The Firebrand (13 page)

“Finish him,” she said. “Don’t leave him to die slowly in pain.”

But I don’t want to kill him,
Kassandra thought;
he can’t hurt me now, and he didn’t do me any real harm.
All the same, she knew the law of the Amazons: death for any man who attempted to rape an Amazon; and she could not violate that law. Under the cold eyes of Penthesilea, Kassandra bent reluctantly over the wounded man and drew her dagger hard across his throat. He gurgled and died.

Kassandra, feeling sick, straightened and felt Penthesilea’s hand hard on her shoulder. “Good work. Now you are truly one of our warriors,” she murmured, and strode forward into the torchlight toward the assembled men.

“The Gods have decreed that the guest is sacred,” Penthesilea chided. “Yet one of your men would have ravished one of my unwilling maidens. What excuse can you give for that breach of hospitality?”

“But who ever heard of women to be riding alone this way?” the leader argued. “The Gods protect only women who are decent wives, and you’re not; you don’t belong to anyone.”

“What God told you that?” Penthesilea inquired.

“We don’t need a God to tell us what just stands to reason. And since you had no husbands, we decided we’d take ye in and give ye what ye needed most, men to look after ye.”

“That is not what we need nor what we seek,” the Amazon declared, and gestured to the women surrounding the men with their weapons.

“Take them!”

Kassandra found herself rushing forward with the rest, her dagger raised. The man she rushed against made no particular effort to defend himself; she pushed him down and knelt over him with her knife at his throat.

“Don’t kill us!” the leader of the men cried out. “We won’t hurt you!”

“
Now
you won’t,” Penthesilea said fiercely, “but when we were sleeping and you thought us helpless, you would have killed or raped us!”

Penthesilea held the edge of her dagger at his throat, and he cringed. “Will you swear by your own Gods never again to molest any women of our tribes—or any other—if we let you live?”

“No, we won’t,” said the leader. “The Gods sent you to us, and we took you, and I think we did what was right.”

Penthesilea shrugged and cut his throat. The other men screamed that they would swear, and Penthesilea motioned to the women to let them go. One by one, they knelt and swore as required.

“But I do not trust even their oath,” said Penthesilea, “once they are out of sight of our weapons.” She gave orders for their possessions to be gathered together and for the horses to be saddled, so that they could ride at dawn.

After her sleepless night, Kassandra’s eyes burned and her head ached; it seemed that she could still feel the man’s gross hands on her. When she wished to move she could not; her body was rigid, locked; she heard someone calling her name but the sound was very far away.

Penthesilea came to her, and the touch of her hand brought Kassandra back to herself.

“Can you ride?” she asked.

Wordlessly, Kassandra nodded, and she pulled herself up into the saddle. Her foster-mother came and embraced her, saying, “You did well; now you have killed a man, you are a warrior, fit to fight for us. You are a child no more.” Penthesilea called out the signal to ride, and Kassandra, shivering, urged her horse into motion. She wrapped her blanket over her shoulders.

Ugh,
she thought,
it smells of death.

They rode, chill rain in their faces; she envied the women who were carrying covered clay pots of hot coals. Eastward, and farther eastward, they rode, the wind chilling and growing colder. After a long time the sky lightened to a pale gray, but there was no true daybreak. All around her Kassandra heard the women grumbling, and she ached with hunger and cold.

Penthesilea at last called for a halt, and the women began setting up their tents for the first time in many days. Kassandra clung to her horse, needing the heat of the animal’s body; the aching cold seemed to seep into every muscle and bone of her body. After a time there were fires burning at the center of the encampment, and she went like the others and crouched close to the tongues of warmth.

Penthesilea gestured near where they had been riding, and the women saw, with astonishment, green fields of half-ripened grain. Kassandra could hardly believe her eyes: grain at this season?

“It is winter wheat,” Penthesilea said. “These people plant their grain before the first snow falls, and it lies through the winter under the snow, and ripens before the barley harvest. For this cold climate, they have two grains, and it is the rye I seek.”

The Amazon Queen beckoned to her kinswoman, and Kassandra came to her side.

“What land have we come to, Aunt?” she asked.

“This is the country of the Thracians,” Penthesilea told her; “and northward”—she gestured—“lies the ancient city of Colchis.”

Kassandra remembered one of her mother’s stories. “Where Jason found the golden fleece, by the aid of the witch Medea?”

“The same. But there is little gold there, these days, though there is much witchcraft.”

“Are there people living hereabout?” asked Kassandra. It seemed impossible that anyone would choose to live in this desolate place.

“Fields of wheat and rye do not plant themselves,” Penthesilea reproved her. “Where there is grain, there is always someone, man or woman, to plant it. And here there are people, and also”—she pointed—“horses.”

Far away on the horizon, hardly visible, Kassandra made out small moving flecks which seemed no larger than sheep; but from the way they moved, she could see they were horses. As they surged nearer, Kassandra made out that they were very different from the horses that she and the other Amazons rode; small and dun-colored, with heavyset bodies and thick shaggy hair almost like fur.

“The wild horses of the North; they have never been ridden or tamed,” Penthesilea said. “No God has touched them to mark them for mankind or women. If they belong to any God or Goddess, they are the property of the Huntress Artemis.”

As if moved by one spirit, the whole herd wheeled and dashed away, the lead mare pausing with its head up to stare, nostrils dilated and eyes shining, at the women.

“They smell our stallion,” said Penthesilea. “He must be watched; if he scents a herd of mares, he might well try to add them to our own, and these horses are no use to us. We could not feed them, and there would not be enough pasture.”

“What are we doing here?” Kassandra asked.

“The Goddess is wise,” her kinswoman replied. “Here in the country of the Thracians, we can trade for iron and replenish our weapons. There will be grain for sale in the city of Colchis, if not nearer; and we have items for trade: leatherwork—saddles and bridles, and more. We will go this afternoon to the village and see if we can buy food.”

Kassandra looked at the gray sky and wondered how anyone could tell whether it was morning or afternoon. She supposed that Penthesilea had some way of knowing.

Later that day, Penthesilea summoned Kassandra and one of the other young maidens, Evandre, and they rode toward the village which lay at the center of the grainfields. As the women entered the village—only a few small, round stone houses, and a central building open to the sky where women were working at the shaping of pots—the inhabitants came out to see them.

Many of the women were carrying spindles with wool or goat’s hair wrapped around them. They wore long, loose skirts of woven goat’s hair dyed green or blue; their hair was dark and ragged. Some had children in their arms, or clinging to their skirts.

Kassandra saw, with a little thrill of horror, that many of the children were curiously deformed. One little girl had a raw-looking cleft through her lip, running up through her face till her nostril looked like an open sore; another had but a thumb and one deformed finger on her tiny hand, which looked like a claw. She had never seen living children like this; in Troy, a child born deformed was immediately exposed on the slopes of Mount Ida for wolves or other wild beasts to destroy. Women and children hung back without speaking, but looking curiously at the Amazons and their horses.

“Where are you going?”

“Northward at the will of our Goddess, and at the moment, to Colchis,” said Penthesilea. “We would like to trade here for grain.”

“What have you to trade?”

“Leather goods,” said Penthesilea, and the women shook their heads.

“We make our own leather from the hides of our horses and goats,” said a woman who appeared to be a leader among them. “But sell us a dozen of your little girls and we will give you all the grain you can carry.”

Penthesilea’s face turned pale with anger.

“No woman of our tribe is ever sold into slavery.”

“We do not want them for slaves,” said the woman. “We will adopt them as our daughters. A sickness has raged here, and too many women have died in childbirth, while others cannot bear healthy babies; so you can see, women are very precious to us.”

Penthesilea was paler than ever. She said softly to Evandre, “Pass the word back that no woman is to dismount from her horse for an instant in this village; not for any purpose, no matter what the need. We will ride on.”

“What is the matter, Aunt?” Kassandra asked.

“We must touch none of their grain,” Penthesilea said, and then, to the woman: “I am sorry for your sickness; but we can do nothing to help you. Nevertheless, if you would be free of it, cut down your standing grain and burn it; do not even let it lie to fertilize the fields. Get yourselves fresh seed corn from somewhere south of here. Examine the seeds carefully for any trace of blight; it is this which has poisoned the wombs of your women.”

As they rode away from the village, Penthesilea, riding through the rye fields, bent down and plucked a few of the green stalks. She held them up, pointing to the place where the seeds would be forming.

“Look,” she said, indicating the purplish threadlike fibers at the tips of the stalks as she held them toward Kassandra. “Smell it; as a priestess you must be able to recognize this whenever you encounter it. Do not taste it, whatever you do, nor eat of it even if you are starving.”

Kassandra sniffed, and experienced a curious moldy, slimy, almost fishy smell.

“This rye will poison any who eat fresh grain, or even the bread which could be baked from it; and the worst form of poisoning is that it kills the children in the womb and can destroy a woman’s fertility for years. That village may already be doomed. It is a pity; their women seem handsome and industrious, and their spinning and weaving work is notable. Also, they make fine pots and cups.”

“Will they all die, Aunt?”

“Probably: many of them will eat the poisoned grain and not die of it, but no more healthy children will be born in that village, and by the time they are desperate enough to enforce, perhaps, a year’s famine on their people, it may be too late.”

“And the Gods permit this?” Kassandra asked. “What Goddess is angry enough to blight the grain in the village?”

“I do not know; perhaps it is not the doing of any Goddess at all,” said her kinswoman. “I only know that it comes, year after year, especially when there has been too much rain.”

It had never occurred to Kassandra to doubt that the grain of the fields was watched over and made to grow through the direct agency of Earth Mother; this was a frightening heresy, and she put it out of her mind as quickly as possible. She was aware again of hunger—she had been without substantial food for so long that she had almost ceased to be aware of it for days at a time.

As they rode, they began to see small animals darting into and out of burrows in the ground. A young girl quickly strung her bow and loosed a hunting arrow, shaped of fire-hardened wood instead of metal, and the animal it struck fell over and lay kicking. The archer leaped off her pony and clubbed it over the head. A flight of other arrows followed the first, but only one or two found their mark. At the thought of hare roasted on the spit, Kassandra’s mouth watered.

Penthesilea drew the riders to a halt with a gesture.

“We will camp here, and I promise you, we will not ride on until we are all fed somehow,” she said. “You warriors, take your bows and hunt; as for the rest of you, set up the targets and practice with your arrows. We have neglected practicing our hunting and fighting skills in these days while we ride. Too many of those arrows went far from the targets. In my mother’s day, that many arrows would have brought down enough hares to feed us all.”

She added, “I know how hungry you all are—I am no more fond of fasting than any of you, and it has been as long for me as for any of you since I have eaten a good meal. Yet I beg you, my sisters, if you have found—or stolen—any grain or anything made of it, or any food at all in that village, let me see it before you eat of it. Their grain is cursed, and those who eat of bread made from it may miscarry, or your child may be born with one eye or only one finger.”

One woman defiantly pulled out a hard and somewhat moldy loaf from beneath her tunic. She said, “I will give this to some woman past childbearing age who can eat of it safely. I did not steal it,” she added; “I bartered an old buckle for it.”

One of the oldest women in the tribe said, “I will take it in exchange for my share of the hare I brought down with my arrow; it has been too long since I tasted bread, and I will certainly never bear any more children to be damaged by it.”

The sight of the bread made Kassandra so hungry that she felt she would rather risk miscarriage or damage to a child she might bear someday far in the future; but she would not disobey her kinswoman. Other Amazons brought forth items of food they had bartered for—or stolen—in the village, almost all of which Penthesilea confiscated and threw into the fire.

Kassandra went to shoot at targets while the seasoned warriors rode away to seek game and the old women spread out across the flat countryside to seek food of any sort. It was too far into the winter for berries or fruit, but there might be roots or some edible fungus somewhere.