3

I feel as if Cybele slapped me with the entire earth.

“Rin!” Pen cries.

I open my eyes. She and Lannip crouch over me. The others, including the Trojans, circle me. I have no breath to breathe. Cybele, did I offend you?

Finally, I can speak. “I’m all right.” Arrows of pain pierce my right side, where I landed. I try to stand but slump back.

Gently, Pen rolls me onto my left side. She presses cautiously on my right shoulder and watches my face. I don’t wince.

“Good.” She continues to probe.

I clench my teeth, but when she barely touches me below my armpit, a groan escapes. She moves her hand down, testing. Groan. Groan. After that, less pain.

“Do you feel this?” She pushes her thumb into my right thigh.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“But do you feel it?” She pokes my other thigh. “This?”

“I feel them, as always.”

“Could have been worse. Three ribs.” She pats my belly. “You won’t go to battle for a while, Rinny-Rin.” She tells Pammon, “Miracle girl. Never broken anything before.”

I struggle against tears. “I can fight. I don’t mind pain.”

“Those ribs will get you killed. You may die in battle someday, as I may, but not for being foolish. I say no.”

I know better than to argue out loud, but deep in my mind, where no one can see or hear, I’m shouting my disappointment. “How long?”

“Until I decide.”

“When will you and the Greeks finish farming?” I ask Pammon.

“A week or more after we get home.”

With help, I manage to stand. On the skiff back to the mainland, I’m a passenger, not a rower. I need help to mount Tall Brown. When we set off, I feel like a pile of stones. Whenever the mare takes a step, the stones pound each other.

I wonder if stones really feel pain. Might I have hurt Cybele’s rock and that was why she blew me off?

At night, Pen paints her sleeping remedy (cedarwood resin, oil of chamomile, roses, lavender, frankincense) on my temples and under my nose and leaves the vial open next to me for the scent to escape. I fall asleep quickly and sleep deeply. We all do. Even the Trojans are drowsy in the morning.

During the day, we ride through our grasslands, following the sun, which has returned, bypassing occasional villages. The weather warms. The Trojans shed their cloaks, revealing thin garments they call tunics that are pinned at the shoulders, leaving their arms bare.

Pain replaces enthusiasm as my companion. Sharp on the first day, it dulls to a constant ache on the days that follow. I tell Pen it’s gone, but she knows better.

On the third day, near sunset, I see a rabbit. Dinner. Barely thinking, I squeeze my knees. Tall Brown breaks into a canter. I reach into my gorytos for my bow. Ai! Ouch! Ai! I pull Tall Brown in. The rabbit is gone.

Pen rides to me. “When your face stops turning gray, I’ll know you’ve recovered.” She waves a hand across my face from ear to ear.

As the pain diminishes, my shame grows. King Priam expects Amazon warriors—and one of them is just an injured girl.

Two days later, since my eyes are sharpest, I’m the first to see the hill that Troy rises from. Soon there’s more than a hill, but I don’t know what. Not a forest. Not a mountain atop a hill.

“Pen?” I point.

“I don’t see anything.”

It grows until everyone sees.

Pammon shouts, “Troy!” He kicks his horse.

If the villages we raid have walls at all, they’re made of mud, but Troy’s wall, from the ground to half its height, is white stone that makes me blink in the sun. I wonder where the stones came from, since all around is grass. Painted mud brick continues above the stone. As we approach, I calculate that if four Amazon women stood on one another’s heads, the top person might peer into Troy.

The carved wooden doors to the gate ahead are open. Although the gate is big enough to ride through four abreast, we dismount and leave our horses to graze. I’m sure they’ll be happier here. I would be.

We stand outside in a clump. Pammon and his companion remain on their horses.

The wall is twenty feet thick, so the gate is really a tunnel. Pen takes my hand. We’re used to the sky as our ceiling, and we don’t move to go in. Why do we have to? I think. The fighting will be outside the city.

The Trojans are laughing. Pen ignores them.

Pammon says to us all, “King Priam is eager to meet you.”

I’m not eager to meet him. Shame over my injury clasps hands with my fear of the tunnel.

Pen and I lead us in. I count a dozen strides as we go through. The stones glisten, and beads of water stand out on them. I smell mold. My ribs don’t slow me or make me limp.

The Trojans, it seems to me, could just stay behind their wall and wait for the Greeks to give up.

But then they wouldn’t get any spoils. Amazons wouldn’t let plunder go untaken, either.

I blink in the sunlight when we emerge, and my heart returns to its normal rhythm. We enter what I believe is a road—impossibly straight, coated with flat stones.

Pen doesn’t let my hand go.

The road is wide, which I like, but walls rise on our left and right, which I don’t like. It doesn’t matter that they’re wonderfully made, with colored stones forming pictures. Since the walls are so marvelous, they could come together and squeeze us to death.

The bottoms of my boots grow hot from the sun on the stones.

How do people live here without melting?

The walls and the road end in an open area in front of an enormous building made of white stone. I find out later the building is called a palace. A woman sits on the top step of the three that lead inside. She’s the first female we’ve come across. Only men, mouths gaping at us, were on the road. An old tan hound lies on her side next to the woman. The dog’s long teats tell of many litters.

The woman’s back is straight, her head held high. She has courage, I think. But I don’t see even a knife tucked in her sash. She’s as defenseless as a tadpole!

She doesn’t stand as we approach. Her mouth and eyes are stamped with sadness, caused, I suppose, by the war. How outlandish she seems. Her head is bare, her black hair thick and wild, almost snakelike. She doesn’t care how she looks, an attitude I sympathize with.

Her pale green robe leaves her arms bare and falls in loose folds, like syrup, pooling in her lap before descending to the ground, mounding over her feet. The neck and hem are bordered by embroidery in gold thread. So little gold says these people aren’t wealthy. I hope the Greeks are richer than they are, or our spoils will be meager.

Her arms reveal her to be slender, but her billowing robe reminds me of snowdrifts.

How do we appear to her?

We wear our scaly leather tunics and our felt leggings plated here and there with gold. Etched into the gold plate are animals—eagles feeding on goats, deer running, hawks circling.

My hat is tall and is embroidered with strutting lions. My forearms below my sleeves and my legs between my leggings and my low boots are tattooed with signs that Cybele loves: sunbursts and wavy lines that stand for wind blowing through grass. This woman’s skin is unadorned.

I don’t envy her, except in one way: she appears cool, while my scalp is soaked, and sweat drips down my thighs.

She regards us all until her gaze settles on me. When we reach her, I stop while Pen and the others go in. I’m in no hurry to be introduced to Priam as the useless girl with the broken ribs.

“I’m de’ighted to greet you,” she says, speaking with the same accent as Pammon. “I don’t care about your fate, so we’come to Troy.” She smiles brilliantly.

Why would she care?

She adds, “Maera will stand up and go to you.”

If Maera is the dog, it’s a silly name.

The dog exhales deeply.

I exhale too, just because the dog did. The deep breath hurts my ribs.

The dog raises her head. She won’t stand. Too much effort at her age.

The woman must be misminded to predict what a dog will do. Cybele shattered her poor arrowhead.

Creakily, the dog rises, and, stiff-limbed, comes down the steps to sniff my leggings.

The woman must have signaled the dog in a way I failed to recognize.

“You will rub Maera’s neck.”

I pull back my hand. I had been about to. Everyone pets a friendly dog.

The woman laughs. Her laugh is airy and pleasant. “I can change the future in small ways.”

“Is the dog’s name Maera?”

“Yes. Do you like it?”

I don’t, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I tilt my head, which could mean anything.

“What would you name her?”

“Old Tan.”

The dog curls up between us on the paving stone below the first step.

“She wasn’t always old.”

I explain the obvious. “First she’d be Young Tan, then Tan, now Old Tan.”

She laughs again. “Do they call you Young Freckles?”

I grin. “We don’t name people that way. I’m Princess Shirin. My mother is Queen Penthesilea. We call her Pen, and everyone calls me Rin. We’re Amazons.” In case she doesn’t know.

“I’m Princess Cassandra, Youngish-But-Soon-to-Be-Middle Cassandra.”

Making this joke, her face smooths and appears hardly older than mine, but when she first stared at us, I saw thin lines of age. I decide she’s a little younger than Pen.

“Everyone calls me Cassandra.”

Another joke.

She squints. I think she’s judging me. “Apollo gave me the gift of seeing the future.”

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Is Apollo another dog?”

Her shoulders shake with laughter. She reaches out to rub Maera’s rump. “You’d like it if Apollo were a dog, wouldn’t you? You could play!” She straightens up. “Apollo is the god of healing and prophecy and many other powers. He gave me my gift of prophecy and then cursed it so that no one believes me. In a moment, a crow will land on your head, and one will land on each shoulder, but you won’t see or feel them.”

She’s crackbrained.

Or all Trojans believe nonsense.

“I’ll tell you what they say.”

We wait in silence.

“Ah. Their words are worth heeding.” She stands without groaning, as easily as a six-year-old, and pulls her shoulders back. “This is what they said:

“‘The tempest is but a breath now—

the volcano merely simmers.

Rin should persuade her mother,

whose lips still shape hello,

to bid King Priam farewell.’”

“Crows see the future too?” Instantly, I regret the words. I don’t want to mock her.

She doesn’t seem insulted. “They’re Apollo’s birds. If you stay here, your mother and the rest will die in battle.”

I feel my face redden in anger. “We won’t die.” Maybe one Amazon will, but I doubt even that. “Greeks will die. No one withstands us.” I calm myself. Cassandra is a city woman and probably doesn’t go to war.

“Greeks will die too,” Cassandra says, “especially at your mother’s hand. You’ll stay in Troy, waiting for your ribs to heal, but when she’s killed, you’ll fight to avenge her death and will die too.” She crouches to pet the dog’s head. “Maera, I shouldn’t befriend her.”

I didn’t ask for her friendship! “How do you know I’m hurt?”

She rises. “Soon, your mother will tell my father that you broke three ribs and won’t join the battle immediately.”

Mother won’t mention me, as if an untested girl would make a difference in the outcome. “My name won’t come up.”

She comes down the step and tilts her face up at me. “You will die in less than a month.”