Last of the Amazons Last of the Amazons Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  12

  THE DERANGEMENT

  OF EROS

  Selene’s testament:

  We had known of Theseus’ coming a month before his ships touched at the Strymon and two before they reached the Amazon Sea. I have told how Heracles had ravaged our nation two generations prior, slaying in single combat a dozen champions, including my mother’s mother. Now these trainbearers, Theseus and his ilk, made bold to emulate the hero’s exploits. We would give them, we vowed, a welcome they could pack to hell.

  We had learned, two days prior to encountering them in the flesh, of the rough handling Theseus’ companies had received at the hands of the tribes to the west, Saii and Androphagi, the Man-Eaters. Our elders feared that these villains had beaten us to the punch; we prayed they had left enough meat on the Athenians to carve up for ourselves. Parties of our scouts ranged the sea bluffs in both directions, seeking sign of the invaders. We meant to take them alive and subject them to Aremateia, the saber ceremony, that is, sacrifice them to Cybele and eat their hearts.

  But when at last we discovered them, so few and so hard-used by our neighbors whom we hated, we took pity on them as enemies of our enemies. And when the great Theseus approached, unarmed and appealing for sanctuary, our rancor relented, as did Stratonike’s, senior of our troop of four. She elected to proceed toward the foreigners with charity.

  How grateful they were. And how handsome! Such burnished curls and slender waists! So that even I, who had steeled my heart to savor their slaughter, found my blood quickened by the sight of them in the flesh. They seemed a race of princes, made all the more engaging by the meagerness of their number and the sternness of their straits. It was the season of the Gathering. With our assembled tribes outnumbering them five hundred to one, what harm could come? So we gave them meat and fire.

  It was on this bluff, called Walnut Hill, that I first saw Damon. A lad he was, barely three summers older than I, and far the handsomest of the bunch. Or so he seemed to my eyes. I set him apart from that moment and told my sisters, This one belongs to me.

  Tal Kyrte reckons the year by months as well as equinoxes. Thus on the ninth day of the Moon of the Coursing Freshets, Theseus and his vessels entered the anchorage of the Mound City of Lycasteia, where the river Borysthenes empties into the Amazon Sea.

  No end of bards’ yarns portrays this occasion: the arrival of Athens’s dashing king and his welcome by brilliant Antiope, war queen of the Amazons. This never happened. Antiope was in the mountains on a hunt. Eleuthera was with her. I know because I was sent to bring them back.

  Antiope disdained this summons, in part to demonstrate contempt for the encroachers, and as well from heedfulness of Eleuthera’s love. I cannot prove this, but I believe that Antiope divined, long before she had sighted Theseus’ squadron or even learned of its arrival, that these ships bore her hard fate. I believe Eleuthera sensed it too. This is why both protracted the hunt.

  Antiope at twenty-seven remained a virgin. So much the harpers got right. For this she won repute from all, but devotion everlasting from her lover. For Eleuthera (who, with Stratonike, constituted Antiope’s High Trikona) had sworn from the moment of her own accession to womanhood that she would hold herself anandros, unpossessed by man. So long as Antiope remained likewise, so long did the pair own love perfect and inviolable.

  They were hunting ibex above the timberline when the ships of Theseus came. To stalk such shy creatures, one must dream. The rams tell where they may be found and what exertions must be made to take them. This night all had retired, when Eleuthera sprang awake with a cry. Her mates rushed to her in consternation, for Eleuthera would never loose such a howl even in her sleep, which, among peaks, where sound travels, effectively terminated the hunt.

  “I slew you, Antiope.”

  So Eleuthera spoke, recounting her dream and, for myself, to repeat these words aloud, even at this remove of time, yet sends the gooseflesh coursing.

  “We had ringed the peak,” Eleuthera continued, recounting her dream, “I and the others of the hunt, and had reached the final outcrop, readying to raise and fire. Only I carried no bow but the iron-cored lance, the horseback javelin. When we made the cry and raised, no ibex stood before us but you, Antiope.

  “You were not yourself but a white ram. Yet I knew you, and you me. You rushed, not with horns lowered as they do, but crest high and breast forward. My cast had not yet been made; I could have held. Yet some daimon drove me. I slung and pierced you through. You tumbled, and your blood painted the rock.”

  Antiope crossed to comfort her lover. But Eleuthera would not be consoled. “The sensation was joy,” she reported. “Elation of such sublimity as I have never known.”

  The party broke off the hunt and rode home.

  The Athenians had reached the Mound City ten days earlier. Their arrival had created a sensation. Among our people the sea is a feared god. Many of tal Kyrte could not conceive of a country beyond the water, from which these strangers had come and to which they would return; rather, they believed these foreigners had come from the sea itself, from the Void where the disk of ocean meets the vault of sky.

  The word for “new thing” in our tongue—netome—is the same as “evil.” The free people’s ways stand unaltered since creation; they believe that any innovation brought to them from outside their universe is inherently wicked, bearing potential to overturn society. What a Greek might call law or custom, the free people call rhyten annae, “the way we do things” or “how it has always been done.” Any new thing imperils rhyten annae, for it threatens all we have been and known, who we are and how we wish to live.

  When Antiope and the hunting party returned, they rode down to the strand, drawn by the crowds flocking about the beached ships. I held in my post as novice, at Eleuthera’s shoulder. She saw the ships and spoke one word:

  “Netome.”

  Thing of evil.

  Eleuthera reckoned these Greeks at once as enemies. Yet such privations had the sailors undergone in their passage, and with such uncomplaining industry did they endure, that their condition elicited sympathy rather than hostility. A number ailed with wounds; others tossed, fever-wracked. I became acquainted with the character of Theseus over the succeeding months; it was by no means past him to exploit the distress of his men to gain advantage. This he did now. He quarantined his party. The season as I said was Saurasos, the Gathering; for miles the plain was carpeted with encampments of the tribes of tal Kyrte and of traders and caravan masters, livestock dealers, gold miners, and lovers. You may imagine the riot. Theseus commanded his company to hold themselves apart. It worked. The contrast between the deportment of his young gentlemen and that of the loutish and grog-besotted tribesmen proved irresistible. Our maidens fell for them. They drew us like honey.

  I too was stricken with love, for that beautiful youth sighted on the strand at Walnut Hill. I grew ill with this passion. In Sinope as a child I had been compelled to memorize verses of love poetry. How I abhorred it and its authors. Now, at one stroke, I understood. I too fell before Eros’ affliction, base as a slave and as devoid of dignity.

  Damon.

  Damon!

  To learn his name set me dizzy with joy. A thousand times a day I rehearsed it, silent and aloud, as if its pronouncement were a charm by whose repetition I could draw its owner to me.

  I loathed myself. How could I be so abject? How permit such folly to overwhelm me? Yet whelmed I was, and no cure for it. When Skyleia and Alcippe, captains of my battalion, called me apart with the command to serve as interpreter to the Greek camp, my heart nearly burst with dread and joy.

  What if Eros dissevered me from my sisters?

  What if love drove me apart from my warrior’s vows?

  I went to Antiope, the only one to whom I could confide my derangement and hope for impartial hearing. (Eleuthera would flay me.) Antiope was eight years my senior and seemed wise as the Sphinx. Of course I must serve, she said. I groaned. To her I made this petition: s
hould mania of love cause me to act counter to the weal of the free people, she must slay me herself! I saw her jaw work and thought my distress had touched her heart; I realize now she was just trying to keep a straight face.

  “Love is a god, Selene, to whose direction none is immune. Even the immortals, they say, are powerless in his grasp.”

  “Not you, lady. You would never yield to such base emotions as now besiege my heart.”

  Smiling, she indicated the grass at her side. I sat; she plucked my dagger and hers and sank them, blades crossed, into the turf.

  “Then we will strike an oath, you and I,” she declared. “Should you fail the free people, I pledge my thrust shall end your life. However, should it be myself to fall, you must perform the same for me.”

  My heart leapt at these words. “You will never fail, lady.”

  She smiled.

  “Pledge this then, by Cybele and Artemis Chrysanios, the holiest oaths of our people, and you and I shall be bound by this pact forever.”

  Thus I swore and felt the weight of distress lift from my heart, such are the devious designs of heaven.

  13

  THE EQUESTRIAN SQUARE

  Selene continues:

  Among the clans who gather each spring as allies of tal Kyrte are the Iron Mountain Scyths, spectacular horse warriors, whose territory commences east of the river Tanais and extends for six hundred leagues, passing so close to the Land Where the Sun Rises that none may proceed farther, men say, without sacrifice of his sight. Some eleven hundred of these had come, under two princes, Borges and Arsaces, and made camp in the Scythian Meadow (such is it called), as they had time out of mind. The Iron Mountain clans are constituted of three nations, the Myrina, the Lagodositai, and the Ythe. The latter came with manes and tails cropped in mourning for their prince, Misethantes, slain fending pirates not many days prior. Numbers of tal Kyrte shared bonds of friendship with the Iron Mountain clans; much sympathy was expressed by the warrioresses, no few pledging to join in hunting down the brigands who had committed this outrage. As Borges and his lieutenants elaborated their description of the pirates, however, it became clear that these were none other than Theseus’ companies, freshly landed, and that the fight in which Prince Misethantes had been slain was the very one Theseus had reported, which had driven him to our country in such distress.

  No host may offer falsehood under the spring truce. With gravity Hippolyta arrested Borges’ speech. “The men you seek are in camp now, under tal Kyrte’s pledge of sanctuary.”

  Borges rejoined with outrage, declaring it the act of an enemy to grant asylum to brigands who had murdered a prince and ally. He demanded that these villains, the Greeks, be turned over at once to his justice.

  Hippolyta was at that time sixty-one years old. She wore a leopard skin across her right shoulder and a double axe in a sheath upon her back; her iron-colored hair fell in a plait to her waist; upon her flesh were carved scars of battle going back fifty years. She straightened upon her sixteen-hand grey, Frostbite, and repudiated Prince Borges. By now a sizable throng had gathered, including myself and Eleuthera. We watched as our peace queen Hippolyta, at past sixty still half a head taller than her knights and companions, stood firm in rejecting Prince Borges’ claim.

  “I hate these foreigners more even than you, my friend, for the evil their countrymen Heracles and Jason have brought to the free people in generations past. Yet the honor of tal Kyrte dictates that they may be given over to no one while they stand protected by our pledge of sanctuary. Let the season of the Gathering run its course, Borges, then exact your vengeance as you wish.”

  This was not good enough for the Scyth. He wanted Theseus’ head now.

  Word travels swiftly in a camp. Before the prince had finished his harangue, Theseus appeared in person, accompanied by a score of his own champions. By now Antiope had arrived as well. Her post as war queen set her on a par with Hippolyta; she advanced and ordered Theseus brought in.

  Let me describe the site. The landward earthworks of the Mound City are monumental in scale (erected not by tal Kyrte but by some prior race, long vanished), with the central redoubt covering above twenty acres, and the inner plaza, the Equestrian Square, trebling that. Great palisades stretch for furlongs, enclosing the site by a grid of elevated causeways from which the slopes, grass-covered, decline to the square itself. Directly beneath are excavated revetments, formerly defensive ditchworks but now used as holding pens for the thousands of horses brought in for trade. It is an ingenious scheme. Buyers pass at ground level to view the stock, with ramps ascending from each enclosure, so that an individual mount may be easily cut from the band and brought up for inspection.

  Above these pens, on the earthworks, now settled the antagonists and their onlookers in thousands, as in some vast amphitheater. Theseus spoke. “Before all,” he declared, “it was not we Athenians who offered offense. Rather we were attacked without provocation by men who refused water or even a place to land to those only passing through their straits, intending not harm, but trade. Second, we had no idea we were fighting allies of tal Kyrte (how could we, who had never even encountered yourselves, our benefactresses?), but only defended ourselves—and in fact barely escaped with our lives.”

  Borges disdained this. All that mattered, he reiterated, was that the blood of his kinsmen had been shed.

  “Very well,” said Theseus, “I will stand up to Borges or any champion he elects, in single combat, here and now—and hell take him who falters.”

  You may imagine the uproar this touched off. Borges it was who was called Iron Rider, for the armored chariot from which he led the charges of his troop (driven by his brother Arsaces, a fearsome bowman) and from which he had never been unseated. The knights of his Iron Mountain clans, constituted always as a war party, wanted only the horn’s cry to inaugurate the bloodbath. As for the Athenians, they, recall, were princes and heroes all, and commanded by one who claimed descent from Poseidon himself, and who owned abundant incentive, beyond even the preservation of his companies, to display his mettle before the clans of Amazonia, in whose debt he stood for his very survival.

  Order was restored by Antiope, acting upon her office as war queen. Tal Kyrte, she proclaimed, may under no circumstances permit the blood of guests to be spilled. Nor could the suppliant be turned out, once asylum had been granted.

  “The laws of tal Kyrte are clear,” she declared. “The free people shall defend to the death all who have been granted sanctuary within their camp.”

  Antiope called the Scythian forward.

  “If you wish to fight, Borges, you must fight me.”

  14

  A DUEL OF HONOR

  A champion of tal Kyrte may not be armed by one of her own trikona, but another at one remove, assisted by the warrior’s mother-mother. The lot, as fate would have it, fell to me, as trikona-mate to Eleuthera, who stood the same to Antiope. It was my role, not only to dress our war queen in corselet and armor, but to select and whet the warheads of her arrows, repaint the blood gutters in ritual jet and ochre, and to razor-fletch the flight feathers. She took four only, one for each cardinal point, with three bronze-sheathed javelins, and a single pelekus, the double axe. None other may attend, save a priestess of Artemis Ephesia to prompt the verses of the ceremony. I must bathe Antiope, apart in the Willow House, which sat astride the thermal springs of the Borysthenes marsh, and donate from my own trove that mirror of bronze by whose reflection our queen would know her soul in the life after, and which, if she were slain, would be buried yoked to her right wrist. In that event I must bear her body from the field and deliver it to Eleuthera and Stratonike, the mates of her High Trikona, who would bear the corpse to Hippolyta, her mother-mother, for burial. This was the mightiest honor of my life. I would sooner have sliced my own throat than committed an error in the rite.

  I had expected to find our lady solemn, and had prepared my aspect with gravity for this chore. But she was gay, and joked away the time, not fr
om restiveness but excess of spirit. Her concern was entirely for a clean kill: that the Scythian be slain at the first blow and require no untidy butchery. My own fear was less of the prince Borges than his brother Arsaces, henchman of the chariot; I urged our queen to remark him with vigilance. I had seen him shoot. To my further surprise, she interrogated me, quite gaily, on the progress of my “affair” with the youth Damon. “Have you kissed him, child? Have you tousled his curls?” When I blushed, she teased me more.

  When we were done and she was fully armed, she made me go over her again, twice. “I must be beautiful today,” she said.

  The harpers have retold the treachery offered by the prince of the Iron Mountain Scyths. That Borges commanded his brother to trade places with him, identities concealed beneath their armor. So that Arsaces, the younger and far superior archer, served not as henchman to drive the team, but as champion, where his skill could work against Antiope, exposed upon her mount, while Borges, shamming as his brother, handled the horses. It was Theseus who smelled out this device, sending an agent to bribe an informer among the Scythian guard. Or, as I have heard as well, a dream may have apprised him. Whichever, he appeared in person, at dawn, seeking entry to Antiope.

  She was in the smoke bath, with Hippolyta and the priestess of Artemis, completing her purification. Two of the Queen’s Companions intercepted him. Theseus was not permitted entrance but must speak from outside that screen erected for such intercourse, called the Willow Wall. He had acquired enough of our tongue to make a stab, but not enough to get it right. “Borges will fight you upside down” was how the message came. So I had to go out and speak to him directly.