The Firebrand (16 page)

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 amazement, 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.

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 shepherd’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 figure in the door shifted slightly; the full moon crowned it with a shining halo, and its robes shone like polished marble. Sky Father’s Queen stood there, Hera, stately and majestic, rooted in earth but reigning over it. “Serve me, Paris, and you will be great. You shall rule over all the known countries, and the wealth of the world shall be yours.”

Kassandra felt Paris bow his head. “Truly you are fair, Lady, Most Powerful Queen.” But the apple still lay heavy in his hand.

She looked up cautiously, fearing the Lady’s wrath, but now the moon seemed to shine through a golden haze, glinting from the helmet and shield the Lady bore. The golden light radiated from Her as well, and even the owl on Her right shoulder shone with reflected glory.

“You will have much wisdom, Paris,” Athene said. “Already you know that you cannot rule the world unless you first rule yourself. I shall give you knowledge of self, and build upon it all other knowledge. You will have wisdom to live well, and achieve victory in all battles.”

“I thank you, Lady, but I am a shepherd, not a warrior. And there is no war here; who would dare to challenge the rule of King Priam?”

Kassandra thought she saw a look of scorn on the Lady’s face, but then She moved, coming close enough so that Kassandra felt she could reach out and touch Her. Her shield and helmet had disappeared, as had Her pale draperies, and light radiated from Her perfect body. Paris brought up his hands, still clasping the apple, to shield his eyes. “Bright Lady,” he murmured.

“There are other battles a shepherd can easily win—and what victory can there be without love and a lady to share it? Thou art fair, Paris, and most pleasing to all the senses.” Her breath brushed against his cheek and he felt dizzy, as if the entire mountain were spinning around him. The air around him was warm; he shone brilliantly, bathed in the Lady’s golden glow. Her voice continued, soft and seductive, pulling him toward Her. “Thou art a man any woman would be proud to marry—even such a woman as Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world.”