by Judith Hand
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Tor Copyright Notice
PROLOGUE
PREFACE
PART I - MEETING
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
PART II - TOUCHED BY THE FATES
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
PART III - DESTINY
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
CAST OF CHARACTERS
MYTHOLOGY AND TRADITION TELL US THE FOLLOWING:
ABOUT AMAZONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Notes
Copyright Page
This story is dedicated to
Harold, the man who
held my hand.
ISLAND OF TENEDOS OPPOSITE TROY—1225 BC
PROLOGUE
IT IS JUST PAST DAWN AND PENTHA, RUBBING SLEEP from her eyes, shuffles from the sleeping chamber to let out the dog.
A sound. Then a scream! Sudden shrieking and shouting all around the house.
“Raiders!” someone yells.
A warning chill ripples through Pentha, head to toe. She is sixteen, and from memory her mother’s frequent warning comes: Hide at once! Arm yourself! That is what her mother has always told them.
Pentha snatches up a cutting knife.
“Acheans!” screams the woman from across their narrow street.
Pentha’s heart beats wildly. Her eyes dart around the room, seeking a place to hide. The wicker basket! Large, waist high, under the window. She dashes to it and flips back the top, climbs in, pushes aside softened deerskins, squats, and yanks down the cover. Wriggling under the skins, she pulls into a tight ball.
Through spaces in the wicker, Pentha sees her sister Deri and their mother running from the sleeping chamber toward her. Three men chase them. Dirty men, hands empty, swords at their sides banging against their legs.
“Artemis strike you dead!” her mother screams. She and Deri run into the street, the men still chasing them.
Pentha thinks, I should go after them. Help them. But she can’t move.
She hears the sound of horses’ hoofs and a wagon. The sounds stop just outside. Should she stand up at the window and look out? But one of the raiders might see her. Instead of standing, she crouches lower.
A husky voice commands, “Leave the women until the men are taken care of.”
Who is that? What will they do with the men?
“Yes, Lord Achilles.”
Pentha presses her hand over her racing heart. She thinks, I must stand up now. I must see.
Then footsteps running back into the house. She peeks again through the wicker to see her mother and Deri rush back in, followed by a huge man fully clothed in leather and bronze armor. “What is a daughter of Artemis and her young doing this far from home?” the man with the husky voice demands of Deri.
Pentha can’t see her mother, but she can see Deri staring, like a paralyzed, frightened hare at the big warrior. Deri, just a year younger than Pentha, is terrified too.
“Die!” Her mother appears in Pentha’s view, knife in hand and charging at the warrior, blocking Pentha’s view of him.
He steps back, bangs into the door, it slams shut.
Her mother and the warrior struggle …
PREFACE
LOVE AND WAR. ETERNAL THEMES. THE AMAZON and the Warrior is a love story set against the background of what is arguably the most famous war ever chronicled in myth or the arts.
Nearly three thousand years ago, around 750 BC, the Greek poet Homer composed the Iliad, an epic about the “Age of Heroes,” a time when weapons were made of bronze because the secret of iron was still not widely known. From our perspective, this phrase seems ironic because our definition of “hero” has evolved. The truth appears to be that in the centuries around 1250 BC, kings from the cities of Greece (Achea) accumulated the wealth to support their lifestyles, and their armies, by sacking cities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean 1 These plunderers took booty in the form of gold and gems, horses and slaves. As depicted by Homer, in a thirst for glory, these royal nobles fought their counterparts among their enemies on the battlefield in deadly duels of honorable combat. These were the heroes of their day. Men about whom story spinners wove their tales, great not because they sacrificed themselves for others, but because they fought or lived larger than life.
This was a time, too, of Amazons, whose home, Themiskyra, lay astride the river Thermodon on the southern shore of the Black Sea.
If we look at the geography of Turkey, the gods seem to have blessed Themiskyra with a relatively sheltered location. A rugged, high mountain range with few passes protected her back from her extraordinarily aggressive southern neighbors, the Hittites. And the Hellespont, the narrow strait that led from the Aegean into the Euxine (Black) Sea, protected her from Achean raiders out of Greece. Strong southern winds swept down the Hellespont almost perpetually from the north, and the currents, too, consistently ran to the south. This is as true today as it was in the Bronze Age. Although a seafaring people, the Acheans did not possess the technology or know-how to sail against the wind. Thus they would have been hard pressed to bring ships through the strait and into position to threaten the Amazon stronghold.
At the mouth of the Hellespont, on the Aegean coast of Turkey, lay the site of the most famous raiding expedition of all—Troy. This is the story of immortal warriors who fought in the Trojan War—men and women.
PART I
MEETING
PROVINCE OF THEMISKYRA, HOME OF AMAZONS—
SOUTHERN COAST, EUXINE SEA, 1217 BC
1
ALONE AND AT PEACE, DAMON HAD SPENT AN hour checking his traps above Two Sisters Falls.
The hour was late. The midsummer sky looked dark and bruised; rain would come before nightfall.
Little Wolf, still awkward at eight-weeks old, bounded along behind him on the narrow trail that, on Damon’s left, sloped gently downhill to a boulder-strewn stream. When they reached the spot where, from between two great pines, a man could take a last glimpse of the fall’s thundering waters before the trail turned, Damon stopped to look back, stroking his beard as he contemplated the water’s beauty. The wolf pup ran under his legs and bumped one of his feet. Damon tripped. He and Little Wolf went over the side.
Damon slammed onto his back. Pain shot through his chest. His breath whooshed out, and he rolled head-over-tail once then twice more like a log until his left side landed in the water. Little Wolf slid to a stop beside him.
Clearly thinking this was great fun, the pup leaped onto Damon’s chest, wagging his tail. Damon burst into laughter.
The eager young thing leapt back onto solid ground and bowed, rump in the air, his tail still waving, inviting more marvelous play. Damon crawled from the water, his linen trousers and tunic clinging coldly to his skin. He took a similar stance, rear up and shoulders down, and the two of them tumbled, the pup growling and Damon laughing.
Damon stopped the game by picking up Little Wolf and staring him down with a somber gaze. Then he settled the soft ball into his lap and stared upstream to the waterfall.
For a moment he simply listened, scratching the wolf behind the ears. In Damon’s head, the sound of cascading water created an aura of exquisite colors—unending swirls, patterns never repeated—of the deep purples and gentle pinks of a glorious sunset.
“Do you see the colors, too?” he said. He closed his eyes and let the sound of the fall and the swirling purples and pinks pleasure his mind. Earlier he’d been reminded of his difference from other people, of his oddity, by the chattering of squirrels. Their sounds evoked much the same ugly aura and nausea in him that human speech did.
He stood and made a half-hearted effort to wring water from his clothing. A quick search revealed no sign of the leather thong used to keep his hair back from his face, and further searching would likely prove futile. The thong could be hidden in any bush, snagged under any rock, or blended in with the brown litter on the slope.
With Little Wolf under one arm, Damon scrambled back onto the trail. A stone’s throw downstream something the size of a deer or even a bear moved on the far bank. Damon froze. Two women approached. Few people, women or men, ever appeared near his cabin.
Their dress—short deerskin tunics with left shoulder exposed and knee-high boots—identified them as Amazons, daughters of the People of Artemis. They carried bows and moved swiftly, silently toward him in a manner indicating they were close on the trail of quarry—and they hadn’t seen him. The woman at the front was startling. Her hair, bound in a typical Amazon braided bun at the back of her head, was a color he had never seen before. Not on a person and not on an animal. A brilliant coppery red. And she was uncommonly tall, a full foot-length taller than her fellow hunter.
The redheaded leader reached the path to the stream used by the forest’s largest creatures—deer, leopard, lion, wolf, and boar—and turned onto it. Her companion, a woman with chestnut hair, followed.
The rope loop trap. Not two days ago Damon had seen it along that same path. According to the boy Bias, Damon’s only regular contact with the rest of the world, the only village within half a day’s walk had been losing goats to something large, probably wolves. The villagers had likely set the snare.
Damon barely registered this thought when he heard the distinctive “thwang” and rustle of a sprung loop trap. A woman yelled. He shook his head, and with a wry smile to Little Wolf he said, “Someone has caught himself an Amazon.”
He loped down to the stream and crossed, easily balancing on a series of rocks that might have been placed by Artemis for just that purpose. As he approached the women, he saw that the red-haired one dangled upside down, her left ankle in the loop.
Noting long, elegantly-built legs, shapely waist, and taut belly, he smiled. He also noted, as she slowly twirled, that she wore a leather undergarment that was little more than a strap that expanded in front to cover her private hair and in the rear, the upper half of her buttocks. He had never known what, if anything, an Amazon wore under her tunic. Only his mother, herself an Amazon before she had married and become pregnant with Damon, could have told him, but she was dead now many years.
“Just cut it!” the dangling woman called to her friend.
Amazement stopped what he’d intended to say. He shook his head. He must have misheard. Her words didn’t create the brown and jagged grey-scummed aura and sickening sensation he experienced from human speech. Her words washed the scene in sunny yellow and his sensation was pleasure.
Her friend, wrestling to untie the rope, secured to the base of a birch tree, said testily, “If I cut it, you’ll fall straight down on your head and break your neck.” Her voice created exactly the repugnant, filthy aura he expected.
They still hadn’t seen him. The redhead tightened her belly muscles and curled her body to raise her hands to her ankle in a futile gesture to grapple with the loop. A look of extreme pain flashed over her face. She immediately let herself hang straight down again.
Her hair had somehow come unbound from the long single braid always worn at the back of the head when Amazons were hunting or in battle, and masses of the extraordinary stuff, red highlighted with gold, rippled toward the ground.
“I can help,” he said. He strode under the hung woman, saying to her companion, “Cut the rope. I’ll catch her.”
After a brief pause, her eyebrows lifted in surprise at this stranger, the chestnut-haired Amazon cut the rope. Damon immediately held in his arms an indignant woman with a flushed face. Whether her color was caused by indignation or from hanging upside down, he couldn’t tell.
Damon couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Apart from your dignity, you seem unharmed. Fortunate. But if you are customarily so unaware, maybe you ought not be out in the woods alone.”
He felt her stiffen. “Let me stand!”
Her voice flared with irritation, but its sunny aura was still lovely to see. He had never, in his life, experienced such a voice.
He enjoyed the feel of the tight, sleek muscles of her thighs and she put a firm grip on one of his arms. She added, hotly, “And, as is very evident, I am not alone.”
True. So she’d also caught him—in an error.
When her feet touched the ground, a look of pain wrinkled a beautiful, high brow.
Regret struck. He’d spoken too soon and too cockily.
Her friend took her hand. “You’re hurt.”
“I … my hip.” She felt her left hip, then tried a step. Her tanned skin actually blanched, her lips thinned, and she quickly shifted her weight off the left leg. The hipbone had clearly not been pulled from its socket, but she still wasn’t going to be walking in comfort, if at all, anytime soon.
Damon noticed a long scar on her upper left arm and wondered … hunting or battle? He said, “Where is your camp?”
The shorter woman replied. “An hour’s walk. At least.”
Damon looked at the darkening sky and clouds low and thick, as if weighted with a heavy burden. Dusk was little more than an hour away. “Have you others there who can help?”
The injured beauty shook her head. She looked at her friend. “You walk it and come back with Gale and Valor.”
“Gale and Valor?” he said.
“Our horses,” said the red-head.
Of course.
A moment of silence—a moment of choice. He could leave them to fend for themselves. Their problem was not his problem. He could return to his cabin and his life and they could continue with theirs.
But then, how would he feel sleeping warmly knowing that they were enduring a night of rain in the open? No matter what she said, or hoped, the red-head was not going to be able to walk or
ride until she let her hip rest.
He took the leap. “Will you be able to ride any better than you can walk? I don’t think so. My home is just beyond the ridge.” He pointed to the trail along which he had only a short time ago been walking quite happily in solitude. “Only a short walk.” He looked again at the sky. “You can be dry with me for the night.”
The red-head studied him. Her color rose still higher. Yes, she was most definitely embarrassed to have been so easily caught. She looked at her friend. He was a stranger, but then this was Themiskyran country and the remote woods at that. Hospitality was the law. The one with chestnut hair seemed pleased at the thought of shelter for the night, but the tall woman still hesitated, her jaw set firm. He guessed she didn’t like being dependent—on anyone for anything.
He swept the injured Amazon into his arms and started walking.
2
“I … BUT …” THE WOMAN STAMMERED.
“Can you walk?”
She shook her head.
To the smaller woman he said, “Please. Carry the pup.”
It had been longer than he could remember since he’d had a woman in his arms, and never one so beautiful. To the feel of female flesh against his skin, his body responded in male fashion. Fortunately, her friend walked behind him.
His most unusual “catch of the day” touched his tunic, the dry side, then the wet one. His flesh prickled. She quickly said, “Was the trap yours?”
He forced himself to look straight ahead when what he wanted to do was study her face as he would a newly-discovered flower. And her words had tumbled out, as if she had felt the same thrill of contact.
“No. There is a village not far from here.”
She was within a finger’s width of being as tall as he, her body solidly built, no doubt from hard riding and fighting. Whenever the trail took an uphill slant, he fell into shorter steps and heavier breathing. Near his cabin, the first cool drop of rain struck his cheek.
When he carried her through the thick, whitethorn hedge that surrounded the yard, she nodded at the hedge. “Does it actually work to keep out the lions and wolves?”