THE WAR
I tossed the cloak back, revealing my leopard skin. “I am Penthesilea,” I answered. “Queen of the Amazons.” My dagger leapt into my hand. Achilles brandished his torch like the strongest bronze sword, and we clashed together behind the tents.
My blood ran hotter through my veins than I could remember, and at last, I felt like the daughter of a god. My enemy’s golden body writhed just out of reach of my blade as I myself side-stepped his every thrust with the torch. A small cloud of sand kicked up around our feet. Achilles sucked in a deep breath and kicked one bare foot against my cuirass, striking the heavy metal. Though unwounded, the blow jarred me, and I teetered backwards. He tried to press his advantage, but though I could barely breathe, I flashed my dagger from left to right and sliced his torch in half. The fiery end tumbled to the ground and petered out to nothing more than an ember.
Our tight field of battle turned dark, and we both flew back to gather our wits and senses. From the darkness, a low chuckle emerged. Color rose in my cheeks.
“Why do you laugh at me, Argive?” I spat.
“You have chosen quite the metaphor to emasculate me, warrior woman.” I could just see him gesture with the leftover torch. “Not quite how I like my women.”
“I’m not another Helen nor some whore to play with in the night. I’ll kill you like you killed Hector.” I could barely see him but sensed that he grew still.
“So again, we come to the prince of Ilium,” he intoned. “I see. I shall pay the price for that for the rest of my days.”
“Maybe you won’t have long to worry about that.”
To my surprise, Achilles dropped the rest of his makeshift weapon and sat upon the ground. “Have you heard my sad prophecy as well, then?” An errant cloud undraped itself from before the moon just then and bathed us both in clear, sacred light. I stared down at Achilles, my great enemy. He sat cross-legged like a child before me with his face upturned towards mine. I clenched my teeth so hard I could have ripped a man’s arm off had it been between my jaws. Achilles stared up at me like a child—or like a supplicant, like Priam had to him only hours ago.
“What prophecy?” I asked, never loosening my grip on my dagger.
“My mother is a goddess, you know,” he said, flatly. “She tells me I can either live a long life without prestige or die young with the fame of a god.” He closed his eyes, and weariness settled on his moonlit features. “Can you guess which I chose?”
I stared at him. How he held his neck, it would be so easy to slit just then, to revenge myself on the slayer of Hector. I could tear through his jugular and let him bleed out on the sands that rightfully belonged to Ilium. But if old Priam had not taken that chance himself, had ostensibly forgiven this beast or made peace, at least, by what greater right could I claim his life? But all deaths must be avenged! My mind argued. It cried and rocked and screamed against me as I sank to the sand and sheathed my blade. Still, I stared at Achilles as if daring him to make a wrong move or word. I could still kill him. And he could kill me. We both knew it.
But this was not the battlefield between Ilium and the Argives. This was merely a back-alley scuffle. Neither of us would die here. We both knew that too.
“So,” I said. There was an edge to my voice that I had no wish to soothe. “You chose fame and glory over a long life. And all those you have slain are left with neither.”
He did not shake his head, but the lines on his face deepened at my words. “I don’t argue your point, Queen of Women. But we are both warriors. You know how it is to fight and slay your enemies. It is always a choice of your own death over theirs. And I do not yet choose to die.”
Yet. The word hung between us like a pall, closing in from all sides.
“How do you think you will die?” I asked, my voice grown quiet at last.
“I know I will die on the field of battle,” he replied. He traced some symbols, barely visible in the sands between us. “I had hoped it would be at the hands of Hector.”
I scoffed. “Sure. And that is why you sank your blade into his belly and let him die while his own father and mother watched from the walls.” I was appalled. His charade of regret should not have won me over so easily. I started to rise.
“When he killed Patroclus, he took from me my heart.” Achilles’ voice stopped me from standing, though he was quiet as a fieldmouse. “When they brought me back Patroclus’ body, oh, how I wept. He was—no, is, is is is, and always—my dearest love. I wanted to die then.” He stopped his sand-scrawling, lost in the memories of his dead friend. “I have wished death upon myself for each and every day since then. I wished for it when I woke that morning. I wished it when I stood before Hector with our blades crossing. I wished it when he stared out at me from beneath his helmet and died at my feet.”
This was something I had not expected—a penitent monster. “Then why did you kill him?” I asked at last. “Why not let him win? There would be no shame in losing to great Hector.” I considered my words carefully before I added, “I trained with him when we were young. He was a great warrior even then.”
He smiled and snorted ruefully. “When you live your life as a warrior, when all your life people tell you how to fight and how to kill, it is not an easy thing to let yourself be killed, even by a hero like Hector.”
“Do not mock him with the word ‘hero’ when you have treated him so poorly,” I hissed.
He brushed away the mystery symbols in the sand with a violent gesture. “I should not have done that,” he admitted.
“Well?” I flicked sand into his lap, and he jerked back a little, startled. “Why did you? Do you not have common sense in the half-godly head of yours? Have none of you Argives ever learned decency? Does self-control get taught to your heroes?”
“I am not a hero, Penthesilea. I am a man.”
“You just said you were birthed to a goddess. Does that not make you more than a man?” I argued.
“Perhaps it makes me less of one.”
Somewhere in the camp, a dog barked. Another one yipped into the night in response, and soon the whole camp was flooded with the noisy rumblings of canines.
“I killed my sister.” The words came out before I knew it, before I understood I was speaking. Achilles stared into my eyes, and I felt strangely unburdened by my omission, even though I hated him so, so much. He did not take my hands or try to hold me as another man might, as I had seen men comfort women in the past. Always physical, always dominating them in some way. But Achilles simply nodded and waited for me to continue.
The words, the whole story, pressed at my throat like a roaring river. I sat with my mouth clamped as long as I could before the tale unwound itself from the shoals of my mind. “My sister, Hippolyta. She was a fighter like me, but she became someone’s wife. I wanted her to be happy, but he betrayed her. And so I led my warriors to attack him in his citadel. I was one blow away from killing him—I had brought him to his knees.” I paused, revisiting the scene in my mind for the hundredth, no the thousandth time. “Poor Lyta. Even in her cuckolding, she could not watch me kill her husband. And so she stepped in front of my blade and took the thrust that was meant for him.” I closed my eyes, seeing her blood jetting against my hand and staining my wrist, a red ocean—endless, endless. “I meant to avenge her. I meant to punish him for hurting her.” I opened my eyes and looked down at my own empty hands. “But I failed. And I have dishonored myself more than anyone else ever could.”
Achilles stared at me, his face lacking the judgment I saw even in the eyes of my woman companions.
“I see Lyta in the face of every man I kill here. I keep thinking that…that if I fight for Ilium, if I kill the right enemies, maybe the gods will forgive me. But I can never….” I choked on the words, ones thought but had never spoken before aloud. “But I can never forgive myself.” I bowed my head. All the longing and regret, and grief swirled within my head in a potent melange.
“As I cannot forgive myself,” added Achilles after many breaths of silence. “I see Patroclus around every corner, in every stranger’s face. I saw him in Hector, even as I dishonored his body.” He, too, drew quiet. “Perhaps we are not meant to forgive ourselves. Perhaps we will never earn forgiveness, not even from the gods, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to come to us like that. We are warriors, Penthesilea.”
I waved my hand to encompass all the men of the Argive camp and the city of Ilium as well. “They are all warriors! Should none of us earn forgiveness for any of it?”
Achilles shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe none of this is what the gods want of us.” He drew a circle between us in the sand. “But, Penthesilea, do not make the mistake of thinking you are equal to these common soldiers, either here or in Ilium.”
“Why?” I bridled. “Because I am a woman? Because I am lesser than even the drunkest, most loutish of men?”
Laughing, truly laughing, Achilles threw back his head. “Lesser? Gods, Penthesilea, but you are mightier than all us men put together!” His smile glowed in the moonlight, brighter and more cheerful than I had expected. “Men follow orders—orders from commanders, from kings, from gods. We follow our proscribed paths through age and old age and death. Even I obey the prophecy of my birth. But you, what fate do you follow? Whose orders do you obey?” He looked at me and stared deep into my eyes.
For a moment, I stared back at him. His eyes were blue, almost silver in the light of the moon, the symbol of my goddess. I considered his words. Did all men merely follow the strands of fate until they fell victim to their ultimate mortality? I certainly had not felt that way. I simply did as I wished or as I felt was right, whatever the outcome might be. Was Achilles right about me, then? Did I somehow reach above the lives of men and choose my own path? But then why did I feel so confused, so flustered, so lacking in purpose now? Ever since Lyta’s death, I had no direction, no aim, no goal. Then Priam summoned me to Ilium, and I had centered all my hopes around the singular purpose of rescuing the city. But perhaps this was just another stone in the path I had before me, the path of my life.
Could I cut the string of fate that I’d refused to follow and untether myself completely from these worldly woes?
Would that mean my death? Was death something I could accept?
My breath hitched. If it meant being reunited with Hippolyta, with Hector, with all those dead and gone before me—maybe.
But, then again, I’d never been one to obey the gods. Maybe I would never reunite with my fallen family. Maybe I would live—continue to live—and find a new purpose for myself.
Achilles began to tell me then about Patroclus. About the gleam of sunlight in his hair and his brash behavior. Then he told me of his own life. About his childhood on Mount Pelion and later Phthia. He sounded so like me talking endlessly of my own adventures with Hippolyta that I laughed and wept at the same time. I told him of our adventure with the leopard and our youths on the island of Otrera, surrounded by women. We shared stories, little excerpts of the happier times before our own follies brought about the deaths of our closest companions. Even as my knees began to ache from sitting on the sand, and I could see Achilles rubbing his tired eyes, we sat together, mixing our histories together like two rivers pouring into the sea. The moon drifted lazily across the blanket of night until it drooped between the Myrmidon tents.
Then we rose without speaking. Achilles handed me up my cape, which I wrapped around myself to cover the distinctive leopard skin and cut of my armor. He nodded to me and led me around to the entrance of his tent. The sun would not rise for some hours yet, but I could see old King Priam emerging with fog in his eyes. He blinked but did not seem too surprised to find me there and not coming to blows with once-hated Achilles.
Achilles and Briseis cleared some of the ransom from Priam’s cart, though Achilles brushed at it with little concern as if he was clearing dust from a long-ignored shelf. Then the Argive placed Hector’s wrapped body on the cart and nodded to Priam. The old man had recovered some of his dignity throughout the night and stood again like a king at the head of the cart. I motioned that I would join him and stepped to Achilles.
“Are you still for Ilium?” he asked, running a hand over the stubble on his chin.
I nodded. “And you for the Argives?”
“Then we will be enemies when we meet on the field,” he replied.
I sighed, though I felt no more regrets. “Yes, enemies. But I will do you no dishonor, Achilles.”
“And I none to you.”
We clasped hands as warriors, as equals.
I turned to join Priam when his voice made me look over my shoulder.
“Maybe you will see your Hippolyta soon.”
“And maybe you will see your Patroclus.”
We nodded to one another, and then I took up the cart with Priam, and we brought Hector’s body back to Ilium.