Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  41

  THE IRON

  AND THE MOON

  In that instant I knew the mound was Selene’s. The sensation was of something cold and keen, like iron, inserted beneath the cage of the sternum and driven up into the tissue of the heart. I doubled, spitting phlegm and sputum. Atop the ridge, Damon appeared. He would not be here, alone, unless Selene was dead.

  The pain in my breast exploded, like a great stone dropped from a height when it strikes the earth and shatters. Shards and slivers detonated inside my chest. Selene had schooled my sister and me in the rites of bereavement practiced by the tribes of the steppe, and Damon’s tale had imparted these excesses in detail. Now they seemed trifles. To scarify flesh or incise the scalp? I would split my skull and leap naked onto the pyre, such was the grief which compassed and eviscerated me.

  Selene.

  Selene!

  Damon rode down to my side. Did I wail aloud, or did my scream resound only within the cylinder of my skull? I felt his left hand about my wrist, his right hard upon my bridle.

  “Not now,” he commanded. “Not now.”

  My flesh felt seared as by coals; I felt my teeth shear through the pulp of my tongue.

  Selene!

  Rage flushed with such power as I sensed must slay me where I stood. It ascended from my soles in waves, scathing and corrosive. Girlhood’s last tatter fell away. I seemed to mount out of myself. Damon. I experienced his agony. It was not like mine. Not grief or rage but despair. For him a void had opened where something precious and unknowable had stood. Here was the marrow. For I reckoned now, for the first time, the coming end of tal Kyrte, the extinction of the free people.

  Our party still held at a distance from Europa. I could see her communicating to the fore element, to Atticus, whom she had permitted to approach alone and who now queried her, apparently for intelligence of events, battles and their outcomes, the whereabouts of Maues and Panasagoras, and of Eleuthera and the last of the Amazons.

  Clearly the prince was astonished at Europa’s apparition, this lass of Athens, his betrothed, whom he had crossed the world in hopes of recovering. I could see him make petition to her—Depart with me, come home!—and her rebuff him absolutely and beyond appeal.

  Europa’s transformation was total. She had become not just another woman but another species. Father had reined-in now on the brow of the slope. That his child was lost to him forever not even the desperate fixity of his purpose could deny. Atticus signed to both troops to follow him; he faced east, the direction in which Eleuthera had fled, and made off.

  Damon held beside me. I heeled my pony forward to the mound. At a distance my sister had looked spectacular, wild and brilliant and glamorous. Up close she appeared feral, almost savage. Her eyes had changed. The light in them was different. They were like a wild beast’s in their pitilessness and coolness of appraisal. She was not herself, yet more herself than she had ever been.

  I must know beyond doubt, Was the barrow Selene’s?

  Europa confirmed this.

  I remarked wounds of my sister’s flesh, a score or more. She dismissed my concern. Her glance scanned me sole to crown. Whatever she saw, it seemed to satisfy her.

  “Sister,” she said, “this is for you.”

  An antelope-skin sheath lay across her thighs. Within it nested an axe. Europa elevated the case in both hands, as one would proffer an artifact beyond price.

  “Selene knew you would come. She commanded me not to depart till I had set this in your hands.”

  The pelekus was Selene’s. My sister passed it across. “Mind,” she warned, “the edge is keen.” I set the sheath atop my thighs and tugged loose the flap.

  At once tears scalded. Selene’s presence, more vivid even than in life, shone from the whetted iron and coursed up the shaft of ash. I flushed and nearly fainted.

  “Are you all right, sister?”

  With effort I straightened on my pony.

  “Why …” I heard my voice ask. “Why did Selene leave this for me and not for you?”

  I knew the answer before Europa could speak it.

  “Because Selene is not my mother. Because I am not her daughter.”

  42

  ELEUTHERA AND THESEUS

  Moments later Eleuthera appeared. She materialized out of the west with ninety cavalry and fifty in auxiliary, novices and wrights of the kabar. Her captains commanded our company to follow.

  You may imagine my state. Despair and exaltation commingled with the overthrow of all I had known, of myself, who I was, where I belonged. Yet not an instant could be spared for reflection; heels and quirts must be applied. The Scyths were close. We had to flee.

  My sister was made an outrider. I bolted with her before anyone could stop me. Her role was to range to the fore, seeking sign of the foe. From Europa and “Flea,” another novice, I learned that Eleuthera’s object was the Tanais, two hundred miles east. South first, to get behind the foe, then east to the river. If Eleuthera’s cohort could get there undetected, it could track the Tanais north to the Gate of Storms and, through that, to the Land of Perpetual Snows and safety. That the river was the frontier of Scythian country would work in our favor, Eleuthera believed. The foe would search everywhere but in his own wallet.

  As for the Athenians under Theseus and Atticus, it would be overstatement to say Eleuthera took them prisoner. She did not deign even to glance in their direction and offered no notice whatever of their king. Yet it was clear she would permit none of Athens’s company to make off on their own, lest they give her whereabouts away to the foe.

  The combined parties rode and trekked three days and nights, south toward the Mound City, via the breaks to avoid detection. Flea remarked that once her people rode the high plains. “Now we skulk in the coulees.” I learned the identities of the remaining champions: Chryssa and Evandre, Althaea and Andromache and Otrete, Prothoe and the Thracian “Stuff.” At the fourth dusk foreriders sighted the sea; our companies pulled up to wait for night. The Scyths or others Eleuthera had not counted on, perhaps bounty hunters, had gotten ahead. Our party was cornered but so far unseen. Eleuthera ordered a cold camp.

  It was here that she and Theseus finally collided. It came about because of my father.

  He had approached Eleuthera, beseeching an audience. When I heard I came on the run. I knew Father would entreat Eleuthera’s dispensation, that the Amazons not take me with them. That my sister was gone from him, he had accepted. My loss, however, would be the blow he could not bear.

  I raced to the cold fire, around which the main of warrioresses and novices had settled. Apparently Eleuthera had given her answer already, which was that blood calls to blood; she would take no step to debar the child of Selene from following her mother’s people. This was communicated to me by Flea and another girl who had been present from the prologue.

  Eleuthera continued her address, no longer to Father, but to her companions about the fire, which was of moss and punk in a crescent trench. Here I must digress for a moment to address the aspect of this woman and the impact of her presence.

  All that Selene had told of Eleuthera, and all that Damon had appended, was nothing alongside the apparition of this female in the flesh. Eleuthera’s years were forty or more, the time of grandmothers among her race; yet her vigor was of one not yet twenty. She was tall, tall as Theseus, and powerful through the shoulders as an oarsman. How she sat her horse! When she galloped down the stream of the camp, her mount’s hooves flung spray, which flew, to my eyes, as so many splashes of quicksilver; the axe in its sheath clashed against her back with each stride; I had never beheld anything so lordly or sublime.

  Eleuthera’s beauty was not mannish, as that of many among the Amazons, but of an order transcending gender. She seemed an entity, not so much of personal or individual being, but the embodiment in flesh of an ideal, and that ideal was freedom. Even her warlike aspect, as spectacularly as this predominated, was but a by-product of this higher quality. As a flame is pur
e and may never be made impure, so was Eleuthera. As a lion is without fear and may never be corrupted by fear, so was Eleuthera. Had she ordered me, “March into that fire,” not the armies of the earth could have held me back. Had she commanded, “Leap from that cliff,” I would have vaulted forth with joy.

  She came forward now, before the cold fire. Her comrades fell silent. Eleuthera addressed their chances of survival.

  “When the free people’s course diverged from rhyten annae, ‘the way we have always done it’—this was when we went wrong.” She was speaking of Athens, I understood, of tal Kyrte’s election to abandon its homeland and carry war across the sea. “But what other course did honor leave us? I have thought about this. I believe it is the ordinance of heaven that has called our time to its close. What will become of our nation? We will linger, displaced farther onto the periphery of events. We will hang on, but no longer as a force, only as a curiosity. At last our race will recede into legend. Who will remember us? The wind may be known by the whirl of dust or the drive of flame. But who can see the wind?”

  Eleuthera elevated her glance toward where Father, Damon, and Philippus huddled at the limit of the circle. Theseus had crossed from the Athenian camp and now augmented their party, accompanied by Atticus and several of the captains.

  “You will not see us,” Eleuthera spoke for their hearing, “but we will be there. Our ghosts will people your nighttime streets, and that part of yourselves that you have driven under in wiping us from the earth will unsettle your slumber. Such violence as we have offered in defense of our freedom will be nothing beside that which you will inflict upon yourselves when we are gone. You have not won, neither your cause nor the gods before whose mandates you genuflect. For we are part of you. In exterminating us, you have slain that which was freest and most noble in yourselves. You have not grown greater by our extinction, but been diminished. Look to it. This is what my heart tells me.”

  Next morning the plain teemed with Scyths. Thousands had overshot us during the night and trooped now in the direction of the Tanais. Their scouts had not seen us yet. Nonetheless our companies must retreat up the coulee, obscuring our tracks and even erecting a palisade, awaiting the final clash.

  That night Theseus approached Eleuthera, offering to use the Athenian ships to ferry the Amazons east. With a rush on the strand of the Mound City, he proposed, our combined parties could overpower whoever held the vessels. The ships’ horse stalls would take the Amazon ponies. With a good wind the squadron could beat Maues and Panasagoras to the Tanais and get the women safely on their way.

  Such a proposal was epochal. Eleuthera reviled it.

  “Shall I survive, Theseus, by the agency of your pity?”

  The king responded. “Pity? I have never feared any as I fear you, nor been vanquished by any as you have vanquished me.”

  Eleuthera regarded him with hate. The company had clustered entire. The moon was dark, the night chill within the coulee. “You have come to our country this time,” the Amazon addressed the Athenian, “hoping to summon Antiope from the Underworld to beg forgiveness for the wrong you have done her. She will never come for you. Put this from your mind. You will find her again only in death.”

  These words scored Theseus to the quick. He seemed to stagger, so that several among the Companions actually started, to brace him up.

  “You should have slain her yourself,” Eleuthera pronounced, “there at Athens on the morn of the final clash. I would have. But you let her ride forth. You stood aside, permitting her to perform the most infamous act of which she or any soul possessed of honor is capable: to take up arms against her own people. You ruined her, in this life and beyond, because you loved Athens more than you loved her.”

  This shaft too found the mark. Theseus reeled beneath it.

  “I too have betrayed her,” Eleuthera continued, “who was far the noblest of our race or yours, for she alone dared yoke sun and moon, man and woman. So I am not unacquainted with the freight of grief you bear.”

  Eleuthera regarded her old enemy.

  “What good has it done you, Theseus, to ‘lift’ men to ‘civilization’? Athens spurns you for it. Those gifts you have set before her, she has spat back in your teeth. Now here you are, come again to us. I should have cut you down the first hour I saw you. I sensed it in my marrow, the netome you brought from afar. But Father Zeus is almighty. He has sent Heracles and Jason, and now you, to break the free women. You have not failed His errand.”

  Such woe stood in Theseus’ aspect as seemed poised to fell him to the earth.

  “Can you hate me so much, Eleuthera?”

  “Hate is a bond, Theseus. And I have hated you a long time.”

  The king made to speak, as if to pray that such hate be now put away. Eleuthera cut him off.

  “The time of the free people is over. And here is the irony, my friend. You who have destroyed us, you of all, Theseus, understood us best and loved us most deeply. You are one of us, and have been always.”

  At these words the king’s self-command broke. Sobs wracked his breast; he dropped upon both knees before Eleuthera. Theseus buried his face against her trousers. The Amazon did not move, or even glance down, only extended her hand after some moments, setting it in clemency upon his curls.

  43

  PASSENGERS

  The Amazon horses must be hoodwinked with cloaks and blankets to get them up the ramps to the ships. They smelled the sea and hated it. Nonetheless they obeyed; all six vessels got away, bearing their complement and an additional hundred and forty—Eleuthera’s warrioresses and the wrights of the kabar. Every stall was filled save six doubles on Theseus’ Aethra; these held one mount apiece.

  It is no small excursion from the Mound City to the Tanais. Nor could the vessels stop ashore to let the women and horses exercise their legs. The Scyths knew whom the vessels carried; they would stay at nothing to overhaul their prey. Aboard ship the Amazons hunkered, miserable as soaked cats.

  Father would not let me from his sight. Or should I call him father? Though he succeeded in keeping me apart from Europa, it was no chore to communicate with her by sign. I would flee with her; I would join my people, the free women of the plains. I bided, confident I could make the jump any time I wished.

  On the ships an Amazon with a lurid scar across her cheek and breast took charge of me. She was a captain immediately beneath Eleuthera and, judging by the deference paid her by her countrywomen, a warrioress of singular celebrity. Her birth name, she told me, was Dosteia. “Though you know me, if Selene spoke true, by another: ‘Stuff.’ ”

  How curious is the ordination of the heart. For I, who had held the stopper on my grief so ably and so well (or so I flattered myself), now, at the hearing of this name which had been linked in memory to Selene so vividly and for so long, now I felt the dam of my heart burst. I fell into the Amazon’s arms and wept like a child.

  Stuff imparted the particulars of my birth, which tale she had had from Selene just this month past. A union of happenstance, such as falls out not infrequently on the land: Mother delivering a stillborn babe, Selene bearing at the same season a healthy girl. Within the private sphere of the farm the switch was made, opposed by none and breathed abroad by none. Even Europa, not yet three years old at the time, was never informed of the truth; she had believed me her sister until only days past.

  The question Stuff’s tale did not answer was the identity of my sire. It was inconceivable that Father would have betrayed Mother’s bed by skulking to Selene’s. Who then but Damon? Uncle read it in my eyes the first night we made camp after the burial mounds.

  “Do you hate me, daughter?”

  Children are cruel, and I was not as grown as I contended. Yes, I hated him. Not for the truth but for keeping it from me. Why must I not know? So I would grow up a proper Athenian girl, to be given to a proper Athenian husband? So none of society would scorn me for my savage dam?

  I drove Damon from me and would not speak to him, eve
n on the ships.

  Stuff communicated as well the context of Selene’s decease. It was not in a fight but a fall, and not from a horse but a riverbank. Selene was gathering willow shoots as treats for her string. “The ground was not stony where she struck, nor was the plunge from a great height. But it broke her neck. She lasted till the mounds were dug for those you saw.”

  Stuff had a reading of this. She believed that Selene had completed her testament, that is, she had consummated the covenant of the trikona, by which the gods had agreed to accept her life in the stead of Eleuthera’s. With this, her task was done. The earth had borne her in its time and now, in its time, took her back.

  Eleuthera herself believed this, Stuff asserted, for when Eleuthera offered the tribute over Selene’s grave, she did so not in speech, as is customary for one perished apart from battle, but in sign, as the nation reserves for heroes fallen in war.

  “Selene believed,” Eleuthera had signed, “that she had committed a crime against the people, that is, her failure to take my life and her own when we were wounded and faced capture at Athens. She feared I blamed her these years since, even hated her, for this abdication. I could not hate you, Selene. For this act you performed from love. Not love for me alone, though that was abundant, but for tal Kyrte, for whose weal you offered your liberty, that it might preserve mine. Beyond all others, you have donated your substance to the free people. More, you have made this gift alone, in isolation, cut off from our society and our care. Who has shown such devotion?”

  Here, Stuff reported, Eleuthera’s composure had broken. Long moments passed before she recovered self-command.

  Eleuthera had concluded her eulogy thus:

  She made first the sign for “Moon,” which was my mother’s name, Selene; then the sign for “fallen.” Not fallen as in moonset but as a stone or leaf falls. As if, the sign imparted, the moon had fallen out of the sky.

  Next Eleuthera made that rotary motion which means the turning of the seasons. Ektalerin is the word in the Amazon tongue; its connotation is “that which may be depended upon,” as the rising of the sun or the greening of the plains. Only, Eleuthera made the motion in reverse, as if to say, All we have known has become inverted.