By Elliott Dunstan
Andromache—once of Hypoplakia and once of Troy, and now of nowhere at all—watches the sky pass by behind her captor and master, the sea splash at the side of the penteconter, and dreams about home. Home is faces, long gone; home was burning, the last she saw it, a thousand voices crying out as they were slaughtered or captured; home is a memory.
“What’s the matter, Andromache? Lost in thought again?” Neoptolemos is staring back at her, the pride of victory lighting up his face. It’s been only a day since they put out from Troy, and her hands are still cold. The first morning without her son. The first morning alone.
-Hell hath no fury-
The anger starts slow, still smoldering as he turns back to stare out at the waves breaking at the prow. She gets to her feet, sandals soaking in the water at the bottom of the penteconter, and she strides down between the rowers. “More found than lost, my lord,” she replies, and he starts, glancing down at her again as she climbs up to stand by him.
He laughs, and she stares at the pearly white of his teeth. He’s young, too young to have so much blood on his hands. Her hands are so cold. So cold. “I thought you’d get a taste for the ocean.” His hand strokes her waist, and the repulsion that runs through her like a shock is so violent, so brutal, that she almost jumps into the ocean herself, to be away from him. She’d be with Hector, and Astyanax, and the rest of her family and people.
-Hell hath no fury-
“Tell me, Neoptolemos, once more,” she says it in a quiet, almost pleading tone, “why my son had to die.”
His eyes blur with confusion for a second, eyes as blue as the ocean and the sky that meet behind him in the horizon, and then smoldering fury sets them alight like tinder to bark. Then—”Oh, yes. Hector’s son. If I’d left him alive, he would want me dead. My father killed his; I’d be the target. Better to end the cycle now.”
And in your favour. But Andromache just nods, the picture of innocence, of matronly subservience and understanding, and pretends not to be hearing the awful thud of a body falling off a wall, over and over again.
“So Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles kills Hector, you kill Hector’s son so he won’t kill you—the cycle ends there, then?”
Neoptolemos shrugs. “Unless there’s some bastards I missed, the house of Priam is at an end.”
It’s never occurred to Andromache to count herself as part of any dynasty or house. She’s a princess, of course. But to hear herself and Cassandra and Hecuba and so many other living, breathing souls denied and ignored, as if their souls passed on when their husbands did—
She touches the front of Neoptolemos’s bronze armour, as if with admiration, and takes hold of a leather strap. Then in quiet, unassuming words, she says, “So is the house of Achilles.”
And she shoves him with strength she didn’t know she had, balancing the fates, and Neoptolemos topples over the prow of his ship, bronze armour glinting in the sunlight, boars-tusk helmet falling off his head and fair curls tossing this way and that in the salty wind.
He disappears under the wine-dark waves with a speed that surprises her, the armour he was so proud of weighing him down (and, she’ll wager, all the lives that hang on it like heavy, sodden fruit).
Andromache has seen plenty of men fall in battle. They’ve fallen to their friends, to their enemies, and when the despair of the Achaean assault had built to the point of no escape, sometimes to the points of their own swords. But as she waits and watches the murderer of her son, her father-in-law, her people drown in the Aegean Sea, she scrubs her hands against each other with a sudden conscious knowledge that now, a man has fallen to her, and she cannot take it back.
Hell hath no fury like a woman with nothing left to lose.
~2~
Hypoplakia – under the mountain – is not quite big enough to be a city, not quite small enough to be a town, storied enough to matter, inconsequential enough that it could vanish without a trace. Herakles founded it generations before, named it Thebe, and all the following generations since called it something else to distinguish it from its cousin.
This is Andromache’s homeland. Even more so, she is one daughter compared to seven sons, all competing to decide who will inherit their not-quite-city, to pay tribute to Troy, which will in turn pay tribute to the Hittites inland in their grand city—
It’s no wonder that when Hector, son of Priam and prince of Troy, rides into Hypoplakia, there’s not even the glimmer of suspicion in Andromache’s mind that it has anything to do with her.
Except, of course, it does. Andromache is sitting in the olive grove when Hector comes to her. He asks her for her hand, like she is a princess with a dowry instead of an unwanted extra mouth to feed, and she accepts—it is her duty, after all, the first thing that Hypoplakia has asked of her, in her short life, and it’s something she can do for her birthplace. Hector marries her in the olive grove, his hand warm in hers, and they ride away together. He whispers promises into her ear that they’ll visit.
(When Hypoplakia burns to the ground under the greedy swords and chariots of the Achaeans, Hector holds her while she cries. He doesn’t mock her. He swears that he will drive them off or die trying—and Andromache is struck by the sudden realization, oh, oh she does love him after all —and asks him please, please to stay with her.)
~3~
She turns from the prow, staring down at the rows and rows of oarsmen and trying to pretend that her heart isn’t jumping into her throat with fear. In the middle, some of the other Trojan slaves are looking up at her with the selfsame fear, Andromache what did you do – but the Myrmidons are confused, angry, befuddled, trying to understand what has just happened.
Of course, she realizes, on the edge of desperate laughter. The grandchild of the sea. It won’t be long before Neoptolemos resurfaces. How could she have been so foolish?
They’re all waiting for the inevitable. Thetis will bring her grandchild back to the surface, and either she or Neoptolemos will execute Andromache for her insolence.
The ship rests in the dead wind, in haunting silence. Then, one by one, the Achaeans drop their oars and stand, staring up at the concubine, the murderer, still unsure whether she is blessed or cursed.
Even Andromache doesn’t know. But when she turns and looks at the sea, the waters are dark and sad, but preternaturally calm. Judgment has been passed on Neoptolemos—and his fate has been decided, for better or worse.
Andromache opens and closes her hands, still cold from the sea-winds. Possessed by vengeance, or a tool of the gods’ justice? She isn’t sure anymore, if she ever was.
She looks back at the Myrmidons, and one of the men in the front meets her eyes, the same crossing-point reflected in his dark irises. “In Thessaly, a slave murdering her master earns the death penalty,” he says calmly.
“It’s a good thing we aren’t in Thessaly,” she shoots back, trying to remember to breathe.
“It is.”
She exhales, shuddering. She’s a princess, and if any of the men in front of her wanted her dead, they would have acted already. Besides, there are at least ten Trojan slaves to… forty Myrmidons. Never mind.
“It’s a shame our king was standing so close to the prow. I was trying to save him.”
The first Myrmidon’s eyes bore into her like daggers, and she can feel more of them throughout the ship. But she walks down the ship again, keeping her back straight. “As his wife—” and isn’t it wonderful how the truth becomes a tool, in the right hands? “I would like to make land and honour him. Of course, I’m only a woman. I will need advisors to help me navigate home to Thessaly. Or wherever we choose to go.” She chooses her words so carefully, they feel like scorpion’s stings on her tongue. The temptation to scream in desperation take me home is so strong that it hurts. But if she knows nothing else, it’s how to be a diplomat. It’s how to promise exactly what she has and make it sound like more.
If she knows nothing else about men, she knows what they’re greedy for.
“Neoptolemos’s wife? Is that how you’re playing this, woman?” comes the snort of derision. She turns and faces the man who spoke—tall, burly and dark-bearded.
She shoves down the fear she feels, knowing she’s exposed in the flimsy dress she’s wearing, knowing she looks nothing like a wife should. “He needed one.”
“Concubines don’t get a say. You can’t slaughter a good man in cold blood and then steal his title.” He spits at her, and it lands on her cheek.
Andromache wipes it away slowly, carefully, with ice in her eyes. “There are many things in this life I cannot do,” she says, fixing her eyes on his and letting the sting come back into her voice. “I cannot bring any of my kinsmen back from Hades. I cannot rebuild the stones of Troy.” Her cheeks light up with fury. “But I have seen my husband and son avenged. And I have spent ten years protecting my homeland. Whereas you,” —her eyes sweep the Achaeans, battered and bruised and old and sore— “are your homes still waiting for you? Ten years gone? Ten years waging war on behalf of some king’s pride?”
The man’s eyes drop in shame, and his cheeks burn. Andromache takes a step closer to him, and pulls the shortsword from his belt, claiming it for her own, and lets the tip hover at his chest. “My name is Andromache. Not concubine. Not woman. Not Trojan. Andromache.”
“Andromache,” he spits.
“And I am the wife of Neoptolemos. He took me for his own, before any Argive wife, and he left no heir.” She lowers the sword. “This ship belongs to me. If you have a problem with it, you may go down to the ocean floor and ask him for counsel.”
His head bows in understanding. And then, so does the man next to him, and the next, and the next, until she’s surrounded by bowed heads and fists on chests. “Andromache,” they say as one, and suddenly she feels dizzy.
It wasn’t supposed to work.
~4~
That night, she is visited not by Hector (her dreams are not kind to her; the one face she wishes she could see again is lost to the underworld, possibly forever) but by Priam, his shamble accentuated in death, his beard long and twisted, his eyes closed in horror.
I tried, she says. I tried. But he shakes his head.
We hid. We all did. We put all our faith in one man—
Once again, Andromache tries to claim that she tried. But the sinking feeling in her chest tells her something different, that if she hadn’t been a helpless woman, if she had been a warrior like Hector, she could have done more. Perhaps.
But it’s hubris of the worst kind to believe she could have changed fate. She won’t fall into that trap.
She looks down into the weight in her arms, expecting to see her son, but instead, there’s only empty air. She can feel him, heavy and warm and sleeping, but there’s nothing there. Only a distant wail, the sudden rush of air on her cheeks as she stands over the wall and reaches for him (too late), and the faraway, sudden, awful thud—
For a moment, she thinks she’s woken up. It’s not until she realizes she’s surrounded by sisters that she realizes that she’s still dreaming. Helen is the one she sees first.
I didn’t mean to, Helen whispers. The face that launched a thousand ships is screwed up with tears, and Andromache may have killed a man, now, but Helen has killed thousands without lifting a finger, and the weight of them all sits on her back. I didn’t want this. I just wanted to be happy.
Cassandra is hiding from Andromache, behind the priestess’s veil. Andromache pushes past Helen (the sympathy is there, but it’s not enough to blank out the unending fury) and tries to lift the veil, but all she can catch a glimpse of are the lips muttering words, over and over again. What were you trying to tell me? She wonders. What were you trying to say?
And then Hecuba. Her husband’s mother, frail and strong all at once, gone mad at the sight of her children’s bodies. The gods had spared her in some small way; she’d slipped out of Odysseus’s chains in the form of a cat, but the small kindnesses made the rest of the cruelty hurt more. Here, in the fate-dream, she is young and tall but her eyes are white voids, staring deep into the past.
A warning, Andromache realizes. All three of them, a warning.
She wakes up with a start, the dawnlight filtering through the tent’s thin fabric, and she gets to her feet. She goes down to the water, ignoring the men as they awake in bits and pieces. And she dips her head into the ocean, letting the past drift away as much as it can, washing away the stains from her eyes.
~5~
The Achaean who had so quietly challenged and reassured her—the first one—is Phileas of Epirus, not even a Myrmidon at all. This puts her surprisingly at ease; that there’s at least one person on board this ship that isn’t tied to Achilles by blood, or a Trojan slave.
“You’ve got guts, for a woman,” he says with a smile flickering around his mouth once she’s lifted her head from the water.
“Is that a compliment?” she shoots back.
“You’ve also got a mouth.”
She isn’t sure how to respond to that. Slavery is meant to make her more obedient, but instead it’s ruined her, taken away all the little rules she’s spent her life following. She stares at the ground instead.
“You have no intention of going to Thessaly, do you?”
“Not if I can help it,” she murmurs. “I don’t foresee a warm welcome.”
“Neither do I.” He sits down next to her, tapping his sword against his knee. “What do you want, then?”
“Blood,” the answer jumps into her throat before she can stifle it. It’s a horrible answer. Vengeance solves nothing, but the blood-debt weighs on her shoulders, crying out to be paid.
Phileas hums thoughtfully at that. “You can only make somebody pay in blood once, that’s the trouble. What do you do after you’ve slaughtered…well, I imagine your list is long. You’ve got more grievances than most.”
“You’ve been paying attention.”
“You’re Hector’s wife. Aren’t you?”
“I imagine the rest of the crew is too stupid to put that together.”
“More than you imagine. But no, most of us don’t waste our time with the marriages and petty squabbles of the kings.”
“Except when you fight their battles for ten years.”
Phileas throws his head back and laughs. “Oh, you’re still on about that. You don’t know what Myrmidon currency is, do you?”
She wrings out the last drops of water from her thick, dark hair, watching him curiously. “No.”
“Two things. Loyalty and gold.”
“And yours?”
“More of the second than the first.”
“You’re not really from Epirus, are you?”
“Oh, I’m from Epirus. My mother’s from Crete.”
Andromache sighs, staring at Phileas with an unimpressed glare. “Of course she is. So unless I can pay them and earn their trust, I’ll end up just as dead as Neoptolemos?”
“That’s right.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“Because, it might help you to know, nobody liked him.” Phileas nods to her arm—or, more specifically, she realizes, at the bruises that have slid back into view, and she yanks her dress back over them. “Achilles was a hero—a bit of a loudmouth, arrogant, but he had the right to be. He did great things. But nobody gets to ride on his father’s fame with nothing to show for it except sacrilege and the murder of old men and children.”
Andromache can feel the blood drain from her face, and she yanks her eyes away from Phileas. She doesn’t want to think about it, but it’s too late.
“My apologies, Your Highness.”
“Don’t,” she mumbles. They sit there in silence for a moment, before she clears her throat. “So the rest – the Myrmidons – it’s about whether they hate being led by a woman more or less than by a teenaged bully.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re not filling me with confidence.”
“You could always put me in charge.”
“You’re Cretan,” she scoffed. “Not in a million years.”
“That’s just cruel.”
She puts her hand back into the water, watching the waves crash over it—then looks up at the horizon, squinting at the blur on it. It’s another ship, she realizes, and she’s seen enough ships come into the Trojan harbour that she knows what it looks like when a ship is listing, trying to find ground.
And then, she knows what they’re going to do.
“Myrmidons!” she calls out, and Phileas falls backwards in surprise, blinking up at her. “Arm yourselves, board the ship, and get ready for battle!”
“What are you doing?” Phileas hisses. But the power in her voice is doing something because, true to their nature as warriors, the Myrmidons are obeying, hearing the call of opportunity—
Andromache points out to the listing ship, and to the design she can just barely make out on the prow. “That’s the ship of Diomedes,” she says with a confidence she almost feels. “And I watched everything that went onto that ship.” She can’t help the giddy glee that fills her bones. “Time to pay my men.”
Before she climbs onto the penteconter, she strokes her hand over the bronze ram on its front, and blesses it with every word she has. She doesn’t know how to sail a ship— but she knows how to inspire confidence in the heart of men, and besides, that’s what her generals are for.
The rest, she’ll learn along the way.
~6~
The night they bury Hector, Andromache can hardly breathe. Looking at his defiled body is too hard – instead, she keeps her mourning to herself, and instead cradles Astyanax in her arms, whispering courage to him and hopes of vengeance. Even then, she knows, deep in her heart, that she will not get to see her son grow old; she takes the knowledge and buries it somewhere in her mind where she can forget, so she can still hope for victory against their ruthless besiegers.
Once the games have ended and the lights have gone out, she takes herself up to the wall and stares out at the massed troops by the shore. She’s watched their number dwindle over the years and began to familiarize herself with their patterns. There is Nestor, the old king, with his pattern as he walks among the tents; Diomedes who tends to the herds when he can’t sleep; and there, at the edge of the camp is Achilles. This is the first time in a long time Andromache has seen him alone, without Patroclus, and as much as she wants to hate him, as much as she wants to see him dead, she can’t help but stare at the empty space by his side with sorrow.
How terrible it is, she thinks, that she can stare across the battlefield where her husband died and feel even a twinge of sympathy for his murderer? Then, she thinks, how terrible it is that instead of comfort in mourning, there is only more death to be found.
She holds Astyanax close, and whispers, “You will be a great king one day.” She keeps going through the tears threatening to choke her. “A kind one. A good one. You’ll make your father proud.”
Astyanax looks up at her with his father’s eyes and burbles into the empty darkness, and she buries her face into his mop of curls and cries.
~7~
“If this is a joke,” Diomedes says with calm amusement, “it’s an excellent one.”
Andromache stands over him with her arms crossed. “This would be the part where you ask for mercy.”
“From a woman with a sword?” he replies wryly. “I don’t think so—ow,” he complains peevishly as one of the Myrmidons pokes him with a spear-tip. “You’ve one breast too many to be an Amazon, you’re disappointingly mortal, and I’ve got all my clothes on.”
“I can change that.”
“Suddenly I regret opening my mouth.”
Andromache chuckles despite herself. She’s starting to see what men got out of all their squabbling and warfare. She has no interest in taking slaves, though—just all the Trojan treasures that Diomedes ‘liberated’ for his own treasury. “Phileas, take some of the men and take everything you can carry.”
“I’ll have you know I won that all fair and square.”
“And now I’ve won it back. If you didn’t want to be pirated, you should have fixed your ship.”
Diomedes huffs. “I’ve been at war for ten years. I deserve a break.”
“I was at war for ten years and lost. Save it.”
He sighs. “Will you at least untie me before you leave?”
“Hmm… No.”
“Gorgon.”
“Achaean.”
“That’s not an insult.”
“Not to you, perhaps,” she shoots back with a curve of her lip, and the paling of his face is all the gratification she needs. She lets her men rummage through the treasure, and she strides back onto her ship, feeling her back straighten and her messy braids tumble down her back.
Once they’ve set sail again, Diomedes’s ship scuppered and floundering behind them, the Myrmidons behind her let out a cheer.
“Where to next, my lady?” comes the cry from the oars, and she turns at the prow, eyes glittering.
“Wherever we want. But first, let’s make land. Time to celebrate.”
~8~
It’s a while before she truly earns their respect, and it takes looking the part—she still wears a concubine’s tunic, but over her exposed thighs she wears leather greaves, braces over her arms, and a bronze choker from Priam’s treasury around her neck. Some of the other Trojans remember how to braid her hair in the royal way; she pins the braids up and lets them frame her face like a Hittite painting, and darkens her eyes with kohl that used to live in Hecuba’s jewellery box, and the ship itself, soon to be only one of many under her command, bears painted teeth under the name ‘Astyanax’. One by one she captures the Achaean ships, Argive and Gerenian and Theban.
With them come the slaves, Ilion and Dardanian, Thracian and Phrygian and Miletian, mostly female with a few young and beautiful men. Some of the children are already with child. Those are the ships that Andromache burns and lets the men jump into the sea. It’s not murder if she lets the gods sort them out.
The years pass and slowly, the past slips through her fingers. At first she misses it. She cries silently in the mornings, when the rosy-fingered dawn steals away names, faces, memories that used to be dearer than rubies. But they’re replaced with new accomplishments, glory she could never have won as somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother. She could never have imagined inspiring fear, not before feeling it so deeply that it shattered her inside and out.
And soon, she locks the door behind her, and allows herself to be Andromache the Warlord, Andromache the Sword Queen. Phileas teaches her the sword. Epistor teaches her the bow. And the dark and inconstant and faithless ocean, that birthed Achilles and drowned his son, the ocean teaches her how to forget.
~9~
Almost ten years pass since the sack of Troy, and Andromache is invited—politely, with the air of those seeking safe passage through the waters she now owns—to the island of Scheria. She might be a vicious warlord, but she’s known as a reasonable one, too, and so she goes in her finery, bronze armbands ringing her biceps and gems in her ears.
Step one of any negotiation, after all, is presentation.
She’s welcomed into the hall of King Alcinous by young men clearly meant to appeal to her—and it’s not that they don’t, it’s just that as much as her eyes stray, she’s not interested beyond enjoying the view - and then she sits down for a meal in his hall.
“Queen Andromache,” the King greets her with a smile, and invites her to sit by his side. There’s another man with him, a man with cautious and cunning eyes, but he looks so wild that Andromache dismisses him without another thought - almost. “I’m pleased you accepted my invitation.”
“I’m pleased to be here. It was very gracious of you to invite me. I know outsiders are not favoured on Scheria.”
Alcinous scoffs. “Men bring destruction in their wake. But you’re no man, and I’ve heard of your ways.” He smiles and raises a cup to her. “Liberator of slaves, and not a drop of blood shed except for those who drown themselves in terror—you are always welcome on Scheria.”
It’s flattery, but for all that, it’s true. Andromache doesn’t like the feeling of blood on her hands, for all that Neoptolemos never bled. She watched too much of it shed, for too little reason. “What do you want from me, Alcinous?”
“Oh, let’s not. Let’s have a song first.” Then Alcinous turns to his companion, the man with the wild beard and the blanket wrapped around him. “This is my other guest, a stranger who washed up shipwrecked on our shores.”
“What happened to men bringing destruction?”
“Destruction or not, I cannot in good faith turn away somebody who supplicated my queen and is in dire need of help. What would you like to hear, my friend?”
The man smiles, scratching his beard, then turns to the singer. “Anything you know of the exploits of the Achaeans.”
Andromache’s blood runs cold. She pushes her hands under the table, managing to keep herself calm by digging her fingernails into her knee as the blind singer begins to pick out a song on his lyre. It’s a song about Odysseus and—who else?—Achilles. Achilles. Curse his name.
It’s like the doors, once locked, are being thrown open from the inside.
The most horrifying part is looking up and seeing the nostalgic tears forming in the strange man’s eyes. I know you, comes the unbidden thought. I know you, and not for good reasons.
The sense fades as the blind singer continues onto a different song, this one about Ares and Aphrodite. This time, Andromache can relax and attempt to eat, although her stomach is unsettled and tight.
I know you, comes the feeling again.
“Sing more about the Trojan War,” bids the familiar voice again as the blind poet comes to an end, and Andromache’s spine chills so cold she thinks it might break.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she says quietly, but it’s too late. The singer has started, and with a horrified, silent scream, she realizes he’s singing—with pride—about the hollow horse that her countrymen had taken as a gift of surrender. The Trojan Horse, it’s called now. A trick. A trap.
A victory, for the Achaeans - and for the man in front of her, so beaten, so worn down, but tearing up more and more with each word, almost glowing with mixed pride and sorrow, with skin and nose and hair she would never have seen in Troy.
“Why, my friend, what troubles you so?” Alcinous asks him. And with a dramatic flourish, the man opens his mouth, wiping his tears.
“I cannot hide my identity any longer. My name is—”
“Odysseus,” she spits. The name is like a knife through the air. And nobody, nobody there, has reason to hate it but her.
But he knows. It takes him some time searching her face, but she can pinpoint the exact moment. His face blanches slightly, but he’s at least a little heroic. He nods in understanding. He isn’t going to pretend that she doesn’t have every reason to want him dead.
“Andromache. The same of Troy, then.”
“The very same.” She gets to her feet, pulling the sword from her belt, and ignores Alcinous’s gasp of horror. Everything is like it was yesterday, now—the sack of Troy, the smell of burning flesh, the bets placed on which of the women would crack first under pressure, the way Hecuba’s eyes had rolled back in her head when she had lost her mind—
“You’re far from home, Ithacan.”
“And without a weapon, too. Unless you’d like to do me the honour?”
“You were happy to use your weapons on the women of Troy without allowing us to arm ourselves,” Andromache scoffs. “Odysseus the Ithacan, suddenly so concerned with a fair fight. You murdered us in our beds. You raped us in front of our children. You pulled us from our altars and killed us in sight of all of the gods.” She rounds the table, Scherians fleeing to the sides of the room and Odysseus backing away from the teeth and sword she’s baring.
“War is war, Andromache—it was always going to end—”
“And how do you think it would have ended if we’d won, Odysseus?” She swings the sword at him, barely missing his torso and watching him flinch with a bitter enjoyment. “All we wanted was for you to leave. Paris was long dead by the time you rammed down our doors.”
Odysseus takes another step back, and a look of panic flashes over his face as he realizes his back is against the wall. “We took a vow—”
“And isn’t it convenient how much gold that vow made you?” Then she chuckles. “Well, how much gold it made everybody else. It doesn’t seem to have done you much good.” She leans in, the blade of her sword whispering over his throat. “Have you ever been helpless before, Odysseus? Have you ever been without the gods to help you? Have you ever been this close to a blade and not had anything between it and your skin?”
Odysseus doesn’t respond, swallowing a lungful of nervous air.
“This is what you did to a whole city, you yellow-bellied, deceitful, pompous coward,” Andromache spits. “To woman after woman. Child after child. And I want you to thank the gods and the stars, for the rest of your sorry life, that I am a better person than you will ever be.”
And she steps back, sheaths her sword, and turns her back to leave. She waits for the footsteps to come after her - she wouldn’t have doubted it of him. But when she casts a look over her shoulder, he’s collapsed on his knees, rubbing the small cut on his throat, eyes fixed on her as she strides away.
~10~
She makes it back to the sea before she finally breaks down. Tears are a luxury as a pirate—any form of weakness is. But for a little while, she isn’t a pirate anymore. She’s a young woman losing everything all over again.
Andromache. It means “war of men,” and she’s been a victim of men’s wars for too long.
She dips her hand into the water, and whispers, “You let me kill your grandson. Why?”
Perhaps it’s her imagination that a hand slides into hers, and she certainly doesn’t hear any voice in response. But she gives herself an answer anyway - that she’s not the only one who doesn’t care for violence and brutality as the only way to be, that hers is not the only family torn apart by war. That sometimes letting human action unfold is preferable to saving the life of somebody who will kill tens, dozens, hundreds more. That sometimes there is no right choice.
She boards her ship, watching her men lingering still on the shore, uncertain of what transpired inside. But there’s no rush, not yet. She drags her fingers over the carved wood of each oar, over the strong pole of the mast, over the salt-soaked sides of her penteconter. Astyanax.
Time to sail—maybe back to Hypoplakia, finally, or back to Troy, or to everywhere and nowhere at all.