Amazons

Before the myth, there were the women. The warrior women of the Pontic steppe — the wide grassland north of the Black Sea — were real. They rode and they shot and they governed and they fought, and the Greeks who encountered them on the trade routes of the Black Sea coast made them into a legend: the Amazons, the daughters of Ares, the all-female nation of warriors on the edge of the known world. The legend distorted the reality and preserved it simultaneously. Both are in this novel. Penthesilea is the daughter of Otrera, the first Amazon queen, and the god of war. She has been riding since before she could walk, shooting the composite bow since she could draw a string, governing the nation since her mother died and her sister Hippolyta was taken. She knows the plain and the horse and the bow and the akinakes and what it means to lead a people who have organized their entire civilization around the full expression of female power. When Heracles came to take Hippolyta's belt — the golden girdle that marked the Amazon queen's sovereignty, the divine gift that meant the god had chosen her — Penthesilea was a child. When the Amazons marched on Athens to take back what had been taken, she rode with the army. When Priam's embassy arrived on the Pontic shore asking for help, the grief of the old king in the cold words of his messengers, she made the decision that queens make when the obligation and the outcome are both clear. She goes to Troy knowing she will die there. She knows because she understands the structure of the thing — the myth that has been building around both of them, the myth that requires the greatest Amazon and the greatest Greek to meet on the plain and test what the testing requires. She comes because the coming is owed. She fights because the fighting is what she was made for. When Achilles kills her and lifts her helmet and sees her face, something happens in the Greek accounts that the Greek accounts have difficulty naming. The myth calls it love. What it was is the recognition — the great fighter seeing in the woman he has just killed the person who was most like him in all the world. She died looking at his face. His face was grief. AMAZONS is a novel of the warrior women of the ancient world — their real history, their mythology, and the specific dignity of the person who fights from the place beyond ordinary courage.