The Firebrand (15 page)

Penthesilea raised her eyebrows. “It would be simpler—and cheaper, I suspect—to sell them what they want.”

“And let them arm themselves against me? Better that my smiths make weapons and let them pay with gold for such weapons as they want. I send some tin and lead and also iron south to the Hittite Kings—those who are left of them. Those caravans too are robbed. There is gold in it for you, then, and for your women if they crave it.”

“I can guard your caravans,” said Penthesilea, “but the price will not be small. My women have traveled here under an omen and are not eager for war; all we want is to return to our own pastures in the spring.”

Kassandra lost track of the conversation; she was absorbed in the snake that was coiling around her arm, gliding into the front of her dress, curling up warm between her breasts. She looked aside to one of the slave women juggling three gold-colored balls, and wondered how the girl managed it. When she returned to paying attention to what was happening, Penthesilea and Imandra were embracing, and Imandra said, “I shall await your warriors the day after tomorrow; by that time the caravans will be loaded and the ships sailing away again to the secret mines in the northern countries. My guards will escort you back to the field where your women are encamped; the Goddess give you a good night; and you too, little kinswoman.” Then she held out her hand. “My snake has abandoned me. Bid her return to me, Kassandra.”

With a certain reluctance, Kassandra reached into the bosom of her dress and scooped out the snake, which draped itself loosely over her hand, twining around her wrist. She loosened it awkwardly with her other hand.

“You must come back and play with her again; usually if I ask someone to hold her for me, she is likely to bite,” said Imandra. “But she has taken to you as if you were a priestess. Will you come?”

“I would find it a pleasure,” Kassandra murmured, as Imandra scooped the snake from her wrist; it crawled swiftly up her arm and slithered down into the Queen’s dress.

“Then I shall welcome you another day, daughter of Hecuba. Farewell.”

As they returned, with the women guards walking two paces behind them, Kassandra thought they were more like prisoners being escorted than honored guests being protected. Nevertheless, as they walked through the busy streets, she heard scufflings in alleys and once a muffled scream, and felt that here in this strange city it might not, after all, be entirely safe for women who were not a part of Colchis.

TEN DAYS later, Penthesilea rode out of Colchis with a picked group of Amazon warriors, Kassandra among them. They would accompany the caravans of tin, unloaded from the harbor ships, on their way southward to the faraway country of the Hittite Kings.

Secretly Kassandra was remembering the words spoken in prophecy: “There remain till the spring stars fall!” Was her kinswoman, then, defying the command of the Goddess? But it was not her place to ask questions. Across her shoulder she carried the Scythian bow, formed of a double span of horn, strung with the braided hair of her horse’s tail. At her side was the short metal-tipped javelin of an Amazon warrior. Riding next to Star, she remembered that her friend had already fought in a battle.

Yet it seemed so peaceful this morning, the bright clear air adazzle with pale sunlight, a few clouds flying overhead. Their horses’ hooves made a muffled sound on the road beneath, a counterpoint to the heavy rumble of the carts, each drawn by two teams of mules, piled high with the wrapped bundles and crude ingots of the dull-shiny metal and covered with black cloth as heavy as a ship’s sail.

The night before, she had stood, with the other warriors, guarding the loading of the wagons; remembering the dense blackness of the ingots of iron, the dullness of the lumps of tin, she wondered why this ugly stuff should be so valuable. Surely there was enough metal in the depths of the earth that all men could have a share; why should men—and women—fight wars over the stuff? If there was not enough for those who wished for it, certainly it would be easy enough to bring more from the mines. Yet it seemed that Queen Imandra took pride in the fact that there was not enough for everyone who wanted a share.

That day was uneventful; the Amazons rode along in single file over the great plain, slowed to the pace of the trundling wagons. Kassandra rode beside one of the blacksmith-women of Colchis, talking with her about her curious trade; she discovered to her surprise that the woman was married and had three grown sons.

“And never a daughter I could train to my trade!”

Kassandra asked, “Why can you not teach your sons your trade of a smith?”

The small muscular woman frowned at her.

“I thought you women of the Amazon tribes would understand,” she said. “You do not even rear your own men-children, knowing how useless they are. Look, girl: metal is ripped from the womb of the Earth Mother; what would be Her wrath should any man dare to touch or mold Her bounty? It is a woman’s task to shape it into earthly form for men to use. No man may follow the smith’s trade, or the Earth Mother will not forgive his meddling.”

If the Goddess does not wish this woman to teach her sons her craft,
Kassandra thought,
why did She give the woman no daughters?
But she was learning not to speak every thought that crossed her mind. She murmured, “Perhaps you will yet have a daughter,” but the blacksmith grumbled, “What? Risk bearing again when I have lived almost forty winters?” and Kassandra made no answer. Instead she pulled her horse ahead to ride beside Star. The older girl was cleaning dirt from under her fingernails with a little chipped-bone knife.

“Do you really think we shall have to fight?”

“Does it matter what I think? The Lady thinks so, and she knows more about it than I do.”

Rebuffed again, Kassandra withdrew into her own thoughts. It was cold and windy; she drew her heavy mantle about her shoulders and thought about fighting. Since she had lived among the Amazons, she had been set every day to practice shooting with the bow, and had some skill with the javelin and even with the sword. Her eldest brother, Hector, had been in training as a warrior since he was old enough to grasp a sword in his hand; his first set of armor had been made for him when he was seven years old. Her mother too had been a warrior maiden, yet in Troy it had never occurred to anyone that Kassandra or her sister, Polyxena, should learn anything of weapons or of war. And although like all Priam’s children she had been weaned on tales of heroes and glory, there were times when it seemed to her that war was an ugly thing and that she was better out of it. But if war was too evil a thing for women, why, then, should it be good for men? And if it was a fine and honorable thing for men, why should it be wrong for women to share the honor and the glory?

The only answer she could summon to her perplexity was Hecuba’s comment:
It is not the custom.

But why?
she had asked, and her mother’s only answer had been:
Customs have no reason; they simply are.

She believed it no more now than she had believed it then.

Withdrawing into herself, she found herself seeking inward, for her twin brother. Troy, and the sunny slopes of Mount Ida, seemed very far away. She thought of the day when he had pursued, and caught, the girl Oenone, and the curious passionate sensations their coupling had roused within her. She wondered where he was now and what he was doing.

But except for a brief and neutral glimpse at the sheep and goats grazing on the slopes of Mount Ida, there was nothing to see. Usually, she thought, it is men who travel and women who remain at home; here I am far afield, and it is my brother who remains on the slopes of the sacred mountain. Well, why should it not be so once in the world?

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.