They were so alike, the Amazon girls, that when Hippolyta died, Penthesilea felt she had been deprived of more than a sister. She had lost her own reflection. For as long as she could remember, she had known what she looked like by looking at someone else: every shift in her own skin, every line, every scar almost, was matched on the body of the one she loved the most. And so as Hippolyta fell – her face creased with pain, the arrow piercing her ribs – Penthesilea knew that she was losing her sister and herself at once.
They had always used weapons. Long before she could walk, Hippolyta had taught Penthesilea to sling stones across their mother’s halls. The older they grew, the sharper the blades became: wooden swords and soft-wood spears were soon exchanged for the real things. And she had revelled in it. They both had. There was something so immeasurably delightful about being young and strong. The girls would ride for hours on near-identical horses: gentle trotting and then cantering and then galloping through the lower reaches of the mountains, their hair plaited tightly to hold it in place, pinned beneath their bright leather caps. They would dismount in the outskirts of the forest, and leave the horses, running until they collapsed on the ground, too breathless to groan at the pain in their lungs. They would lie amid the pine cones and look up at the sky between the upper branches of the trees, and know there was no one alive who was happier than them.
And the games they used to play. Running up the slopes, picking up white pebbles, or an abandoned birds’ nest, running back to the bottom of the hill to add it to a pile of woodland treasures, each one eyeing the other’s growing hoard with envy, marvelling at her swiftness and strength. And the speed test, which Hippolyta always won. The two girls would stand beside one another on open ground, and count themselves down: ready, steady, go. Penthesilea would fit an arrow to her bow, and shoot it high in an elegant parabola. At the same time, Hippolyta would begin to run, laughing at her own ability to cover so much ground so quickly that by the time the arrow began to descend, she was waiting, ready to catch it in her hand. She never failed, until the last time.
And so Penthesilea had lost her sister, dearer to her than life itself. Not only that but she had killed her. An accident, the others said, trying to comfort her. As though there could ever be any consolation for this. And because she had lost the thing she held most dear, and because she had not merely lost it but had herself destroyed it, and because there was no possibility that she could go on living without Hippolyta, Penthesilea resolved to die.
Death itself would not be enough, however. For the terrible crime she had committed she could face only one death: that of a warrior, in battle. Which battle it was did not matter particularly. The only requirement was that there must be a warrior skilled enough to kill her. Most men (Penthesilea was not arrogant, merely aware of her talents) did not have the capacity to beat an Amazon in combat. There was one man, however, that even the Amazons spoke of in whispers. Quicker even than them, one had heard. The fastest warrior ever to fight. And so Penthesilea took her women on the long journey south to the fabled city of Troy.
The journey was not arduous for the Amazons, who were a nomadic people. Their horses were strong and they rode from dawn to dusk without ever growing tired. They slept only briefly during the hours of darkness and began their journey again as the sun rose the next day. If her women wished to stop their princess – to beg her to reconsider her plan to die – they respected her too much to do so. They rode alongside her, and they would fight alongside her. If she was resolved to die, they would die alongside her too.
Their arrival was not a complete surprise to King Priam, whose scouts had heard a rumour that the women were coming south. Two Trojans rode out to meet Penthesilea, and ask her intentions. Whose side did she intend to take, in this, the tenth year of war on the Scamandrian plains? Greek or Trojan? Were the women aggressors or defenders? Priam had sent two large gold tripods and jewel-encrusted bowls to try and win an alliance with the Amazons. Penthesilea accepted them without a second glance. She cared nothing for trinkets – what use were baubles for a woman who lived on horseback? – but she did not wish to give offence by refusing them.
‘I’ll fight for your king,’ she said. ‘Ride home and tell him the Amazons will fight the Greeks, and that I will fight Achilles, and I will kill him, or die in the attempt.’ She did not add that these two outcomes were equally desirable to her. The scouts bowed and sought to flatter her with desperate thanks. But she bustled them away. She did not need to know that Priam was grateful for her support. Of course he was. The story of what had happened to his son, to brave Hector, the Trojans’ greatest warrior, had penetrated even the northern reaches of her Scythian home: how Hector had defended his city for ten long years, and how he had led his men in many famous victories. Penthesilea knew, everyone knew, how he had once fought a man dressed in Achilles’ armour and killed him; how for a brief moment the Trojans believed that Achilles himself was dead, and how they pushed the Greeks all the way back to their camp, the greatest day of fighting in the whole war. But then Hector stripped the armour from the fallen Greek to discover – incensed – that it was not Achilles, but rather another man, Patroclus, wearing Achilles’ arms and fighting in his stead. The rage of Achilles when he heard of the death of his friend was instant and implacable; she knew how he had roared like a mountain lion and sworn his revenge on Hector and any Trojan who crossed his path. He was as good as his word, and stalked through the battlefield, mauling every man he saw, until Hector stood before him. Penthesilea knew how he slaughtered Hector – thick, black arterial blood spattering on the mud beneath their feet – and screamed his savage joy. How he mutilated the corpse of his enemy, and tied leather thongs through his feet, turning man into carcass with no thought for the impiety of his actions. How he drove the body of the Trojan prince around the walls of his own city, dragging the battered corpse three times past the eyes of his broken parents, his pitiful wife, his uncomprehending infant son.
Of course Priam was grateful for a friend in the Amazons. The man had nothing else left.
Penthesilea and her women made camp by the River Simois, slightly to the north of Troy: their tents were sparse and plain, animal skins tied round wooden stakes. They contained nothing beyond the hides on which the women slept, and the armour they would wear in battle. Even their food supplies were meagre: Amazons disdained the luxury of their Trojan friends. Plain food, as little as they could thrive on, and that was all. Anything else would only slow them down. She did not send an embassy to the Greeks: she had no desire to make a formal announcement of her presence. They would know she was there soon enough when she led her women into battle the next morning, beside the Trojans.
Although the ground was rock-strewn and hard, Penthesilea slept an unbroken night, for the first time since her sister had died. It would be her last night of sleep, she knew, so perhaps Hypnos had decided to make it a pleasant one. When she awoke before dawn, stretching out her long limbs in preparation for her armour, she yearned for the battle to begin. She ate with her women, a warm, nutty porridge cooked over the embers of last night’s fire. They spoke little, and only of tactics.
Then she returned to her tent and put on her warrior garb. First, the dark yellow chiton, a short tunic, tied at the waist with a thick brown leather belt, which also held her sword sheath. Then she added her prized leopard-skin cloak, which gave her warmth and ferocity in equal measure. These men, these Greeks would see they could not scare her, a woman who could outrun a leopard and cut him down mid-stride. The creature’s paws hung below the tunic, its claws stroking the front of her thighs as she moved. She bound the straps of her leather sandals around her finely muscled calves and reached for her helmet. Hippolyta’s helmet, with its high plume of blackest horsehair and its inlaid snakes, curling around her cheeks. When the Amazon queen rode into battle, she would ride as her sister, as the greatest warrior of them all. She picked up her round shield, hard red leather bound to five layers of calf-skin. She placed her sword in the sheath, and picked up her long spear, testing its weight and its sharp point. She was ready.
Her horse, a tall grey mare with a vicious bite, stood patiently as she plaited its mane into a neat row. No warrior would grab her horse from under her by the hair, and if he tried, she would likely take off his fingers. When everything was prepared to her liking, Penthesilea turned and looked at her women, these imperfect reflections of herself. Her Amazons were bright jewels of the mountainous north, glittering in these lowlands. They would defend a city none had ever set eyes upon until yesterday, and they would protect women and children they had never met. She felt a surge of something in her breast, and it took her a moment to identify the feeling of pride beneath the ever-present grief. Hippolyta was beyond help, but Troy could be saved, and her women would be its saviours.
She took the reins in her shield-hand, so her throwing arm remained unencumbered. She had dropped her bow when Hippolyta died and, even after the funeral pyre, when she remembered it was lost, she had not returned to the ground where it fell, knowing she would never fire another arrow. But her women were all fine archers, and they strapped their quivers to their backs, and balanced their bows across their shoulders. What match could any Greek be for them?
The Amazons mounted their horses and began to ride the last few stades towards the field of battle. As they left the lower ground on the southern banks of the Simois, they heard distant trumpets sounding the opening of the gates of Troy. Penthesilea’s women were soon across the flank of the Trojan warriors, and then in front of them, where they belonged. The Trojans were, Penthesilea noticed, a ragtag gang of fighters now. Where were the heroes she had heard about in the bard’s song? Hector was dead, of course, but where was Paris, or Glaucus, or Aeneas? She frowned as she scanned the men, and saw none of towering height or obvious strength. Their biceps were no match for her own. The heroes must be among them, but they were not such men as she had expected to find.
When the Greek warriors approached from their camp in the west, she felt her breath quicken. These men were scarcely any greater in number than the Trojans. Was this all that remained of the fabled thousand ships which had carried their men to the sandy shores of the Troad? How many had died, she wondered, and how many had simply given up and sailed home again? Still, among the Greeks she could see a few men of significant stature, their armour and ornate shields declaring their nobility. Surely somewhere was the man who would bring her the death she craved.
And then she saw the light glinting off the red and black plumes of his helmet. He carried no shield because – she had heard – these days, he feared no one but the gods. No Trojan had bested him in battle for years, and the only man who had offered the slightest resistance was poor Hector: dead and defiled, belatedly buried. And once he had killed Hector, he no longer cared whether he lived or died, just like her. This man, surely, was the one Penthesilea sought. Achilles, king of the Myrmidons, their black shields fanning out behind him. This was the man who carried her death in his hands.
The combat between these two great warriors was – for all its importance to the people of Troy – shatteringly brief. No one, not even her women, could say whether Penthesilea had ridden into battle to die rather than to kill. But the result was the same either way. Achilles was the fastest creature alive, faster than the lynx that roamed the mountains, faster than Hermes who carried messages from Zeus to men. And faster than Penthesilea.
She and her Amazons made straight for the Myrmidons, who scurried aside, like ants. But after ten years of war, they were battle-hardened: they knew the terrain as though it were their home. The Amazons, who were used to fighting on the hard mountains of the north, were less sure-footed. But their horses soon understood that broad, soft mud was as treacherous as narrow, stone-strewn paths. The archers took aim and picked off the ant-men on the right-hand flank. Achilles whirled around to see who was targeting his men – after he had spent so long being feared and shunned on the battlefield, who could be so audacious as to bring their attack to him?
These new riders were fresh but they were not so large in number. His men – he scanned quickly, automatically, and shook his head as he noted that ten had been felled already – were pulling back, fear running from one to the next, like the plague which had picked off so many Greeks last summer. Achilles would not see his men routed. The one riding behind the archers, sword drawn. Was that their king? He believed so: the others rode around him, as though they were protecting him for single combat. Well, Achilles would give him what he asked for. In less time than it took to blink, he hurled his short spear. His aim was unerring. The shaft humming in its neck, the king’s horse fell, its forelegs buckling. But the king was not afraid: he leapt nimbly from his collapsing steed and landed squarely on his toes. Over the heads of their men, the two leaders’ eyes met, and both knew it was a fight to the death. Achilles barked orders and his men stopped their retreat and readied themselves against the next barrage of arrows.
As he had done so many times before, Achilles moved through the battlefield, impervious. He was not so much stronger or braver than other men. A little, but any man can be lucky on his day, and cut down a better soldier. Yet no one ever laid a hand on Achilles, because they could never get close enough to try. Every man on the plains knew what the Amazons did not, which was that Achilles’ true strength lay in his astonishing, impossible speed.
And so one moment he was hundreds of feet from Penthesilea, and the next he was beside her with his sword buried in her neck. He gave it a small shake, like a hunting-dog with its prey, and watched with only the mildest interest as wine-coloured blood spurted from her throat and sprayed across his tunic. He had worn so many men’s blood over the years, what difference did one more make? He wrenched his sword free and watched the king stagger to his knees. Penthesilea’s head slumped back and her helmet fell to the ground. And only then did the greatest warrior alive realize that he had killed a woman.
He felt a sudden wrench of shame. Not because he had never killed a woman before. He had only a hazy recollection of most of the people he had killed: one death was so much like another, after all. But the Myrmidons had devastated so many towns in surrounding Phrygia throughout this war, he must have killed dozens of women as he went. Not all of them had offered themselves up as slaves or concubines; some must have refused to abandon their husbands, or chosen to try to protect their children, whom he would also have killed moments later. He could picture none of them. Even the face of Hector, the one man he had killed in rage rather than because slaughter was what he was for, even that was sliding away from him now as the months wore on. But the face contorted in pain in front of him was like nothing he had ever seen, and he knew that he had finally committed the one act he would regret. This woman was his mirror image, just as Patroclus had once been. He gasped as the blood bubbled up between her lips. He, who had never shown hesitation or fear. He watched her eyes cloud, like cataracts forming. He saw her open her mouth and say a single phrase, and then he saw the light darken. He looked up at the sky, filled with horror, and heard a coarse voice laugh behind him. He turned and stabbed the man without thinking: he would never know who it was he had killed. He saw other Greeks back away from him, afraid he would turn on them too. He gave it no further consideration, thinking only of the woman and her blood-filled mouth.
He wondered if anyone else had ever died saying the words, ‘Thank you.’