The Amazon's End
The Tragedy of Penthesilea
Penthesilea, War-Queen of the Amazons, rode to Troy with twelve of her best warriors and a blood-debt she intended to pay at the gates of the city. The war had been running for ten years when she arrived from Themiscyra, driven not by the hope of saving Troy but by her own blood-guilt — the death of her sister Hippolyta in a hunting accident, or what the myth calls an accident. She had chosen not long penance but a significant act of war.
The Greeks had Achilles. Troy had its walls and the ghost of ten years' hope. Penthesilea had twelve women, a bronze spear, and the kind of certainty that belongs to people who have decided they are not going to survive and find it clarifying.
She was the last great queen of a people the world was in the process of forgetting, and this was the last great war, and there would not be another opportunity like it. The narrator has opinions about what history chose to remember of what followed — and what it chose to forget.
Drawing on the Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus and Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica — the ancient world's continuation of the Iliad — The Amazon's End follows Penthesilea from Themiscyra to the Scaean Gate in the voice that has carried this series from the beginning: present, wry, and constitutionally unable to let a legend pass without noting what the poets left out.
"She came to Troy to die well. History would decide whether she had managed it."
