The Amazon and the Warrior - Softcover

Hand, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765349361 ISBN 13: 9780765349361

Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

After the death of her mother at the hands of legendary Greek warrior Achilles, Penthesilea, the Warrior Queen of the Amazons, vows to seek revenge, despite the urgings of her lover, Damonides, a once-formidable warrior who yearns only for peace, who warns her not to become embroiled in the conflict at the besieged city of Troy. Original.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Hand has made the transition from left-brained scientist to right-brained novelist. Before she began writing fiction some twelve years ago, she was teaching Animal Behavior and Ornithology in the UCLA biology department.

She is the author of several novels and two screenplays. Her epic of the Minoan civilization, Voice of the Goddess, has won numerous awards. Her contemporary romantic thriller, Code Name Dove, features a female spy whose day job is to lead adventure tours and whose great personal love is photography. In all of her stories, she writes of strong, bold women, women who are doers and leaders.

An avid camper, classical music fan, and birdwatcher, she currently lives in Rancho Bernardo, California.

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The Amazon and the Warrior

PART 1

MEETING

PROVINCE OF THEMISKYRA, HOME OF AMAZONS--SOUTHERN COAST, EUXINE SEA, 1217 BC

1

ALONE AND AT PEACE, DAMON HAD SPENT AN hour checking his traps above Two Sisters Falls. The hour was late. The midsummer sky looked dark and bruised; rain would come before nightfall.

Little Wolf, still awkward at eight-weeks old, bounded along behind him on the narrow trail that, on Damon's left, sloped gently downhill to a boulder-strewn stream. When they reached the spot where, from between two great pines, a man could take a last glimpse of the fall's thundering waters before the trail turned, Damon stopped to look back, stroking his beard as he contemplated the water's beauty. The wolf pup ran under his legs and bumped one of his feet. Damon tripped. He and Little Wolf went over the side.

Damon slammed onto his back. Pain shot through his chest. His breath whooshed out, and he rolled head-over-tail once then twice more like a log until his left side landed in the water. Little Wolf slid to a stop beside him.

Clearly thinking this was great fun, the pup leaped onto Damon's chest, wagging his tail. Damon burst into laughter.

The eager young thing leapt back onto solid ground and bowed, rump in the air, his tail still waving, inviting more marvelous play. Damon crawled from the water, his linen trousers and tunic clinging coldly to his skin. He took a similar stance, rear up and shoulders down, and the two of them tumbled, the pup growling and Damon laughing.

Damon stopped the game by picking up Little Wolf and staring him down with a somber gaze. Then he settled the soft ball into his lap and stared upstream to the waterfall.

For a moment he simply listened, scratching the wolf behind the ears. In Damon's head, the sound of cascading water created an aura of exquisite colors--unending swirls, patterns never repeated--of the deep purples and gentle pinks of a glorious sunset.

"Do you see the colors, too?" he said. He closed his eyes and let the sound of the fall and the swirling purples and pinks pleasure his mind. Earlier he'd been reminded of his difference from other people, of his oddity, by the chattering of squirrels. Their sounds evoked much the same ugly aura and nausea in him that human speech did.

He stood and made a half-hearted effort to wring water from his clothing. A quick search revealed no sign of the leather thong used to keep his hair back from his face, and further searching would likely prove futile. The thong could be hidden in any bush, snagged under any rock, or blended in with the brown litter on the slope.

With Little Wolf under one arm, Damon scrambled back onto the trail. A stone's throw downstream something the size of a deer or even a bear moved on the far bank. Damon froze. Two women approached. Few people, women or men, ever appeared near his cabin.

Their dress--short deerskin tunics with left shoulder exposed and knee-high boots--identified them as Amazons, daughters of the People of Artemis. They carried bows and moved swiftly, silently toward him in a manner indicating they were close on the trail of quarry--and they hadn't seen him. The woman at the front was startling. Her hair, bound in a typical Amazon braided bun at the back of her head, was a color he had never seen before. Not on a person and not on an animal. A brilliant coppery red. And she was uncommonly tall, a full foot-length taller than her fellow hunter.

The redheaded leader reached the path to the stream used by the forest's largest creatures--deer, leopard, lion, wolf,and boar--and turned onto it. Her companion, a woman with chestnut hair, followed.

The rope loop trap. Not two days ago Damon had seen it along that same path. According to the boy Bias, Damon's only regular contact with the rest of the world, the only village within half a day's walk had been losing goats to something large, probably wolves. The villagers had likely set the snare.

Damon barely registered this thought when he heard the distinctive "thwang" and rustle of a sprung loop trap. A woman yelled. He shook his head, and with a wry smile to Little Wolf he said, "Someone has caught himself an Amazon."

He loped down to the stream and crossed, easily balancing on a series of rocks that might have been placed by Artemis for just that purpose. As he approached the women, he saw that the red-haired one dangled upside down, her left ankle in the loop.

Noting long, elegantly-built legs, shapely waist, and taut belly, he smiled. He also noted, as she slowly twirled, that she wore a leather undergarment that was little more than a strap that expanded in front to cover her private hair and in the rear, the upper half of her buttocks. He had never known what, if anything, an Amazon wore under her tunic. Only his mother, herself an Amazon before she had married and become pregnant with Damon, could have told him, but she was dead now many years.

"Just cut it!" the dangling woman called to her friend.

Amazement stopped what he'd intended to say. He shook his head. He must have misheard. Her words didn't create the brown and jagged grey-scummed aura and sickening sensation he experienced from human speech. Her words washed the scene in sunny yellow and his sensation was pleasure.

Her friend, wrestling to untie the rope, secured to the base of a birch tree, said testily, "If I cut it, you'll fall straight down on your head and break your neck." Her voice created exactly the repugnant, filthy aura he expected.

They still hadn't seen him. The redhead tightened her belly muscles and curled her body to raise her hands to her ankle in a futile gesture to grapple with the loop. A look of extreme pain flashed over her face. She immediately let herself hang straight down again.

Her hair had somehow come unbound from the long single braid always worn at the back of the head when Amazons were hunting or in battle, and masses of the extraordinary stuff, red highlighted with gold, rippled toward the ground.

"I can help," he said. He strode under the hung woman, saying to her companion, "Cut the rope. I'll catch her."

After a brief pause, her eyebrows lifted in surprise at this stranger, the chestnut-haired Amazon cut the rope. Damon immediately held in his arms an indignant woman with a flushed face. Whether her color was caused by indignation or from hanging upside down, he couldn't tell.

Damon couldn't suppress a chuckle. "Apart from your dignity, you seem unharmed. Fortunate. But if you are customarily so unaware, maybe you ought not be out in the woods alone."

He felt her stiffen. "Let me stand!"

Her voice flared with irritation, but its sunny aura was still lovely to see. He had never, in his life, experienced such a voice.

He enjoyed the feel of the tight, sleek muscles of her thighs and she put a firm grip on one of his arms. She added, hotly, "And, as is very evident, I am not alone."

True. So she'd also caught him--in an error.

When her feet touched the ground, a look of pain wrinkled a beautiful, high brow.

Regret struck. He'd spoken too soon and too cockily.

Her friend took her hand. "You're hurt."

"I ... my hip." She felt her left hip, then tried a step. Her tanned skin actually blanched, her lips thinned, and she quickly shifted her weight off the left leg. The hipbone had clearly not been pulled from its socket, but she still wasn't going to be walking in comfort, if at all, anytime soon.

Damon noticed a long scar on her upper left arm and wondered ... hunting or battle? He said, "Where is your camp?"

The shorter woman replied. "An hour's walk. At...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765349361
• ISBN 13: 9780765349361
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Braun; https://in.pg.com/contact-us/; ; Sulzbacher Str. 40-50; Schwalbach/Ts.; 65824; Deutschland