He answered startled; I could hear them outside muttering. I turned back to her and said, “You know, who are a warrior, that one often stakes one’s life on a little thing. So why not on a great one? That was what I thought.”
“You won the fight.” She had looked down, and I could hardly hear her. “You fought fair, so …” Her fingers twisted in a fold of the blanket.
The guard scratched and coughed outside; he had brought the fire in a clay mixing-bowl. I took it at the door from him, and set it by her feet on the earthen floor. She sat staring into it, and did not turn when I sat down beside her.
“I shall watch with you now till light, in case anyone comes to trouble you again. Sleep if you like.” She was silent, gazing into the embers. “Don’t grieve,” I said. “You were a faithful hearth-friend, and true to your warrior’s vow.”
She shook her head, and murmured something. I could tell what it meant: “But I broke another.”
“We are mortal,” I said to her. “One can only do so much. It would be a bad business, if the gods were less just than men.”
She did not answer; and being so near, I saw well enough she could not. There was no doubt what she was needing, warrior or not; so I put my arm about her, and said, “What is it?” softly.
This brought the rain from the sky. She had been taught it was shameful to weep, and at first it hurt her, breaking through; but presently as it eased her heart she lay in my arms with the strain and stretch all loosened, as trusting as a child. But she was not that; she was a woman eighteen years old, strong, with warm blood in her; and when man and woman are born to love as we were, they will find it by any road. We felt one another’s mind, as we had felt it fighting; love came to us as birth does, knowing its own time better than those who wait for it. Though she knew less than any maid who has heard the women chatter, yet she knew more, knowing only me. My own life left me to live in her; with all women before I had been myself alone. And though what I had learned with them, which I had thought was much, went all for nothing, yet I learned again from her trust, and it was enough.
By daybreak, we had forgotten the need of words, or that we had never spoken together at all in our own tongues. When the Guard outside argued together if they should dare to wake me, she knew by my smiling what they said; we pulled the blanket over our heads till they had looked through the keyhole and gone away. Not till I heard the voice of a runner from the ships, sent up by Pirithoos to learn if I was dead, did I come back like a stranger to the world of mortal men.
III
THE STRAITS OF HELLE passed like a dream. Even its wars were dreamlike. All things else were a sleep we woke from to one another. I did not care what my men made of it, and they knew better than to tell me. As long as they showed her respect, it was all I asked.
As for Pirithoos, when I brought her down to the camp he rolled his eyes to heaven; but having given me up he was glad to see me, and kept the right side of a quarrel. She was proud, and had cause to be shy, and at first she took against his roughness. But valor won him always, even in women; and when he found she knew the war-customs all along the coast as far as the mouth of Hellespont, he changed his tune. In council of war they got a respect for one another which turned to liking. She was never his notion of a girl; if she had been a youth, indeed, he would have settled to it more easily, and half the time in those early days he treated her like a boy of some kingly house over whom I had lost my head. But, knowing nothing of such customs, she only felt his good will; before long, he was teaching her pirates’ Greek.
She warned us, among other things, that the tribes who had let us through on the voyage out would attack us when we came back laden. So we were ready. These wars, when I remember them now, come back to me shining like harpers’ tales. I could not put hand or foot wrong with her there beside me. Lovers of boys may say it is the same; but I should think it is easy to be looked up to by a lad not come to his full strength, whom you are teaching all he knows and helping out when he is overmatched. We two fought like one. We were still finding one another; and war, to those who understand it, shows forth a man. We learned as much of each other in battle as we did in bed. It is good to be loved for the truth struck out of one in the eye of death, by a lover who has no fear to make her judgment humble. Her face was pure in battle, as it had been when she offered to the Goddess. Yet it was not blood she offered, nor the death of the enemy, but faith and valor, and the victory over fear and pain. There is no cruelty in the face of the lioness.
We fought among the longships that came forth to meet us; and at the springs of fresh water on the slopes; and in the creek where we beached to caulk the hulls, and the dark blue-painted Thracians charged us naked, creeping up behind the sandhills and scrubby tamarisks. By night we waked from each other’s arms to take up shield and spear; and sometimes even by day, when the fight was over, we would go off with its blood and dust still on us, to lie down in love among the bracken or the dunes; and if there was nowhere to go it was a grief to us.
My men found this strange, which was enough to make them mistrust it. It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they feel the black cold of chaos. They had taken for granted that I meant to break her in, and till I had made a house-woman of her like any other, would feel myself half a man. As for my manhood, I reckoned it was proved by now and I could leave such cares to others; for the rest, one does not clip one’s hawk and put it in the henyard. For her I was man enough.
Pirithoos, who had more sense than this, still wondered aloud that mad for her as I was, I would risk her in war. I could only tell him it was as it was. Besides, I had beaten her hand to hand, her first defeat since she took up arms; and as our bodies knew each other’s needs without asking, so with our souls. It was a joy to feel her get back her pride. He would not have understood, however; and still less did my fools of spearmen. If I had torn some screaming girl-child from the household altar, and forced her before her mother, it would have been all in the day’s work to most of them. But now, I started to find the evil-eye sign chalked upon the benches. They thought she had bewitched me. Pirithoos said it was because when we fought together we never got a scratch, and the Amazons were said to have a charm against it. At this I said no more; if one of them after all had seen the Mystery, I did not want to be told.
We came out into the Hellene seas and fair blue weather. All day we would sit handfast on the poop, watching the shores and islands, and learning to talk with words. What with her tongue and mine and the Shore Folk speech stringing it together, it was a patched-up business at first; but it served our turn.
“When I told you my name,” I said, “you knew it.”
“Oh, yes. The harpers came to us every year.”
“Did I look as you had thought?” I know what harpers are, and wondered if she had expected a man seven feet high. There was barely an inch between us.
“Yes,” she said. “Like the bull-dancers in the pictures, light and quick. But you had put up your hair under your helmet. I missed your long hair.” She touched it as it lay over her shoulder. Then she said, “On New Moon’s Eve I saw an omen, a falling star. And I thought when you came, It fell for me. I must die; but with honor, by this great warrior; and they will put my name in the Winter Song.’ I felt—oh, a change, an end.”
“And then?” I said.
“When you threw me and got my sword, that was a death to me. I woke all empty. I thought, ‘She has given me out of Her hand, though I kept Her laws. Now I am nothing.’”
“That is the way of it, when you hold out your hand to fate. I felt the same on the ship going to Crete.”