Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  Hear, O People, the peal

  of God’s sacred tongue, resounding alone

  atop Ares’ anvil, hammered into hearing

  by the mawl of valor.

  When humankind appeared, they were weak and puny. Horse nursed them on mare’s milk and blood, and raised them as her own. Horse led the clans to water when thirst parched the plains and to vales of fruit and forage when famine bore them hard. When swift fire raced across the steppe, horse commanded the people, Leap upon my back; and bore them at the gallop to safety. Horse taught them to hunt the shy hart and the wild oryx, the mountain eland and the gazelle. And when grim famine stalked the land, Horse instructed the people: Eat of my flesh and live. Without these boons and others numerous as the lamps of heaven, the race of mortals would have perished a thousand times over. Always Horse preserved them. And when the free people in thanksgiving sought to make sacrifice to God, they offered up that which they revered and venerated beyond all, their savior and ally, Mother Horse.

  Horse taught the free people her ways, to ride and raid; she schooled them to bear winter’s hardship and summer’s travail. Her flesh she donated in every part, from the casings of her organs, with which the free people bore water, to her sinew for bowstrings, her gut to stitch wounds. From her mane the free people wove rope and winter cloaks. They used her hide and hooves and even her teeth, grinding these for beads and dyeing them into belts for their maidens’ loins. The people were happy. They ranged God’s estate in freedom, wanting nothing which Horse and their own hands could not provide. They would have roamed so forever, had not the gods, by their own discord, intervened.

  For that race of humankind which knew not the horse dwelt in misery and abjection, scratching its living, as swine do, of acorns and the roots and grubs of the slough. Prometheus the titan took pity on them. He stole fire from heaven, when Zeus of the Thunder expelled the generation of immortals elder to himself.

  Prometheus gave fire to man.

  Horse feared fire. The free people fled from it as well. But those bog-bound of humankind discovered the arts by which it could be made their patron. Meat they roasted, and grain; they tamed the wild rye and barley and made these to grow at their bidding, imprisoned within their walls, and by the close flame to bake these to bread.

  With fire came pride, as Prometheus (whose name means Forethought) well knew, whose object was the overthrow of heaven. And in his pride man tore the flesh of his mother, the earth, rending her with the beaked plough, to sow the seed by which he would stoke his arrogance.

  Man knew speech now, and collected into towns, stinking kennels abhorred by God, where not even His holy storm may penetrate, but walls and ramparts keep it out. Man lived in hovels, reeking with smoke and sooty with ash. These made his hair smell, and the dirty rags he wore to clothe his nakedness; his hands stank with it and his skin grew ashy and abraded. The free people drew scent of these creatures and fled, as horses do, from his foul and malodorous approach.

  Men’s language succeeded the language of birds and horses and the silent tongue of the free people. The stem of his speech was fear, fear of God and God’s mysteries. Man sought by naming things to denature them and deplete them of the terror they held for him. His words were harsh and disharmonious, and as remote from true language as the screech of bats is from the music of the stars. Yet among our captains it was recognized that those encroaching tribes as Pelasgians and Dorians, Aeolians, Hittites, and such, who coveted our lands and the herds which ranged them with us, made speech with words and employed these as weapons. So some of our race must learn their tongue to resist and confute them. In each generation a number were chosen. I hated and feared this, for God had cursed me with facility for this art, and I hid myself each time the war queen’s gaze scanned among the people.

  I had a friend Eleuthera (such was her name in Greek) and her I loved beyond moon and stars and breath itself. Among my race, any who displays promise as a leader may not grow to womanhood among her own, lest her mates, out of their love for her and fear of seeing her elevated apart from them, work mischief to damp her gifts. So she is sent away to allied tribes, where she is tutored in the arts of war and politics, to return only after her moon’s blood. When she was ten, and I seven, Eleuthera was called to this commission. All light left my heart at this hour and when they came to me, the ministers, calling me to learn the languages of men, I resisted no longer.

  I was taken out, dressed in doeskin with my hair beaded and parafinned, to the trace which runs from the Gate of Storms to the sea and along which the traders’ trains pass. A war-schooled mare carrying a foal was staked out with me. The traders took me across the sea to Sinope and placed me in a proper household, under whose law I became what they call a sinnouse, a sort of companion to the daughters of the house, who is above a slave but beneath a sister. I learned the Greek tongue, both Aeolian and Pelasgian, to speak and spell.

  The family was not unkind to me. The father offered no insult and in fact shielded me as if I were a daughter. But he would not let me ride or run, and when I reached once to touch the crescent saber mounted above the hearthstone, he slapped my hand. “No, child, this is not for you.”

  I dwelt in the women’s quarter, learning home craft and music, to spin and to weave. Days I studied; nights I lay apart and wept. My heart longed for home—for the sky, which was God, and the wild earth, our Mother. I missed the sweet voices of heaven which spoke in birdsong and the chirrup of the prairie marmot, the spirits of thunder and the flood and ebb of the sea of stars. When I caught scent of the stable, the horse-smell racked my soul. I ached for the Wild Lands, even their pains, for sharp stones beneath my heel, the sting in the nostrils of the frost-bound steppe, and her gifts, the warmth of my Eleuthera’s arms about me in the night.

  There is no word for “I” in the Amazon tongue. Nor does the term “Amazon” exist. This is a foreign invention. One says “the daughters” or, in our tongue, tal Kyrte, “the Free.” Eleuthera, as I said, is a Greek word; my friend’s true name is Kyrte.

  Among tal Kyrte, one says not “I,” but “she who speaks” or “she who answers.” To express herself, one says in preface, “This is what my heart tells me,” or “She who speaks is moved thus.” One of our race does not perceive herself as an individual apart from others, mistress of a private world divisible from the internal worlds of others. When one of my people offers speech in counsel, she does not produce this as a Greek might, from his own isolated disseverment from God; rather she summons it from that which contains her; that is, allows it to arise from that ground which has no name in our tongue but is called by the Thracians aedor (in Greek, “chaos”) which is the sky, which is God, that which animates all things and inhabits the spaces between things, understaying and undergirding all.

  Before she speaks, one of the free people will pause, sometimes for no small interval. This the impatient Greek takes for slow-wittedness or stupidity. It is neither; rather a distinct and disparate manner of viewing the world.

  In Sinope when I heard people use the word “I,” I experienced it as a thing of evil, recognizing its wickedness at once. Even after I learned the hang of it, and came to use it myself, I hated it and felt it a bane which would consume me if I kept its usage too long.

  The term of my indenture was defined in this manner. When the mare (whose worth was my tuition, so to say) foaled, and that foal grew to saddle age, I might school it and ride it home. I could not wait for this, however, but stole another horse and weapons. I fled home, believing I could put this “I” behind me. But it had sunk its malign roots into my heart and contaminated me, that I might never truly return to the Daughters, not as I had once been, at one with them.

  When one of tal Kyrte misses steppe and sky, she longs not just for their beauty but also their cruelty. For among the free people the foreawareness of one’s death, and heaven’s indifference to it, is the keenest and most brilliant pleasure, rendering all precious. This is the supreme mystery, the fact o
f existence itself, before which mortals may only stand in silence.

  The city people hated and feared this mystery. Against it they had founded their walls and battlements, not so much to repel invaders of flesh as to hold at bay this unknown, to blot it from their hearing and wipe it from their sight.

  This is why they hate tal Kyrte, the free people. Our existence recalls to them that before which they have flown in terror. If we can live with it, in fact live in it, then they must be less than we, to have erected such edifices to its exclusion. That is why they hate us and why they came, Heracles first and then Theseus, to destroy us.

  Once in Sinope I saw the great Heracles. He was old then, past forty, with his famous Labors behind him, but still brilliant. The whole city tramped out to see him.

  The bards praise Heracles as the solitary hero who plundered our queen Hippolyta’s virgin belt. This is a lie. He came to the Wild Lands with twenty-two ships and a thousand men at arms—and not such clods as one sees with stone-point spears dull as billhooks, but iron-armed, in cuirasses of tin and silver, shields bronze-faced and heavy as waggon wheels, and helmets of electrum and gold.

  They wished to see him wrestle, did the people of Sinope, and set the prize of a bronze cauldron for any standing past the count of ten, and a talent of silver for him who took the great man off his feet. You could see Heracles cared little for such sport, bored of it long since, but he still threw with such violence all who dared close with him that levity departed the tourney, and wives feared for their husbands, lest this son of Zeus snap their spines, not knowing, even so far past his prime, his own strength.

  I trailed him afterward through the streets, compassed as he was by his corps of toadies and tufthunters. His strength, one perceived, was not of men but of gods; you could believe he had slain the Nemean lion bare-handed, whose skin he yet wore, so dense was the pack of muscle across his shoulders and so massive the columns of his thighs. Yet what struck my child’s observation was not Heracles’ might but his sorrow.

  He was not free, nor had been ever, but a vessel formed (and deformed) of heaven. God had bequeathed him glory imperishable, a berth among the stars, and charged him to overturn the order of the world. This, Heracles had done. He had performed his labors.

  I studied his eyes, in the glimpses one could catch between the press of idolaters. Once I thought his gaze met mine. Did he know me for the race to which I belonged? I believe he did, and at once.

  He had defeated us, and others would follow, seeking to emulate his glory. Yet his aspect spoke now, I perceived, of grief and contrition. I performed my Father’s bidding, Heracles’ eyes seemed to tell mine, begging their remission. I had no choice.

  Heracles, as the world knows, had come to the Amazon Sea twenty years earlier, first of the southern races to bear arms against the free people. He came with thirty companies of infantry and five of cavalry and encamped before the Typhon’s Gate of Themiscyra. This was at the rising of Arcturus, when the clans of the daughters of Ares gather from as far as Libya, and, declaring he had been sent by King Eurystheus of Mycenae to bring home our queen Hippolyta’s virgin girdle, tantamount to demanding her submission to him as a concubine or whore, he called out to single combat any and all champions of the free people.

  Hippolyta reckoned at once the evil borne by this man and the woe it foretold for the nation. But the young bloods could not see past the outrage he offered. They clamored, these daughters, to be first to face him. Hippolyta commanded forbearance. She would deflect Heracles’ purpose. She would deny him the fight he had come for.

  Hippolyta stripped her girdle and offered it in peace, appending tokens of respect, honoring the invader’s enterprise and lineage as child of Zeus. Heracles accepted with gratitude, to his credit grasping the purpose of this device and wishing, since he had achieved his aim, to depart without bloodshed.

  But Melanippe, “Black Mare,” who held that year the post of war queen, and Alcippe, “Powerful Mare,” her commander of cavalry, could not bear this affront. Pride spoke to them out of their strong hearts, inciting them to battle. What force had deranged their reason? Who but Zeus, devious-devising, to grant, by their vanquishment at his hand, honor to his son Heracles.

  There is on the landward side of Themiscyra a dry course called the Raceway, where the traders’ market stands in summer but which on this day had been cleared for the games in honor of Phrygian Cybele. Onto this field the pride of the free people rode. They sent an unbroken colt into the Greek camp, sign of challenge understood by all, and called Heracles out.

  On that day he slew in single combat Aella, “Whirlwind”; Philippis; Prothoe, my mother’s mother; Eriboia of the electrum helm; Celaeno; Eurybia, who had slain a leopard with her bare hands; Phoebe, called “Manslaughterer”; Deianera; Asteria; Marpe; Tecmessa; and at last Alcippe and Melanippe themselves, champions of the free people.

  The harpers tell it thus: that Heracles’ famous lion skin, which he wore draped about his shoulders, impenetrable to all save its own claws, had preserved him from the darts and axes of the daughters of Ares. This is nonsense. My mother was there and saw it. This she told: it was no beast’s hide beneath which Heracles took the field, but iron armor of such weight and thickness as no other could bear and still move and fight. The flung javelin caromed off this blacksmith’s plate, even at point-blank range, and Heracles was so strong that though the impact might arrest his advance momentarily, it could not knock him off his feet. Sword and spear were as straws against him, and the mass of his great club, which an ordinary mortal could barely lift, staved our bronze shields and helms as tissues of flax.

  In a duel of honor, single combat is law. Yet who, male or female, could stand up to such a prodigy one-on-one? My mother made his height at six and a half feet; I would declare him taller, even when I saw him at Sinope at over forty years old. He could kill an ox with a blow of his fist, men swore, yet I saw him as well outsprint in the races even the swiftest lads and all the men. Such physical primacy bred a fearlessness that made his precocity even more formidable. Nor were these the sum of Zeus’ gifts to his son, but supernal vision and reflex as well. At Sinope he put on a demonstration. He stood at the neck of a stone runway, hemmed by barricades, while three warriors, doughtiest in the city, slung javelins from inside a dozen paces. No one could hit him. He could snatch an arrow out of the air; sidestep its rush and catch it by the shaft as it flew. Stones and sling bullets he caught in his fist or dashed aside with his club, as boys on the line-field bat away the bowled ball.

  So they advanced to their doom at Themiscyra, the champions of our race, one succeeding another, like knights hurling themselves from a precipice. Heracles took his girdle prize, its luster now amplified by blood, and sailed home.

  A calamity of such scale had never befallen the daughters of Ares—the loss in their prime of the flower of the nation. My mother’s generation grew to womanhood in the shadow of this shame, and my own imbibed as mare’s milk both the trauma of that vanquishment and the foreterror of some more catastrophic overthrow, borne upon us by the next wave of invaders, successors to Heracles, who must ineluctably follow.

  Champion of our generation was Antiope, granddaughter of Hippolyta and triple-mate to Stratonike and Eleuthera, the most brilliant archers and riders of the day. Antiope it was, even as a child, who resuscitated the nation. At that time the ancient rite of mastokausis, as the Greeks call it, the searing off in infancy of the right breast, had fallen from favor. Antiope revived it. At seven years she ordered her own mutilation, that all strength, as she grew, would accrue to the muscles of her shoulder and back, and no womanish flesh impede the draw of the bow and the cast of the javelin. Not one of our generation failed to emulate her. When at age ten the trikona of Antiope, Eleuthera, and Stratonike were called to study war with the northern tribes, they went with hearts singing with joy. They elevated to a peak unprecedented proficiency in the use of the pelekus, the double-bladed axe, and roused the generation of youth to
mastery of the javelin and the Cimmerian bow. The practice of the steel-rimmed discus they learned and taught, to hurl from horseback, taking a man’s head, helmet and all, at one howling swipe. Antiope’s flesh she trained to be superior to heat and cold, hunger and fatigue, and schooled her string from colts, driving them again and again into the storm beneath Zeus’ bolts, to fear neither riot nor havoc, but to love battle and drink with joy from the well of strife. About her she assembled a corps of champions—Eleuthera; Stratonike; Skyleia; the younger Alcippe; Glauke, “Grey Eyes”; Xanthe, “Blonde”; Euippe, “Beautiful Mare’’; Rhodippe, “Red Mare”; Leucippe, “White Mare”; Anteia; Tecmessa, “Thistle”; Lyssa; Evandre; and Prothoe—a match and more for the paragons of old, and dedicated, all, to the reclamation of preeminence for the race. Their zeal fired not only our nation, the Lycasteia, but the Themiscyra, Chadisia, and Titaneia, and the clans and tribes as far as the Iron Mountains and the Belt of Storms. The elders looked on with pride as the plain rang with horses and young women training in the arts of war.

  Antiope’s gifts were not of valor alone, but statecraft and generalship. The combat of solitary champions, she persuaded the elders to debar, drafting in its place cohesion of cavalry and unity of assault. She called for return to the old ways. At her impetus the Corps of Mounted Archers was reorganized into companies, squadrons, and wings under commanders accountable not to those beneath but those above. She reinstituted the crescent charge and the assault called “chest-and-horns.” For her hand Antiope fashioned a type of javelin unknown heretofore, weighted with iron in its core and warhead. Such a missile was too heavy to throw, even on the run, unaided. But catapulted by a sleeve extender, to amplify the leverage of the shoulder, and hurled not sidearm but overhand and from horseback, to add moment to its launch, it could be propelled to devastating effect. Antiope added a belly-band for her mount, with a step stitched in, so that she could plant her sole and rise at the gallop, driving the big muscles of her legs and back into the cast. At seventeen she could splinter a pine big around as a man’s thigh. At twenty-four, when she acceded to the post of war queen, she had strung upon her lance the scalps of twenty-nine enemies slain hand-to-hand upon the steppe.