Penthesilea straightened her body to face him head on, sword to sword. She was actually taller than he was, and had a longer reach with the sword. They clashed together, with a flurry of sword-strokes too swift to follow. Akhilles reeled backward and for a moment went down on his knees. He made some signal so that his men rushed in and immediately engaged all the other warrior women. Then, swiftly as a striking snake, he was up, his sword moving almost too quickly to be seen; Penthesilea retreated a few steps until she stood against her horse's flank. But his relentless sword pressed her until she went down. Kassandra heard the breath sob out of her as Akhilles fell to the Amazon's side. What was the madman doing? He tore at her clothes in a frenzy, leaned forward and as they watched in horror, violently raped the corpse.
Monstrous, she thought, if only I bad my bow! Akhilles had finished and was fighting off the four Amazons who had come to attack him. He cut down two of them at once, then took, down another with a spear, wounding her so that, reeling away, she was cut down by one of his soldiers. The remaining women made a desperate rush to recover Penthesilea's body, but they were hopelessly out-numbered and within a few more minutes not a single Amazon warrior remained alive. The soldiers rounded up and led away their surviving horses. In a single hour of battle, an entire tribe with all their culture and their memories had been wiped out, and that fiend Akhilles had carried out the final insult to a warrior who dared challenge him. She did not believe for a single moment that he had been overcome by lust; it was a cold-blooded act of contempt.
It would have been fitting if Apollo had let fly his arrow at that moment to take him in the very act of overweening pride. The God who loathed excess in revenge or even in war would have been the perfect avenger. Akhilles no longer qualified as an honorable opponent in battle, she realized; he was like a mad dog.
But the Gods stand by and will do nothing. If Akhilles were a mad dog, someone would come and kill him, not to avenge the dead but to protect the living, and to put the poor maddened beast out of its misery.
And if Apollo will not act, it was not for nothing that I am sworn to serve him - if only by doing what a more innocent priest would expect the God to do. For the first time since she had knelt and prayed as a young girl to the Sunlord to accept her, she knew clearly why she had come to the Sunlord's house. She looked one last time at the body of Penthesilea lying shamefully stripped and bared on the field, then turned away; she had done all her weeping that morning when she begged Penthesilea not to go, and had no more tears.
She went up into the Sunlord's house and to her room; from the chest there she took her bow, a gift from Penthesilea, elaborately gilded and inlaid with ivory like the Sunlord's own. She strung it with a plain arrow—she might need to get the range, and into her quiver she put the last of the envenomed arrows which the old Kentaur Cheiron had made.
Kassandra realized she was shaking from head to foot; she went down into the kitchens and found herself some stale bread and a little honey, forcing herself to eat. The women were gathered there, baking fresh bread for the funeral feast of the Great Snake, and besought Kassandra to wait for the fresh baking, but she refused everything except a mug of watered wine. They were all astonished at seeing their priestess armed, but they forbore to ask her questions; as an elder priestess her doings were assumed to have a good purpose, no matter how mysterious or obscure, and could not under any circumstances be challenged.
Then, deliberately, she went down into the most secret room of the temple, and from a chest to which only a few of the high priests and priestesses had the keys, she took a certain robe adorned with gold, and the golden sun-mask. With hands schooled to steadiness, she put them on and tied the strings.
She was not entirely sure whether what she did was the highest of sacrileges - she thought of Khryse putting on these things in an attempt to cajole an inexperienced girl into serving a lust he could not satisfy any other way - or whether she was serving the honor of Apollo by doing what the God ought to be doing and would not.
Sandals were a part of the costume; gilded sandals with small golden wings attached to the heels. She laced them on, wishing they were really winged so that she could fly down over the Akhaian camp. Silently she climbed to the balcony which overlooked the battlefield, remembering how Khryse had stood here in the aspect of Apollo to shoot down the arrows of plague into the Akhaian camp. He had cried out, too, in Apollo's voice.
The bodies of the Amazons lay at the center of clustering clouds of flies. The horses were gone; the Trojan chariots and foot soldiers who had marched out this morning had retreated within the walls of Troy. Akhilles strutted in the midst of his own guards, apparently waiting for someone to come and challenge him to a fight. Couldn't his own soldiers see that the man had gone outside every limit of sanity and decency? Yet they still respected him as their general!
She did not cry out as Khryse had done; Apollo had given her nothing to say, even though he was the God of song. Perhaps someone else would make a song about this, but it would not be with her words. She simply strung the bow, took careful aim at Akhilles and let fly. The arrow fell a little short; but now she had the range. The Akhaian hero had not seen the arrow and continued his strutting between the chariots. Now where to shoot, when the iron armor covered so much of his body? She looked up and down to see that though the helmet covered face and hair, on his feet he wore sandals which were no more than a couple of narrow strips of leather. So be it then; she let fly at his feet.
The arrow struck his bare heel; he evidently thought it no more than an insect bite, for she saw him bend to brush it away. Then he drew out the shaft, and looked about to see where it had come from. One by one the Trojan soldiers looked up at the walls to see what Akhilles's Myrmidons were staring and pointing at. Kassandra stood motionless - she was probably out of ordinary bowshot when it had to be directed straight upward, even if anyone had the courage to shoot an arrow at what could have been the God. She felt completely invulnerable, and even if an arrow had come out of the blinding noon, she had accomplished what she set out to do.
Akhilles was still standing, gazing upward at the source of the arrow, apparently unaware of the nature of the wound; but after a time she saw him reach down and claw at his foot, signalling one of his men to bind it up. Well, let them try; she knew that even if they should now cut his foot off - and that had been tried for small localized wounds such as this - the poison had entered his blood, and Akhilles was already a dead man.
For a few more minutes he strode arrogantly about the field, then stumbled and fell; he was on the ground now in convulsions. There was confusion in the Akhaian camp - and then a great cry of rage and despair went up, not unlike the death-cry raised over Patroklos. Down lower at the wall where the other women were watching there were cries of jubilation, and at last a great shout of thanksgiving to Apollo. But by this time Kassandra had slipped down from the wall and was in the secret room returning the mask and robe to their locked chest. When she came out again everyone was crowding to the wall, pushing and shoving to find out what had happened.
"One of the Akhaian leaders is dead," someone told her. "It might even be Akhilles. Apollo himself appeared, they say, high on the walls above Troy, and shot him down with his arrows of fire."
"Oh, did he?" she replied, sounding skeptical, and when they repeated the story, said no more than, "Well, it's about time."