Chapter Ninety-Four
We traveled for as long as the light would allow, each of us desperate to reach our home. It was as if my bones ached for Themiscyra, and the closer we grew to it, the more intense that longing became. I needed solitude. I needed time to make plans. And I needed to bury our dead.
“Will this ever get easier?” Althea asked as we rode.
I had taken Thalassa’s body on Erebus, while Safak had been placed on her steed, her friends bracing her body as they rode.
As I watched them, I thought of the day I first saw Safak, standing on her horse’s back as confidently as if she were standing on solid ground, despite the child that had been growing in her belly.
She had considered her life with us a gift, a blessing from the gods.
She would have been grateful her friends had chosen that manner for her to return home.
Grateful that even in death, they had let her ride alone.
“If it gets easier, it means we are no longer loving as deeply as we should,” I said to Althea. “So I hope it does not.”
There is a difference between embracing death and accepting it.
Anyone who rides to battle without the realization that it might be the last time they feel the heat of the sun on their skin or the weight of a blade in their hands is a fool.
Anyone who believes that when the dead are tallied at the end of the fight they will find only their opponents’ bodies on the ground is sadly misguided. That was the life we had chosen.
We rode to each fight accepting that death might come.
But we hadn’t been racing to battle the day we lost Thalassa and Safak.
I think that is why we mourned them so deeply.
Thalassa had longed to die with a sword in her hand, yet when she reached the underworld, she had been wielding only the sharpness of her tongue.
It was why her burial needed to be the greatest we could offer.
She had not been blessed with the honor of a warrior’s death, but we would show the gods of the underworld that every deserved a place among the heroes.
By the time we arrived in Themiscyra, flies buzzed around the blanket-wrapped bodies.
Blankets that only days before we had lain upon, laughed upon, made love upon, were now drenched in the aroma of decaying flesh.
They would be washed in the river, of course, soaked to remove the scent, left out in the sun to bleach the stains, and by the time winter came, no one would recall which blankets had held our dead and which birthed our young.
I wondered if perhaps we should have tried to remember.
“Take the women straight to the river,” I said to Sotiria as we arrived in our lands.
We had not hunted since the women’s death other than to provide a small offering to Ares to thank him for our survival during our encounter with the Phrygians.
Considering that we had been caught so unaware, it had been a gift from the gods to lose only four that day.
“The bodies need to be washed,” I continued. “The horses will want to bathe too.”
“You are not coming with us?” Sotiria asked.
I shook my head. “I need to hunt.”
“I am sure there will be food enough here. The women who remained will have had little else to do.”
“I need to hunt,” I stressed again. With that, she understood.
It was selfish on my part to wish to leave as soon as I had returned home, but even before the Phrygians’ attack, I had been feeling the claustrophobia of my position.
I had thought our time with the Gargareans would have allowed me the opportunity to step back from my responsibilities, but everywhere I had turned, women had been seeking help or advice.
When I had not been guiding them, I had been with Cleon or with Hirtus and my closest women, planning for the future.
I had found no respite other than in Cleon’s body, and those moments had been tinged with grief from the knowledge that it would soon come to an end.
I will confess, in such times I thought of Iphinone, of the freedom her nomadic life offered her, a freedom I had offered to all my women but not myself.
“Damaris and I will see to the funeral arrangements,” Sotiria replied. “You will attend?”
“Of course,” I said, hurt that she would need to ask such a question. “I will be back long before sunset. We will bury the bodies then.”
Sotiria nodded, and I tugged on Erebus’s mane, ready to move him away, only to hesitate.
“Check with Althea where to bury the bodies. There are some places it would be…less than ideal to use.”
I expected Sotiria to question this, but she did no such thing.
“We see you, Otrera,” she said instead. “We see what you do for us. The burdens you take upon yourself for us. Thalassa and Safak saw too. Go. We will take care of the dead.”
My selfishness was not restrained to my women, for I did not think of Erebus as I rode out to hunt that day.
I did not consider how he had also been traveling for days.
I did not consider how he might have wished to head to the water with the other horses, to cool his muscles and drink until his belly was full.
No. I thought only of myself, of what I needed in that moment.
And what I needed was to be on his back and lost in the nuances of the forest. To focus so intently on the sounds of crunching leaves and twigs that the ache in my chest was dulled, if only for a moment.
The ache for the women I had lost but also for myself.
For Cleon and me. And an ache for a future I knew nothing of.
I picked a place where water sprang from the ground.
The soft gurgles were met by slow trills of birdsong, and muted light diffused through the canopy of leaves.
There, I lowered myself from Erebus and dropped to my knees, only to change my mind.
I had not knelt to him when we fought, and I would not kneel to him now.
Instead, I stood tall and pushed my shoulders back.
“I am ready for you!”
The fact that Ares would have heard if I had barely whispered did not matter to me. I threw the words from my belly with all the force I could.
“I am ready! Ares, I am ready for our daughters to be the most feared of warriors. I am ready to fight in your name. I am here, Ares! I am ready to be your wife.” Only when I was done, my breath heaving from my lungs, did I let myself fall back to the ground.