And now it is his turn to fall.
Penthesilea and her women rode out through a city filled with confusion and alarms. Criers were calling out from the walls that the Achaeans were gathering behind Agamemnon and his captains. The rumor was that the Greeks were planning a treacherous assault while Hector slept and brave Aeneas was at the front on the other side of the Hole. Penthesilea noticed groups of women in the streets wandering aimlessly in ragtag bits of men’s armor, as if pretending to be Amazons. Now the watchmen on the walls were blowing trumpets and the great Scaean Gates were slammed shut behind Penthesilea and her warriors.
Ignoring the scurrying Trojan fighters falling into ranks on the plain between the city and the Achaean camps, Penthesilea led her dozen women east toward the looming Hole. She’d seen the thing during her ride in, but it still made her heart pound with excitement. More than two hundred feet tall, it was a perfect three-quarters circle sliced out of the winter sky and anchored in the rocky plains east of the city. From the north and east—she knew, since they’d approached from that direction—there was no Hole. Ilium and the sea were both visible and there was no hint of this sorcery. Only when approached from the southwest did the Hole become visible.
Achaeans and Trojans—staying separate but not fighting—were scurrying out through the Hole on foot and in chariots in long columns, as if some evacuation had been ordered. Responding to messages from Ilium and from Agamemnon’s camp, Penthesilea imagined, ordered to leave their front lines against the gods and to make haste home to prepare for renewed hostility against one another.
It did not matter to Penthesilea. Her goal was Achilles’ death and woe to any Achaean—or Trojan—who made the mistake of getting between her and that goal. She had sent legions of men in battle down to Hades before, and she would do it again today if she had to.
She actually held her breath as she led her double column of Amazon cavalry through the Hole, but all she felt upon emerging on the other side was a strange sense of lightness, some subtle shift in the light itself, and a momentary shortness of breath—when she did bother to inhale again—as if she were suddenly on a mountaintop where the air was thinner. Penthesilea’s horse also seemed to sense the change and pulled hard against the reins, but she forced him to his course.
She could not take her eyes off Olympos. The mountain filled the western horizon… no, it filled the world… no, it was the world. Straight ahead of her, beyond the small bands of men and moravecs and what looked like bodies on the red ground to the Amazon who had suddenly lost all interest in anything that was not Olympos, rose first the two-mile-high vertical cliffs at the base of the home of the gods, and then ten miles more of mountain, its slopes rising up and up and up…
“My Queen.”
Penthesilea heard the voice only distantly, recognized it at last as belonging to Bremusa, her second lieutenant after faithful Clonia, but ignored it as surely as she did the sight of the limpid ocean to their right or the great stone heads that lined the shore. These things meant nothing when compared to the looming reality of Olympos itself. Penthesilea leaned back in her thin saddle to follow the line of the shoulder of the mountain higher and then higher and then endlessly higher as it rose into and above the light blue sky…
“My Queen.”
Penthesilea swiveled to rebuke Bremusa only to find that the other women had reined their horses to a stop. The Amazon queen shook her head as if emerging from a dream and rode back to them.
She realized now that all the time she had been enraptured by Olympos, they had been passing women on this side of the Hole—women running, screaming, bleeding, stumbling, weeping, falling. Clonia had dismounted and had propped the head of such a wounded woman on her knee. The woman appeared to be wearing a bizarre crimson robe.
“Who?” said Penthesilea, looking down as if from a great height. She realized now that they had been following a trail of abandoned and bloody armor for the last mile or so.
“The Achaeans,” rasped the dying woman. “Achilles …” If she had been wearing armor, it had not helped. Her breasts has been cut off. She was almost naked. The crimson robe was actually her own blood.
“Take her back to …” began Penthesilea but stopped. The woman had died.
Clonia mounted and fell in to the right and rear of Penthesilea, where she always rode. The queen could feel the rage coming off her old comrade like heat from a bonfire.
“Forward,” said Penthesilea and spurred her war mount. Her war axe was strapped balanced across her pommel. Athena’s spear was in her right hand. They galloped the last quarter mile to the band of men ahead. The Achaeans were standing and bending over more bodies—looting them. The sound of the Greeks’ laughter was clear in the thin air.
Perhaps forty women had fallen here. Penthesilea slowed her steed to a walk, but the two lines of Amazon cavalry had to break ranks. Horses—even warhorses—do not like to step on human beings, and the bloodied corpses here—women all—had fallen so close that the horses had to pick their way carefully, setting their heavy hooves down in the few open spaces between the bodies.
The men looked up from their looting and pawing. Penthesilea estimated that there were about a hundred Achaeans standing around the women’s bodies, but none of these men was recognizable. There were none of the Greek heroes there. She looked five or six hundred yards farther on and saw a nobler group of men walking back to the main Achaean army.
“Look, more women,” said the mangiest of the men stripping the female corpses of their armor. “And this time they brought us horses.”
“What is your name?” asked Penthesilea.
The man grinned, showing missing and rotted teeth. “My name is Molion and I’m trying to decide whether to fuck you before or after I kill you, woman.”
“It must be a hard decision for such a limited mind,” Penthesilea said calmly. “I met a Molion once, but he was a Trojan, comrade to Thymbraeus. Also, that Molion was a living man, and you are a dead dog.”
Molion snarled and pulled his sword.
Without dismounting, Penthesilea swung her two-bladed axe and beheaded the man. Then she spurred her huge warhorse and rode down three others who barely had time to raise their shields before being trampled.
With an unearthly cry, her dozen Amazon comrades spurred into battle beside her, trampling, slashing, hacking, and spearing Achaeans as surely as if they were harvesting wheat with a scythe. Those men who stood to fight, died. Those who ran, died. Penthesilea herself killed the last seven men who had been stripping corpses alongside Molion and his three trampled friends.
Her comrades Euandra and Thermodoa had run down the last of the sniveling, groveling, begging Achaeans—an especially ugly, whining bastard who announced that his name was Thersites as he pleaded for mercy—and Penthesilea astounded her sisters by ordering them to let him go.
“Take this message to Achilles, Diomedes, the Ajaxes, Odysseus, Idomeneus, and the other Argive heroes I spy staring at us from yonder hill,” she boomed at Thersites. “Tell them that I, Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, daughter of Ares, beloved of Athena and Aphrodite, have come to end Achilles’ miserable life. Tell them that I will fight Achilles in single combat if he agrees, but that I and my Amazon comrades will kill all of them if they insist. Go, deliver my message.”