The Mirror of Helen

Chapter One THE AMAZON

I remember the day the Amazon came. It was soon after they buried Lord Hector's body and the City was still in mourning, but the arrival of Penthesileia and her contingent of Amazon warriors threw the population into a tumult of rejoicing. The City was like that in these days, swept alternately by despair and hope. A defeat on the fields of battle and there would be long faces everywhere, then would come a rumor of new allies or of growing disaffection in the Argive camp, and everyone would be foolishly optimistic; even the slaves and tradespeople swaggering and boasting about "unconquerable Ilium." I wake up in the night sometimes after a vivid dream of those days and feel again the trapped, closed-in feeling that every inhabitant of the City felt after nine long years of siege.

We were in prison, but it was an open prison. The Argives were too few in number to blockade the city: when not actually engaged in battle they mostly kept to their camp on the shore by their ships, impossible to dislodge but at times seeming more a nuisance than a real threat. The King sometimes called them "that nest of pirates down on the shore" and it was very much like living near a stronghold of pirates or bandits who would periodically swoop out of their camp for raids. They raided the neighboring lands as often as they attacked the City: from our neighbors they could get food and wine and captives to serve them. From their attacks on the City they gained only the glory they so often prated of and the slow deadly attrition of our fighting men. Sometimes they stripped the armor from a fallen foe or held a captive City warrior for ransom, but our warriors did the same to them, and both sides came out about equally in that traffic. Man for man they outkilled us, and despite the unconquerable walls of the City we inside those walls felt a fear gnawing more and more at our bellies.

Probably the Argives would have attacked any body of men bearing arms attempting to enter the city, but like all Danaans the Argives despised women and likely Penthesileia could have brought her fighting girls into the city in full battle array without any Argive response. Prudently she made them keep their weapons out of sight and the Argives let her troop of horsewomen enter the Scaean Gate with no more than a few jeers and taunts sent after them from the Argive scouts. But once inside the gate they were met by the King's messengers and stopped at the guardhouse to put on their panoply of war. Then they rode through the city to the King's House in their barbaric splendor.

I watched them coming from the roof of the House: tall women mostly, lean and rangy with big hands and hardbitten faces, javelins and longbows strapped to their backs and jutting up over their shoulders like some strange sort of horns. They rode their shaggy horses bareback, almost as much a part of their mounts as a centaur's human torso is part of the horse body below. Riding before them, as deadly dangerous as any warrior in her troupe, but beautiful as the rosy-fingered dawn, was their leader, Penthesileia.

She was dark, like my people, and proud as any daughter of the Sea Kings. For ten years I had served the most beautiful woman in the world and compared to my Lady, Penthesilea could hardly be called beautiful. I am near kin to the Ariadne of Kaphtu, and compared to the daughter of M'nos this girl was hardly more than the chieftainess of a little barbarian band. Yet there was a beauty and an authority about this Amazon princess which could not be diminished by any comparison. She had the deadly beauty of an arrow or a flung javelin arcing swiftly to its victim, yet she was a girl, straight and sweet and honest. If she had lived in my older, kinder, land I would have welcomed her as a fellow Leaper of the bull.