wounded; her cheek torn open, blood dripping from the flap of skin and flesh.
Penthesilea came to her and bent over Star’s body.
“She was young to die,” said the Amazon Queen gently. “But she fought bravely.”
That was not, Kassandra thought, much good to Star now. The Amazon Queen looked her straight in the face and said, “But you too are wounded, child. Here, let me tend your wound.”
Kassandra said dully, “It is nothing; it doesn’t hurt.”
“It will,” said her kinswoman, and took her to one of the wagons, where Elaria washed the torn cheek with wine, and then dressed it with sweet oil.
“Now you are truly a warrior,” said Elaria, and Kassandra remembered having been told that on the night when she had killed the man who tried to ravish her. But she supposed that a real battle made her more truly a fighting woman. She bore the wound proudly, the mark of her first battle.
Penthesilea, her face smeared with blood, bent close to examine the cleansed wound and frowned. “Bind it carefully, Elaria, or there will be a dreadful scar—and that we must not have.”
“What does it matter?” Kassandra asked wearily. “Most Amazon warriors have scars.” Penthesilea herself was dripping blood from an open slash on her chin. Kassandra touched her cheek with careful fingers. “When it is healed it will hardly show. Why make a fuss about it?”
“You appear to be forgetting, Kassandra, that you are not an Amazon.”
“My mother herself was once a warrior,” Kassandra protested. “She will understand an honorable scar of battle.”
“She is a warrior no longer,” Penthesilea said grimly. “She chose a long time ago what she would be; that she would live with your father, keep his house, bear his children. So if your father is angry—and angry, believe me, he will be if we send you back to him with your beauty marred—your mother will be greatly distressed, and her goodwill is very valuable to us. You will go back to Troy when we head south in the spring.”
“No!” Kassandra protested. “Only now am I beginning to be of some use to the tribe instead of a burden. Why should I go back to being a house-mouse”—she pronounced the words disdainfully—“just when I have shown myself fit to become a warrior?”
“Think, Kassandra, and you will know why you must go,” Penthesilea replied. “You are becoming a warrior; which would be well and good were you to spend the rest of your life with us. I would welcome you among our tribe, a true warrior and a daughter to me as long as I live. But this cannot be; soon or late, you must return to your life in Troy—and since it must be so, then for your own sake it had best be soon. You are old enough now to be married; indeed, your father may already have chosen a husband for you. I would not send you back so changed that you would be miserable all your life if you must spend it within city walls.” Kassandra knew this was true, but it seemed to her that she was being punished for becoming one of them.
“Don’t look so downcast, Bright Eyes; I am not sending you away tomorrow,” her kinswoman said, and drew the girl to her breast, stroking her hair. “You will remain with us at least for another moon, perhaps two, and return with us to Colchis. Nor have I forgotten the promise I made you. The Goddess has called you to Her service, has set Her hand upon you as priestess born; we could not claim you as warrior in any case. Before you depart from among us, we shall see you presented to Her.”
Kassandra still felt that she had been cheated; she had worked so long and bravely to be accepted as an Amazon warrior, and it was that very hard work and bravery in battle which had lost her the coveted goal.
The scene of the battle was being cleared; the bodies of the Amazons—besides Star, two other women had been slain by arrows and one crushed beneath a fallen horse—were being dragged away to be burnt. Penthesilea pushed Kassandra gently down when she would have risen.
“Rest; you are wounded.”
“Rest? What are the other warriors doing, wounded or not? May I not bear the part of a warrior at least while I still remain among you?”
Penthesilea sighed. “As you will, then. It is your right to see those you have slain sent to the Lord of the Underworld.” With tenderness she touched the girl’s wounded cheek.
Goddess, Mother of Mares, Lady who shapes our Fates, she thought, why did You not send this one, the true daughter of my heart, to my womb, rather than to my sister, who had chosen to give her to a man’s dominion? She will know no happiness there, and I see only darkness lying before her, darkness, and the shadow of another’s fate.
Her heart yearned for Kassandra as never for her own daughters; yet she realized that Hecuba’s daughter must bear her own destiny, which she could not abate, and that the Dark Goddess had set her hand on the girl.
No woman can escape her Fate, she thought, and it is ill done to seek to deprive Earth Mother of Her appointed sacrifice. Yet for love of her, I would send her to serve Earth Mother below, rather than sentence her to serve the Dark One here in mortal lands.
10
KASSANDRA SAW her companions consigned to the flames without any visible display of emotion; when they made camp that night, at their insistence she spread her blankets between those of Penthesilea and Elaria.
It did filter through her mind that, without consulting her, a decision had been made. Now that the worst of the danger was over, they seemed suddenly to have remembered that she was a princess of Troy, and she was now to be carefully protected. But she was no more and no less a princess than she had been two or three days ago.
She missed Star, though they had not, she supposed, really been friends. Yet there was a subdued horror in Kassandra at the thought that every night on this journey she had spread out her blankets on the trail close beside this girl whose body now lay burned to ashes after having been smashed into ruin and pierced with arrows.
A little less luck, an opponent a little more skilled and the javelin that had torn her cheek would have gone through her throat; it would have been her body burned tonight on that pyre. She felt vaguely guilty, and was too new to the warrior’s world to know that every one of the women lying around her felt exactly the same way: guilty and troubled that it was she who was alive and her friend who had died.
Penthesilea had spoken of the Goddess’ laying Her hand upon her, as if this were a fact like any other, and Kassandra found herself wondering if she had been spared because the Goddess had some use for her.
Her torn cheek itched with maddening ferocity, and when she raised her hand to try to ease it by scratching or rubbing, a sharp pain kept her from touching it. She shifted the cloak she had wadded under her head and tried to find a comfortable position to sleep. Which Goddess had laid a hand on her? Penthesilea had told her once, casually, that all the Goddesses were the same, although each village and tribe had its own name for Her. There were many: the Moon Lady, whose tides and daily shifting rhythms laid Her compulsion on every female animal; the Mother of Mares, whom Penthesilea invoked; the Maiden Huntress, whose protection was on every maiden and everyone who shot with the bow, guardian of warriors; the Dark Mother of the under-earth, Snake Mother of the Underworld . . . but She, Kassandra thought in confusion as her thoughts began to blur into sleep, had been slain by Apollo’s arrows. . . .
As often before sleep, she reached out in her mind for the familiar touch of her twin’s thoughts. There was the riffle of a wind from home, and the thyme-scented air of Mount Ida drifted through her senses; the darkness of the s
hepherd’s hut she had never, in her own body, entered was around her; she wondered what he would have thought of the battle. Or would this have seemed commonplace to him? No; for now she, a woman, had more experience of battle than he had. Shadowed darkly at her side she could see—or sense—a sleeping form she identified as the woman Oenone who had for so long been the center of her—of his fantasies. She had become accustomed in the last months to this curious division of herself and her twin, till she was no longer sure which sensations and emotions were hers and which Paris’. Was she asleep and dreaming? Was he?
The moonlight illuminated the softly shining form of a woman standing in the shadowed doorway of the shepherd’s hut, and she knew she looked on the form of the Lady; a Queen, regal and shining; now the shining one shifted, and the light streamed from the silver bow, with arrows of moonlight filling the little room.
The moonlight seemed to pierce through her body—or his—running through the veins, weaving around her like a net, drawing her toward the figure in the doorway. It seemed to her that she stood, facing the Lady, and a voice spoke from behind her left shoulder . . .
“Paris, thou hast shown thyself a fair and honest judge.” Kassandra saw again for an instant the bull Paris had awarded the prize at the fair. “Judge thou therefore among the Goddesses, which is the fairest.”
“Truly”—she felt Paris’ reply come as if from her own mouth—“the Lady is most fair in all her guises. . . .”
Boyish laughter echoed at her shoulder. “And canst thou worship Her with perfect equality in all the Goddesses, without preferring one above another? Even the Sky Father shies from such a difficult balance as that!” Something smooth and cool and very heavy was put into Paris’ hands, and golden light shone up upon his face. “Take thou this apple, and offer it to the Most Fair Goddess.”
The Firebrand Page 12
