Marion Bradley - The Firebrand

"Now you are truly a warrior," said Elaria, and Kassandra remembered being told that on the night when she had killed the man who had tried to ravish her. But she supposed that a real battle made her more truly a fighting woman. She bore the wound proudly, the mark of her first battle.

Penthesilea, her face smeared with blood, bent close to examine the cleansed wound and frowned. "Bind it carefully, Elaria, or there will be a dreadful scar - and that we must not have."

"What does it matter?" Kassandra asked wearily. "Most Amazon warriors have scars." Penthesilea herself was dripping blood from an open slash on her chin. Kassandra touched her cheek with careful fingers. "When it is healed it will hardly show. Why make a fuss about it?"

"You appear to be forgetting, Kassandra, that you are not an Amazon."

"My mother herself was once a warrior," Kassandra protested. "She will understand an honorable scar of battle."

"She is a warrior no longer," Penthesilea said grimly. "She chose a long time ago what she would be; that she would live with your father, keep his house, bear his children. So if your father is angry - and angry, believe me, he will be if we send you back to him with your beauty marred - your mother will be greatly distressed, and her goodwill is very valuable to us. You will go back to Troy when we head south in the spring."

"No!" Kassandra protested. "Only now am I beginning to be of some use to the tribe instead of a burden. Why should I go back to being a house mouse," she pronounced the words disdainfully, "just when I have shown myself fit to become a warrior?"

"Think, Kassandra, and you will know why you must go," Penthesilea replied. "You are becoming a warrior; which would be well and good were you to spend the rest of your life with us. I would welcome you among our tribe, a true warrior and a daughter to me as long as I live. But this cannot be; soon or late, you must return to your life in Troy - and since it must be so, then for your own sake it had best be soon. I would not send you back so changed that you would be miserable all your life if you must spend it within city walls." Kassandra knew this was true, but it seemed to her that she was being punished for becoming one of them.

"Don't look so downcast, bright-eyes; I am not sending you away tomorrow," her kinswoman said, and drew the girl to her breast, stroking her hair. "You will remain with us at least for another moon, perhaps two, and return with us to Colchis. Nor have I forgotten the promise I made you; the Goddess has called you to her service, she has set her hand upon you as priestess-born; we could not claim you as warrior in any case. Before you depart from among us, we shall see you presented to her."

Kassandra still felt that she had been cheated; she had worked so long and bravely to be accepted as an Amazon warrior, and it was that very hard work and bravery in battle which had lost her the coveted goal.

The scene of the battle was being cleared away; the bodies of the Amazons - besides Star, two other women had been slain by arrows and one crushed beneath a fallen horse - were being dragged away to be burnt. Penthesilea pushed Kassandra gently down when she would have risen.

"Rest, you are wounded."

"Rest? What are the other warriors doing, wounded or not? May I not bear the part of a warrior at least while I still remain among you?"

Penthesilea sighed. "As you will, then. It is your right to see those you have slain sent to the Lord of the Underworld." With tenderness she touched the girl's wounded cheek.

Goddess, Mother of Mares, Lady who shapes our Fates, she thought, why did you not send this one, the true daughter of my heart, to my womb, rather than to my sister who had chosen to give her to a man's dominion? She will know no happiness there and I see only darkness lying before her; darkness, and the shadow of another's fate.

Her heart yearned for Kassandra as never for her own daughters; yet she realized that Hecuba's daughter must bear her own destiny, which she could not abate, and that the Dark Goddess had set her hand on the girl.

No woman can escape her Fate, she thought, and it is ill done to seek to deprive the Earth Mother of her appointed sacrifice. Yet for love of her, I would send her to serve Earth Mother below, rather than sentence her to serve the Dark One here in mortal lands.

Kassandra saw her companions consigned to the flames without any visible display of emotion; when they made camp that night, at their insistence, she spread her blankets between those of Penthesilea and Elaria.

It did filter through her mind that without consulting her, a decision had been made. Now that the worst of the danger was over, they seemed suddenly to have remembered that she was a princess of Troy, and she was now to be carefully protected. But she was no more and no less a princess than she had been two or three days ago.

She missed Star, though they had not, she supposed, really been friends. Yet there was a subdued horror in Kassandra at the thought that every night on this journey she had spread out her blankets on the trail close beside this girl whose body now lay burned to ashes after having been smashed into ruin and pierced with arrows.

A little less luck, an opponent a little more skilled and the javelin which had torn her cheek would have gone through her throat; it would have been her body burned tonight on that pyre. She felt vaguely guilty, and was too new to the warrior's world to know that every one of the women lying around her felt exactly the same way; guilty and troubled that it was she who was alive and her friend who had died.

Penthesilea had spoken of the Goddess laying her hand upon her, as if this were a fact like any other, and Kassandra found herself wondering if she had been spared because the Goddess had some use for her.

Her torn cheek itched with maddening ferocity, and when she raised her hand to try and ease it by scratching or rubbing, a sharp pain kept her from touching it. She shifted the cloak she had wadded under her head and tried to find a comfortable position to sleep. Which Goddess had laid a hand on her? There were many; the Moon Lady whose tides and daily shifting rhythms laid her compulsion in every female animal; the Mother of

Mares whom Penthesilea invoked; the Maiden Huntress, whose protection was on every maiden and everyone who shot with the bow, guardian of warriors; the Dark Mother of the under-earth, Snake Mother of the Underworld… but she, Kassandra thought in confusion as her thoughts began to blur into sleep, had been slain by Apollo's arrows…

There were so many Goddesses; every little village seemed to have a shrine to one or more of them, and yet Penthesilea had told her once, casually, that all these Goddesses were the same, although each village and tribe had its own name for her.

As often before sleep she reached out in her mind for the familiar touch of her twin's thoughts. There was the riffle of a wind from home, and the thyme-scented air of Mount Ida drifted through her senses; the darkness of the shepherd's hut she had never, in her own body, entered, was around her; she wondered what he would have thought of the battle. Or would this have seemed commonplace to him? No; for now she, a woman, had more experience of battle than he had. Shadowed darkly at her side she could see - or sense - a sleeping form she identified as the woman Oenone who had for so long been the center of her—of his fantasies. She had become accustomed in the last months to this curious division of herself and her twin, till she was no longer sure which sensations and emotions were hers and which Paris's. Was she asleep and dreaming? Was he?

The moonlight illuminated the softly shining form of a woman standing in the shadowed doorway of the shepherd's hut, and she knew she looked on the form of the Lady; a Queen, regal and shining; now the shining one shifted, and the light streamed from the silver bow, with arrows of moonlight filling the little room.