Penthesilea

Judith Tarr

The Queen of the Amazons, it is said, came once to the great Alexander...

This story was later expanded into the novel, Queen of the Amazons (Tor).

The Queen of the Amazons came to the great Alexander in the royal city of Zadrakarta, just after he had become Great King of the Persians and Lord of Asia. She rode into his hall with a company of bare-breasted warriors, gleaming in bronze and gold, and flung herself at his feet, and begged him to be the father of her son. Alexander, men say, was flattered, but he refused; and she went away unsatisfied, but greatly in awe of the young conqueror.

So men say. Men tell tales to serve themselves. Women, unless silenced, have better things to do with the life the Goddess has given them, than to boast and vaunt and tell lies round the fire at night. Women have a taste for the truth, even when that is too strange for men to endure.

The truth of the tale is altogether different, and altogether wonderful, though perhaps, to a man, it would be a horror past imagining.

oOo

The Queen of the Amazons had but one child, and that child was born without a soul. She lived, grew, thrived; she ate and slept and seemed to dream. But when the seers looked into her eyes, they saw only emptiness. Even in animals there is a soul, but in this strong young body there was none.

There was consternation among the priestesses and the council, and great outcry against the abomination. But the queen was unmoved. “The Goddess will mend what she has made,” she said. “Be patient; protect her; wait and see.”

They would not. She was a monstrous thing, they cried; a visitation of the Goddess’ wrath upon the tribe.

At that the queen rose up, laid her hand upon the image of the Goddess that had dwelt in the tribe since the dawn time, and swore a great oath by heaven above and earth below, that this and no other would be Queen of the Amazons when she was dead.

She turned in ringing silence, lifted the child from the altar on which she had been laid, and strode away from the priestesses and the council and any word that might be spoken against her one and only and irrevocable heir.

oOo

The queen’s heir had no name, for a name requires a soul, and she had none. But with the turning of the years, she gained an epithet of sorts, a word that children used to signify a thing for which they knew no other name: Etta. She answered to it as well as she did to anything else, which was little if at all; for she never spoke, nor seemed to see or hear much that was of human making—except the arts of war. For those she had a gift that was pure instinct, and pure deadly skill.

In the twelfth year of Etta’s life, the Great King of Persia fell at the hands of a traitor, and a vaunting boy from Macedon took the throne and the empire. Word came even to the far reaches of the steppe, to the tribes and villages where women ruled and men were permitted only on sufferance. It came swiftest of all to the queen where, led perhaps by prescience, she hunted in the hills not far from Zadrakarta.

She went down to the city between the mountains and the sea, to see for herself what new thing had come upon the world. She left her warriors behind, and her hunting companions, for she had no desire to make of it a state visit. Only Etta followed her, and I.

I was Etta’s keeper then, her nursemaid as some were inclined to call me; I knew her ways, what she would eat, how she sustained life without wit or conscious will. She had an animal’s instinct to protect herself, which made her a remarkably gifted warrior, and an equal instinct for her mother’s presence. She was like a dog, trailing in the queen’s shadow.

The queen had never made any effort to cast the child aside; no more did she do so now. As for me, I was part of the child, as I had been since first I was given the keeping of her. The queen had not asked it lightly. I was and am rather more than a guard or a dry-nurse; my lineage is old and my rank not inconsiderable, and the Goddess called me to her priesthood before my breasts were budded. But I did not refuse the charge that was laid on me. I had no such clarity of vision as was granted to the queen my cousin; still I could sense a little of it, and be certain that this child must be protected.

We slipped away from the hunt in the quiet before dawn, covering our trail for some distance away from the camp. It was not that we mistrusted the queen’s own warband and oath-sisters, but she was minded to see this Alexander for herself, outside the bonds of royal protocol. Therefore we rode as hunters from the plains, with no splendor of dress or ornament. Our clothes were good and our weapons well made, but it needed a keen eye to see their quality beneath the stains of travel.

Zadrakarta was full of Macedonians: big, rough-spoken men who filled the taverns and roistered in the streets. I had heard that this Alexander kept decent discipline in war, but in the flush of victory it seemed that the army could do as it pleased. There were games, to which women were not admitted, and which the townsfolk found frankly embarrassing: all the men in them were naked.

We were not women of town or army, nor would we bow to any man’s will. In Persian dress, with scarves over our faces, we tarried for a day at the games. They were not unlike the games of spring and autumn among the tribes, when the young warriors tested their prowess, and men came to be judged for their fitness to be the fathers of our daughters. We saw a few here whom we might have been glad to take to our beds, but that was not our purpose in this place. We looked for the one who ruled them, the king who was still, by all accounts, little more than a boy.

He was not sitting in the high seat above the field, though that was surrounded by men of rank adorned with gold enough to ransom half of Persia. I had heard what people said; I looked for a sturdy man, not tall, with hair the color of new gold. Soon enough I found him, down on the field, running races with men who as often as not were bigger than he.

He did not always or even often win. The victors were not afraid of his rank and power, either, nor did they yield the prizes to him. The one who tried had to see it given to the man who had come in last, with a warning not to do such a thing again. Alexander, it seemed, wanted his victories whole, well and honestly won.

That was strikingly unusual in a man, and unheard of in a king. But this was not the usual run of either men or kings. Past that first, unknowing glance, when I saw him as those not touched by the Goddess could see, I was blinded, dazzled, confounded. He was like a rioting fire, like a blaze of the sun. Such a soul came direct from the spheres of heaven. It was too strong for living flesh to bear.

This one would never live to grow old. The fire of the spirit would burn his body to ash long before grey age took him. But oh, Goddess, what a light he would shed before he consumed himself!

I came back reluctantly to the duller world, and to my duty. My queen was watching Alexander, but not as one who is rapt in awe. She was studying him, narrow-eyed, judging as a queen must judge.

Her child between us, blank and soulless Etta, startled me by leaning forward over the tier of benches. I gripped her tightly before she tumbled down. She took no more notice of me than she ever did. Her eyes, for the first time that I could remember, had something like an expression. They were fixed on Alexander. They were full of his fire.

She who saw nothing human or animal, only weapons aimed at her, saw this child of light. She tugged at my hand, struggling to break free. I set my teeth and held on tighter. She began to fight in earnest.

Just before she escaped, I realized that her mother was no longer beside me. My queen had risen and begun a leaping descent through the tiers. On the field below, the races had ended. Men were challenging one another, offering tests of combat.

No one challenged Alexander—until a clear voice that I knew all too well rang out over the clamor of the crowd. “Alexander! Alexander of Macedon!”

He whipped about. He was fast, and light on his feet, even after a long day of games and, I did not doubt, an even longer night of wine and roistering.

He looked up to where my queen was standing in her Persian guise. His eyes were grey—I could see them clearly, for I had come down beside the queen. Her daughter was crouched at her feet, clear blue eyes still fixed on Alexander.

“Alexander,” said the queen, “I wager that you cannot best me in combat.”

“Indeed?” Alexander said. His head tilted. “What will you wager?”

“This,” she said, laying her hand on her daughter’s head.

My breath caught. Alexander’s brows were up. “A boy? He’s pretty; I’ve seldom seen a prettier. But I’m no Persian king. I’ve no need of boys to ornament my palace.”

“This is my own child,” the queen said, “my blood and bone. What will you wager, king of Macedon? What will I take .with me when I win?”

Alexander grinned at her. “You have gall, I grant you that. I’ll give you . . .” He paused. His brows knit. Suddenly he laughed, light and free, as one who wagers everything on certain victory. “I’ll give you whatever you ask, that is in my power to give. Only ask it, and it is yours.”

She bowed to him. I could not see her expression beneath the scarf, but her eyes were full of mockery. “That is a good wager,” she said. “Shall we fight?”

oOo

They fought with swords, sharp blades unblunted. Alexander’s guards and servants were appalled. His men cheered him on. They loved his crazy courage, to fight naked against an unknown, shrouded and no doubt armored enemy. They would never know what Goddess was in him, driving him: giving him strength—but never as much as She gave her daughter, her beloved, my queen.

He was lethally fast and brilliant in battle, but my queen was the Penthesilea, the daughter of war, and her sword had been forged in the morning of the world. She danced a sword-dance about the heavier, slower, more quickly tiring man, with grace that caught at my throat.

In the midst of the dance, as he rallied and pressed hard against her, the bindings of her headdress parted, then fell away. Her hair, bright gold, made the watchers gasp. But Alexander, who could see her face, checked for the space of a breath, astonished: for like all Greeks and their kin, he never thought to see a woman in the field of battle.

She had been winning before then, in my estimation, but once he saw her face, there was no battle left. She beat him back with ringing blows, forcing him to defend himself, but he was crippled, defeated; he could not strike, only parry. She drove him to his knees, and thrust her sword in the sand between them, and said coolly, “I had thought better of you.”

He was a high-colored man, ruddy even at rest, but as he knelt at her feet, he went crimson. He surged up in pure blind rage.

Her arm caught him and thrust him down again. But he was beyond reason. The third time he fell, her blade came softly to rest across his throat.

His eyes cleared. As suddenly as it had. risen, his fury died.

She lowered her sword. He stood slowly, stiffly, bleeding from a score of small wounds. He was exactly as tall as she. “If I needed a child,” she said, “I would ask you to give me one.”

“If you asked,” he said as civilly as a man could who had just been soundly and publicly defeated in battle by a woman, “I would respectfully decline to do the honors.”

‘Would you?”

“Some things cannot be forced.”

“Yes,” said the queen.

He looked hard at her, as if seeing her for the first time. I thought he might say something for all to hear, but when he spoke, it was only to say, “Come to dinner with me.”

That was a royal command, but the queen of my people chose to suffer it. She followed Alexander out of the crowds and the sun, past men who stared and murmured, in a flurry of rumor and speculation. It had not been clear to any but Alexander, what had come forth to fight him; they still were thinking that my queen was a Persian, a fighting eunuch perhaps, intent on avenging the death of his king.

oOo

He fed us royally, but not in the crowds and confusion of a royal feast. There were a few friends and companions, somewhat wide-eyed when they saw us bathed and unveiled. Alexander with the courtesy for which he was famous had offered us a selection of garments, both women’s dress and men’s. We chose coats and Persian trousers, for comfort and because they were close enough to our own fashion.

We ate in a smaller dining hall of the palace, within sound and scent of the sea. I do not recall now what I ate; but I remember vividly the faces of these lords and generals, warriors all, as they understood at last what we were. Alexander laughed like a boy. “Legends! Old tales walking out of the plains. You are—you really are—Penthesilea?”

“I am the Penthesilea,” my queen said. “My line has borne that title for years out of count.”

“And you came to see me.” He tilted his head in the way he had. “To teach me a lesson?”

“To see what you were.” She smiled at him. “And to teach you a lesson.”

“Did I learn it? Or am I still being taught?”

“That will be clear in time,” she said.

“So,” said Alexander. “You won a gift from me. What is your desire?”

“It is not yet yours to give,” she said. “But when it is, I shall ask for it.”

“What, the other half of Persia?” That was one of his generals, a big man, black-bearded, with an air about him of one who needed a good thrashing with the flat of a blade.

I would have been happy to oblige, but this was not our country. I could only watch him along with the rest, and tend Etta, who would not eat for her unceasing. fascination with Alexander. I persuaded her at length to take a bit of bread sopped in honey, which she ate neatly as she always did; she was a clean creature, whatever she lacked in wits or will.

The black-bearded man was watching us. Looking for weaknesses, I thought, and greatly pleased to find one. “Well, Alexander,” he said, “whatever you have to pay for losing the fight, at least you won’t be nursemaid to an idiot.”

I tensed to rise, to teach him the lesson he so badly needed, but my queen caught my hand. “Selene,” she said: only my name, but it bound me. She regarded the Macedonian with the hint of a smile. “One may be forgiven a lack of understanding,” she said. “This is my daughter, my heir. She is blessed of the Goddess. If your king had won her, he would have won a queen of the Amazons.”

The Macedonian’s lip curled, but Alexander spoke before he could insult us further. “A great prize,” he said, “and a great gift.” He looked into Etta’s face and smiled. And she, who had never shown human expression, mirrored that smile exactly.

“She’s very beautiful,” he said. He did not add, even with his eyes, that it was a pity she had no heart or spirit to give that beauty substance. He reached out his hand. She reached in turn, to clasp it. “Good day to you,” he said with courtesy that cannot be learned; it is born in a rare few, vanishingly few of whom are kings.

Of course she did not answer, but her eyes never left his face. She was basking in the light of him, as if he had been the sun.

He bade a servant bring a chair to set beside his own, and drew her to it. All the rest of that dinner, he ate with one hand, for she would not let go the other. He heard such tales of our people as my queen and even I, reluctantly, would tell; he was insatiably curious, eager to learn all that he could, and of us he had heard every myth and legend from the most preposterous to the merely foolish.

We sat there well past sunset, but although there was wine enough, it was well watered; we did not suffer the infamous excesses of a Macedonian banquet.

Some of his companions, the black-bearded man among them, excused themselves—to escape, I supposed, to a more comfortably male gathering. The rest lingered with us. They had some share of Alexander’s thirst for knowledge, and some of his quick intelligence. I caught myself warming to them, helped perhaps by the wine, though I drank little enough of that.

When it was time to go, we met a difficulty. Etta would not leave the king. I had anticipated that; I was ready for the silent battle. But Alexander said, “Beautiful one, you should sleep. In the morning you may come to me; we’ll visit the horses together.”

She could not have understood him; words to her held less meaning than the cries of birds. Yet she let go his hand. She took her eyes from him at last, bent them down, and permitted me to lead her away.

oOo

As long as Alexander was in Zadrakarta, we stayed as his guests, housed in the palace and given a servant, and a groom for our horses. Etta had abandoned her mother; as much as she could, she attached herself to Alexander, following him like a dog, crouching at his feet when he sat to eat or hold audience. He was remarkably gentle with her, and strikingly tolerant; he was fierce in protecting her against both mockery and disapproval. Soon enough, his people learned to take no notice of the odd blank-faced child in the king’s shadow.

I was the shadow’s shadow. Because I was possessed of both soul and wit, I could undertake to be inconspicuous. I cared for my charge as I could, as little as there was to do here, with servants to tend her and a king to guard her.

Duty tore at me. My queen came and went as she pleased, by Alexander’s order; any who accused her of spying was swiftly silenced. I, seeing the queen’s heir so manifestly safe, was sorely tempted to abandon the charge and follow where my heart truly was, with the queen. But I had given my word. I would serve the heir until the queen, or the queen’s heir herself, set me free.

She came to me one evening as the year drew on toward winter. Alexander was out fighting; there was a great deal of Persia still to subdue, and he was much preoccupied with it. To my amazement, Etta had not tried to follow him to his war. As if some communication had passed between them, a promise that he would return, she settled into her old, blank calm.

She was sitting by the fire in the room that Alexander had given her, staring blindly at the flames, when her mother passed the door-guard. The queen was windblown and damp and spattered with mud, for it had been raining that day, a cold raw rain. She came in shivering. The servant, unprompted, ran to fetch dry clothes for her; I warmed her hands in mine, and led her to the fire, sitting her down beside her daughter. Etta was rapt in contemplation of the flames; she was oblivious to us both.

The queen ran a hand lightly over the bright gold curls. “It’s time,” she said. “Winter comes; the people need us. It’s time to go home.”

My heart leaped at the prospect, but I said, “This one may beg to differ.”

“She may,” said the queen. She was warming slowly; the chattering of her teeth had eased. She took the cup that the servant brought, and sipped wine heated with spices. Between sips she said, “If she wishes to stay, and if the king will agree to it, she may.”

I was silent. I tried to be expressionless, but I was no Etta. My eyes, I have been told, never fail to give me away.

“I release you from your charge,” she said. “You’ve kept it admirably, for years longer than you must ever have expected. Now you may lay it down.She herself has chosen her keeper. You are free.”

“No,” I said. I startled myself. “I can’t be free. Not while her soul is bound apart from her body.”

“Not even to go back to the people? Not even to be what you were born to be, priestess and warrior, protector of the tribe?”

“I protect my queen’s heir,” I said.

She might have said more, but she chose to say nothing. She bent her head. “As you will,” she said.

oOo

My queen went back to her people, as duty bade her. I stayed where my duty bound me. My heart was dark and still; my prescience had fled. I only knew that where the soulless one went, there must I go.

It was a long journey, a tale of years. We saw the road through Asia, and the land of India, but never the stream of Ocean. Alexander’s army refused to go so far. He, forever their lover, gave way. They say he wept that he had no more worlds to conquer. I know that he wept because his people would not follow him where he yearned to go.

Word came from my people through long chains of messengers, until it stretched and distorted into little more than rumor. There was a war or two, a famine, a fire on the plain; but there were joys, too: rich hunting, strong victory, the birth of a white filly-foal among the horses. I was near to forgetting what I had been; my thoughts most often were in Greek, though my dress was Persian, for modesty and for convenience.

The histories tell nothing of us. My doing: I could protect my charge from notoriety, and guard her against false rumor. There were so many followers about Alexander, after all, and more, the farther he traveled. We were too familiar to remark on, and too dull, in the end, to notice. What were we, after all, but a woman of a certain age, and a speechless idiot?

Etta grew from beautiful and empty child into even more beautiful and just as empty woman. She needed strong protection then against men who saw the shapely body and the vacant eyes, and thought to take what they pleased. I killed one or two, and maimed half a dozen more. After that they were wary, walking well shy of me and offering at least token respect to my charge.

My queen died while we followed Alexander home from India. We were in the Gedrosian desert then, in that horror of heat and sun and thirst, when even the strong shriveled and died. I endured because I must; I tended Etta, I saw to it that she had what water there was, and I kept her on her feet when she would have lain down on the march.

It was a long while since I had been scrupulous in keeping the rites of the Goddess. I worshipped her still, but in these foreign lands, in this foreign army, with no one of my own kind but a soulless child, I had let slip the observances one by one, until I could barely remember even the great ceremonies.

Yet in one thing I remained as I was. I still dreamed. The dreams came when they would, which was often enough; they were sometimes foreseeings, sometimes memories, and sometimes visions of the world as it was in that hour. I learned more of my people then than from any message or rumor; for a little while I was among them again, living the life to which I was born, and my heart eased immeasurably—until I woke and found myself again among strangers.

In Gedrosia we traveled by night in what cool there was, and slept through the burning heat of the day. That day I had found a sheltered hollow in the sand, and made a burrow for us both. There was water, rather brackish but not too scarce, and bread to wash down with it. I felt almost luxurious, and almost at ease, as I dozed beside Etta.

She was not as drawn with suffering as most of us. She was thin, certainly, and her cream-pale skin had burned dark gold, and her hair bleached from gold to almost white. Yet she showed no sign of weakness. She slept as a healthy young thing could, even in a pit of Tartarus.

As I slid in and out of sleep, I seemed to pass from this world of fire into a world of blessed water. Rain fell in torrents, running in rivers over the plain. I saw my queen, caught in the midst of the hunt, gathered in a circle with her companions. They all sheltered under cloaks, but she stood bareheaded in the storm.

She was older; we all were. But she was still strong, still beautiful. She laughed as the rain sheeted over her, flattening her hair to her skull and her garments to her body. She spread her arms and danced with the joy of life and living.

The Goddess took her just then, in supernal mercy, with great blessing. I saw the fire come down, the bolt from heaven. It pierced through her from crown to

sole. It seared her body to ash; her soul spun free, brighter than the lightning, startled, singing like a lark as it soared up to heaven.

The body that I had believed must be waiting for it was still asleep beside me in the horror of Gedrosia. No soul came to fill it; no living spirit to fill her emptiness with splendor.

I had no tears, but still I wept. My queen was dead, gone, lost forever. I sprang up, staggering with the effort. But where would I go, what path would I take, that I had not set foot upon already? My horse was dead; my body clung to life by sheer will. I could go no faster, nor drive myself harder.

There was nothing I could do but sink down in my burrow of sand, and give myself up to mourning for my kinswoman, my beloved, my queen.

oOo

We survived Gedrosia, Etta and I, and Alexander whose spirit was unconquerable. Every step of that journey after my dream had come and gone, I yearned for my people and my country, my tribe without a queen. But when we had come to the end, to water and blessed green and relief, at last, from thirst and hunger and furnace heat, I dreamed again.

She came to me, my queen, as I had seen her in life, with her bow in her hand and her sword at her side. She smiled at me as she had so often before, that smile I would have followed to the ends of the earth—and for which I had let her leave me, and bound myself to follow a man, a mere king. “Selene,” she said in an accent I had half forgotten, the accent of our people. “Dear cousin. Are you happy?”

Strange.question for the dead to ask. I answered honestly. “How can I be happy? I live in exile. And you, my queen, are dead.”

She laughed as if my grief were a splendid jest. “Oh, yes!” she said. “I am dead. Is that why you creep about in such gloom? That’s foolish. I’m with the Goddess now, in the land of everlasting.”

“You should be here,” I said in unslaked bitterness, “in this body that waits for you.”

She frowned slightly, though her lips still smiled. “Body? Waiting? It’s not my time to be reborn.”

That startled me; it left me in confusion. “And yet—you said—your oath—”

“I swore that she would be queen after me,” she said. “And so she will. That is as true a vision as it ever was.”

“How can she be queen? The Goddess made her, but never finished her. She was never given a soul.”

“One waits,” said the queen. “Wait, and see. It’s not long now. The time is coming.”

“I am coming,” I said, “to the plains where I was born.”

“Wait,” said the queen. “Be patient. Protect my heir. She is safer by far here than she ever would have been among the tribe. They go to war, cousin; my loyal friends, my warriors, my priestesses, fight against those who would proclaim a queen. If you bring her there, as she is now, she will die—and you with her. And she will never be reborn, for only souls may take flesh again, and she, as yet, has none.”

I heard her in a kind of despair. The urgency in me to be gone, to go home, flared into ash.

She laid her hand on my head, both blessing and comfort. “Soon,” she said. “The time will come; you will know. Wait, and see.”

oOo

I waited. I guarded my charge, who was now, little though she was fit for it, my queen. I watched Alexander in the dregs of his great war of conquest. The fire in him was overwhelming the flesh at last. He was still young; he was barely come to his prime. Yet he had begun to fade.

Etta still followed him with unswerving devotion. The more he faded, the more devoted she seemed to be. When his dearest friend died, the lover who had been with him from his childhood, he would suffer no one else to see his grief. But she, his silent shadow, and I who was hers—we saw. She could offer no comfort but her presence. I had none that he would accept. I knew the pain that was in him, the anguish of loss; for I too had lost one whom I loved. Time had barely blunted the blow.

He never recovered, no more than I; but he learned to endure. The heart was not quite gone out of him. He was still Alexander; he still ruled the world. That gave him a little joy, even yet. In time, everyone murmured, he would remember his old bright self; he would be strong again, and lighthearted again, as he had been before.

They had no prescience. If he had reached the stream of Ocean, perhaps that would have cooled the fire of him. But his army had refused to go so far. The fire of his spirit had shrunk to an ember, and that was growing cold.

oOo

Alexander was dying. He lay in his golden bed in the palace of Babylon, in the hot and steaming summer of that country, and burned with fever. The ember, I thought, had flared. When the flame was gone, only ash would remain.

Etta would not leave him. She crouched at the foot of the bed, as motionless as one of the carved lions that upheld it, and her eyes, clear and empty blue, fixed on his face. The servants had long since grown accustomed to her. The great ones who came and went, some weeping, others narrow-eyed as they weighed their chances once the king was dead, eyed her askance but did not move to dislodge her. Even the most arrogant of them had learned long since to let her be.

I stood in shadow, silent and forgotten. As the long hours of the king’s sickness stretched into days, I remembered my training long ago, fasting and cleansing the flesh so that the spirit could see more clearly. The heaviness of earth dropped away. Through the shadows of it, I saw the dim candles of men’s souls, and the blazing fire that was Alexander. Etta I could not see. She had no substance here.

Alexander burned without measure or restraint. His consciousness hovered on the edge of dissolution.

He was nearly free of the flesh. It crumbled about his spirit, swollen with fever, racked with wounds, full of old pain.

The physicians gave up hope long after I knew that this fever would not pass. It was fear for their lives, I suppose, and a degree of wishful thinking. Many of them did love him; they wept as they tended him.

oOo

My queen came to me in the night, after I had stopped reckoning time and merely lived from day into darkness. I had fed Etta when servants brought bread and possets which the king was too far gone to eat. I was empty even of hunger. When she came, I was waiting for her, standing guard over the gates of the dark.

She was not as pale as I was then, nor as far removed from living will as Alexander. She looked, indeed, as she had in the prime of her life: young, strong, beautiful. She stood over Alexander, looking down at the wreck of him. Her face had the remoteness of a cloud, or of a god.

I did not move or speak, but she turned to me. Through her I could see Etta sitting where she had been since he was laid in this bed, insubstantial as an image in water.

My queen held out her hands to me. I knew better than to touch the dead, but I met her eyes. They were dark and endlessly deep. “Help me,” she said.

Old vows, old dreams bound me. I had sworn oaths to this shade of a queen, on behalf of her shadow of a daughter. Now they all came down upon me. I must see this thing done; must bear witness to it when the time came, before the council and the warriors of the tribe.

My queen laid her insubstantial hand on the husk that now barely housed the spirit of Alexander. It was more than human, more than mortal. What god had chosen to inhabit this flesh, I did not know, nor did it matter.

I took Etta’s limp cool hand in mine. My free hand reached across the burning body of the king.

Never touch the dead. My old teachers’ voices echoed in my skull, throbbing with urgency. They rose to a roar as my fingers closed about my lady’s.

Her hand was cold. It had substance, which I had not expected. Chill wind gusted through me; I caught the scent of graves, and glimpsed, for an instant, a light so bright it came near to blinding me.

She tightened her grip until I gasped. The pain brought me back to this place and this time, precisely balanced between the living and the dead. Warmth in my right hand, living but soulless; cold in my left, dead to earth yet living in a realm which I could barely comprehend.

I was the link and the joining. I was the bridge. My queen opened the gate.

He stepped out of his dying body as from an outworn garment. I saw once more the young king of Zadrakarta, naked without shame, light on his feet, with those remarkable eyes, and that tilt of the head as he looked all about him. He was ever quick of wit; his lips tightened as he looked down at the thing he had left, but I saw the understanding in him, and the refusal either to rage or to be afraid.

He did not understand all that he thought he did. He took us in, triune face of the Goddess if he had known it: maiden, mother, crone. His eyes widened slightly. “What, no winged Hermes?”

“He comes for your people’s dead,” said the queen.

“Indeed,” said Alexander. “And what am I?”

“Dying,” she said. “But with a choice. I bring it from my Goddess, king of men. Would you live? Would you look on the sun again?”

I saw the yearning in him, the longing that twisted his phantom heart with pain. Yet he said, “These things always have a price. What will I pay to be alive again ?”

“Remarkably little,” said the queen, “all things considered.”

“What, my wealth? My titles? Half my empire? All of it?”

“Everything,” she said. “Even your name.”

He lifted his chin. I had seen that look in battle. He was smiling, but his eye had a gleam of steel. “Then what will I be?”

My queen swept her glance across me to the living shadow beyond. Etta had fixed her stare on Alexander. Even as bodiless spirit, he fascinated her.

I had understood some time since. It had a certain inevitability, and a certain monstrous tidiness, like one of the Greek plays Alexander was so fond of.

He laughed. If I could have killed him for it, I would have; but he was beyond any mortal harm. But he was not mocking any of us. He was laughing in incredulity. “What are you asking me to be?”

“Penthesilea,” she said. It had been her name and title. No one now held it, though I had no doubt that some had tried to take it. The one they were all bound to accept as queen, by her own great oath, strained past me, stretching toward the shade that was Alexander.

As unwise as it might prove to be, I let her go. He recoiled, but she was both swift and strong. He was but a shade; his body was sinking from the heat of fever into the cold of death. She was alive, if only as a flower is, mindless and soulless but fixed on the sun.

“When she was born,” my queen’s voice said, sounding somewhat faint, as if it came from a little distance, “the Goddess gave her no soul. One was in the world for her, that was made clear to me, but it would not come until it had done its duty elsewhere.”

“Impossible,” said Alexander.

“For the Goddess, all things are possible.” My queen was fading; my hand could not hold her, however tightly it clutched. “When first we met, we made a wager. I never asked for payment. I ask it now. Will you take this gift that the Goddess has given you?”

He stiffened, then eased with an effort that I could see. “And if I refuse? If I call the wager void, because you died before it could be paid?”

“You die,” she said.

He looked down at himself, then up at Etta, as if she had not been as familiar as one of his dogs. But then, I thought, he had never imagined that this might be the flesh he wore when his own body had burned to ash.

He was a man like no other, but he was Greek enough to find women both alien and a little repellent. And of course there was his mother, who should have been one of us; she was never made for a life of meek submission. She had taught him both to love and loathe her sex.

I knew that he would refuse. He was Alexander; he was as near a god as living man could be. But he could not take this gift, which he would see as a bitter sacrifice.

“I . . . would rule?” he asked after a stretching pause.

“You would rule,” my queen said. She was far away now, and faint.

“I would not be challenged?”

“You would be challenged,” she said. “I am too long dead to protect you.”

“Have you allies?”

“Selene knows,” she said, now so distant that I could barely hear her. “Trust Selene. Listen to her. Take her counsel.”

“But I haven’t—”

She was gone. He looked from Etta to me, and back again. He looked long at the inert thing that had housed his spirit for nigh on three and thirty years.

1 said nothing. He spun back to me. “Tell me there’s another choice. I’m not dead. I won’t be dead. There’s .too much to do.”

“There is always too much to do,” I said. “Your life is ended, king of Macedon. The dogs have already begun to squabble over your bones. This—who knows? You could be immortal.”

“I could come back,” he said as if it had just dawned on him. “I could take—I could be—”

I waited for him to come to his senses. It did not take long. He knew better than I, what the men of this world would say to such a thing. They would laugh. Then they would rise up in all their numbers, march against our people and destroy them.

He fell silent. Then: “Will I remember? Once I wake up-will I still be myself? Or will it be like being born again?”

1 spread my hands. “I don’t know,” I said. “It has never been done before. The Goddess has never set a body in the world while its soul still inhabits another. Why She did it—who knows why the gods do anything?”

“Maybe She was curious,” he said. “Or maybe She needed two of me, and Macedon needed me first.”

He had a fine sense of his own worth. But it was very likely true, what he said; I could hardly contest it. When I spoke, it was to say, “You must choose soon—before the fire goes out in the body. Or you will die, and there will be no returning.”

I had roused in him no fear, not of death. But of leaving this life—after all the grief and all the loss and all the pain of his wounds of both body and spirit, still he yearned to live.

“Better the lowest peasant in a living field,” he said at last, “than king among the dead.” He sighed, though he had neither breath nor lungs for it. Without pause, without further word, he strode toward Etta.

With her mother’s departure she had faded again, nearly to vanishing. I could barely see her, but it seemed that his eyes were as clear as mine were clouded. As he drew nearer, she became more distinct. She was reflecting the light of him, the moon to his sun.

They stood face to face. I could have sworn that he was the living man and she the formless dead.

She raised her hand. He raised his to match her. They touched.

On the golden bed, the body gasped and convulsed. In the world between the living and the dead, Alexander blazed up like a beacon in the dark. As suddenly as he had caught fire, he winked out.

I fell headlong from world into world. The tiles of the floor were hard; they bruised my knees, and my hands flung out to break my fall. I smelled the reek of sickness, and beneath it, subtly, the sweet stench of death.

There was someone in the room, some strong presence. The skin prickled between my shoulderblades. I turned slowly.

It was only Etta. She had fallen from the bed and caught herself against one of its carved lions. She was breathing hard, as if she had been running. Her body trembled.

She lifted her head. My breath caught. I had expected it, prayed for it, and yet to see it . . . it was astonishing. Terrifying. Splendid.

There was life in those eyes, expression in that face. Memory—it was there; all of it, as she turned to look on what she had left behind. I wondered if it was a blessing, that she should remember; whether it would have been more merciful to veil her with forgetfulness, and let her be born all new.

It was not my place to judge the Goddess. She had done a great thing, as was well within Her power; a fearful thing, it might be, but as I met those clear blue eyes, I knew that I could serve this one whom She had made.

My young queen smiled at me, with a twist of wryness in it that I knew all too well, and a tilt of the head as she considered what I was now, and what she had chosen for herself. I looked for regret. I found none.

It had been so in all his battles, when Alexander was alive. Once he had set his armies in motion, he never looked back. He fought the battle to its conclusion.

People were coming. The physicians had fled; the servants were gone. These could only be the wolves and jackals, come to gnaw the bones of his empire.

Etta—no, I should not call her that; she was queen now by right of blood and spirit, Penthesilea of the Amazons. Penthesilea hesitated for a stretching moment. Old habits die hard, and she had never been a fool. She knew what must happen now: the Wars of succession; the battles over the heirs; the struggle for rule of the empire.

She had died to all that, and risen again to a new realm, a new throne. There would be battle for that, too, after so many years; wars enough to keep even the great Alexander occupied.

“And maybe,” she said to herself, “maybe even the stream of Ocean.”

“Maybe,” I said.

A thunderous crash brought us both about. Whoever was outside had found the door barred, and set about breaking it down.

My young queen caught my hand. I was running, borne along behind her, fleeing as any sensible servant would do, now that the lions were fighting over the spoils. No one tried to stop us. We were only women. Later they might be inclined toward rape, but for the moment they were intent on pillage. In my heart I thanked the Goddess for the frailty of men, and their feeble wits which could not fix on two thoughts at once.

I had prepared for flight, once Alexander was dead: there were horses, weapons, provisions waiting, well hidden outside the walls of the city. My young queen did not shame me with effusion, but her glance1was approving. Already she was settled in this body; she mounted and rode as easily as she had in that other life.

She never looked back. I could not be certain what

was in her heart; I could only see her face, which was eager, intent, and her eyes, which were full of living fire.

oOo

We were long gone when the war began in earnest. She had not forgotten who she had been, nor ever would, but her choice was made, and her wager paid. We rode north and east, away from the lands of men and the empires of Alexander, out upon the sea of grass, the plains of my people. What we did there, what battles we fought, what sufferings we endured in the winning back of my dead queen’s title and her power, and how in the end there was once more a Penthesilea over the tribe of the Amazons, is a tale of its own, and has nothing to do with the legends of Alexander. Alexander, as the world knew, was dead. His like would never walk among men again.

But among women, and Amazons in particular . . .

“Well,” she said to me one long warm evening, as she suckled her lively and strong-spirited daughter and watched the dances of the young warriors about the midsummer fires, “you still must admit, old friend, that even here, I’m hardly the common run of women.”

We were speaking Greek. She still had a Macedonian accent; that had passed from life into life. I smiled at it, because it brought back memories that only we could share. “No, my queen,” I said in that same language. “Even here, you are anything but ordinary.”

Copyright © 2005 by Judith Tarr

First published: The Enchanter Completed: A Tribute Anthology for L. Sprague de Camp, ed. Harry Turtledove