Hippolyta and the Curse of the Amazons by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page A

without—”
    “Go!” Orithya said again. “We both have little time.”
    Hippolyta kicked the little mare in the ribs, but as it started off, she glanced back one last time—at her sister disappearing behind the palisade and at the little town beyond it—and wondered when she might ever see them again.

CHAPTER SEVEN
CAPTURE
    H IPPOLYTA HAD BEEN TRAINED in the arts of hunting and war. She’d been taught how to live on berries and nuts, on wild onions and nettles. She’d spent whole nights on forced marches with her instructors and had to endure their frequent blows. But she was not prepared for the journey to Troy. The problem wasn’t the endless hours of riding. Or the heat of the noonday sun. Or the cold nights on the hard ground.
    The problem wasn’t the fording of swift rivers or leading the horse through rock-strewn mountain passes or battling the armies of insects that seemed to attack both day and night.
    The problem was the baby.
    She wouldn’t call him by his name.
    Oh, she had expected to rear a child of her own someday, taking a temporary husband from one of the neighboring tribes so that she might give more life to the Amazon race.
    Someday.
    But she hadn’t expected to have to care for a baby so soon.
    She hadn’t known that a baby would cry so much.
    It cried when it was tired.
    It cried when its breechcloth needed changing.
    It cried when it was hungry.
    It cried when it wanted attention.
    It cried when it wanted to cry.
    When the goat’s milk ran out, Hippolyta had to hunt down birds and rabbits and trade them at lonely farmsteads for fresh milk for the baby. What was left over after the trade was scarcely enough to feed herself.
    Finally, after two weeks of riding, she saved a wild she-goat in the hills of Phrygia from a pack of menacing wolves. Since the animal seemed to live on thistles and ferns—and air—it made an easy companion. The milk it produced was enough to feed the child.
    But not enough to keep him from crying.
    I could cheerfully kill him myself, she thought as he once more sent up that thin, fierce wail that seemed to pierce her straight through to the bone.
    She pulled the little mare to a halt, slowing the goat as well, for it trailed behind them, pulled by a long rope. Groping for the skinful of milk the goat had produced just hours before, Hippolyta shoved the makeshift teat into the baby’s mouth.
    At least when he is suckling, he’s quiet, she thought. And cradling both the baby and the bottle in her left arm, holding the reins in her right, she kicked the mare on.
    Bleating, the goat followed after.
    Never, Hippolyta thought, touching her sister’s bracelet with her forefinger, never has there been a Long Mission like this. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about it. In the end she did neither.
    By the time they reached the plain of Mysia, a journey of four weeks more—with yet another two weeks at least till Troy—Hippolyta was feeding and changing the baby by reflex. When he was cranky, she found he could be soothed with the lullabies her mother used to sing to her little sisters. If he tired of those, she sang the rousing hero ballads instead. He seemed especially to like the one about the great warrior queen Andromache, who won so many famous victories.
    He began to cry less and learned to smile. He played with her hair, entangling his little fist in her long, straight black locks. When he got too big to carry easily in one arm, she made a sling out of her cloak and tied him to her back. He seemed to enjoy riding that way and spent hours alternately napping and contentedly watching the roadside.
    Hippolyta began to think that perhaps he was not so bad after all—for a boy.
    But she never gave him his name.
    One night, when the boy was nearly sixty days old and they were well into the Lydian lands, Hippolyta fell asleep exhausted before even finishing her evening meal.
    The fire had burned low, and the baby was asleep in his little hammock, slung between