“If this sad Hephaestus is now king of the gods,” said Penthesilea, her voice as loud and irritating as fingernails on a flat, slate rock, “why was he hiding in his cave the whole time we were on Olympos?”
“I told you—he’s waiting for the war between the gods and the Titans to end.”
“If he’s the successor to Zeus, why in Hades doesn’t he just end it himself by commanding the lightning and the thunder?”
Achilles said nothing. Sometimes, he had discovered, if he said nothing, she would shut up.
The Scamander Plain—worn smooth over its eleven years as a bat-tlefield—looked as if the ground had not been sheared, there were still the prints of thousands of sandaled men here, and blood dried on the rocks—but all living human beings, horses, chariots, weapons, corpses, and other artifacts had disappeared even as Hephaestus had described it to Achilles. Even the tents of the Achaeans and the burned hulks of their black ships were gone.
Achilles allowed their horses to rest on the beach for a few minutes and both man and Amazon watched the limpid waves of the Aegean roll up on the empty sand. Achilles would never tell the wolf-bitch next to him this, but his heart ached at the thought that he would never see his comrades in arms again—crafty Odysseus, booming big Ajax, the smiling archer Teucer, his faithful Myrmidons, even stupid, red-headed Menelaus and his scheming brother—Achilles’ nemesis—Agamemnon. It was strange, Achilles thought, how even one’s enemies become so important when they are lost to you.
With that, he thought of Hector and of the things Hephaestus had told him about the Iliad—about Achilles’ own other future—and this caused the despair to rise in him like bile. He turned his horse’s head south and drank from the goatskin of wine tied to the pommel.
“And don’t think I will ever believe that the bearded cripple god actually had the ability to make us married,” groused Penthesilea from behind him. “That was a load of horse cobblers.”
“He’s king of all gods,” Achilles said tiredly. “Who better to sanctify our wedding vows?”
“He can sanctify my ass,” said Penthesilea. “Are we leaving? Why are we heading southeast? What’s this way? Why are we leaving the battlefield?”
Achilles said nothing until he reined his horse to a halt fifteen minutes later.
“Do you see this river, woman?”
“Of course I see it. Do you think I’m blind? It’s just the lousy Scamander—too thick to drink, too thin to plow—brother of the River Simois which it joins just a few miles upstream.”
“Here, at this river we call the Scamander and which the gods call the holy Xanthes,” said Achilles, “here according to Hephaestus who quotes my biographer Homer, I would have had my greatest aristeia—the combat that would have made me immortal even before I slew Hector. Here, woman, I would have fought the entire Trojan army single-handed—and the swollen, god-raised river itself!—and cried to the heavens, ‘Die, Trojans, die!… till I butcher all the way to sacred Troy!’ Right there, woman, do you see where those low rapids run? Right there I would have slain in a blur of kills Thersilochus, Mydon, Astyplus, Mnesus, Thrasius, Aenius, and Ophelestes. And then the Paeonians would have fallen on me from the rear and I would have killed them all as well. And there, across the river on the Trojan side, I would have killed the ambidexterous Asteropaeus, my one Pelian-ash spearcast to his two. We both miss, but I hack the hero down with my sword while he’s trying to wrest my great spear from the riverbank to cast again….”
Achilles stopped. Penthesilea had dismounted and gone behind a bush to urinate. The crude sound of her making water made him want to kill the Amazon then and there and leave her body to the carrion crows that roosted on the creosote bush’s branches near the river. The vultures’ daily feed of dead flesh evidently had disappeared and Achilles hated to leave them disappointed.
But he could not hurt the Amazon. Aphrodite’s love spell still worked on him, leaving his love for this bitch coiling in his guts, as nausea-making as a bronze-tipped spear through the bowels. Your only hope is that the pheromones may wear off in time, Hephaestus had said when they were both drunk on wine that last night in the cave, toasting each other and everyone they knew, raising the big two-handled cups and confiding in each other in the way only brothers or drunks can do.
When the Amazon was remounted, Achilles led the way across the Scamander, the horses stepping carefully. The water was no more than knee deep at its deepest. He turned south.
“Where are we going?” demanded Penthesilea. “Why are we leaving this place? What do you have in mind? Do I get a vote on this or will it always be the mighty Achilles deciding every little thing? Don’t think I’ll follow you blindly, son of Peleus. I may not follow you at all.”
“We’re hunting for Patroclus,” Achilles said without turning in his saddle.
“What?”
“We’re hunting for Patroclus.”
“Your friend? That queer-boy fruit friend of yours? Patroclus is dead. Athena killed him. You saw it and said so yourself. You started a war with the gods because of it.”
“Hephaestus says that Patroclus is alive,” said Achilles. His hand was on the hilt of his sword, his knuckles white, but he did not draw the weapon. “Hephaestus says that he did not include Patroclus in the blue beam when he gathered up all the others on earth, nor when he sent Ilium away forever. Patroclus is alive and out there somewhere over the sea and we shall find him. It shall be my quest.”
“Oh, well, Hephaestus says,” jeered the Amazon. “Whatever Hephaestus says has to be true now, doesn’t it? The runty crippled bastard couldn’t be lying to you, now could he?”
Achilles said nothing. He was following the old road south along the coast, this road that had been trod by so many Trojan-bred horses over the centuries and followed north more recently by so many of the Trojan allies he’d helped to kill.
“And Patroclus out there alive somewhere over the sea,” parodied Penthesilea. “Just how in Hades’ name are we supposed to get over the sea, son of Peleus? And which sea, anyway?”
“We’ll find a ship,” said Achilles without turning to look back at her. “Or build one.”
Someone snorted, either the Amazon or her mare. She’d obviously stopped following him—Achilles heard only his own horse’s shoes on stone—and she raised her voice so that he could hear her. “What are we now, bleeding shipbuilders? Do you know how to build a ship, O fleet-footed mankiller? I doubt it. You’re good at being fleet-footed and at killing men—and Amazons who are twice your better—not at building anything. I bet you’ve never built anything in your useless life… have you? Have you? Those calluses I see are from holding spears and wine goblets, not from… son of Peleus! Are you listening to me?”
Achilles had ridden fifty feet on. He did not look back. Penthesilea’s huge white mare stood where she had reined her in, but it now pawed the ground in confusion, wanting to join the stallion ahead.
“Achilles, damn you! Don’t just assume that I’m going to follow you! You don’t even know where you’re going, do you? Admit it!”
Achilles rode on, his eyes fixed on the hazy line of hills on the horizon line near the sea far, far, far to the south. He was getting a terrible headache.
“Don’t just take it for granted that… gods damn you!” shouted Penthesilea as Achilles and his stallion kept moving slowly away, a hundred yards now. The bastard son of Zeus did not look back.
One of the vultures on the shrub-tree by the holy Xanthes flapped its way into the sky, circling the now-empty battlefield once, its kin-of-the-eagle eye noting that not even the ashes of the corpse fires—usually a place to find a midday morsel—remained.