A Song of War: a novel of Troy Read online

  I didn’t need a helmsman to get me to Lesvos; it was only fifty leagues, and I could see landmarks all the way. We got the little ship into the sea, and our oarsmen pulled with a will when I told them they were free men when we landed. I had a scale shirt and a sword if I needed them. I wore the guise of the goddess and a sword, too. Riddle that as you like.

  And then, tiller in my hand, I looked back at the beach.

  I should never have looked back, any more than Orpheus did. There was Achilles.

  He stood and watched.

  I sailed away.

  THE FIFTH SONG

  The Bow

  by Libbie Hawker

  He that fights fares no better than he that does not;

  coward and hero are held in equal honor,

  and death deals like measure to him who works and him who is idle.

  Homer, the Iliad

  PENTHESILEA

  Even before she reached Troy, her song was one of mourning. She had followed the sun for days, for weeks, riding slowly on her gray mare through a world grayed by her sorrow. She had ridden that route before—ten years gone, a lifetime past—when, in a joyous train of women-warriors, she had followed her sister Hippolyte west, past the sunrise reach of the dark sea, down through the steep green mountains edged in mist to hot plains tufted in sere yellow grass. And on and on to the city of Troy, to its golden shore, where a ship had waited to carry them farther still, to Sparta.

  Then, riding behind Hippolyte, Penthesilea had been happy. They all had been as happy as girls dancing at a wedding—they were going to a wedding, the wedding of the king of Ithaca to a cousin of Zeus-born Helen of Sparta. By day, the young women that had comprised Hippolyte’s honor escort had ranged out over that vast plain, racing their horses under the high blue dome of the sky. By night, they had sparred with their spears in the starlight and told bawdy jokes around the cook-fire. Penthesilea had never felt so free before.

  She had begged her parents, the leaders of their tribe, to allow her to accompany Hippolyte on her mission of goodwill to Sparta. In truth, she had been too young to make the trip. She had not yet killed her first enemy in battle, and so she was not a warrior, not yet fit to represent the dignity of their Cimmerian tribe. But Hippolyte had argued for her—splendid, straight-backed, sharp-eyed Hippolyte, who by Penthesilea’s age had already killed three warriors, and who could coax any favor from their parents’ hearts.

  “Penthesilea can oil my spear for me,” Hippolyte had said, throwing an arm around her younger sister in a way that suggested she would take the girl with her whether their parents agreed or not. “Besides,” she added, off-handed and cool, “it’s only some damned Achaean wedding. What trouble can my little sister make at a wedding?”

  All those days, as Hippolyte’s party had ranged out over the baked, golden plain, laughing and carrying on like colts in a springtime meadow, Hippolyte herself, the gift-bearer, the ambassador, had maintained a straight-backed dignity, a watchful aloofness that suited their lineage. But whenever Penthesilea had caught her sister’s gaze, Hippolyte gave her a secret smile, and her dark eyes shone.

  Now, aching with weariness, though she had never pushed her horse faster than a trot, Penthesilea remembered the brightness of the world ten years past and shuddered. Then, these plains had been golden and blue, and tiny birds had skimmed in front of their horses as if wishing to race them at a gallop. Every time those birds would pivot on their small, sharp wings, their feathers would catch the sun and their bodies would glint with a sudden flash of green, malachite beads scattered over the dazzling plain. There were no birds now, no precious beads, no rush of wind in her hair. There was only the heavy drone of unseen insects in the grass, the steady plodding of hooves, a weight like a broken brick in her heart. And all the color was gone from the gray, gray world.

  Penthesilea didn’t notice that her horse had begun to climb a hill, but soon enough the mare’s leisurely pace became a labor, tearing Penthesilea’s thoughts away from the dark and bitter past.

  She reined in on the crest and regarded the city of Troy in dull resignation. The slope fell away again below the gray mare’s hooves, a gentle but inevitable stoop into yet more of that dry, hot expanse of knee-high grass. And another rise, edging more steeply to the west, to the foot of the long, pale wall that ringed the great city of Troy like a lazy snake. Even at a distance, Penthesilea could see the flat roofs of a thousand houses, dots of glaring sunlight floating above the black score-marks of streets and alleys. Troy itself climbed the eastern face of the hill, until, at the highest point of the stony bluff, an inner wall encircled the palaces of the rich and mighty, the temples of the gods, protective as a mother’s arms. She could see the cool shade where the land dropped below the city’s western wall, a scarp that faced the sea winds. Beyond Troy, the sea was a colorless shimmer in the unrelenting sun.

  Penthesilea closed her eyes and breathed deep. Below the dry scent of baked earth and dying grass—the pervasive odor of the plain—she could smell the salt of the water and the faintest hint of spice from the city itself. Then the wind rushed at her more strongly, insistent, and Penthesilea noted the heavy, cloying stench of death in the air.

  She had long since earned her place as a Cimmerian warrior; the smell of death was nothing new to her, nothing shocking. But it never failed to sicken her a little, to make her mouth flow with saliva and her stomach tense with wariness. She turned her head and spat into the grass. The taste of death was always foul; even now, when death and war were all she sought.

  She squinted under her hand. The siege tents were obvious, the Achaean camp like a small city of its own across the plain from Troy, squatting beside the mouth of the river. There was no use trying to count the Achaean forces. On the edges of their sprawling camp, she could see tiny men like ants laboring around a nest, hauling wood from the stand of trees that still clung to the river’s bank, building pyres to burn their dead.

  So there had been a recent battle. Which side was growing more desperate, Penthesilea wondered. Was Troy fighting harder to break the grip of the siege, or was the pot of High King Agamemnon’s fatal patience finally, after so many long years of leading this war, boiling over?

  It makes no difference to me. If Troy falls or if it stands, my purpose will be satisfied. She tapped her mare’s ribs with her heels, and the gray horse started down the long slope.

  Before long, Penthesilea reached the pale track that curved under the city’s walls, following the narrow bend around toward the great gates. She could see Achaean warriors on the plain, picking at the remains of a battle like vultures, scavenging what they could of weapons, provisions, armor spotted with old, dry blood. The men looked up from their grisly chores as she passed, shading their eyes to squint after her—these westerners were always transfixed by the sight of anyone on horseback, particularly a woman—but it was clear from her felt tunic, her pale trousers, and her long black braid that she was a Cimmerian, and therefore not party to this conflict.

  Yet.

  She spared hardly a glance for the Achaeans who straightened from the bodies of the dead. She paid no mind to their whispers of Amazon. She had far greater concerns than these men, than their scorn for her misunderstood people.

  She proceeded along the narrow road toward the city’s main gate, followed by whispers and stares. A few men trailed her on foot, curious and cautious. But no one accosted her until she reached the Scaean Gate.

  The great square frame of the gate itself towered over the city’s wall, its soaring lintel carved with a likeness of Poseidon. The dual doors were at least six times the height of a man, stout black wood strapped and studded with bronze, which had long since traded its glow for the patina of age. Two pillars of brilliant red flanked the gate, and high on the wall another rank of crimson pillars, the façade of some temple, peered over crenelated notches. The red of those pillars, stark and bloody, was the first color Penthesilea had seen since leaving her tribe.

  A man shout
ed down from the wall. “Who are you, stranger?”

  Penthesilea called back, spacing her words carefully so the man could understand. The Trojans, she knew, considered the Cimmerian accent thick and barbaric. “I have come from Scythia to speak to my cousin.”

  “And who is your cousin?”

  She drew a deep breath, conscious of the few Achaean warriors milling far behind her, men clustering, increasingly curious. Her spear was strapped across her back, easy to draw if she was attacked, and her mounted vantage gave her superior reach on any Achaean sword. But they outnumbered her, and they had arrows.

  She sent up a hasty prayer to the gods—if any gods still deigned to listen to one as cursed as she. I must reach my cousin. If I am to restore my honor, I must reach her and swear to her service, or all is for naught.

  The shout came again from the top of the wall. “Who is your cousin?”

  She could delay no longer. She swallowed hard and shouted back, “Helen.”

  There was silence on the wall for a long time. The gray mare swished its tail in the sun. Finally, with a clatter and a groan, the Scaean Gate edged open, and men with shields appeared. They formed a protected path for her, facing outward, short swords raised—though none of the Achaeans who lingered beyond the road’s edge raised anything sharper than a curse.

  Her chest expanding with relief, Penthesilea squeezed the mare with her legs and trotted through the Scaean Gate.

  Penthesilea was made to wait for more than an hour in the courtyard of Troy’s great palace. Long after her horse was led away to the stables—the famous Trojan stables, where, it was said, the best war horses in the world were trained—she sat, still and quiet, on a small limestone bench in the shade of a pillar. She watched the pillar’s long shadow creep across the courtyard pavers, silently marking the passage of time.

  Without her horse beneath her, Penthesilea felt small, diminished. The city of Troy was very large indeed—far grander than any town or encampment she had ever seen in Cimmerian lands. Yet despite its great size, despite the palpable weight of the palace and the huge stone wall, Troy held an atmosphere of quiet despair. There was no soft laughter of servants among the shadows. No men’s voices drifted from high palace windows. In the far distance, from the direction of the red-pillared temple she had seen from the gate, Penthesilea could hear a faint din of rattles. Even that act of worship had an air of fatigue, the listless drag of exhaustion.

  Penthesilea hadn’t known what to expect of Troy. She had never been to the city before. Ten years prior, on that joyful ride with Hippolyte and her escort of warriors, they had passed the shining city on its grand hill and ridden straight for the shore. There they had boarded the ships that would carry them all to Sparta, to the wedding feast where Hippolyte was to present gifts to the king of Ithaca and his bride. Penthesilea had hated travel by boat, no matter how beautiful the sea and its islands were. Men were never made to rock upon the waves, and waves lacked the predictable rhythms of a horse’s gait.

  But horses cannot run on water. Huddled in her narrow band of shade, listening to the wan, distant chime of rattles in the temple, Penthesilea felt as much out of her element as a horse trying to canter over the wide, ever-moving sea.

  Something prickled along her scalp, then crept down her spine. It was a sensation she knew well from battles and raids: the feeling of being watched. She looked up sharply, squinting at the bright glare of sunlight on stone. Across the courtyard, between two pillars, a woman stood alone, watching Penthesilea with an unreadable expression. She was darker than most Trojans—reason enough to stare, for few people as dark as she ever visited Cimmerian lands—and had the black, tightly curled hair of a Nubian. But she was dressed in the manner of a well-born Trojan woman, a tight bodice over a long, flowing skirt with intricate embroidery at its hem. The skirt had once been black but had faded to some sickly shade of darkness that was not quite gray. In places, where the woman’s knees would have pressed it often against a stone floor, it was so worn that it seemed almost pale.

  What kind of woman would go about the Trojan palace dressed in sorry rags? Penthesilea stared openly at her, counting her heartbeats until the woman turned abruptly and drifted away into the palace’s shadowed depths.

  “My lady.”

  Penthesilea jumped at the voice. The woman in the ragged skirt had so unnerved her that she hadn’t heard the slave approaching. Inexcusable carelessness for a warrior of the steppes; Penthesilea’s face heated as she rose.

  “Princess Helen will see you now,” the servant said and turned on her heel. Penthesilea followed her long, fluttering skirt into the cool halls of the palace. The woman moved with quiet efficiency, yet there was a tightness to her shoulders that Penthesilea couldn’t help but notice. Nor did she miss the way the servant wrung her hands as she walked.

  Something had gone desperately wrong in Troy. Have I come at the wrong time? Would the gods be that cruel to me—have I earned their ultimate scorn? Or have I come at the perfect time?

  They reached a bronze-strapped door, and the servant pushed it open, stood aside to let Penthesilea in.

  She blinked and swallowed hard at the sight of Helen’s chambers. Save for minor differences in style—the lusher, bolder colors the Trojans favored, the more ornate decorative flourishes—she could have been staring back through time, ten years into the past, to see Helen in the women’s quarters of the Spartan palace. A western woman’s necessaries were strewn all around the room: the high square frame of a loom, a patterned cloth abandoned halfway up its taut warp threads. A couch for lazing. A small table with a polished mirror made from Aegyptian electrum. A handful of women scattered around the room, occupied by the tasks that western women found so compelling: dropping their spindles to whirl at the ends of their fine woolen threads, whispering, staring morosely at nothing.

  Helen stood in the middle of her chamber, slender and elegant and golden, unmarked by ten years’ passage. She dressed like a Trojan woman; that was the only difference in her, the only change Penthesilea could discern. Helen’s lovely face even held an expression of faint dissatisfaction, a dull surprise as if she, too, was startled to find this chamber so familiar.

  The door shut behind Penthesilea. She bent before the daughter of Zeus, lowering her gaze to the floor.

  “I remember you,” Helen said. Her low, perfectly controlled voice filled the chamber, though it was not loud.

  Penthesilea straightened, met Helen’s clear, gray gaze. “Ten years ago, I came bearing gifts for your cousin Penelope when she married the king of Ithaca.”

  “Yes.” Helen’s mouth curved slightly, a tiny smile. “You played with my daughter, Hermione. You showed her how to hold a spear.”

  Penthesilea opened her mouth, ready to make some polite but meaningless reply. Then she saw the shadow of pain pass over Helen’s face. It was fleeting and small and quickly banished. But it had been real. She nodded instead of speaking.

  Helen turned, gestured toward her two couches with an unconscious grace. She sat, watched Penthesilea stumble awkwardly toward the other couch. “Remind me: your name.”

  “Penthesilea, Lady.”

  “Of course. But it has been so long since I’ve seen you. A cousin, am I correct?” She tipped her golden head to the side. “At least, according to Cimmerian beliefs.”

  Penthesilea’s heart leaped in her chest. Had she ridden all this way for nothing? If Helen didn’t accept her, didn’t believe that they were kin, then her last hope for redemption was lost.

  “A cousin,” Penthesilea said, a touch more insistently than she’d intended. “All the world knows that you are Zeus’s daughter, and many generations ago he sired my line, too.”

  Helen’s smile was cool, amused. “What, then, can I do for you, Cousin? Why come to Troy, now of all days?”

  Penthesilea breathed deeply, steadying herself, as she breathed in battle to steady her spear arm. “I have come to serve you. To pledge myself to you as your guardian and warrior.
”

  The soft whispers from Helen’s companions vanished into silence. Even the faint hiss of thread through the spinning women’s fingers stopped. Penthesilea could feel many eyes upon her now, but she did not break Helen’s steady gray stare.

  “Why would I need another warrior?” Helen finally asked. “I have warriors inside Troy’s walls and outside, too—all of them fighting for me.”

  The words should have been a boast. Penthesilea had no doubt that her golden cousin had intended bravado. But Helen spoiled the effect by swallowing—that long, smooth swan’s neck tensed, and for just a moment, and between two beats of her heart, Penthesilea could read something blunt and bitter in Helen’s face. It was not regret—not quite. It was the dullness of exhaustion, the helpless despair of a woman who had long since grown tired of her circumstances.

  Penthesilea gave an uncomfortable shrug. “This is war, Lady. Who cannot use another good fighter when the world is all blood and fire?”

  One of the other women, leaning against the window frame with her arms folded tightly around her body, muttered so softly she nearly went unheard. “Nearly ten years of war.” Penthesilea glanced at her, trying to place that small freckled face—she, too, had been at the wedding in Sparta; what was her name? The woman continued to stare out the window; the beam of sunlight in which she stood picked out the freckles on her pale cheeks and sharp nose and set a warm glow flaring through her nut-brown hair. But her eyes were swollen and red from many hours of weeping.

  Penthesilea knew what it was to cry that way, to pour out a river of tears so deep and fast it choked off breath but was still not deep enough to drown sorrow. She stared at the freckled woman, her stomach tightening with a new anxiety. Something had indeed gone amiss in Troy—something still more terrible than a near decade of war.