THE WAR
Blood seeped from my wound in a trickle, then a torrent. My muscles twitched and grew cold. Perhaps it had finally come. The death I’d hoped for for so long.
Achilles knelt beside me. He tore off his helmet, then mine. His light eyes searched mine, his brow furrowed, sweat dripping down it.
“Penthesilea?” His voice was low, almost a whisper.
I stared up at him, feeling my body weaken. I stared into his blue eyes, the same clear blue of the sky above him.
And I wanted to live.
I thought of the trees on Themyscira, the little rivers crisscrossing it, the hot sands of its beaches beneath my bare feet. I thought of my hand on Zephyr’s flank and feeling the life pump elegantly through his body.
And my grief for Hippolyta slid from me like a discarded pall.
I wanted to live. I wanted to live without killing, without warring, without battling men for no reason.
“I want to live,” I gasped, my eyes locking with Achilles’.
He placed his hands on either side of my face and stroked my cheeks. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes, just beside the little creases and wrinkles that had begun there.
“Oh gods, Penthesilea,” he said. “You, out of us all, you deserve most to live.”
The tears dripped from his eyes and down his nose into my face. I blinked them away from my own eyes.
“Close your eyes, Pen,” he said, using a nickname he could not have known. “Close your eyes, and let me end this. You will be at peace.”
Peace, I thought. I closed my eyes. The trees of my island filled my view. Waving leaves and threading branches. Peace—peace was home. Peace was Zephyr. Peace was life.
I waited for another blow from Achilles’ sword, the final blow.
But it did not come.
My face burned in the sun, and I squinted through one eye. Achilles rose and turned his back on me. Then he strode through the mess of corpses and picked up something from amongst them. My leopard pelt torn from my body during the fight with Ajax. He lifted it tenderly and placed it over a nearby body.
I stared blankly at the body staring back at me. My leopard pelt lay upon the body of Antibrote, now dead and eyes glazed. In the bright sunlight, I again was struck with how much she looked like me. What did Achilles intend?
And then his voice cut across the battlefield. “Here lies Penthesilea,” he cried, “Queen of the Amazons. A worthy fighter and a worthier friend. Take her body, men of Ilium. See that it has all the honors of a hero.”
The fighting had stilled all around us. Men and warriors stopped their killing and their struggling and listened to Achilles.
And so I was dead but not dead. They honored the body of Antibrote as if she were me.
After the soldiers straggled away, I fingered the wound in my gut. It was bloody, but perhaps not deadly, not as deep as I had thought. Achilles had spared me.
Because I asked him to live?
No, because we were the same and because he also wanted to live. Not to avenge Patroclus or Hippolyta but to honor them.
When the sun fell, but before the corpse-gatherers came, I rose. I discarded my sword and armor and strode, not towards Ilium but to the northeast. Ilium was doomed, and I had done as much as I could. We all had. It was a little walk to the beach, but there I sank my feet into the cool waters.
A familiar neigh greeted me. I spun around to find a golden face burying itself in mine.
“Zephyr!” I cried, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, feeling his head and shoulders for signs of injury. He was well, or at least as well as I was.
I held him crushed in my arms for a moment before swinging back up into his saddle. The leather felt good, familiar to me, though I had no wish to charge into battle as we had often done.
“Come, Zephyr,” I said, and kicked him gently. Together we ambled along the coast, northeast, always northeast. Eventually, we would reach the island. Eventually, we would be home.
Otrera named me Penthesilea, or “mourned by men.” And mourned by many I would be—by Achilles for as long as his short life burned brightly in his breast, by Aeneas in his stories to his little son, by my mother who would hear of our defeat at Ilium. Would she shed a tear for me? Would she pray in her temple to Artemis, a deity nearly unrecognizable to me as my beloved Moon Goddess? And, for a little while at least, I would be mourned by myself. The Penthesilea who once was. But I was a new Pen, a new woman, turning ever towards the sun and the wind and to life.