The Firebrand (9 page)

“A pretty little thing,” said the Kentaur. “Soon all my young men will be fighting over her.”

Kassandra blushed and hid behind Elaria again. In Priam’s palace, even her mother freely admitted that Polyxena was “the pretty one,” while Kassandra was “the clever one.” Kassandra had told herself that she did not care; still, it was pleasing to think someone found
her
pretty. “Well,” Penthesilea said, “let us see this honey, and the woman you want us to take off your hands.”

“Will you feast with us? We are roasting a kid for the evening meal,” the Kentaur said, and Penthesilea glanced at her women.

“We had hoped to sleep this night in our own tents,” she protested, “but the kid smells savory and well roasted; it would be a shame not to take our share.” And Elaria added, “Why not rest here for an hour or two? If we do not get home tonight, tomorrow is another day.”

Penthesilea shrugged. “My women have answered for me; we will accept your hospitality with pleasure—or perhaps just with greed.”

The Kentaur beckoned and rode toward the central campfire, and Penthesilea motioned to her women to follow. A young woman knelt before the fire, turning the spit where a kid was roasting. The fat dripping on the fire smelled wonderful, and the crisped skin sizzled. The women slid from their horses, and after a time the men followed.

Penthesilea went at once to the woman turning the spit. Kassandra noticed with horror that both her ankles had been pierced and that her feet were hobbled together by a rope passed through the wounds, so that she could not take large strides. The Amazon Queen looked down at her, not unkindly, and asked, “You are the captive?”

“I am; they stole me from my father’s house last summer.”

“Do you want to return?”

“He swore when he pierced my feet that he would love me and care for me forever; will he cast me off now? Would my father have me back in his house crippled and my belly swelling with a Kentaur’s child?”

“He tells me you are not happy here,” Penthesilea said. “If you wish to come with us, you may dwell in our village until your child is born, and then return to your father’s house or wherever you wish to go.”

The woman’s face twisted with weeping. “Like this?” she said, gesturing toward her mutilated ankles.

Penthesilea turned to the Kentaur leader and said, “I would have taken her willingly, had she been unharmed. But we cannot return her like this to her father’s village. Wasn’t it enough for your young man to carry her away and take her virginity?”

The Kentaur spread his hands helplessly. “He swore he wanted her forever, to keep and cherish, and feared only that she might manage ever to escape him.”

“You should know, after all these years, how long that kind of love endures,” chided the Amazon Queen. “It seldom outlasts the taking of the maidenhead. An eternal love sometimes lasts as long as half a year, but never survives pregnancy. Now what can we do with her? You know as well as I, she cannot be returned to her father’s village this way. This time you have gotten yourself into something from which we cannot extricate you.”

“At this point my man would pay to be rid of her,” the Kentaur said.

“So he must. What will he give, then, to be rid of her?”

“A good mare in foal as indemnity to her father, or for a dowry if she wishes to marry.”

“Perhaps for that we can manage to be rid of her when she can walk again,” Penthesilea said, “but I promise you, this is the last time we solve your love troubles. Keep your men away from the village women and perhaps you will not bring us all into disrepute like this. And it had better be a good mare or it will not be worth the trouble.”

She sniffed appreciatively. “But it would be a pity for the kid to burn or roast too done while I scold you. Let’s have a slice of it, shall we?”

One of the Kentaurs took a big knife and began to slice chunks of meat and crisp skin off the kid. The women gathered and sat on the grass while the food was handed round, with wine from leathern jacks, and chunks of honeycomb. Kassandra ate hungrily; she was tired of riding, and willing to recline on the grass as she ate, and drank the wine. After a time she felt dizzy and lay back, closing her eyes drowsily. At home she was allowed to drink only well-watered wine, and now she felt a little sick. Nevertheless, it seemed that no meal eaten within walls had ever tasted so good to her.

One of the young men who had ridden next to the Kentaur leader came to refill the cup in her hand. Kassandra shook her head. “No more, I thank you.”

“The God of Wine will be cross with you if you deny His gifts,” said the boy. “Drink, Bright Eyes.”

That was what her father called her in his rare affable moods. She sipped a few more swallows, then shook her head. “Already I am too dizzy to sit my horse!”

“Then rest,” the boy said, and pulled her back to lie against his shoulder, his arms around her.

Penthesilea’s eyes rested on them and she said sharply to the boy, “Let her be—she is not for you. She is the daughter of Priam and a princess of Troy.”

The Kentaur chief laughed and said, “He is not so far beneath her, my lady; he is the son of a King.”

“I know your royal fosterlings,” said Penthesilea. “I recall too well when Theseus took our Queen Antiope from us, to live within walls, and die there. All the same, this maiden is in my care, and anyone who touches her must first deal with me.”

The boy laughed and let Kassandra go. “Perhaps when you are grown up, Bright Eyes, your father may think better of me than our kinswoman does; her tribe does not like men, nor marriage.”

“Neither do I,” said Kassandra, pulling away from him.

“Well, perhaps when you are older you will change your mind,” the boy said. He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. Kassandra pulled away and wiped her mouth vigorously, as the Kentaurs laughed. Kassandra saw the crippled village woman watching her, frowning.

The Amazon Queen called her women to their horses, helping one of them load the promised honey on her mare’s back. Then she cut the rope binding the crippled woman’s ankles, and helped her to the back of a horse, speaking to her gently. The woman was not crying now; she went willingly with them. The Kentaur embraced Penthesilea as she mounted her horse.

“Cannot we persuade you to spend the night in our tents?”

“Another time perhaps,” Penthesilea promised, and heartily returned his embrace. “For now, farewell.”

Kassandra was confused; were these men and boys the terrible Kentaurs of the legends? They seemed friendly enough. But she wondered just what their relations were with the Amazons. They did not treat the women the way her father’s soldiers spoke with the women of the household. The handsome boy who had kissed her came and looked up, smiling, at her.

“Perhaps I shall see you at the roundup?” he said. Kassandra looked away, blushing; she did not know what to say to him. He was the first boy except her own brothers she had spoken to.

Penthesilea motioned the women to follow her, and Kassandra saw that they were riding inland, and that the slopes of Mount Ida towered over them. She thought of the vision she had had of the boy with her face herding sheep on the slopes.

He may herd sheep, but I am to learn to ride,
she thought, and, still dizzied with the unaccustomed wine, she leaned forward, balancing herself against Elaria, and fell asleep, rocked by the horse’s swaying gait.

THE WORLD was bigger than she had ever thought; though they rode from first daylight till it was too dark to see, it seemed to Kassandra that they were simply crawling over the plains. The hills of Troy could still be seen behind them, no farther away than before; in the clear air it sometimes seemed she could reach out and touch the shining summit of the city.

Within a very few weeks it seemed to Kassandra that her life had always been lived with the horsewomen of the tribe. From day’s beginning to day’s end she did not set her feet to the ground, but even before breaking her fast was already in the saddle of the chestnut mare they had allotted to her use, whom she called Southwind. With the other girls her age she stood watch against invaders, and at night kept the horses together, watching the stars.

She loved Elaria, who cared for her as she did her own daughters, girls of eleven and seventeen; Penthesilea she worshiped, although the Amazon Queen rarely spoke to her except for a daily inquiry as to her health and welfare. She grew strong, bronzed and healthy. In the endless burning sun on the plains she saw the face of Apollo Sun Lord, and it seemed to her that she lived her life under His eyes.

She had lived with the horsewomen for more than a moon when one day as the tribe dismounted, in view of the now distant Mount Ida, for their frugal noon meal of hunks of strong mare’s-milk cheese, she found herself telling Penthesilea all about the curious vision.

“His face was as like to mine as is mine to my own face reflected in the water,” she said, “yet when I spoke of him, my father knocked me down; and he was angry with my mother too.”

Penthesilea paused for a long time before answering, and Kassandra wondered if the silence of her parents was to be repeated. Then the woman said slowly, “I can well see that your mother, and especially your father, would not wish to speak of this; but I see no reason you should not be told what half of Troy knows. He is your twin brother, Kassandra. When you were born, the Earth Mother, who is also Serpent Mother, sent my sister Hecuba an evil omen: twins. You should both have been killed,” she said harshly. When Kassandra shrank away, her lips trembling, she reached out and stroked the girl’s hair. “I am glad you were not,” she said. “No doubt some God has laid His hand on you.

“Your father felt, perhaps, that he could escape his fate by exposing the child; but as a worshiper of the Father-principle—which is, in truth, a worship of male power and ability to father sons—he dared not wholly renounce a son, and the child was fostered somewhere far from the palace. Your father did not wish to know anything of him because of the evil omen of his birth; so he was angry when you spoke of him.”

Kassandra felt tremendous relief. It seemed to her that all her life she had walked alone when there should have been another at her side, very like her but somehow different.

“And it is not wicked to wish to see him in the scrying-bowl?”

“You do not need the scrying-bowl,” Penthesilea said. “If the Goddess has given you Sight, you need only look within your heart and you will find him there. I am not surprised you are so blessed; your mother had it as a girl and lost it when she married a city-dwelling man.”

“I believed that the—Sight—was the gift of the Sun Lord,” Kassandra said. “It first came to me within His Temple.”

“Perhaps,” said Penthesilea. “But remember, child: before ever Apollo Sun Lord came to rule these lands, our Horse Mother—the Great Mare, the Earth Mother from whom we all are born—she was here.”

She turned and laid her two hands reverently on the dark earth, and Kassandra imitated the gesture, only half understanding. It seemed that she could feel a dark strength moving upward from the earth and flowing through her; it was the same kind of blissful strength she had felt when she held Apollo’s serpents in her two hands. She wondered if she were being disloyal to the God who had called her.

“They told me in the Temple that Apollo Sun Lord had slain the Python, the great Goddess of the Underworld. Is this the Serpent Mother of whom you speak?”

“She who is the Great Goddess cannot be slain, for She is immortal; She may choose to withdraw Herself for a time, but She is and will remain forever,” said the Amazon Queen, and Kassandra, feeling the strength of the earth beneath her hands, took this in as absolute truth.

“Is the Serpent Mother, then, the mother of the Sun Lord?” she asked.

Penthesilea, drawing a breath of reverence, said, “She is mother to Gods and men alike, mother of all things; so Apollo is Her child too, even as are you and I.”

Then . . . if Apollo Sun Lord sought to slay Her, then was He seeking to kill His mother?
Kassandra’s breath caught with the wickedness of the thought. But could a God do wickedness? And if a certain deed was wicked for men, was it wicked also for a God? If a Goddess was immortal, how then could She be slain at all? These things were mysteries, and she set her whole being into fierce resolve that one day she would understand them. Apollo Sun Lord had called her; He had given her His serpents; one day He would lead her to knowledge of the Serpent Mother’s mysteries as well.

The women finished their noon meal and stretched out to rest on the green turf. Kassandra was not sleepy; she had not been accustomed to sleep this way at midday. She watched the clouds drifting across the sky and looked up to the slopes of Mount Ida rising high above the plain.

Her twin brother. It made Kassandra angry to think that everyone knew this when she, whom it concerned most closely, had been kept in ignorance.

She tried to remember deliberately and consciously the state she had been in when she had first seen her brother in the waters of the scrying-bowl. She knelt motionless on the grass, staring upward at the sky, her mind blank, searching for the face she had seen but once, and then only in a vision. For a moment her questing thoughts settled on her own face, seen reflected as if in water, and the golden shimmer which she still called, in her mind, the face and breath of Apollo Sun Lord.

Then the features shifted and the face was a boy’s, her own and yet somehow subtly
not
her own, filled with a mischief wholly alien to her, and she knew she had found her brother. She wondered what he was called, and if he could see her.

From somewhere in the mysterious linkage between them, the answer came: he could if he wished; but he had no reason to seek her, and no particular interest.
Why not?
Kassandra wondered, not yet knowing that she had stumbled on the major flaw in her twin’s character: a total lack of interest in anything that did not relate to himself or contribute in some way to his own comfort and satisfaction.